Divest from Racism
Thanks to Brene Brown’s Unlocking Us podcast featuring Sonya Renee Taylor for jumpstarting these thoughts around divestment.
Let’s participate in a thought experiment. There are many ways to answer the following questions:
What would happen to racism if we divested from it?
What does divesting from racism look and feel like?
Before we entertain those questions, let’s build our way there. First, racism is currency. In other words, society assigns different values to different races. In the United States of America, white [cisgender, hetereoseual (cishet), affluent, able-bodied] men are deemed the most valuable because our systems have been designed with them as the focal point since the founding our countryhood. “All men are created equal” really means white, landowning men. Thus, our banking, government, education institutions reflect and perpetuate this concept. Conversely, a Black [transgender, queer, less affluent, disabled] woman, the person with the greatest distance from that previous identity, would be considered the least valuable.
We invest in this narrative with violence towards the Black woman, orchestrated as limited opportunities, believed stereotypes, and physical and emotional harm in order to create distance and highlight that they are not valuable. Additionally, we imitate and perform whiteness, as best as we can, demonstrated through colorism and values, for example, because we want to get proximate to and feel connected with the perceived top value.
This investment hinges on our belief of and participation in the value structure. What would happen if every person woke up and said, “I am valuable and my value is not dependent on anyone else” and divested their energy, time, and money from racism and its dominant narratives who we are or who we can be.
Racism would collapse because there would be nothing propping it up.
