I’m very happy to be writing the first article for this column. The Diversity Corner will beregularly featured in our quarterly newsletter The Wolf.This corner grew out of our organizational goal “to undertake an ongoing process of addressing our own racism and integrating an anti-racist commitment in staff training and in our programs. To increasingly seek to transform all aspects of structural and systemic domination within ourselves and in the larger world, including racism, homophobia, economic injustice, ecological destruction and the many forms of palpable and chronic woundedness”. We now donate a significant portion of our quarterly animating meeting to work on these issues. Our year began with exploring these issues and setting the following goals in two workshop settings:

Goals

• To begin and continue the “ism” (a way of describing any attitude, action, or institutional structure which oppresses a person or group because of their target group status) healing process.
• To strengthen the capacities of our white allies to challenge racial oppression and white privilege in their lives and within social justice movements.
• To begin to start and continue “analyzing with an anti-racist lens” (a term created by the African-American anti-racist trainer Enid Lee) to examine the interrelationships between the white supremacy system and the systems of capitalism/imperialism, patriarchy/heterosexism, and the systemic violence of the state.
• To continue the “ism” (a way of describing any attitude, action, or institutional structure which oppresses a person or group because of their target group status) healing process.
• To examine and deconstruct the concept of“whiteness.”

This work has taken us to some deeply wounded and forgotten places, individually and as a group. As a community Pace e Bene has opened up the very essence of our beings and allowed the trust and love that is necessary to begin the journey towards wellness to flow freely among us. Sometime defensiveness, hopelessness, and lack of trust can show up asmanifestations of fear but our support and our willingness to leave judgment out side the door allows us to sit with the pain and discomfort of internalized & racial oppression and we can then begin the healing process. The willingness of our group to engage in this important work has deepened our relationship in a profoundly spiritual way and will act as a foundation for the work that will follow.