Diversity & Decolonization Resources

This page was created by the previous Diversity and Decolonising Circle. In case you’d like to recommend any new resources that should be added to this list, please get in touch with the Weavers Circle.

Videos

Ubuntu: Healing Racism within Us and our Communities

Self-organisation: What works? The DAF D&D circle – Part 1: Getting together

Self-organisation: What works? The DAF D&D circle – Part 2: Conflict transformation

Call Recording: Q&A with the Diversity and Decolonising Circle

Silenced Stories of the Displaced Hmong

D&D Circle: Fostering deep mutual learning within a small group

Articles

Avoiding Authoritarian Responses to our Predicament

We want the Forum  to be a welcoming space for all who are waking up to difficult realisations about societal disruption and collapse; and we’re committed to non-violence in both action and words. The idea of societal disruption and collapse can evoke strong emotions and extreme reactions, and we recognise that there’s a risk these could encourage tolerance for exploitation and oppression of people and nature. What are some examples of some such comments, which we see from time to time on our platforms and which we actively resist? READ MORE

Solidarity in the Deep Adaptation Forum

On the Solidarity page, projects from around the world are presented that could benefit from the support, financial or otherwise, of Deep Adaptation Forum participants. We do this in recognition of the fact that many of us, in DAF, enjoy safety and security, have money to donate, and even access to power-holders in somewhat democratic states, sometimes contrary to the individuals and groups who are most exposed (or have been most exposed) to the severe ecological, economic and political disruptions that are discussed in our spaces. READ MORE

Learning journeys

Members of the D&D circle have been sharing on the Conscious Learning Blog parts of their respective journeys of (un)learning around the topics explored by the circle.

How I Decided to Take Action on Anti-racism and Decolonising (Sasha)

Creating Safe and Trusting Space for Difficult Conversations (Nontokozo)

A Journey of Deep Learning in the Diversity and Decolonising Circle (Wendy)

How to Transform How I Am in the World? (Dorian)

Learning and Practising the Language of Anti-racism (Kat)

Selected other resources

Do you have more resources to recommend, as regards tackling anti-racism and colonisation? Please share them with us in a comment to this blog!

Courses:

• Loretta Ross’s mind-blowing online course, Calling In the Calling Out Culture
• Nonty Sabic’s Rise Ubuntu courses and webinars

Bibliographies:

• June Holley’s excellent Bibliography on dismantling racism and white supremacy culture

Websites:

• Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, “an arts/research collective that uses this website as a workspace for collaborations around different kinds of artistic, pedagogical, cartographic, and relational experiments that aim to identify and deactivate colonial habits of being, and to gesture towards the possibility of decolonial futures.”
• Possible Futures: a collective “centring the perspectives of a massive diversity of Global South peoples as an attempt to make visible colonial hegemony present everywhere in our complex human-made systems today.”
• Deep Decolonisation Recovery Circles – DIY Guide by Eva Schonveld, to learn how to facilitate a deeply introspective and fruitful reflection circle. This process has been used fruitfully in several D&D Open Meetings.

Books:

• Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta. Indigenous worldviews on global systems, and what can be learned from them. The focus is on Australian Aborigenal knowledge and practices. Highly readable, mind-blowing, and even fun.
• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Explores the reciprocal relationship that humans have to the land and to plants, from the twin perspectives of Native American traditions and Western botany.
• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliveria. “Instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?”
• The Future of Whiteness, by Linda Martin Alcoff. Invites us to reimagine Whiteness that is seperate from racism, as a potentially more viable solution to eradicating the term or concept. She writes clearly and brilliantly on her reasons for suggesting this, and offers examples of where it has occurred. Alcoff herself is biracial – half white working class, and half Panamanian, and has been deeply involved in anti-racism work for many decades. 

Videos:

• Loretta Ross TED Talk – Don’t call people out – call them in. In this bold, actionable talk, Ross gives us a toolkit for starting productive conversations instead of fights — what she calls a “call-in culture” — and shares strategies that help challenge wrongdoing while still creating space for growth, forgiveness and maybe even an unexpected friend. “Fighting hate should be fun,” Ross says. “It’s being a hater that sucks.”
• Why Overpopulation is Actually a Problem. This video essay by Our Changing Climate explores why the myth of overpopulation is actually a problem. Specifically, it shows how overpopulation is leading to dangerous conclusions both on the right and the left. On the right, it’s leading to conclusions of population control, murder, and ethnic cleansing. On the left, it manifests as birth control access, but is still couched in the ideas of population control. Overpopulation is ultimately a myth that at best distracts from the needed work of climate action, and at worst leads to violence.