7 days to go! Upcoming Unlearning Racism Report Launch on the 21st of March

To mark the seventh year of the Unlearning Racism Programme, we are launching a report on the 21 March 2024! The report offers reflection, learning and accountability to our communities, Black and Brown-led movements and ourselves. It sets out to evaluate whether the Unlearning Racism Programme has served its purpose and fulfilled its aims, through centring the voice and experience of Black and Brown-led movement leaders to measure the programmes success and where it fell short. 

Reflecting on our work and sharing the learning in public has always been a core part of our practice. This is part of our accountability to the Black and Brown-led movements we exist to serve, and an offering to those organising from a position of solidarity, so the lessons learnt can be applied by others. 

Throughout this journey we have published our lessons learnt through our blogs. Through the generous feedback and insights shared by Programme Mentors, some key learnings from these periods of reflection was the importance of working with accountability:

• How accountable is our work, how effective is it and how does it meaningfully contribute to movements for racial justice?
• Recognising the importance of being led by those with lived experience of racism as white people cannot have an embodied or comprehensive sense of it since white supremacy was constructed to serve us.
• Understanding solidarity as accountability in action, beyond training delivery and learning.
• Working with and deepening relationships based on trust, not centred on what we get wrong, but a commitment to harm reduction.

Our other lessons were:

• The harm in white people only being interested in learning about white supremacy and stopping there. The efforts of the programme could enable harm if it didn’t go further and engage white people to take accountable action in support of racial justice.
• The limited collective action and solidarity with mentors were due to whiteness showed up in organising practices. This was seen in how white organisers prioritised outputs over relationship building with Mentors; lacked flexibility to resource emerging needs and creative ideas when these arose; failed to give direct feedback or say no when asks weren’t possible, and under-communicated boundaries and needs both as individuals and as a collective. 

A pivotal lesson shared by our Mentor and CEO Peninah Wangari-J was that ‘the learning happens in caucused spaces and action happens in community’.

Our upcoming report reflects on all our learning and practice over the last seven years over ten themes, from the paralysing power of shame, isolation as a tool of disconnection, the intersection of capitalism, disconnection from UK movements and more. 

Keep an eye on our newsletter and socials for the upcoming report!