26 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY june 8-14, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com country was founded and what it was based on,” she says. Other students come in with more of a foundation in racial justice concepts. Cynthia Ainsworth, a student services librarian at Hartnell College in Salinas, joined a cohort of ECCR a year-and-a-half ago. Ainsworth, who is white, has long been involved with the local activist organization Whites for Racial Equity and works on racial equity initiatives at Hartnell. “Most everything was not new to me,” Ainsworth says, of the content of the course. “It was more of a relationship-building experience.” The same could be said for Mari Adams, who identifies as white and mixed race, and who quickly began attending DEI Task Force meetings after moving to P.G. a year-and-a-half ago. For her, ECCR was a way to meet other people in her community who share her perspective—or at least her commitment to having the conversation. “I wasn’t taking it as much for education as community—and I got that,” Adams says. Ainsworth, and others, talk about anti-racism as a journey, a spectrum from relatively less awareness to relatively more awareness. “When you get a group of white folk together, we’re all on a different place on the continuum,” Ainsworth says. For at least one Black ECCR participant, firsthand observation of this continuum has proven a main takeaway experience from the class. Shira Crawford met Williams during a Black History Month movie night hosted by BLAAC, and was impressed by the conversation he facilitated after the movie ended. When she heard about ECCR she was curious enough to check it out—“it felt like an attempt to have conversations that were not superficial,” she says. For the mother, realtor and grad student, the content of the course is deeply familiar. But engaging in conversation about racism in a mixed-race group—that’s unusual. “I feel like there’s a bridge that’s being created in me,” Crawford says. Over the past two years, Williams says close to 80 people have participated in ECCR, ranging from a 17-year-old high school student to an 80-yearold retired CEO. He says the class demographics roughly track with the demographics of the area—50 percent of participants are men, 50 percent women; most are white. ECCR is not the first or only attempt to develop a curriculum that can help educate people to change. In Monterey County, the group Whites for Racial Equity hosts discussions, book clubs and trainings with the goal of “cultivating greater racial competency” among white people. Founded in 2015, Whites for Racial Equity is an affiliate of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national activist group founded in 2009 amid the racist backlash to former president Barack Obama’s election. Following George Floyd’s murder and the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2020, corporations, schools and other organizations rushed to provide diversity, equity and inclusion (often abbreviated as DEI) or bias training for workers. Some companies even created new leadership positions tasked with increasing diversity, often by focusing on hiring practices. These efforts toward change have attracted a backlash. Many of the companies that rushed to hire more diverse workers have since conducted layoffs— and some data suggests that these layoffs have disproportionately impacted people of color. There has also been a political backlash from conservative Republican lawmakers across the county. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, for example, released a memo in February warning state agencies and public universities to stop considering diversity in hiring decisions. In April, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (also a presidential candidate) signed into law guidelines that limit discussion about race in Florida businesses and schools. In May, he signed a bill banning DEI initiatives in the state’s public colleges. Despite these headline-grabbing instances, polling by Pew Research Center reveals that, while there are notable partisan differences, a majority of Americans (56 percent) believe that increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace is a good thing. ECCR’s methodology and individual approach sets it apart from other diversity or bias trainings, but it fits into this ecosystem—bolstered on the one side by those who believe change is necessary, and weathered on the other by those who do not. What unites the people who chose to participate in ECCR, no matter their race or background, is a commitment to showing up—missing family dinners or forgoing other work responsibilities in order to invest time and energy in self-reflection. It’s work—both for participants and for the facilitator. “It takes a lot of humility to do this work,” Ainsworth says. ECCR is open to anyone willing to show up and do that work. It’s designed for participants who are actively seeking to learn, and willing to change their hearts so they can change their minds. Personal buy-in is the starting point. For those who do buy in, Williams’ intention is that, through practice, students will develop a certain emotional resilience in the face of what are often fraught, charged conversations or situations. The goal, he says, is for students to get past the place where emotion controls their actions (whether that looks like using a racist epithet or posting a black square on Instagram), to a place where they are able to use those powerful emotions as a motivation for making change. At the very least, Williams hopes students graduate with an ability to understand how racism has affected them—whatever that impact might be. “Nobody in this country is exempt [from the impacts of racism],” he says, “and nobody can say it’s been a positive experience.” To learn more about the Black Leaders and Allies Collaborative and get information about an upcoming session of Euro-Centric Cultural Reflectionism, visit blaac.org. “Nobody in this country is exempt [from the impacts of racism]. And nobody can say it’s been a positive experience.” READING LIST Are you curious about anti-racism and racial justice, or interested in learning more about the history of race in America? There are a plethora of resources available, including, but not limited to, the books on the short reading list below. Some of these books are part of the course material for ECCR—other title suggestions came out of interviews for this story. A special thank you to Hartnell College student services librarian Cynthia Ainsworth (also an ECCR student) for her help compiling this list. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein I’m Still Here by Austin Channing Brown Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter Founded in 2013, Black Lives Matter is a decentralized social movement that seeks to draw attention to racial discrimination against Black Americans. Above, Black Lives Matter protesters in Seaside in 2020. Parker Seibold
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