Facing our Racism: Becoming Conscious Partners Workshops
Tuesday/Thursday October 27 & 29, 2020,
7 - 9pm (each night)
More Spaces Added by Popular Demand
Sunday, November 8, 2020,
12 - 5pm
Suggested Donation: $35
The killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor galvanized White people to become “conscious partners” with our Black sisters and brothers to end racism. Crucial to this new understanding and awareness is the formation of genuine, open, truthful relationships between Black and White community members. Such equal, transparent and emotionally disclosing relationships require stepping outside of our usual, superficial modes of conversation and finding ways to get to know each other at a deeper level.
Identifying white supremacy and white cultural domination is where this conversation will begin. We will examine how these forces work within our interfaith communities, often beneath our awareness. This “Facing our Racism” workshop will analyze the systemic, institutional, policy, and power-driven persecution and discrimination against Black Americans since the very beginning of slavery.
The intention of this workshop is to create a new awareness and understanding of how to become conscious partners as, as White people, to our Black sisters and brothers within our interfaith communities. White people are called to acknowledge, in dialogue with Black people, the depth of exploitation, abuse and violence, including the history of lynching. "Facing our Racism: Becoming Conscious Partners" will explore the reality of unconscious bias, often expressed through micro-aggression. This unconscious bias often operates in the form of disowned racial superiority and exclusion, diminishment and devaluing of people of color.
About the Presenters:
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Dr. Connie Holmes is a retired psychologist who counseled cancer patients and their families for 28 years in Boston and in the San Francisco Bay area. She conducts these workshops throughout the United States. Her great-grandfather perished in Theresienstadt, a World War II concentration camp. Her exposure to the horrors of the Final Solution has motivated her to join the struggle for racial justice in the United States.
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Dolores Moorehead, MS, has been a leader in the civil rights movement for decades helping Black and White people talk about racial discrimination. She facilitates a conversation that allows participants to address their pain and shame so as to begin the healing process. She worked together with Dr. Holmes at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland for four years.
Sponsored by Cooperative Metropolitan Ministries (CMM), the greater Boston area’s oldest interfaith organization that has been fighting racism since 1966.
