Ima rave about Dereca Blackmon’s course: Spiritual Allyship toward Dismantling Racism. It finished weeks ago, and is still (very actively) moving through me. I am not done with the material we were graciously handed. As Dereca says, Allyship is a lifelong commitment. It will take me at least a lifetime to deserve the title “Ally”.

The 5-week course (on Zoom, of course… everything these days seems to be on Zoom ;) included a 30-minute break-out group at the end of each class. That’s 30-minutes with a total of 3 people - to talk about and better integrate what we just heard (from Dereca). Dereca packed in a lot in an hour and a half. We had plenty to talk about.

I could not begin to share all that Dereca said. There were SO MANY gems. Here’s one of them:

Call in (not '“call out”)

During that lesson’s break-out session, we spent the entire 30-minutes talking about those 5 words. We later emailed back and forth about those words. The 3 of us were on the edge of a new discovery. One shared this resource:

What do you think? Does this tool give you greater courage to speak up when you hear racist comments?