www.montereycountyweekly.com june 8-14, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 23 a simple black square to their feed, ostensibly as a way to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s easy to deride these squares for what they are—a display of performative allyship that ultimately means little to nothing. But perhaps there’s another lesson to be learned from the black squares. The fact that this country was built on the backs of enslaved people is a heavy fact, made only more so by the hundreds of years of abuse, violence and marginalization that has followed. Truly contemplating this legacy brings a host of uncomfortable emotions—guilt, shame, anger, fear, sadness—and knowing how to identify, process and ultimately use these emotions for good takes training. The first few weeks of “race relations boot camp” are a rollercoaster ride of emotions. If you were educated in a classroom that teaches this history (and not all do—in recent years many states have adopted legislation that limits how teachers can discuss issues like race, politics and gender identity), you’ve been taught how the institution of slavery shaped the foundation of America, how white slave owners brutally treated the people they viewed as property, and how traces of this dynamic still persist, despite incredible progress made. But when was the last time someone asked how this history makes you feel? Or, for that matter, how the murder of George Floyd or Philando Castile or Breonna Taylor made you feel? Dirrick Williams will do just that. The Pacific Grove native and founder of the Black Leaders and Allies Collaborative teaches Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism (ECCR), an anti-racist curriculum of his own creation that centers on students’ emotional responses to racism—and aims to teach students how to channel those emotions toward creating change. (In the course of reporting this story, I participated in a cohort of ECCR. In order to honor the confidentiality of the course, this story does not discuss specific conversations that took place during the course.) Williams is adamant that ECCR is not a traditional diversity training. It’s not only about learning the history and the facts of racism, though there is some of that. Over the course of 14 weeks, small cohorts meet for two hours each week via Zoom to have real, honest conversations about the ways in which racism shapes our society and what it takes to be a good ally—a classroom dynamic that feels a bit like a cross between a Socratic seminar and group therapy. It all begins with self-examination, with an exploration of the emotional toll of racism, whether this often-invisible force is something you think about regularly or something you are privileged enough to avoid thinking about. Like any Socratic seminar, the direction the conversation takes is to a large extent dependent on who is part of the conversation. “What I do is I drop something [a question, a polemic] in the middle of the room and then…it tends to go,” Williams says of his facilitation style. “The goal is not to change your mind. The goal is to change your heart so that you will change your mind.” Back in the summer of 2020, Williams watched the Black Lives Matter protests with a certain concern. “A decentralized movement will end up with many issues,” he says. “There’s too much room for infighting and ambiguity.” At the time, he worried primarily that the wave of energy seen in the streets would fade, as the attention and energy it takes to produce protest movements tend to do, and that once it did people—white people especially—would return to a sense of complacency. “I thought there should be a way to hold on to that,” Williams says. A Black man born and raised in Pacific Grove, a town with an overwhelming 80-percent white majority, per recent census data, Williams is intimately familiar with the realities of racism—from regular microaggressions to full-on violence. On July 6, 2018, while at Monterey Lanes bowling alley to collect entry forms and fees for an annual golf and bowling tournament he ran to benefit the youth services nonprofit The Village Project, Williams was the victim of a violent, racist attack. Outside the bowling alley, he encountered Noah and Tricia Boewer, who called Williams the N-word while Tricia falsely claimed Williams had deliberately grabbed her as he “The goal is not to change your mind. The goal is to change your heart so that you will change your mind.” Dirrick Williams, seen here in the home office from which he facilitates cohorts of his anti-racist education program Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism. The classes take place on Zoom. Daniel Dreifuss
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