Since Mid-March, QYDC has been continuing to build into workshops and courses relevant, participatory conversations and exploration among youth workers and all parents, about dealing with the additional trauma presented by living during a pandemic as well as coping with the reckoning sparked by the police killing of George Floyd earlier this summer. This has meant working to collectively find strategies and solutions, and recharging about our role right now as extrafamilial adults with perhaps an unprecedented amount of time with our community’s children, at a time when they are likely to have more pronounced stress, adversity and trauma in their lives.

This is an important time to facilitate this reckoning amongst youth workers, so that we can be effective supports for our children. Ibram X. Kendi’s “Stamped from the Beginning” and Robin Deangelo’s “White Fragility” as well as many other books selling out nationwide represent a readiness to delve further into a self-reflection process from which we can emerge committed to incorporating an antiracist stance into our lives, with the goal of actively working to change the policies that perpetuate racial disparities in our society.

The process QYDC is integrating into its work includes building understanding about implicit bias, colorblindness, systemic racism, and antiracism, to support youth workers’ ability to identify and correct both the internalization of racist beliefs that children can absorb, and prepare and protect them from these harms that they may encounter daily. And then not to stop there, but to endeavor to continue to identify racism within ourselves and our society and root it out, through continual self-exploration and confronting it in our relationships, community, and in the institutions with interact with and that our children interact with.

Understanding what perpetuates racism today means understanding who the system is working for, if not for people of color. It means understanding our economic system and how it deals with threats, how it uses its power, and why it is able to in a liberal democracy. How are people divided and suppressed, disempowered and kept from building their own ability to meet their needs. The founders of this country and of modern capitalism stressed that this new republic can only work, can only be kept from spinning out of control into an autocracy or fascist state or global imperialist colonizer, when there are strong checks and balances against the consolidation of power. Bringing power back to the people, in order to restore a healthy democracy for America, means checking consolidated financial and corporate interests in a structural way. Policy that builds a multiracial middle class, that removes obstacles to closing racial disparities and aggressively ends those disparities and equalizes opportunity, is a key goal in eliminating racism.

Let’s get busy with that, and let’s start with ourselves, our relationships and our communities.