The Food Pyramid of Anti-Racism
Build Your Priorities From the Bottom Up
Note: This post is specifically for white people. If you think there’s something you’d like to say to white people (esp white women) in regards to this, feel free to contact me to guest-blog or collaborate! Also note that I’m not perfect!!! I have to work on this stuff just as much as anyone else and I will fuck up because fucking up is part of the process! Perfection is not required and fucking up is normal!
I think most of millennials and Gen X remember the archaic and honestly flat out stupid food pyramid that used to get passed around in school to demonstrate the quantities and types of foods that were recommended as staples of diet. Thankfully, Harvard University has reorganized the pyramid to make it fit with the current knowledge that we have about nutrition and exercise habits, prioritizing portion control, exercise, and mindfulness as the basis for the diet built on top.
Just as we’ve grown and learned from what did not work with the previous formulations of the food pyramid, we’re still learning about what works and doesn’t work with the way we organize other aspects of our lives including the way we interact with complex topics such as anti-racism work and social structures (all breads and pasta used to be the “support” of the pyramid and now they’re at the “sparingly”…pasta and police both start with ‘p’ just saying). The important thing about the food pyramid for the context of this article is that it is based on the initiative of an individual—so that is how I’ll present how I’ve structured my anti-racism pyramid. Why do this? Because white women fucking love infographics and it’s an easy one to manipulate. It might not even be the best way to organize it! As the food pyramid has altered, so might this pyramid alter! But let’s lay it all out from the bottom to the top.
The Bottom: Intrapersonal Work
The bottom part of the pyramid is the most important part. It makes up the base that holds the rest of the pyramid up and allows the rest of the pyramid to function. Without a sturdy foundational base, the pyramid will crumble, rendering itself utterly ineffectual. Intrapersonal work is the bulk of what you should be doing as a white or white-passing individual—this work is focused on your own mind, your known and unknown biases, and how you have not only benefited from your privilege but wielded in the past as well. Sometimes intrapersonal work is worked out in interpersonal work as well, the same mortar used for those bricks as the bricks above it, the weight of the above levels cementing the structure of the bottom—this is okay and good! “Settling” is something that is important when it comes to the development of how you personally handle your own complicity in white supremacy and interactions with others will help you contextualize your positions, feelings, and thoughts.
Sometimes you’re coming at this after having been “canceled.” That is, someone took a wrecking ball and smashed the shit out of your pyramid or an earthquake took you right out. Because your pyramid wasn’t steady, it crumbled and now you’re working on building it up again and doing better this time: building a strong base is what will help you next time someone shakes your foundations. (Please note here that having a wrecking ball come in isn’t a bad thing. You won’t know where you failed in your pyramid’s structure until someone comes along and gives you a good shake! Appreciate the shakes as they come and repair or build back as needed.) Understanding how you function within and as part of a social, economic, and political infrastructure built around white supremacy is something that can be exceptionally daunting. It’s important that you learn what you can do, how you can accept it and how you can learn to work against it not just for your own peace of mind but for the liberation of all of our friends who remain disadvantaged!
What Can I Do? Read books, watch videos (see the bottom of this article for more on this), and, as TikTokker let_go_my_meg_o suggests: do some journaling! Books are a great way to put some good bricks down as the outline for your pyramid. It’s important that you’re working through your thoughts and feelings with these books so when you get into your feels whether they be happiness, sadness, anger, what-have-you, get out a little journal and write all your thoughts down. Sometimes these thoughts are going to be not great but that’s why they’re in the journal and not in anyone else’s space. They’re for you to work through so you can smooth out all the bubbles in your mortar. Building the base to your pyramid can take a long time. Sometimes people don’t get any further than just this step. That’s okay (really, I’m not kidding, this is okay). It’s ideal if you can reach beyond this point, but it takes a lot of work which is why it’s always a good idea to have a therapist or best friend who can motivate you (please don’t ask your [one] Black friend to be this person for you).
The Next Step: Friends, Family, and Coworkers
Chances are you already have a friend or two who are doing this work alongside you who’ve inspired you. Hopefully they’re real world friends that you see often enough in meatspace rather than the sort you only ever see online but online is alright too (cue “store-bought is fine” soundbyte) as any kind of sharing at this stage is good for your bottom level to settle under the weight of ideas coming in from people you know and sometimes the resistance you have to face in order to put more bricks down and realize how the ideology works in a small “real world” scenario. Personally, most of my family doesn’t want to read “depressing” books and many of my friends or coworkers can’t get heavy into “the work” because they either don’t want to or aren’t ready to do it. Believe me, it’s not something you can be forced into or pressured into or even shamed into. It has to be something you want for yourself and for your community. Inspiration is key—once your friends and family and coworkers see how it functions on a real-world level and are willing to talk to you about it, you’re doing one of the most important aspects of anti-racism: grassroots.
Grassroots activism starts at home. It’s the most basic aspects of a society and it’s all about being able to open up dialogues with regular people in their day-to-day lives. Some folks would love to be part of a flashy organization that protests outside of prisons and gets arrested on the Capitol steps but that’s not where the majority of sweeping change happens. The quiet strength of family bonds that allow us to present new ideas to people we love and cherish who may not trust those new ideas if they came from a stranger are what truly drive sweeping alterations of social conscience. Big changes happen because small shifts have made those big changes possible. Think of it like an earthquake—over time, more and more pressure is applies from different tectonic plates until one of them slips and an earthquake occurs—same process. The more small bits of pressure that are applies from grassroots activism, the better the chance that a big sudden shift will happen in the future.
Work With Organizations
Capitalism makes most voluntary work with organizations extremely difficult and this is by design (capitalism is supposed to keep those without too busy trying to be those with that they can’t help each other when it counts). My general readership base is going to be white women and queer folks of all shapes, sizes, and privilege status so that’s why I’m focusing on what I write about here but as a generalization, your privilege might just be a little bit higher than someone else’s and so your ability to work with and alongside organizations might be better than someone else’s ability. If that’s you: please consider doing it! If you can’t volunteer, donate! Donations are a great way to show tangible support for the work that those organizations do. Organizations you choose don’t even have to be those that work directly with issues of anti-racism but can be organizations that work with protecting rights that are important for civil justice such as the ACLU. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children can always use donations and their work directly affects children who are taken advantage of—and what percentage of those children are non-white? A greater percentage, lemme tell you.
A couple good starting options to think about when it comes to volunteer work and donations (in no specific order):
Keep your ear to the ground for organizations that sound good and are run by people who seem to have good heads on their shoulders. No organization is perfect and perfection is not the goal here—which is good, because you aren’t perfect either! If perfection was required, nothing would ever get done! Best part about organizations, you can always make one time donations to several of them rather than set up a month-to-month. You might end up with a lot of mail asking for more money, but sometimes the reminders are useful for those of us who are often forgetful of which orgs we’ve donated to in the past. Local city missions are also a good idea to look into—helping your specific local community should always be a top priority and volunteering is easier the closer you live to headquarters.
Work With Strangers
Strangers are people you do not know. You’ve never known them, they are outside of any organization, they might be uninitiated in the conversations around race and just living their lives blissfully ignorant that there’s even anything wrong at all. They might think that “All Lives Matter” because on it’s own, that phrase makes sense to them and they may or may not have done work—you don’t know.
Work with strangers is usually a sort of passive throw-away statement here or there. It’s gently bringing up things in a conversation at a party when someone has said something borderline or even completely racist and they might not be aware of it. It’s asking people to explain to you why a racist joke was funny as if you don’t get it until they’re uncomfortable. Work with strangers is extremely difficult. Mostly because you have to be able to handle discomfort. If your intrapersonal work has developed a strong emotional and mental base for your anti-racism work, you will have realized that discomfort should be the natural basic state. Comfort is not what anti-racism is about—it’s about knowing that what you believe in will be met with disgust, hatred, and resistance and doing it anyway. Prepare to never get invited to that group’s parties ever again—and do it anyway. White women especially usually want to do anything they possibly can to protect their complacent lives and the comfort that comes from everyone “just getting along.” Stop getting along. Anti-racism work means sacrificing your personal comfort and opportunities to press forward the idea that everyone should be able to have access to those opportunities.
Work with strangers often includes work with Black or Indigenous people around you. This poses another set of challenges. TikTokker WhiteWomanWhisperer developed a set of tactics she calls “White Woman Whisperer Active Listening Lessons” (WWWALL) to help guide white allies with their interactions not just with strangers but even with your BIPOC friends. The tactics sound simple, but might take a little work (or a lot of work) to wrap your feelings around them.
Respect it first, understand it later. You don’t have to be able to wrap your mind around everything BIPOC are telling you. Your job is to soak in all the experiences that are being laid out in front of you and make certain you’re not minimizing the experiences of those who’ve shared them with you and especially not right there to them. Do not be disrespectful!
Take things seriously, not personally. Almost nothing that is shared by BIPOC has anything to do with you personally. BIPOC hatred of white people as a whole is not hatred of you personally. Not everything in the world is about you or has to cater to you or has to have you in mind. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING SHOULD BE TAKEN PERSONALLY. If you have a strong pyramind base, this isn’t a problem.
No personal stories. If a BIPOC shares something with you and your first impulse is to start a response with the word “I” or with a story “relating” to their experiences: do not do that. There is no reason on earth that you need to be sharing a story that happened to you in order to empathize with someone who just shared a vulnerability with you. Your response should be a simple, “Thank you for sharing” or “I’m so sorry you experienced this. Thank you for sharing.”
Focus on why people are talking, not what is being said. This can be a tough one and it’s probably what most of your journaling might end up being about! It can be super tough to hear things like “white people are terrible” and think what’s actually being said is what the exact words are. This is almost 100% of the time not the case. What is being said might be “I have experienced innumerable cases of discrimination and I’m not ready to trust.” Understanding why that is and actively internalizing the unspoken is what counts here, along with not taking this personally. Why people are having conversations is often the toughest thing to parse through but if you’ve followed the previous three tactics, this can be something that works itself out through your journaling and work with friends, family, and organizations. This is not something you need to hash out with the person who is speaking.
Generally speaking, your interactions with strangers aren’t going to be in any way, shape, or form, an aspect of your work that is the most meaningful in terms of overall impact but it can feel impactful because you’ve started at zero and individual progress is addictive. Opportunities to create dialogues with complete strangers are few and proselytizing is pretty much never met with a willing ear (think of well-meaning Christians coming door-to-door) but sometimes you end up with a kind-hearted and open-minded seat-mate on the plane. It’s pretty darn rare.
SPARINGLY: Social Media
The very tip of your pyramid is online “activism.” Yelling at people on TikTok or Twitter is not activism. Getting into comment fights with your neighbors on Facebook is not activism. Making reactionary statements and getting into a pugilistic feedback loop is not useful and should not ever be considered part of your normal staple diet of anti-racist work. This may happen from time to time. It’s hard not to get hot under the collar and take out some aggression on Ron DeSantis’ dumbass Twitter page (make sure you’re not saying stuff that could get the cops on your ass and make sure to mass delete tweets regularly). It’s hard not to tell people who advocate for censorship of marginalized voices that they’re little miniature fascists. I do it, we all do it, it’s super tough to not do this when you’re passionate about something.
The majority of your social media anti-racism should be passive. Content creation is all well and good but your TikTok (etc.) page should primarily be for soaking in small bits of information at a time from BIPOC creators so that you can find multiple perspectives and experiences. When something sounds meaningful: write about it in your journal. This is a great way of finding anti-racism topics you want to explore with yourself to work on the base of your pyramid, but don’t forget the above WWWALL tips from WhiteWomanWhisperer!!! Make sure you’re not adding to the burdens of BIPOC creators by commenting what should be going into your journal. When in doubt: don’t say anything!!! It’s also important to stress that this content should be in small amounts. Once you come across one or two things to stew about, stop taking it in until you’ve processed those things! Else you might get overwhelmed or forget items that might have made your pyramid stronger. Additionally: consider subscribing to BIPOC newsletters (I know WWW has one) and keep in mind they’re not perfect either. Nobody has to be! Find videos and content that challenges you and see what you can make of it.
Work hard and don’t be afraid to fuck up! We all do it!