"What's happening in my world is driving me crazy! I can't take it anymore! I vote! What else can I do?"

Four times today I've heard a version of this. Here's my suggestion.

Racism is involved in all of it. Learn about it—what created it, what perpetuates it, what forms it takes, why the racial conditioning is so hard to eliminate. Learn how we are all complicit in the good and not so good in our society. Work on yourself; I’ve been to Dialogue: Racism dozens of times in 30 years and will go again soon because new crazy-making stuff keeps happening and I need help to stay grounded. Find out how you can contribute to the solutions and do your bit. We can do this!

When I started going to Dialogue: Racism at the Center for Healing Racism, I searched all the new terms I was learning: racial conditioning, unaware racism, internalized racism, institutional racism, environmental racism, cultural racism but not all of them were to be found. That was 30 years ago; there was no Google. Now, they can be googled. Let me see how many hits I get today (2/7/2023 at midnight), and let’s see what suggestions we can find about what we can do about it.

• Racism: definition. About 288,000,000 search results

  • Prejudice + Power to discriminate (https://www.apa.org/topics/racism-bias-discrimination)

• Racial conditioning, About 6,000,000 search results

  • Including Unconscious racism (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/naked-truth/202006/unconscious-racism)

• Unaware racism, About 1,800,000 search results

  • Operationally defined nowadays as Implicit Bias (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/making-people-aware-of-their-implicit-biases-doesnt-usually-change-minds-but-heres-what-does-work)

• Internalized racism, About 1,170,000 search results

  • Note 2 very different explications.

  • From Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internalized_racism)

    • From ThoughtCo (https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-internalized-racism-2834958)

• Institutional racism, About 3,450,000 search results

  • Definition (https://www.britannica.com/topic/institutional-racism)

  • Race, Racism and the Law (https://www.racism.org/articles/275-2020-election-and-racism/race-and-racism/2952-what-is-institutional-racism)

  • ThoughtCo (https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-institutional-racism-721594)

  • Examples (https://www.health.com/mind-body/health-diversity-inclusion/institutional-racism)

• Environmental racism, About 10,600,000 search results

  • Health effects (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/environmental-racism)

• Cultural racism, About 32,100,000 search results

  • In our lives (https://www.shortform.com/blog/cultural-racism/)

How about taking this endeavor to a new level. In creating this newsletter, I found new suggestions about what we can do to address racism, so I’ll be trying something new. With today’s Substack, I added a chat feature—I hope it is user friendly and we can benefit from it soon. I invite you to come aboard and share your efforts to confront racism in your locale, and I’ll let you know how my efforts are going.

Thanks for reading my newsletter and your feedback on my efforts.

Substack often encourages us to ask for your support for our research, ideas and writing. If you choose to make donations, I will give all the money to the Center for the Healing Racism, which continues to be a source of inspiration and hope for our future.

Peace, light and love

Sandy