The news headlines are constantly changing — White Supremacists Rally in Charlottesville, homeowners of color lack financial resources to rebuild after Hurricane Harvey, Trump administration ends Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — but the larger story we are living traces the same threads of racism and exploitation.
My personal journey brought me to cooperatives because I dreamed of a more democratic and equitable world, where communities can hold power and wealth through their ownership of the structures that they live in: food, educational, political systems and more. However, this journey has also taught me that I and other white people must own up to the ways we have benefited from the historic and current ownership structures that are neither democratic nor equitable, and only further the concentration of power and wealth among the white upper class. As a white person with many generations of family living in the south, I know that I am a direct descendant of people who owned enslaved Black people. Now is not the time for white people–especially those of us within the solidarity economy movement–to distance ourselves from the roots or the current manifestations of racial and economic disparities that we live within, but to face them boldly. Yes, in this moment white people may want to distance ourselves from the reality of white supremacy because we feel guilt and shame, or perhaps it is painful to break rank and we fear being ostracized, or we even may resist change and be in denial of the reality. We might look for quick fixes, or strive to have the ‘best’ analysis without taking any action, or claim that the problem exists somewhere else. But if you too dream of a more democratic and equitable world, we must own up to the reality and our relation to it.
