This week we officially wrapped up with the camp session, continued and concluded with the racial equity workshop. I was so incredbly inspired by the racial equity workshops which gave me opportunities for honest opinions with my peers, enabled me to learn and grow as well as empowered me to speak my voice. In the third racial equity workshop, we learned more about many of the important concepts such as perfectionism, sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, etc. For some of these concepts, I have considered them but have not thought about them in such depth. For example, the concept, “worship of the written word” gives so much insight into systematic racism, since usually BIPOC folks’ experiences tend to be invalidated just because those with strong documentation and writing skills are more highly valued, even in organizations where ability to relate to others is key to the mission. This relates to how in our education, writing abilities are often highly valued as well, which I did not make the connection to racism before. Another concept that I thought was significant was individualism – in the United States, we often conceived individualism as part of our culture, and valued it in many forms and ways such as freedom and democracy. However, this can present an issue since it creates a lack of accountability, as the organization values those who can get things done on their own without needing supervision or guidance. It also relates to racism because oftentimes, the credit is attributed to the leader who is rather than the mass and the people who did the work.
On Friday we continued with the reflection, and I gained so much insight from the conversations around climate crisis, environmental activism as well as how our generation could take actions to start raising awareness for our cause.