Dear <<First Name>>:
Good day to you. The RUPI Board of Directors has collaboratively written a statement of support for personal and systemic changes that increase racial justice. You'll find our statement here. Since we are a predominantly white-identified organization, this month's focus is on de-centering whiteness with resources for education and change. We are also deep into evolving and integrating our work with white privilege and status power to include this topic in our core curriculum by October 2020.
Increase your power-wisdom this month: buy a right use of power book, take an e-course, register for a training. https://www.rightuseofpower.org
Note: Our Core and Teacher Training has shifted to online.
Check out new resources at the BePoP website www.bepowerpositive.org and follow us at Facebook and Instagram.
Order your own cool Be Power Positive T-shirt at the BePop website: https://www.zazzle.com/bepop_shop/products
Sincerely, Cedar on behalf of Right Use of Power Institute
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UPCOMING RUP TRAININGS
Right Use of Power Core Training Online
Friday/Saturday Sept. 25-26, and Monday/Tuesday Sept 28-29, 2020
1:00-4:30 mountain time each day
$300 for 12 hours, CE hours available
with Dr. Cedar Barstow, D.P.I. and Magi Cooper, C.H.T.
http://www.rightuseofpower.org/calendar.html
Right Use of Power Teacher Training, now online
Thursday/Friday Oct. 1-2, 2020, Thursday/Friday February 4-5, 2021
1:00 to 4:30 mountain time each day for 12 cumulative hours
PLUS 24 additional hours
of small group and individual mentoring spread over time
$950 for 36 training hours, materials and 2021 Guild Membership
(Note: Core Training is Part I of the Teacher Training)
with Dr. Cedar Barstow, D.P.I. and Magi Cooper, C.H.T.
http://www.rightuseofpower.org/calendar.html
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- July 2020 -
IN THIS ISSUE --
Right Use of Power Institute Racial Justice Statement, reading time 2 minutes
Becoming Anti-racist chart, anonymous
History of Race, Phil Vischer, viewing time 15 minutes
The Journey from I to We, Dr. Reynold Ruslan Feldman, reading time 3 minutes
White People UndFreedom--Simple and To the Point, Judith Barr
White People Under Construction, Courtney Martin, reading time 8 minutes
Anti-Racist Resources from Greater Good
For Our White Friends Desiring to be Allies, Courtney Ariel, reading time 8 minutes
Right Use of Power Courses
Our Vision, Mission, and Values
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Statement from Right Use of Power Institute (RUPI)
Board of Directors
Concerning Right Uses of Power for Racial Justice
The Right Use of Power Institute (RUPI) of Boulder, Colorado, USA envisions a world in which people use their power with wisdom, compassion, and skill. Our organizational mission is to foster shared well-being through programs, tools, and resources that guide individuals in understanding and using their power with integrity.
Given our mission, we, the members of the RUPI Board of Directors wish to make a public statement about our response to the active racial-justice movement now under way in many countries. As partially the result of colonial and imperialistic attitudes, abuses, and misuses of power by the white race over time have led to entrenched systemic racism toward people of color. We recognize that white people have status privileges, often taken for granted and unconsciously held. We recognize that white people must learn to use the power of their status with wisdom, skill, strength, and compassion. In helping to effect this transformation, we intend to challenge and change attitudes and systems that continue to oppress black, brown, and native peoples throughout the world, beginning with those in ourselves. We actively stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. We care.
Here is what the Right Use of Power Institute Board is currently doing to support right uses of power for racial justice:
• Our white-identified board members are undertaking an internal assessment to examine and improve their uses of power as board members with each other and in the world, including the exploration of internalized racism.
• As part of recognizing status power as an important part of systemic racism, we are integrating considerations of status power as a core component into all our training programs by October 2020.
• We are devoting the July 2020 Power with Heart News to a collection of resources for racial-justice work.
• Perhaps most importantly, we are currently in listening mode, cultivating our humility, and engaging with our grief and discomfort, in order to understand what we don’t yet understand. We are connecting with leaders in the racial-justice movement locally, nationally, and internationally to explore how we can be better allies on this critical journey of equity and justice. Our intention is to integrate our new understandings about racial justice continually into what we do and how we do it.
Being an ally is about more than writing statements full of nice-sounding words. It’s about holding space for marginalized voices, listening to them, and most importantly, acting with compassion and skill to ensure that our impacts align with our best intentions.
Adopted unanimously by the Right Use of Power Board of Directors on July 20, 2020
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Here's a chart (author unknown) that I have found to be helpful, encouraging, and non-shaming.
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The Journey from I to We, or Why Lives that Have Mattered Less Need Now to Matter More
Dr. Reynold Ruslan Feldman
In response to the Black Lives Matter protests, we white people have answered with the truism, “All lives matter.” In fact, with a bow to the Green movement, all life matters, or should. But that’s the point. All life doesn’t and all lives don’t. Not at least to those of us who have lucked out to be born with cultural silver spoons in our mouths: money, two-parent families, a nice neighborhood, the best public schools, and—by a total quirk of fate—white skin. There’s not much room at the top, the thinking goes, and those of us, through no virtue of our own, who happened to be born in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy have little incentive to make room for those below us, let alone to give them a hand up. In a society based on social Darwinism, your win is paid for by my loss. We white Americans live in a gated community of the mind if not of heart and soul. Stay in your place so I can stay in mine seems our belief.
Social Darwinism and its economic offspring, capitalism, are based on survival of the fittest. What is left out of account is the fact that white skin and a middleclass birth or better are the true Operation Head Start. In a wonderful short video, a camp leader declares to a racially and socially mixed group of teenagers that he will give the winner of a footrace $100. But first the racers must answer a series of prompts like “If you were born in a two-parent family, take two steps forward,” “If you grew up in a single-family house, take two steps forward,” “If you were sent to a private versus public school, take two steps forward,” and so on. By the time the counselor shouts “Go!,” the white, middleclass kids have a sizable advantage. Guess who wins?
The term that comes to mind now is restorative justice. In the footrace of life in our ego-based society, we should do just the opposite: “If you came from a one-parent household, take two steps forward,” “If you grew up in a ghetto, take two more,” “If you attended a poorly equipped, poorly staffed school in the ‘hood, take another two,” etc. Affirmative Action, Operation Head Start, Food Stamps, and other programs are baby steps in this direction. But much more is needed. I think now of Black Americans whose ancestors were brought here against their will to work as slaves so that their white masters could become wealthy, whose families were sold apart, who today, though legally free, suffer from a kind of cultural PTSD among other inherent disadvantages. I think of Native Americans whose land, language, and religions were stolen, whose treaties, especially once gold was discovered in the West, our white male government repeatedly broke. Restorative justice means that because their lives mattered less, now they must matter more. That translates into payment in both money and land. Nice talk and beautiful apologies are an insult. It’s said that the longest journey is from the head to the heart. I think it’s actually from I to We. America’s greatness is a nice thought. Now it’s time to turn it into a reality.
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FREEDOM – SIMPLE AND TO THE POINT
Excerpt from a larger work by Judith Barr
Freedom is not another word for
“I have a free pass to act as I wish,
regardless of its consequences on others.”
Freedom is not another word for
“You don’t have any authority over me.”
Or “You don’t have any power over me.”
Freedom is not a synonym for
“you can’t make me do anything!”
To celebrate real freedom means taking responsibility for your actions, words, thoughts, and feelings.
To celebrate real freedom means being in your power, using your power well –
not over others.
To celebrate real freedom means using your gifts in service for you and others.
© Judith Barr, 2020
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(Excerpts by Cedar Barstow) Read whole blog here: https://courtney.substack.com/p/white-people-under-construction?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy
Engaging with a wide variety of white folks across the country, with all different sorts of professional affiliations, here’s a bit of the pattern keeping I’ve been doing: White people are excavating the past harm they’ve done and aren’t sure what to do with it. Alongside the bigger structural questions about reparations, many of us are navigating a lot of confusion about what repair looks like in a wide variety of interpersonal situations. White people’s relationship with one another are seriously strained. Some of us are trying to figure out how to be unconditionally loving with friends who have been called out for racist abuse, but also not let them off the hook. It’s hard not to just absolve people we know and love, but complicity no longer feels loving. We’re also having conversations with family and friends that we never did before; it finally feels urgent (it always was, of course). It’s messy as hell.
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White people are discovering that they have bodies (!!!) and that racialized trauma lives in our bodies, too. We are realizing that if we are going to fight racism, we have to reconnect with our own bodies, histories, and trauma. Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, goes a long way towards catapulting a reader into this journey, probably one reason it’s zoomed up the bestseller list in recent weeks. A lot of white people feel deeply disembodied, and a lot of white people have a story about themselves that they are “bad” at feeling things in their bodies.
White people are relieved to be taking action and appropriately suspicious of the sense of relief. It feels empowering to order the books, sign up for the webinars, donate the money, and take anti-racist action. We are actually doing something about racism! Yet it’s easy to slip into a box-checking mentality, which has a white supremacist quality to it. We need to learn how to follow and recognize how much we don’t or shouldn’t have control. We need to feel out a wandering, winding, messy, and relational path that should take us a lifetime to travel. As Austin Channing Brown says, “This is about being better humans.”
https://courtney.substack.com/p/white-people-under-construction?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy
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Articles, podcasts, and more that explore our potential to reduce prejudice in society and in ourselves. |
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FOR OUR WHITE FRIENDS DESIRING TO BE ALLIES
BY COURTNEY ARIEL
AUG 16, 2017
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Author's Note: I'm writing this in hopes that it can be used to lighten the load of marginalized folks, keeping in mind that not all marginalized people want to engage in the ally conversation, and that is perfect as well. For those who do, my prayer is that when someone asks you the question, “how can I be a stronger ally?” you might choose to save your breath/energy and send this in its place.
I am not going to do much coddling here; I don’t know that I believe that love requires coddling. Here are six things you can do to be stronger allies. (excerpted by Cedar Barstow, read all six and the rest of the article here: https://sojo.net/articles/our-white-friends-desiring-be-allies
1. Listen more; talk less. You don’t have to have something to say all of the time. You don’t have to post something on social media that points to how liberal/how aware/how cool/how good you are. You are lovely, human, and amazing. You have also had the microphone for most of the time, for a very long time, and it will be good to give the microphone to someone else who is living a different experience than your own.
2. For one out of every three opinions/insights shared by a person of color in your life, try to resist the need to respond with a better or different insight about something that you read or listened to as it relates to their shared opinion.
3. Being an ally is different than simply wanting not to be racist (thank you for that, by the way). Being an ally requires you to educate yourself about systemic racism in this country. Use your voice and influence to direct the folks that walk alongside you in real life (or follow you on the internet), toward the voice of someone that is living a marginalized/disenfranchised experience.
5. Ask when you don’t know — but do the work first. This is nuanced. Some marginalized/disenfranchised folks will tell you not to ask them anything; don’t be offended by that. Folks are tired, and that is understandable because it is exhausting to be a marginalized person in this world. However, there is something special that happens within human connections and relationships. In a nutshell, don’t expect for people to educate you. Do the work to educate yourself. Ask questions within relationships that feel safe, and do so respectfully.
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Sometimes living with privilege can disillusion us into thinking that being in community with other humans doesn’t require work. This is a lie; it requires a great deal of work. And all of that work requires being a human and trying to love other humans well.
I believe that this is holy work, the work of justice, the pursuit of it. It doesn’t need an audience, and it will not always have one. It will happen most days in ways that are unseen. It might mean providing a meal or shelter, listening, using your particular area of expertise to help someone in need of that expertise who might not have access to it otherwise, bailing a protester out of jail, or paying a family’s rent one month (if you have the resources to do so), or marching at a rally with marginalized folks alongside other allies. There may not always be a practical, tangible way to pursue this work, but I believe you will know it when you meet it face-to-face.
However it looks, it will be something that you do without needing to be thanked or receive praise — you are not a savior. Marginalized/disenfranchised folks can and will survive without you — we are magic. However, I urge you to pursue this work, knowing that a system of white privilege afforded you access to opportunities while denying them to so many others.
Above all, I urge you keep trying. You're going to make mistakes; expect this. But keep showing up. Be compassionate. Lead with empathy, always. Keep learning and growing. If you do this, I truly believe you’ll be doing the work of an ally.
Please keep in mind that self care is hugely important. Take care of yourself and protect your energy before you attempt to care for anyone else.
https://sojo.net/articles/our-white-friends-desiring-be-allies
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Right Use of Power E-Courses
Meet Your Ethics Continuing Education Requirement using Right Use of Power e-courses from the convenience of your own home, in your own time. Or go into more depth with each topic in the Right Use Of Power book.
 My Hakomi colleague Rob Fisher calls this ethics program, "ethics from the inside out, rather than from the rules' side in." Recently revised and up-dated, the courses are engaging and cover the material in the book:Right Use of Power: The Heart of Ethics, by Hakomi Trainer, Cedar Barstow and is the ethics approach described in the book:Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy. The courses are approved by NBCC, NCBTMB, and BBS (California), and some other organizations by reciprocal agreement.
Five Courses, each worth three CE hours and covering the following topics:
Dimension One--Power Differential, Codes and Guidelines, Ethical Decision-Making, Violations and Statistics.
Dimension Two--Personal Power, Shame, Touch, Sexuality, Transference.
Dimension Three--Boundaries, Resolving Difficulties, Grievance Processes, Referrals.
Dimension Four--Leadership and Power Dynamics, Challenges, Soul Work and World Service.
The More Dimension--Dual Role Relationships, Impact and Intention, Feedback, Self-Care, Influence/Values/Diversity.
Find out more about the E-courses here.
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RIGHT USE OF POWER INSTITUTE'S MISSION
The Right Use of Power Institute is a small international 501c3 non-profit organization.
We envision a world in which people use power with wisdom, compassion and skill.
Our mission is to foster shared well-being through programs, tools and resources that guide people in using their power with integrity.
Our Values
Our programs and resources are built on the following core values:
Inclusivity--actively working to cultivate equity
Compassion--telling the truth with heart
Direct Experience--whole-person, holistic, practical learning
Integrity--aligning impact with intention
Connection--understanding power as relational
Power with Heart News supports our mission by providing writings by RUPI members and links to other materials that elucidate issues of power. We also bring new perspectives and guidance, and advocate for socially responsible uses of power. Our aim is to counter misuses and abuses of power with wise, compassionate and inclusive uses of power. We do our best to be non-partisan advocates of right use of power in every realm.
JOIN US IN TAKING OUR PLEDGE
TO USE OUR POWER WISELY AND WELL.
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