By Courtney Epton, White public school parent in NYC & some
I used to think I was born in the wrong decade. For years and years I thought perhaps I was from the past. But this week, this month, this year, I am coming to terms with a new truth – that I am, at times, from the future.
In my brief but brilliant stint working alongside the inimitable Crystal Martin, PhD, we designed and facilitated spaces for educators with Freedom Dreaming by Robin D.G. Kelley as our anchor. During this time I kept asking myself – what does radical imagining look like for White people? Since I am a White people, I continue to ask and to be rooted in this question.
This inquiry is deeply indebted to Black traditions of radical imagination and Afrofuturism, which have long insisted that dreaming beyond the present is a necessary practice for survival, resistance, and liberation. When I first began to recognize the persistence of this question for me, I spent a lot of time also thinking about how proposing that White people engage in something akin to freedom dreaming may be misplaced – these practices were not designed for the oppressor, the violent racism endemic to White Supremacy Culture does not land on White bodies first or worst. This violence, though, this is the very reason I cannot look away – White people must envision our healed selves as part of liberated futures. To avoid or deny this practice compounds the damage that unhealed White people continue to perpetuate on communities and society at large. And so I dream.
My dreams have layers, take pit stops, go too far, never go far enough.
As far as I can see: I see through to a time when White People are healed, writ large. We are trusted. We are reconnected to our humanity. We center community and love. We no longer cause harm on a mass scale; rather we contribute to a thriving and liberated society. I can see it because I know people doing the work of shedding the White Supremacy Culture embedded into us for millennia, and the work of people believing we can do this. I can see it, too, because I have children and dream daily of their ongoing generational healing and of the impacts of raising healing White people. I can see what’s possible, because it is happening, and I can dream of what it looks like, what it can mean, at scale.
A pit stop dream, somewhere between here and there: I dream of a time (with my rose colored glasses this can begin within the Mamdani administration) when we not only recognize racism as a White people problem, but we invest in addressing it as such. Where we devote a part of our attentions to healing White minds and bodies and where detaching from the nasty racism we were taught, both explicitly and implictly, becomes the norm. (See this dream stretched out in Part I here)
When Courtney Mykyktn said, “People like you do things like this,” I now hear ‘things like this’ to mean stay connected to your humanity, release White Supremacy Culture from your body. I hear in her words that, although the whole world may seem to tell you that you and your people are too broken, you are not; that when we talk about our collective liberation being tied together, you are a part of that collective.
Though I deeply, painfully see and understand why this is all, for now, just a dream, I reject the idea that this vision of the future is impossible. As a fervent student of anti-racist and equity frameworks, my own sense of worth on this planet requires that I ask – what would a future look like that affirms the humanity of White people and believes in our capacity to heal as part of educational equity and justice work?
My most persistent, most tangible dream (already in process in some very special spaces): I dream of school communities across the country where the language of understanding and dismantling White Supremacy Culture is shared among staff and families and young people, causing barriers – to access and to humanity – to collapse, collective healing to thrive, and imaginations to soar.
See Part I here
0 Comments