Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable

In this article, we articulate a framework for making our commitments to racial justice actionable, a framework that moves from narrating confessional accounts to articulating our commitments and then acting on them through both self-work and work-with-others, a dialectic possibility we identify and explore. We model a method for moving beyond originary confessional narratives and engage in dialogue with "the willingness to be disturbed," (Wheatley, 2002) believing that disturbances are productive places from which we can more clearly articulate and act from our commitments. Drawing on our own experiences, we engage the political, systemic, and enduring nature of racism as we together chart an educational frame that counters the macro-logics of oppression enacted daily through micro-inequities. As we advocate for additional and ongoing considerations of the work of anti-racism in educational settings, we invite others to embrace, along with us, both the willingness to be disturbed and the attention to making commitments actionable. This article is inspired by conversations we've had about how our shared commitments to racial justice become manifest and actionable in our everyday lives. We have long been in conversation in overlapping groups of colleagues and friends about embodying transformative racial justice in our personal and professional lives. As the personal and professional so often blur, we collectively decided we'd document these reflections for this special issue of Across the Disciplines—that is, to share our articulations of commitment and our efforts to make commitments actionable. We hope to open dialogue and engage with others similarly involved in conversations with friends and colleagues and, in doing so, to emphasize the processual nature of the work. The unified voice that follows is a product of recursive, dialogic process that cannot be captured by the linear development or unfolding of the argument of this article, but which we hope you will see as part of the conversation—a step along the way. Our work hinges on dialectic thinking, which engages the necessary tension between the critique against racism and the critique for social and racial justice. Critique is differently defined but is always considered an essential condition to making change. Like Porter et al. (2000), "[we] are not interested in simply reporting how evil institutions are; we think critique needs an action plan" (p.613). Power structures and systems of oppression are not changed enough by critique alone, but can become more entrenched by each conversation, presentation, and article that reveals oppression (Kincaid, 2003). As The New London Group (2000/2002), Porter et al. (2000), and Kincaid (2000) all argue, change requires new stories, new ways of collaborating, and new ways of living. In other words, critique (in its many forms) should dovetail with opportunities to take action (also in its many forms). Alongside our conversations about critique against and critique for, we discovered similar limits within our personal narratives, and these limits made us think about ways to re-narrate. Because our discussion started by accounts of our first encounters and realizations of the depths of racism, we soon discovered the affordances and the limits of such narratives. Our article starts there, with reflections that were mainly characterized by a willingness to be disturbed. The trouble with the limits of our narrative accounts and our willingness to be disturbed catalyzed for us the move toward constructing a model for the reflective pursuit of racial justice. In what follows then, we first consider how "confessional" narratives often trap people into thinking of racism as primarily located outside of themselves and solvable by completing specific tasks (along the lines of a checklist). We argue that one must move from confessional narratives to articulations of commitment that are paired with reflective action. A great deal of self-work is required on the journey of growth from articulating of a commitment to racial justice to making that commitment actionable and sustainable. In this article, we discuss self-work through cultivating emotional intelligence and finding time and space to work on racial justice matters. Thinking dialectically, we understand self-work is done alongside work-with-others, which moves us toward institutional change. In making our commitments actionable, then, we suggest the need to work in complementary personal, interpersonal, and institutional domains. Cultivating a willingness to engage and articulate one's commitment can help us understand how to effect institutional change toward racial justice. But working with others in these three personal, interpersonal, and institutional domains to pursue social justice is a demanding project, which entails more than the long-term goal to end white privilege and oppression, while affirming the full enfranchisement of all people. Working to end racism also entails a willingness to be disturbed—that is, a willingness to cultivate a tireless investment in reflection, openness, and hope for a better, more fulfilling future for us all. Embracing a Willingness to Be Disturbed As we work together to restore hope for the future, we need to include a new and strange ally— our willingness to be disturbed. Our willingness to have our beliefs and ideas challenged by what others think. No one person or perspective can give us the answers we need to the problems of today. Paradoxically, we can only find those answers by admitting we don't know. We have to be willing to let go of our certainty and expect ourselves to be confused for a time (Wheatley, 2002, p. 34). The processual work involved in creating this piece taught us that a willingness to be disturbed underlies the work of articulating and making commitments actionable. The more we talked, wrote together, and shared our commitments, the more we found ourselves challenged, confused, and even disturbed at times—wrestling with our personal narratives, our racialized positions in the world, and our relative power and privilege. We have had to re-dedicate ourselves to careful listening and to working through a number of risks and vulnerabilities amongst ourselves. Through choosing to be willingly disturbed, we have come to believe, as Margaret Wheatley (2002) does in Turning to One Another, that "[c]uriosity and good listening bring us back together" (p. 36). Our willingness to be disturbed and our willingness to listen help us overcome seemingly insurmountable divides in the face of institutionalized racism enacted daily through a series of ongoing micro-aggressions and micro-inequities (Sue et al., 2007). Willingness to listen and to be disturbed makes us develop ways to resist how these micro manifestations of aggressions and inequities recycle their ever-present historical legacies. We follow Wheatley's challenge to embrace a willingness to be disturbed to signify the important role self-work plays in our project. Like Wheatley, we value encountering disturbances because doing so helps us "see [our] own views more clearly," and is "a very useful way to see invisible beliefs" (p. 36). Entering into conversations with a willingness-to-be-disturbed stance signifies that personal epistemologies are part of systemic racism and oppression. This willingness also signals an openness to dialogue with readers and a recognition that anti-racism work is messy and ongoing. In other words, we must voice that our conversations were not easy and included strife against our care not to reproduce racism and hurt. Likewise, we struggled with issues of wanting to be up to the task of publishing (of making public) our conversation. This task, for us, has involved recognizing from the onset that our commitment to anti-racism is not a one-time deal: we are here with each other and with others to learn, to recommit ourselves, and to work toward making our commitments actionable in our lives. We strive, therefore, to confront our individual and collective fears and respons(a/i)bilities—work that we have found necessitates a willingness to be disturbed, as Wheatley calls us to. Finding and Listening to Disturbances in Our Narratives We believe that disturbances are productive places from which we can clearly articulate and act from our commitments. In this article, we capture the generative potential of this willingness to be disturbed, as we work toward a framework that actualizes our shared commitments to social justice. But there is a story to how this model came to be, one that leads us to believe that articulating and making commitments actionable involves moving beyond what we term "confessional narratives." Soon after we began working on this project, we realized that we tended to start, but then get trapped by, narrating our encounters with oppression in its varied forms. Our initial drafts began with writing self-reflections on our own histories with systemic, internalized, and (inter)nationalized racism. Our accounts were useful in some ways. They helped us to ground our positioning, identify how we have come to make anti-racism/racial justice central to our pedagogical and professional lives, articulate the commitments that guide our work, and describe the ways we act on those commitments. Writing our stories necessitated embracing disturbances and articulating commitments, and we realized common threads: all of us are, despite our different backgrounds and identities, part of a privileged group and shielded by manufactured segregation/distance. But as we all narrated our early encounters with oppression, we seemed to be in some ways attached to an idea of the self that emerges and lurks in the narrative. We wondered, therefore, about the real working of our narratives, and we could no longer deny their confessional nature. Moving Beyond Confessional Narratives Confessional accounts—efforts toward disclosing positionali