Advocacy and Action for Antiracism

Education

White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action (WPCR) brings people together to examine white privilege and racism in order to galvanize them to anti-racist action. Our mission is to provide people with tools and resources to challenge and change attitudes and actions that perpetuate racism. While our focus is on white people’s role in dismantling racism, our courses are open to everyone who is committed to achieving racial justice. Please join us for our next 5-week or 3-week workshop.

Organize/Join

SURJ BOSTON is a local chapter of Showing Up For Racial Justice, a national network of groups and individuals organizing white people for racial justice. Through community organizing, mobilizing, and education, SURJ moves white people to act as part of a multi-racial majority for justice with passion and accountability.

Support/Donate

Black Lives Matter Boston’s mission is to organize and build Black power in Boston and across the country. Some examples of this is to galvanize our communities to end state-sanctioned violence against Black people. To support the development of new Black leaders, as well as create a network where Black people feel empowered to determine our destinies in our communities.

Support/Donate

NAACP: The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all persons.  Business as usual is costing Black Americans their lives. The NAACP has started a social movement and we need your voice to make one thing clear: #WeAreDoneDying. Join us, as we urge Congress to take every measure in ensuring we protect Black lives.

Community Action 

BLACK LIVES MATTER SIGNS: Demonstrate your continued support for the Black Lives Matter movement to support their work against racist policing and police violence, abolishing mass incarceration, economic disparities and factors that allow the school to prison pipeline to exist, with a sign displayed in your yard.

Educate Your Children*  

In a time of violence and civil unrest and seeing the fissures of racial inequality clearly, let’s all take action and make a difference. For parents, here are examples of how:

1. Teach our children to be upstanders, not bystanders (and then model this ourselves). Organizations like Facing History & Ourselves are on the forefront of proving learning prompts

2. Call out racism (conscious and unconscious) when we see and hear it, and do this in a public way where our children can see

3. Teach, teach, teach them – and read together, books like like A Young People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, available on Amazon or local public libraries

4. Watch movies and documentaries with your children that will inspire deep dialogue on race and difference, like Just Mercy based on the book by social justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson

5. Remind children (and ourselves) that we can make a difference in our respective spheres of influence. If we can affect only one life we have contributed toward the change we hope to see.

• Children should be encouraged by parents to open discussions about race, bias and difference at home and with friends

• Children can inspire conversation by asking their teachers questions to help them and their peers better process issues about race, difference and bias

• Allow kids to practice advocacy/speaking up in a safe space at home with examples of different scenarios – we used episodes of ABC’s What Would You Do? with John Quinones as the stimulus for family conversations about standing up for others

• For teens, there’s Young Revolutionary: A Teen’s Guide to Activism – a book for teens by a teen, for tangible actions kids can take when they want to speak up and take action, including developing social change campaigns

6. Read aloud to your children, with examples available on Amazon and local public libraries

Readings for Parents to Educate Themselves

Children aren’t immune to racism. Here’s how you can talk to your children about it.

<p”>Coronavirus is a Teaching Moment About Racism in America For Our Kids</p”>

We need more white parents to talk to their kids about race. Especially now.

Thank you Needham Diversity Initiative for these resources