0:00:00 Jackie Strohm: Hi everyone, I'm Jackie Strohm, the Prevention and Resource Coordinator at PCAR. On today's episode, we will be talking about the book, Dancing on Live Embers: Challenging Racism in Organizations. We are so grateful to be joined by two amazing authors and activists today, Tina Lopes and Barb Thomas, the authors of Dancing on Live Embers. We are also joined by two PCAR staff members, Tatiana Piper, our Community Advocacy Coordinator, and Karen Galbraith, our Training Projects Coordinator. Welcome everyone.

0:00:34 Karen Galbraith: Thanks, Jackie. Hi everybody, this is Karen, and I just wanted to take a minute to do a little bit of framing for this podcast today and give you a little bit of background about it. So, I just wanna say from the get-go, that unfortunately we can't cover all of the important issues and information that's covered in Dancing in Live Embers, so I really recommend that you take it upon yourself to read the book and learn more about it. But today, during this episode, we've identified a few key themes that we think are particularly relevant based on our work within the field of sexual violence prevention and response. And in addition to this podcast, we hosted a live discussion about the book where we utilized case studies, quotes, and questions from Dancing on Live Embers to guide our conversation.

0:01:18 KG: And so, we chose this book to be part of a book circle that PCAR has been doing because we know that white privilege and power are at play in the rape crisis movement and within our centers. And in order to serve all survivors and to prevent sexual harassment abuse and assault, we need to examine and eradicate the ways racism regularly shows up in the work that we're doing. And so, sort of borrowing from Barb and Tina, as stated in the book's introduction, Dancing on Live Embers investigates how racism, white power and privilege work in ordinary daily moments of organizational life. It holds that familiar workplace interactions for scrutiny and analysis, and looks for openings to advance racial equity and justice. This is our primary focus, because unexamined white power and privilege continue to be central obstacles to racial equity in organizations. And there are also powerful factors shaping current global politics, economics, and relations between people and nations.

0:02:18 KG: And so, I think that is a beautiful summary of what is covered in the book, but also so timely and relevant to sort of the current climate within our country. And so, we also want to acknowledge that while his book was chosen over a year ago for the book circle that we've been hosting with rape crisis centers, this discussion about how to actively challenge racism in our organizations is so timely, given the systemic oppression and the crisis of anti-blackness and police violence in America. And so, while we are experiencing a revolution with people calling for change and more people than ever being motivated to take action, we are also seeing more acts of violence and hate against black people and people of color. And we want to acknowledge that these are times of great pain for many people and communities, and we really hope that our discussion today and our highlighting of Dancing on Live Embers will provide us with some tools that can help us to bring healing and change within our organizations, with each other, and within ourselves.

0:03:19 JS: Thank you, Karen, for taking the time to make sure we're all in the same page before we get started here. I would love for us to start by having Tina and Barb telling us a little bit about themselves and their background. So Tina, would you like to start? 

0:03:38 Tina Lopes: Sure, thanks Jackie for having me on this podcast. And Karen, I appreciated that eloquent description of why the book seemed to have relevance for you. I have been doing work to look at how sexism, racism, heterosexism, classism, all the various isms that we talk about when we're in the sexual violence field, how they all relate to each other. I've been doing this work for about 30 years now and I have seen how important it is to not just talk about the theory, but to talk about how it happens in the daily moments, as Karen was saying. What happens in our organizations when we're brushing past each other or in the lunchroom or when we're making a decision about who gets to attend a meeting or a conference or get to have an opportunity to go somewhere. And so, I have spent my life trying to work with people to have different conversations with each other, trying to find ways to balance compassion for us as human beings who are going to be imperfect, as well as a firmness around the need for accountability so that we actually do the change work we say we wanna do.

0:05:16 TL: I've been really lucky that I've worked mostly in organizations like the one that you belong to. Organizations set up to fight injustice, and I've also chosen to work in public sector places, in school boards, child welfare, and in social housing with government departments, because I think those are some of the critical places where change needs to happen. And I'm always humbled by how difficult this work is, and there are days when I don't want to do this work, because it's so exhausting and demoralizing. But I also know that one of the biggest gifts in my life is that I get to meet with and befriend people like yourselves who are determined to do this work and finding ways to do it against all the obstacles. So, that's what keeps me going and I'm glad to be here.

0:06:13 JS: Thanks so much, Tina. Barb, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

0:06:20 Barb Thomas: Well, I'm an older, white, straight woman living in Toronto, and I would say that I've spent a good part of my life interrogating my own whiteness, that I had to go... I had to leave my country and live in Barbados for two years, which is a predominantly black country at the southern end of the Caribbean, to discover that I was white. And that I was white in Canada before but just didn't know it. And that led me to a whole inquiry of how white supremacy works to keep white people unconscious of their whiteness, of our whiteness and of the roles we play in the oppression of other people. So, at this point, I'm still learning. I'll be learning that all the rest of my life. Tina has been a very important teacher for me in this work. And I have conversations about race with my four daughters and my seven grandchildren as well. And it's an ongoing learning for all of us.

0:07:36 JS: Thanks so much for that. So, can you tell us a bit about how the two of you met and began collaborating on racial justice work? And then, at what point did you decide to co-author this book? 

0:07:51 BT: So yeah, I'm happy to start off on this, because meeting Tina was a very happy occasion for me. A group of us had started an organization called the Doris Marshall Institute for Education and Action, which tried to provide process help to social movement organizations. And by that I mean, that social movement organizations like Rape Crisis Centers, unions, social justice organizations often have a set of values that they're actually not living. And the gap between the set of values that they have and what they're actually doing is causing grief both for the people that they attempt to serve and the ones who are working inside it. And so, that's the kind of help we were doing or trying to do, learning as we went. And part of that work was anti-racism organizational change work. And so into the middle of this walks Tina Lopes one day to my very small office above a store where we fronted the Doris Marshal Institute. And Tina was looking for community to do the work that she was already doing, and from there our collaboration started. And maybe, I'll let Tina say something about her memory of how we met before we talk about maybe why we wrote the book.

0:09:31 TL: Brings back good memories, Barb. Well, as Barb said, I was looking for a place to deepen the work of racial equity and its intersections. The important thing about that time was that we actually had here in Canada, a government that was willing to fund some work to support people to apprentice in this work. So that's an important thing that I'm remembering now, is how important it is to have the resources to support people to learn about how to do the work of social justice and anti-black racism, anti-racism. And to do it in a way that doesn't create silos. So, I happily found out about Barb and the Doris Marshall Institute through friends and communities, and I became a pest. I just actually gave Barb no peace. I just kept knocking on her door.

0:10:41 TL: And she actually, at the time, was working with a South Asian colleague called Alok Mukherjee. And I think the two of them had received some funding from the federal government to work with to bring in people who wanted to learn and to be able to pay them. So that's the second thing I wanna highlight. I'm so appreciative that Barb and Alok actually saw that in order to do this work, it's important to ensure that the people who are doing the work and learning how to do it also have a livable wage in order to be able to do it. The third thing I'd like to say is that Barb was making all kinds of things happen. [chuckle] And was conscious of how to share the access to resources that she was given as a white woman. I think the access to the money from the government, the ability to hire people, was easier for her as a white woman.

0:11:48 TL: And she was able to acknowledge that and to think about how to use her location as a white woman to bring myself in. And I haven't described myself yet. So I'm gonna do that now, because it's important to say that if you heard my name, many people assume that I'm Latinx in some way. But I'm actually racialized as South Asian, and have this name because the Portuguese colonized the part of India that my ancestors are from. And so, I was given this Portuguese last name as part of that whole colonial process. But I get racialized as South Asian and it's very confusing for people to try and make sense of all of that. So Barb and I worked together, and the last thing I'll say about this is that, what I loved about this collective is that it actually drew on the knowledge and the wisdom and the hard-won tools of people globally, from people who've been involved in anti-oppression and justice work in Nicaragua, in Chile, in the Philippines, in India, in Grenada, and there were folks with all those identities working at this institute. And we in the north, 'cause Barbara and I are in Canada, we in the North were learning about how to do this work from people from the Global South and it was an unforgettable, incredible experience.

0:13:33 BT: So you asked sort of why we wrote this book, why we troubled our lives to write this book. So, we may have different memories of this, but what I remember was the fatigue of starting to get requests for more anti-racism training from the same damn... Oh, excuse me, the same organizations that we had worked with 15 years ago, but now had a new grant to have some more anti-racism training. We actually felt so discouraged by this that we were being asked to train people again years later who had done nothing with the training, and we decided that actually our own integrity was compromised by continuing to do this. So, we started to do some more career-limiting moves that we specialize in apparently, and that is, we started to turn down work where there was no plan for the training to help an organizational transformation process. And in the course of that, we got even by taking some of the case studies that we had experienced in other organizations that had refused to move and wrote them up as case studies in our book.

0:15:01 BT: As Tina mentioned, we were able to get money from the Canadian government at that time to write this book and to produce it so that it is accessible visually and has graphics in it and so on. So the graphics and the designer by the incredible Margie Adam who worked with us on this. But I guess, we also wanted to foreground white privilege, white dominance, white supremacy, and not just keep having the same argument about whether there was racism or not. I don't know, I know that Tina will have other things to say about why we did the book.

0:15:52 TL: You're so right that it was mostly because we got tired of the request for training. I'd like to say a bit more about that. We found that many organizations, when they were being critiqued by people using services or community organizations, would critique them for not actually living up to their vision and mandate. So I don't know if you've had this experience, but lots of sexual violence organizations will have wonderful vision and mission statements about wanting to support everyone and be inclusive, and yet don't practice it. And then, communities will try and hold them to account, and all of a sudden, the first reflex is to ask for training. And when we would have conversations often with white women who were in leadership positions of these organizations, they really wanted to be able to say that they were doing the training and to make sure it was known publicly. But we're not interested in actually doing the very hard and necessary work of examining their own practices, their own policies, and the ways in which they were failing to live up to those.

0:17:12 TL: This was a very serious conversation that Barb and I had because we were not willing to be colluders in that process of offering the training so that the leadership could get a pass on any legitimate criticism and then not seeing any of the systems changing. And I wanna be very clear about this, we weren't on a high horse about this. The reason we took that position was because we were seeing that women and children who needed the services or who could really make a difference if they were employed in the organization, were constantly overlooked and denied opportunities simply because of the bodies they were in. Because of their race, country of origin, language, faith, and we couldn't be part of something where that would continue to be the case, but the organization would be able to put something out on its website saying they just completed anti-racism training.

0:18:16 TL: So, the book was a way for us to do three things. One was to equip people like yourselves in organizations, hopefully many of your listeners are people who are looking for ways to keep the conversation going, but also to be able to hold a mirror up to some of the leaders and say, "Does this look familiar to you? How about we do something different?" Because the other thing that we were finding was that the resistance looks very much the same, and it was getting boring having to have the same conversations with the same kind of resistance that was always very polite. So, the book does that. And the last thing I wanna say about it is that the last chapter is a conversation between Barb and myself, because we thought that it was really important to model that even though we were writing this book and have some legitimate knowledge and skills in this area, we were not free from the requirement to examine our own practice and to be vulnerable about that and to share that so that others could use that conversation to move people in their workplaces a little further.

0:19:39 JS: I love that story.

0:19:41 Tatiana Piper: That was extremely powerful. And thank you Tina and Barb for sharing the origins of your book with us. I did have a follow-up question of just how and where did you find the strength and courage to take such a strong stance because that takes a lot of guts and it takes a lot of courage to essentially do what's right, do what's meaningful. And I think that sometimes holds a lot of people back of doing what in our guts, in our hearts, in our souls is the right thing or is the best thing.

0:20:25 TL: Thanks Tatiana. That's a really insightful question and not many people ask it, but it's so important. When Barb said it was career limiting, she wasn't joking. When we sent a draft of this book out to friends and colleagues to read it, they were actually mortified that we would be so willing to be vulnerable about our own process and didn't want us to do it. I'll let Barb speak more to that because a lot of white women were concerned that Barb was putting so much on the table with... As you were saying Tatiana, the courage that she did. And in terms of turning down work, it has definitely cost us a great deal. It does make me afraid because this is what I do for a living. It affects my livelihood to turn down work. I'm not in any way independently wealthy. And it has meant I've had to do without some of the things that I would have liked to have had because we didn't take on certain types of work.

0:21:42 TL: So it is true that it came at a cost. And when you're asking how did we find our way, I'll speak for myself, how did I find a way to do that? I think it's partly because I've seen this work as directly connected to my spiritual practice. I see us as living in a universe where the most fulfilling thing about being human is to create a society where we can be as whole as possible. And it's not just an economic or political stance, it's also what I believe to be true for us as whole human beings. And because that matters to me so much, there are things that matter more than what money can make available. I think even more importantly than that, I came to this continent, to Turtle Island as a teenager. And I have learned about how the life that I've been able to enjoy here came at horrible costs to the indigenous peoples. I think the language that you use in the US is Native Americans.

0:23:09 TL: So the first peoples of this land who actually demonstrated great humanity in sharing what they had, keeping the first white explorers and settlers alive by sharing what they had and realizing that I'm accountable to the indigenous peoples of this land. And they are being policed and denied resources and dying in disproportionate numbers. They are filling our jails, in the school-to-prison pipeline. I don't wanna go on too much about this. But just to say, many of the benefits and privileges that I've experienced have come at the cost of indigenous peoples here. When I've done work in every sector; social housing, child welfare, education, violence against women, it's clear that the people most impacted are indigenous and black and other racialized women and children. And so the bottom line for me is, what I'm doing could potentially mean that they are allowed to remain in places of harm while leaders and white people get to put something on their resume or on their website, then I can't do it. It's not ethical and it goes against the very type of world that we're trying to bring into being.

0:24:48 BT: Thank you for the question Tatiana because I don't think there's a simple answer to it. Sometimes there aren't words about why. I think I was starting to get depressed at the gap between what I was doing and what I hoped to do. The very work that I'd undertaken to help other organizations with was in me and I needed to close that gap for my own survival and wholeness. And also, what do I tell my daughters, my white daughters that I've had conversations with about racism and white privilege all their lives? And I am using my white privilege to earn more money from white people who look better and aren't doing anything. So for me, I felt accountable to myself and my daughters, but also to the larger community that Tina and I are a part of, who were trying to do this work as well and we are differently positioned in the bodies that we're in. The very beautiful thing that Tina has just said about accountability to indigenous people in this land, I'd like to say that that was a feature at the time that we started writing the book. But for me, that's only become crucial in the last 10 to 15 years as I've been learning more about my own settler past and the history of this country, another thing that I wasn't taught when I grew up. And I also just wanna say that Tina and my partnership and our love for each other really helped a lot in having those conversations and in helping each other be accountable.

0:26:55 JS: Thank you so much for sharing all of that. It's really helpful to hear as we try and continue to push our own organization and others in this movement forward. It does take a lot of strength. And so I'm really happy that you had the strength to write this book because we've learned so much from it and we know others have too. And so speaking of the book, how did you come up with the title of the book, Dancing on Live Embers? And how does this title relate to what readers can expect when they work to challenge racism in their own organizations? 

0:27:36 TL: Well, that title came from my experience of trying to do this work in my body. So I said I think at the outset that I've chosen to work mostly in justice-seeking organizations, which means that I've worked with women shelters, the YWCA, worked with grassroots organizations, trying to work on literacy, on anti-poverty coalitions, as well as with social work organizations, which means that I've spent most of my time working with progressive people who consider themselves activists on the left if you like, who want to see social change. And it would seem for someone in the field of anti-racism work that those would be welcoming places, that those would be the kind of places where you might actually be able to do the work with less risk because it looks like the doors are thrown open and you walk in. And the floor looks like it's a nice even cool floor until you start walking across it. And then all of a sudden, you realize there are these coals, there are these embers that only you experienced as a racialized person in a mostly white progressive organization, particularly when it's a mostly women-led organization.

0:29:27 TL: And this is going to be a very controversial thing for me to say. One of the other reasons Barb and I wrote this book was that we began to see how actually treacherous it was for racialized women or women of color to work with and alongside white women specifically. So there was this false sense of security. And I would find that there were these risks that I'd be sitting in a meeting and all of a sudden I was in danger and nobody else would re-recognize or see it because it was all happening in a very polite way. People were speaking in calm tones. Their references, very reasonably made, to rules and policies and procedures. And all the while, what's happening is that I and other racialized women of color were being undermined, where our expertise was being questioned. Our work was being valued differently and none of it was explicit or overt. And so the title came from the experience of constantly having to be wary of the risks that were there, recognizing that we could get burnt doing this work.

0:31:01 TL: When the video of George Floyd has become so visible. You might say that that was a huge fire that has happened that nobody could overlook. Like it just has taken over. But most of the time when racism is happening in an organization, it's subtle. And it can be easily... It looks like there is no fire. But for those of us on the receiving end of the racism, it is hot and it burns and it destroys. And so when you ask about what readers of the book will expect, they can expect that actually we're going to be pulling back the ashes and showing where the embers are still alive in our organizations, where there's still work to do and to recognize the danger in not addressing it because it's 2020. If these fault lines don't get addressed now, then I think they're going to be some... What we're going to is some serious fall out and we can talk more about that later. I wanna give Barbara a chance to speak about the title.

0:32:21 BT: Well, it's Tina's beautiful titling. As soon as she said it, it was like, "Yeah." And we were lucky enough to find an artist friend of ours, Stephanie Martin, who had done a painting that we used on the cover of this. Tina has talked very eloquently about the heat and the danger for racialized people doing this work. I wanna say something, as a white person, for me, the title is apt because it reflects the level of alertness and the heat of emotions that this topic carries with it. And I think for white people, it's discovering that it's not our whiteness, but our unconscious use of our whiteness that causes harm and then our defensiveness about that. And in the ways in which we can make ourselves the focus rather than dealing with the racism hurt feelings and whatever. So I think there's so much in the title that evokes what happens when you try to have a frank matter-of-fact conversation that calls out how racism is happening in a particular moment. And because racism is understood as individual acts of bad white people, good white people need some help in seeing that good white people participate in white supremacy every single day, of every single minute of every single day. And that the more we can look at that in a matter of fact unemotional way, the more we can be part of the solutions.

0:34:39 JS: Thanks so much for explaining to us the origin of the title of that book. It was really interesting to hear about. And I think it really resonates with us also and most likely our listeners.