Antiracist Triad: The process begins

In early December of 2020, I made an ask of my tribe for two people to create a triad of white-bodied individuals to do antiracist work based on the description Resmaa Menakem wrote about in his article entitled, “When White Bodies Say, “Tell Me What to Do”. The Voice of Love, my gut, my heart, had been tugging me in that direction ever since I read his piece in May of 2021. His article provoked on so many levels and its main gist is this.

Get out of your white privilege bubble, seek confrontation to expose your bodily experience of racial trauma, examine your life, and “commit to growing up.” Do this with a lifelong triad (here is an excerpt from his article).

Your Lifelong Triad

Find two other people with white bodies whom you trust. Make this agreement with them:

The three of us will get together weekly to work toward ushering in a living, embodied, antiracist culture. Separately and together, we will read, research, study, discuss, challenge each other, figure things out, and act from the best parts of ourselves.

We'll each do a lot of listening. But we won't just meet and converse. We'll also act—though we don't yet know what forms those actions will take.

We know that, along the way, we will face peril and possibility, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and keep going. Our path forward will be unknown, uncharted, and emergent. We will not follow a playbook; we will write our own.

We know that we must be humble. We will often need to follow in others' footsteps. We will only rarely, and perhaps never, take the lead.

If one of us leaves the group for any reason, we will find another white-bodied person to join us, and we will continue.

We will do this for the rest of our lives. When all three of us are gone, the group will live on with different white bodies.

We started in December and this is what I can say.

It was as if I had been living in a beautiful princess tower blind to the world.* I wrote in June 2020 to my children about our wall of white privilege. I pledged then to speak about that which was not labeled in my childhood. To call out the racism and model working towards a more equitable world. But I was doing the work by myself and still a bit a princess about it - not wanting to get my skirts too dirty.

We have been doing the triad work for less than a year and it has smashed open my princess bubble. I am now working to claim my position as the Queen. The Queen is able to feel the discomfort of having inherited such wealth, such ease, such advantages when so many have nothing. She is able to feel that discomfort and ask for forgiveness. She does not push away the pangs of sorrow and injustice but uses those as fuel for her resolve. The Queen vows to use her privilege to speak the truth. The Queen sees the wrongs of the world and is not afraid to name them and smash walls to fix. The Queen sees the hurt and the trauma and does not look away like the princess.

The princess wails over inequality.

The Queen listens, brainstorms a war strategy with her triad, and leads the charge.

The Queen doesn’t worry about following antiquated rules designed by the heteronormative patriarchy of the Global North. The Queen recognizes the complexities of our society and does not bury her head in silks and satins, but rolls up her velvet sleeves and gets to work. Mud and blood and discomfort and all.

The Queen forges her own way, she does not expect to be coddled like the princess, she commits her soul to a life that sings with meaning and purpose.

I am 45 years old. My triad is helping me grow up in a way that is piercing and deep. I am so grateful.

The triad is key to this process. Like that scene from Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams calls out Matt Damon on being a child because he only knows things from books. Reading Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America or Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” on my own was one experience - but talking about the words with the group and feeling it land in my body is another. To read it with a group of two other white bodied individuals and listen to their experiences, their stories, their worries - and be heard in my turn. The triad anchors the lessons in a way I would not be getting if I were doing this alone. Doing antiracism with the triad vs doing the work on my own is as if the work went from black and white to 3D technicolor.

The triad has become my support, my accountability, my cheerleading, my ballast, my provocation, my sanctuary - it is amazing.

If you are called to put together your own antiracist triad - I would recommend reading The Education of a Wasp by Lois M. Stalvey to begin. From there the process will sweep you in directions varied and wonderful.

Leaving you with Trevor Noah on American Racism - because life is both joy and pain. Both And.

* I don’t think it is a coincidence I was in a princess tower in January of 2022 when I first started the triad for my bone marrow transplant. In case I ever wondered whether the hand of the Divine guides our lives.