"Intercultural" Conversations

So, a funny thing about today’s prompt from GCORR: intercultural and anti-racist are not the same thing. They may overlap, for sure, but when engaging in anti-racist work in the United States, you should be first and foremost concerned about anti-racism.

This is not a world-ending critique, of course, just a call for us to intentionally choose what we’re focusing on. This moment in the United States is, first and foremost, focused on confronting personal and systemic anti-Black racism, wherever it may be found. If we’re doing good intersectional work, the benefits of our work will reach beyond anti-Black racism, but to call people to intercultural work is a different thing entirely. Reading a book by a white Canadian or French or English author is intercultural work, but it’s not anti-racist work and honestly, my fellow white people, what we need right now is to do anti-racist work.

I’ve also felt very, very convicted by a tweet I saw months ago which said something to the effect of, “Black people are asking for change and white people join a book club.” This is not to say that education isn’t important, of course. This is not to say that white people shouldn’t read a book before asking a BIPOC friend of theirs questions about race. But we need to meet the moment we’re in, and as much as that moment has shifted since May, the moment still asks for us to put more than just our reading list on the table.

So, follow GCORR’s suggestion today if you’re just now dipping your feet into the waters of anti=racist work. It’s not a bad suggestion. Just don’t let yourself off the hook. Reading The Help or Love in the Time of Cholera isn’t doing anti-racist work. Jump into a reading group that’s going to tackle something a little more weighty.

In fact, if people are interested, I would love to re-read Beloved by Toni Morrison as the weather, hopefully, turns colder. You can surely grab a used copy somewhere. But don’t let GCORR’s suggestion today send you into a land of white comfort where we all read White Fragility and reflect on how fragile we indeed are, while surrounded with the metaphorical bubble wrap of other white people. Push yourself to dig into something deeper.

Or, you know, take this opportunity to evaluate your friend group. If your friends all look pretty much like you, think about why that is. Because it is possible for “intercultural” conversations to be a part of your everyday life, and not in a soul-crushing way. Today, me and a friend of mine navigated together the sometime fraught waters of finding a tattoo parlor with a tolerable level of racism. Tonight, my partner and I will continue to talk about the racial dynamics in academia, because that’s a primary concern in his career. Now, hear me: I’m not telling you to go out and get a Black friend or a Latinx partner. I’m not saying I’m a better person because I have friends with different amounts of melanin than I do. Each and every friend I have who isn’t white can tell you that I still stumble, despite my commitment to doing anti-racist work. But your relationships are worth thinking about, and I encourage you to think about them.

In the meantime, I have two conversation-based pieces of content for you to interact with, in case you haven’t found your group today. The first is Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man.

And the second is Conversations with People who Hate Me:

Check out the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, or by going here.