Resources
The Integrated Schools Movement: Where We Begin
Integrated Schools mobilizes, educates and supports parents and caregivers to desegregate our children and integrate our families, with a focus on the decisions we make about where to enroll our children and how we show up in those school communities.
Becoming an integrating family is not a finite process, but an ongoing practice that draws on:
an understanding of race/racism and other forms of oppression and how they have systematically contributed to and continue to perpetuate segregation of our school communities;
a willingness to examine and dismantle our own assumptions, beliefs, and cultural scripts that contribute to those same systems of oppression; and
the critical humility to listen, reflect, and learn from those with lived experience of marginalization, especially other families in our schools and communities (see, for example, ECCW: Developing Critical Humility: A Dialogic Practice for White People, May 31, 2007).
It’s important to recognize that this is not an exhaustive list of resources, and that it is particularly focused on the issue of school integration, not necessarily the larger work of antiracism – the ongoing and lifelong process that we engage in to understand and reflect on our history, uproot the causes of racism, and work to heal the harms done in the name of White supremacy.
While there is material here for anyone who has been impacted by Whiteness (aka, everyone), much of this material was developed specifically with White people in mind because of the fact that being White in the United States generally means having lived without much consciousness of race and racism. Further, because White people of all socioeconomic backgrounds have both resisted racial integration and benefited from White supremacy culture, it is the greatest responsibility of White people to work toward meaningful integration.