When did I first become aware of racism?

Recently, I participated in the CTTT (Coming to the TABLE) Circle Process Training.* I wrote about volunteering with my children for CTTT Freedom Walk 2026 (happening this Monday in NYC, see you there!)

The Circle Process Training was an online course where CTTT Circle Keepers went over the format and modeled the Circle Process - the format for all CTTT meetings.

According to the facilitators (huge shoutout to Stacy/Gretchen) the Circle Process is, “a deliberate container to encourage emotional vulnerability and trust around a very charged issue.”

A deliberate container to encourage emotional vulnerability and trust around a very charged issue.

I almost want to write that sentence again and again because I am so in awe with the intelligence and maturity of that idea (emotionally, spiritually, somatically, etc).

Could you imagine if our civic spaces created a deliberate container to encourage emotional vulnerability and trust around a very charged issue. The mind boggles - maybe someday. In the meantime, there are regular meetings that ARE doing this good work and have been for 20 years.

I took extensive notes from the class introduction and I highly recommend taking time to soak in the lessons yourself if time.* The Circle Process for CTTT:

…is a way to build repair, reconcile the legacy of enslavement and to find healing. It is part of the restorative justice philosophy. Circles, as a way of dialogue, support community building, relationship building, and also helps folks embody ways to be with each other that is life affirming, embracing an inclusive mindset - giving folks the opportunity to explore repair, reconciliation and healing.

Circle embrace the concept of transformational relationships. You move away from transactions (X from me for Y from you) and more we are in this together (let us see where this experience leads us). Circle Process comes from peace making circles in indigenous communities in Canada and one of the important aspects of peace making circles and indigenous culture is its spiritual nature. Circle is a sacred space.

CTTT we have taken on the task/commitment to heal from the racial trauma that our ancestors experienced and what we experience today. It is hard to talk about race. It is hard to talk about racism. Peace making circles or the Circle Process is a wonderful space to make it easier for for us to be brave in these conversations - because Grace lives in this space, when we get it right.

Grace lives in this space, when we get it right. What an amazing sentence. I could write that one three times too.

So, after describing the Circle Process, the centerpiece, and the Touchstones - the participants broke into small groups to experience a Circle in action.

After introductions in our small group, the Circle Keepers, asked the first question for all of us":

When did you first become aware of racism?

This is a topic I have spoken about extensively with my Anti Racist Triad - three White friends. But being asked this question by a Black stranger made my body clench. I started to sweat, and I took a breath and paused. “That is a really hard question for me with strangers.”

“You are in a safe space.”

And Grace entered.

I had been raised not “to see” color. That it was rude to use the terms Black and White when describing friends, strangers, participants in a story.

Yet to be blind to skin color in America implicitly assumes that everyone is like me. When one takes 2 seconds to really think about it - that is insane. Obviously insane. Let’s make the implicit explicit and debunk that right now.**

Kesiena Boom summarizes this very well in her Vice article: 100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating for People of Color. “#96: Understand that nothing in your life has been untouched by your whiteness. Everything you have would have been harder to come by if you had not been born white.”***

In a perfect world, yes, colorblind is the way to go.

In a perfect world.

As Beverly Tatum says in her beautifully updated seminal work, Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race, “we may be living in a color-silent society, where we have learned to avoid talking about racial difference. But even if we refrain from mentioning race, the evidence is clear that we still notice racial categories and that our behaviors are guided by what we notice.” (pg 24, emphasis by Tatum)

Racial inequality runs rampant through all statistics of education, wealth, incarceration, health, housing, access to capital, etc - which means that our color-silent society is just sticking our head in the sand.

Difficult to create circles around Grace when eating sand.

Or, as James Baldwin says so beautifully, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

*Below is the 75 minute class if you have time to delve into this good work. All of their trainings on in the Recordings & Replays section of the Year of Liberation Resource Hub. I love that I was asked to read the BothAnd Touchstone. Serendipity of awesomeness, right there.

**Always and forever, a shoutout to Micah from the Good Work Institute on such a perspicacious insight.

***I love her “#99: Recognize that fighting racism isn’t about you, it’s not about your feelings; it’s about liberating people of color from a world that tries to crush us at every turn.”

OR, as Michelle Alexander says so beautifully in her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. “We are now living in an era of unabashed racialism, a time when many white Americans feel free to speak openly of their nostalgia for an age when their cultural, political, and economic dominance could be taken for granted - no apologies required. It can no longer be denied that the colorblind veneer of early twenty-first century American democracy was just that: a veneer. Right beneath the surface lay an ugly reality that many Americans were not prepared to face.”