Happy Wednesday!
I hope you are having a good week and that you are stopping by the Trinity 21 Day Racial Equity Challenge page frequently. For 21 days (or the entire 40 days of Lent) we are encouraging participants in the challenge to do one action daily to further your understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity. This link directs you to multiple options for reading, watching, listening, noticing, engaging in and reflecting upon racial equity.
Today I am exploring the concept of ‘noticing’ the world around me from a racial equity perspective. To begin, I encourage everyone to watch the very brief (approximately 1 minute) video found here:
After watching I think you might agree with me that we tend to notice what we are looking for, and to ignore that which may not be on our ‘radar.’ I am challenging myself to pay more attention to
- Who is (and is not) represented in the ads I watch on TV and see in magazines?
- What are the last five books I read? What is the racial mix of the authors?
- What is the racial mix of the main characters in my favorite TV shows? Movies?
- Who is filling what kinds of jobs/social roles in my world? (e.g. who’s the store manager and who’s stocking the shelves? Who’s waiting on tables and who’s busing the food?) Are these roles correlated to racial identity?
What do you notice in your daily round? Are you surprised by what you notice? Are you inspired to make any changes, and if so what might you change?
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Have you ever noticed who catches the bus in front of the CVS next to church? It tends to be people of color dressed in working clothes, often in healthcare uniforms. I assume these people work in Moorestown, live in neighboring towns, and don’t have the money to spend on a car for transportation. So when NJ Transit cuts back on the bus schedule because ridership is down, or raises fares, these are the people who are impacted. Keep an eye out for people waiting for the bus in your town and see what it tells you.
Speaking of my town and more specifically my neighborhood. My desk faces a window that looks out onto our street. I spend a lot of time gazing out the window. Ours is a fairly active neighborhood, people walk dogs and ride bikes. But what I notice is that we are overwhelmingly white. So much so that when I notice anyone Black on our street, I am surprised. Our CVS has predominantly white customers. I don’t recall seeing Black customers at the pizza place, the cleaners, the dog groomers, the nail salon close to us.
I live in a world as segregated as if someone had planned it to be. I am especially aware of that now that I’m retired and not out in the world as much as I had been before. And then there is the isolation of Covid. I suspect that this neighborhood is composed this way because of the lingering effects of decades of red lining. Systemic racism, so ingrained into where we live, that I didn’t even notice , until I noticed.