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About

My Social Justice Journey

In 2017, I was invited to participate in TMI Project’s first Black Stories Matter workshop to performance. I decided to re-visit a story I had published several years earlier, a story I thought I fully understood, about my ten month sojourn at Greer, a state-run children’s home, at the age of nine. The story focuses on my experience as a mixed race child from a middle class family living with Black children I’d only seen at a distance but never known in any personal way. These were children who had grown up dealing with poverty, violence and lack of good resources — realities I had never experienced.

As I re-worked this familiar material, surrounded by a cohort of Black writers – storytellers and truth seekers of all stripes – I felt encouraged to explore and articulate feelings that lay beneath my sense of disconnection and alienation that I had written about in the original version. The camaraderie and shared purpose of this group created a sense of trust and unconditional acceptance that empowered me to acknowledge something painful about myself that I’d managed to conceal (even from myself) for most of my life.

I concluded my story with these lines:

When I tell people about my experience at Greer they say ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that,’ but I’m not. I’m profoundly grateful I spent a year as an orphan living in a state run ‘home’ with black girls I never would never have known or been able to imagine in my previous life as a well-loved, well-fed and well-dressed child riding in a private school bus to a private school with other kids like me. Before this my own racism had been invisible to me. This was the first time I really saw my othering of people. I will always feel profoundly grateful for Trina, Missy, Phyllis and especially Shelly.  They showed me something important about the world and about myself that I needed to know.

The shadowy truth that I was finally able to acknowledge in this story was an unspoken assumption – baked into my white proximate upbringing – of my own superiority to Black (and other) Americans who had not grown up with a level of privilege and access (if not wealth) that I took for granted. In naming this harmful assumption, I began to understand the stealth of white supremacist culture at work in my own life.  By outing this shadow-belief, I released a tremendous tension in my psyche and opened up so much space in my life for honest communication and learning from others.

I learned two very important things from this experience:

  1. no one’s identity or upbringing inoculates them from the disease of white supremacist culture and
  2. in order to grow our capacities as humans and build sustainable relationships, we must be willing to explore the true stories we’re living

Since 2018, I have also served as a program facilitator and co-director of Black Stories Matter programming with the TMI Project. Over the past five years, I have co-facilitated numerous Black Stories Matter workshops in person and online curating stories from Elders and Youth in the Black communities in the Hudson Valley and beyond — building a body of work to reclaim our stories.

With more than 20 years teaching storytelling and almost a decade leading diverse groups in organizational environments, my clients have included:

  • Robert Sterling Clark Foundation program for leader-grantees
  • Ulster County Mental Health Association
  • Bottomless Closet, NY
  • Omega Institute
  • Hawthorne Valley
  • Vassar College
  • Bard College
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