Social Justice

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” Audre Lord

“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors have given you. It is in your history. It is in the way you walk, in the way you stand, in the way you care for each other, and in the way you care for the land.” Winona LaDuke (Ojibwe)

This can be a starting place for resources on educating ourselves about social justice issues. There are many resources available and many issues that we are being called on to understand and care about. We are being called to live with awareness, and to repair the disconnection caused by personal and collective trauma. We are being challenged to expand our awareness, and to understand and respect other’s humanity and the right of everyone to live in freedom.

“I have come to believe that behind the entire epidemic of chronic afflictions, mental and physical, that beset our current moment, something is amiss in our culture itself, generating both the rash of ailments we are suffering and crucially, the ideological blind spots that keep us ignorant of the connections that bind our health to our social-emotional lives. Chronic illness is not a glitch, it is a consequence of how we live.”
Gabor Maté, MD

Gabor’s latest book is wide ranging and covers many of the systems of conditioning that together create the toxic culture we live in.

Resources:

Indigenous People and Colonialism:

• Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada
  Reports from the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation

• Indigenous Canada, free course from the University of Alberta

• Maps of Indigenous land

• 150 Acts of Reconciliation

• Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls

• Indigenous Solidarity Action Guide

• Ecotrust Call to Action

• Landback

Patriarchy

This is really the water we all swim in. It hurts everyone.

Some people feel they have the right to control other people’s bodies. Some people feel they have the right to objectify and use the bodies of other people.

Any time we challenge and break out of gender roles and conditioning, we challenge the rigid narrow ideas of control that give some people the right to control and use others.

There is so much written on this that I don't have specific recommendations on resources.

Gender Identity and Conditioning

• Alok Vaid Menon’s website

• Alok The Urgent Need for Compassion, on Man Enough Podcast

• Alok’s book Beyond the Gender Binary

• E R Fightmaster interview on being nonbinary

• My YouTube playlist on Gender Identity

• GLADD Reference of Terms

• Engage and learn in community: Tristan Katz

• GLADD

• EGALE Canada

• Trevor Project

• It Gets Better

Racism

Life is hard for everyone. If you are white, racism is not one of the things that makes it harder for you.

Go to Instagram and search #antiracist or #racism

Prentis Hemphill: What It Takes To Heal, How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World.

Engage and learn in community: Michelle C Johnson

Quaking in America and My Grandmothers Hands, somatic healing and abolition, Resmaa Menakem books and courses
White Bodies and the Energies of Race

Robin d'Angelo website and Cheat Sheet

There are many available resources on anti-racism.