Bridges to Heal US: Stories and Strategies for Racial Healing

by Erin Jones

I want to be the me I didn’t have as an executive. I want you to know your voice matters. I want you to know you belong there. I want you to embrace opportunities to learn from other great women.

I want to be the me I didn’t have, so you can be the you you’re meant to be.

I write this book not as one who claims to know all the things necessary to get us to racial healing and wholeness, but I offer what I do have: hope, stories, and strategies.

I see you!

Suddenly, you seemed aware that maybe skin color did change how people could move through the streets of this nation.

I saw you begin to understand the difference between equality and equity and form connections to education and healthcare and housing and justice.

I am writing this book to each of you who is questioning your role in the racial healing of our nation.

I am writing specifically to that person who has already done some reading, attended at least a training or two on diversity and equity, and knows they need to understand and DO more.

“No one ever noticed we were gone,” one of them said.

“We don’t expect to live to twenty-one. Why would we dream about a future?”

Suddenly, I knew, all at once, I had been born brown out of the body of a White woman, abandoned and adopted by White people, who chose to raise me at one of the best private schools in the world for this! I knew exactly how I was meant to change the world.

“Mom, I love you and Dad so much! Thank you for being my champions, and thank you for choosing to change the world every day as teachers. I never saw you as world-changers before, but now I do. Now I get it!”

Part of our problem at the moment is that we are each running in our own race without sharing the stories of our triumphs and struggles. This leads us to believe we are running against one another instead of on the same team.

Most of what you will read is based on almost fifty years of living as a biracial, Black-presenting, Afro-wearing, born-in-the-United-States-but-raised-in-Europe-by-White-adoptive-parents, Bryn Mawr College graduate, wife to Black man, mother to three Black young adult children, thirty-year veteran K-12 educator, and Jesus girl.

I have witnessed the harm that is caused when we do not talk about race.

I finished out the weekend of camp and headed home, knowing that, as much as I loved teaching middle school students, I needed to make sure I also did everything in my power to be and build bridges to heal our brokenness as a nation around race.

Although I am a trainer in racial equity, I am first a storyteller.

Preparing to talk about race effectively is kind of like preparing to run a long-distance race. You cannot jump in and expect to go deep in your first conversation, just like there is no way a first-time runner could complete a 10K or a half-marathon without any training. In fact, your first conversation about race is likely going to be really uncomfortable, just like running the first mile in training.

I believe the work of talking about race and justice is for everyone, of every color and every background. This work is for you, whoever you are. This work is for me. The work is for US; it is necessary for our healing.

To be honest, we adults are just big twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. We are easily defensive and disappointed, and hard on ourselves.

If gratitude was an essential strategy for me, I thought it would probably also be helpful for others. So I started asking participants in each of the Zoom rooms I found myself in to share their gratitude in the chat as a way to start each session. I found that starting with gratitude set a positive opening tone for the difficult conversations that were about to happen.

Thinking back to my days in the classroom, I do not think I would describe the climate of my classroom as “safe.” I did want students to be comfortable, but, more than comfortable, I wanted students to be brave, to be willing to try hard things and fail and get back up. I did my best to model those things myself.

The reality is that those who are not “safe” in most education spaces and professional environments are typically the very people who live mostly in the margins—women, people of color, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+. The “safety” of White people is typically prioritized in predominantly White spaces, so the necessary conversations never happen. I cannot tell you how many of my friends and colleagues have been accused of creating a hostile environment simply for trying to raise a concern about how they or how their students of color were being treated.

“Erin, not every Black child wants to become a middle-class White person, and why should they want to?”

Embrace a posture of learning, not fixing ● Take risks—the more vulnerable you are willing to be, the more you will get out of this experience ● Push through the inevitable discomfort that will come; do not let it paralyze you ● Show grace to yourself when you make mistakes and towards others when they do ● Apologize when you make a mistake (“I am sorry” is not always easy, but it costs you nothing) ● Realize that there is more than one way to experience this country/community—just because you have not seen it or experienced it does not mean “it” has not happened ● Be curious These are just recommendations.

Imagine if each person in your school or on your job or at your church felt like they could show up as their full self. Imagine how empowering that would feel, instead of the constant pressure to assimilate, to become something you are not.

The three practices we have discussed—gratitude, brave spaces, and grounding-in—need to be practiced to the point they are habits, to the point where you develop muscle memory. You do not need to wait for a conversation about race to practice any of them. Instead, seek out opportunities in your home with your children or your partner or on the job with your colleagues to practice each. The more regularly you practice these strategies, the more they will become your “norm,” and they will lead you to much more authentic and productive conversations and work.

1. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), and 2. Have no more than three key points you are going to make, no matter how long your speech is, and use three key words to draw your listener back to those points.

I was hearing three new words in the wind. These three words have become the framing now for almost every speech I deliver related to race and justice and equity and reconciliation. Humility. Humanity. History.

I suddenly had this realization, after living in the United States for over thirty years: being required to wear a mask, being asked to stay home for the health of others, must be what oppression feels like to people who have never experienced oppression.

Humility. His words reminded me that we, as a nation, lack humility.

I realized that, similar to the response to the health pandemic, no one really knew “the answers” to “fixing racism” in the United States, either. People were joining Zoom book clubs right and left, reading Dr. Ibrahim X. Kendi to learn about anti-racism and Robin DiAngelo to learn about white fragility. No single person had “the answer” for our ills.

No single person had all the answers.

I watched US denigrate “other,”

The photograph of Derek Chauvin atop George Floyd will forever live in my memory as a powerful representation of dehumanization.

I was drawn to the idea that our only way forward is not necessarily to agree with one another but to find ways to disagree while centering the “other’s” humanity.

It is easy to call your neighbor a “baby-killer” when you do not see them as being “made in the image of God.”

Our only way forward to healing seems to rest in our willingness to humanize the people around us, even and especially those who look and sound and believe differently from us. I make every effort to go out of my way to get curious about people who say things that are in stark contrast to what I believe.

“When they say that thing that makes you mad, Erin, get curious. Ask why they believe that thing, how ...

The state of Oregon was designed as a state for only White people. Many members of the Indigenous communities here in Washington State, but also across the nation, were forced to attend boarding schools, where they were stripped of their languages and cultural practices up until a generation before mine. Although those realities have changed legally, there are consequences for these origin stories. These histories have implications for how communities experience the state of Washington and the United States today.

We cannot go back and change what was before, but we can make sure going forward we acknowledge the harm and the ways that harm continues to have an impact today. We can consider ways to repair the harm and provide increased and accelerated access wherever possible.

In this chapter, I hope to find some common ground on how we communicate with regards to words like “equity,” “equality,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and the many others I have come across in my time as an educator.

First of all, “cultural competence” suggests a person can become “competent,” as if there is an “end” somehow to the learning cycle as if someone can develop an awareness of all the elements of every culture. That was an impossible task.

Understanding cultural norms also did not change test scores or graduation rates, which was our charge at the State Superintendent’s Office.

Equity is about taking down barriers and/or building the bridges necessary for all stakeholders to THRIVE.

Although I began talking and training on “cultural competence,” we transitioned in the last four years to talking about “culturally responsive practice” to be proactive, continuously, and consistently responsive to the different cultural values and expressions that should be considered in classrooms and workspaces.

“Culturally responsive practice” means considering the different cultural expressions and ways of being that exist within a classroom, institution or organization and choosing to intentionally adopt cultural practices that affirm all who are members of that community.

I will never fit neatly into any boxes. I will never be Black enough for some, and I will be too Black for others. I will never be Christian enough for some, and I will be too Christian for others. I will never be liberal enough for some, and I will be too liberal for others. However, the older I get, here is what I know to be true about myself—I will always be Erin enough.

We cannot fix what we are not willing to face.

“Honey, if you were not my daughter, maybe I would see all Black people like they do. Maybe I would be just like them.”