Following Up and Moving Forward
Hello Tide Risers,
I am writing to follow up on my message from last week. The Tide Risers leadership team has met to discuss what actions we can take as a community to address the systemic oppression and killing of Black people, and I wanted to share our initial action steps below.
First of all, I want to affirm that Black lives matter. One of the great strengths of Tide Risers is our diversity, and that has been a priority for us from the very beginning. There is ongoing work for us to do to make Tide Risers more inclusive and accessible, and I am eager to pursue that work. I do recognize that as a white woman leading this organization, I will have blind spots and insensitivities, and I will make mistakes. But I am strengthened by the knowledge that we are a community committed to courageous conversations and we actively pursue the growth mindset imperative to the development of empathy and awareness.
Secondly, I would like to outline a few actions we have decided to take within Tide Risers to work toward the eradication of systemic oppression and killing of Black people, and institutionalized racism throughout our world. I consider the following to be an incomplete offering, and I invite you to please contribute your thoughts about what more we can do as a community.
Tide Risers offers us the space and time to have conversations that we may not be able to have elsewhere. We'd like to build upon our offering of spaces to have courageous conversations about race. To that end, we are adding the following programs. We will endeavor to make these spaces as safe as possible, leaning on our leadership principles, our active listening skills, and the trust we have built within this community
1. A new UpLevelHer series led by Tide Risers Founding Member Eisa Nefertari Ulen
A Film, Two Books, and You
A multi-ethnic and international groundswell of resistance to police brutality, and the anti-Black racism that edifies it, has brought us all to a tipping point. Beyond the effort to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace there is this: How do we dismantle the systemic, institutionalized oppression of BIPOC people? The short answer is, we do it together.
Please join your sister Tide Risers in a 3 part series of learning sessions meant to affirm and inform, led by Eisa Nefertari Ulen, Founding Member of Tide Risers. Starting with the film Toni Morrision: The Pieces I Am, we will also read Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Louise Erdrich's The Round House. By centering the voices of Black, Asian, and Indigenous women, we will grow our understanding of the past and spark the flame to light a brighter future.
Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning (Atria), a novel described by The Washington Post as “a call for healing in the African American community from generations of hurt and neglect.” She is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers, a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and National Association of Black Journalists Award. Her essays on African American culture have been widely anthologized, most recently in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket), which won the Social Justice/Advocacy Award for 2017 from the School Library Journal's In the Margins Book Committee. Eisa has also contributed to TheHollywoodReporter.com, Essence, Parents, The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Ebony, The Huffington Post, Pen.org, Los Angeles Review of Books, TheRoot.com, Truthout.org, TheDefendersOnline.com,
TheGrio.com, and CreativeNonfiction.org. Eisa graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. She has taught literature and writing at Hunter College, Baruch College, and The Pratt Institute. A founding member of Ringshout: A Place for Black Literature, she lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.
Please see our website for scheduling information. We will make this UpLevelHer series free to anyone in Tide Risers, whether or not you have registered for the Empriseurs UpLevelHer program.
2. An invitation to people within our community who do not identify as white to convene a facilitated space to talk.
Please let me know if you would be interested in a facilitated space for you to talk with other women within an affinity group. We will offer our full support and make resources available including Slack channels, our Zoom account, and administrative support for scheduling, rsvps, etc.If you are interested being a part of such a space, please let me know.
3. Facilitated spaces for for white women to talk.
One common theme that emerged from some white people who responded to the message I sent out last week was that they wished they could express themselves the way I had. I heard from people that they feel they lack the vocabulary, writing skills, and courage to be able to vocalize their feelings, or even to begin to engage in this conversation. I would like to seek ways to enable the white women of this community to develop and use their voices when it comes to matters of race, privilege, and systemic oppression. To that end, I will convene a space for white women to talk together. If you are interested in joining this conversation, please let me know.
4. Financial support
Finally, I will be making a donation to the Equal Justice Initiative in the U.S. and the One Case At A Time (OCAAT) Fund in the U.K. on behalf of Tide Risers, because Black lives matter. Please feel free to join me in making a donation to either of these organizations, or a cause that is important to you.
I welcome your thoughts on more actions we can take individually and as a community. Please feel free to reach out to me directly to discuss.
In solidarity and with love,
Lara