• Origins of my interest are very fear based. Fear of being the bad white person. A component that is strong and driving, and trying to reckon with it because it does move me.
• Situated as a white women, my conditioning is causing pain, and that drives me.
• Story really drives my ability to feel in relation to race and racism, feel sorrow, anger. That I work at a RJ organization and don’t feel connected to it so often, and then I read Baldwin and actually feel my emotions
• Feels so good to be myself, to feel grounded
• To be honest its hip hop. Listening to it for a long time. Yes in my history,definitely emerged as a white woman listening to it cause it felt good and got me cool points. Now I’m still listening to it, and it has taught me how to love myself, and I do link it to spirituality and it is a social justice music.
• Learning how to love yourself from people of color who are resilient has fueled me.
• Such a cliché narrative- feel your own stake in collective liberation, understanding your history and how your people are involved in both oppression and liberating.
• RJ organizing from a deep fear of climate change, then politicized around resource use and it being built on primitive accumulation and slavery. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel it so viscerally about racism sometimes is because its intellectualized. My triggers are around climate change.
• My started really young, totally baffled by the hatred of my community for Latino migrant workers. Now being absolutely politicized by my daughter, “took me aside and said stop doing this charity work mom” So the drive within me has now found a new place that is appropriate and genuine.
• When I was little, what was unsaid was always louder than the spoken. A lot of night in fear of the unknown, ghosts, that I had no cultural or spiritual framework to hold. It seems now so much of the unseen and unheard are politicized. Ghosts still shaping the hauntedness of this country and context. And to not feel “nuts” when I talk about that in a professional setting
• Just went to NOLA and went on a history tour. Every inch of NOLA was built by slaves and that was not talked about. And then heard a friend who is a queer African women in NOLA and how different those stories are.
• Every one talks about the ghosts but not the ghosts of slavery
• Had my world shattered very quickly, in another country at gunpoint andthought I was going to die and during that time seeing all my ideas about whiteness show up, like “I can’t be killed because I am a white person, or I have a purpose” as if my purpose is more important than others. In that night I saw myself as a voyeur and just had the window between myself and the world just shatter. And from there a beautiful journey into my whiteness.
• Part of my drive is trying to reckon with my ancestors.
• German and Swiss- Anabaptist and menonite church. My ancestors came tothis country, when the movement was happening in Europe, it was called the

radical reformation. They believed in collective discernment, mostly of peasants, instead of reading the bible by the church only.

o Communal, love our enemies, not going to baptize our kids they get to chose.

o The first thing protestants and catholics agreed on were to kill the Anabaptists.

o A lot of killing of women, burning at the stake. Women were reciting bible at death, unusual for illiterate women. But because it was communal in nature.

o Mennonites and quakers, saw themselves as having a history of oppression and therefore largely didn’t own slaves (although there is definitely racism) but history of solidarity

o But they say we have no power, but I think well now you do that you have light skin privilege etc. Cant play the victim in perpetuity

o To claim our history in a complex way, both the ways we have stood against it and have worked to perpetuate oppression.

• What a sense of identifying as marginalized can do to your self or history.
• Scott-Irish, and other have a history of being enslaved while also a history ofintegration that shows a lack of empathy of marginalization. Letting go of

  values in order to survive.

• Ancestors before the ancestors who immigrated, people I know nothingabout. Reading texts about medieval time, but my ancestors survived so they are either the people who threw the others under the bus, or they are the heretics. Relationship to made up time.
• Growing up in Ashkenzi Jewish community, strong sense of victimization and positionality of victimhood, racial justice was super important and drilled into me, didn’t learn I was white until I was a teenager – a sense of not just fighting for myself but for other people
• Visceral grasping to connect to religious tradition I was raised in though it is fraught, feeling haunted – the vastness of violence shows up in my body – Visionary radical work in healing is why I’ve been drawn to spirituality, received messages about Jewish exceptionalism, taught about how strong Jewish participation in Civil Rights – never again means never again for everyone
• How to understand my stake as an individual, liberation is collective and dynamic
• Story and poems are more and more important
• Ritual practice that is political
• Connection to ancestors – absence that came up in cultural appropriationdialogue
• Growing up with many Jewish people, felt envious – my story is that I have nolineage that is explicit, feels so relative
• What is claimable, what is possible, feeling ghosts of conservative relativeand hateful ideology as well as liberal racism – lineages I don’t want to take from

• Place is confusing thing to be connected to, grew up here feeling so at home – yet voice that comes up this is not your home
• All the lineages that are present here – I want to start a lineage here for the future, is that crazy without collective wisdom tradition from thousands of years? That is and is not of this place, when does a lineage begin?
• Biological vs. chosen lineage – bringing in queerness, my Jewish ancestry is biological through a parent I have cut off, adopted by someone who carries that lineage that I don’t relate to, how do we queer that conversation?
• Growing up in a religion that felt oppressive, how to create rituals that are supportive, and apprehensive of cultural appropriation in the bay?
• Friend who blew my mind, a practicing Buddhist who talked of her belief that they are the karmic embodiment of ancestors who perpetuated oppression, a karmic fuck you to white supremacy
• Relationship to menstruation as resistance, not showing up as a machine that functions the same way all the time, something deep inside me that connects to the struggle in a profound way
• Intergenerational restorative justice
• Used to be a part of a collective of indigenous and non-indigenous, to cometogether as descendents of colonized and colonizers, to heal – a lot of

  dimensions and generations involved in this

• Been obsessed with learning about all shifts in fertility cycle, and personalhealing
• To connect to my witchy ancestors, I only need to look within and herbs, allright there