On white activists and anti-racist work

I'm a white activist who has done antiracist work with primarily white, female groups for decades.  I used to do workshops for "progressive feminist" organizations to "help" them diversify when they found themselves with an almost all-white constituency. I'd tell them that they couldn't expect non-white women to join an organization that didn't represent them, and that true diversity required reconfiguring the organization at the most basic level:  go to the community they wanted to include; form a focus group from the community; ask that focus group how the organization could best represent the community's needs; integrate a non-token number of women from that community into the organization's board; and undertake those projects along with the other projects the organization currently maintained. I advised brand new feminist organizations to do this from the ground up, rather than as a reconstruction project later.  What I found, after 20 years of working with such organizations and such women, is that the huge majority of them do not want to be genuinely integrated -- what they want is enough non-white faces around them, that they can FEEL like they're diverse, WITHOUT changing the normative white model in which they operate.  My experience -- and the experience of many antiracist "coaches" -- is that it's an extremely rare organization that will actually carry out a voluntary shift in the power balance.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "People can cry a lot easier than they can change."

"Reaching out" is not enough.  Using different promotional media is not enough.  People aren't stupid -- they know where the power lies even when you put black faces in your advertising (as many colleges do when they try to attract students, putting a proportion of non-white faces that is far higher than on the actual campus). You need to be willing to be inclusive on the level that awards real power to people who aren't like you.

- Kali, in response to my post on The Merch Girl about the differences between being inclusive and not being exclusive