Here’s an excerpt from the “30 Day Challenge” offered by “The Antiracist Table” about how we need empathy to rehumanize and we need empathy to get past shame:

Shame is a common feeling for non-Black people when race comes up. Shame may also come up for BIPOC around race for different reasons. Brené Brown says shame “is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” Brown says the real antidote to shame is “shame resilience,” which “is about moving from shame to empathy.”

Brown outlines four steps to get to shame resilience:

1. Recognizing shame and understanding its triggers;
2. Practicing critical awareness;
3. Reaching out; and
4. Speaking shame.

Continuing on with some thoughts on “Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade” from the “Equal Justice Initiative Report,” as first noted in this recent blog.

Here’s some of the things taught in the middle of the report:

– It is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people held in the Upper South were separated from a parent or child through sale, and a third of all slave marriages were destroyed by forced migration.
– Only a small percentage of enslaved people were traded due to economic hardship or attempts to escape.
– Slave markets across Alabama, particularly the one in Montgomery, facilitated the kidnapping and enslavement of free African Americans.
– To conceal an enslaved person’s age or ailments, traders would decorate the enslaved to increase their marketability.
– African American women were raped by their owners and passed around to friends and visitors to do the same.

This 18-minute audio file is so wonderful to get relaxed. It’s got a hint of hypnosis in it. You’ll want to lay down and listen to this with earbuds if possible. Or with speakers in a quiet place…make sure you are not driving when you play it!

I just started the “30 Day Challenge” offered by “The Antiracist Table” and the reading assignment for Day #1 is an eye-opener as could be expected. It’s entitled “Slavery in America: The Montgomery Slave Trade” from the “Equal Justice Initiative Report.”

Here’s some of the things taught in the first section of the report:

– The magnitude of slavery was larger than I thought – 10.7 million people were transported to America, with another 2 million dying in transit
– The particular experience of American slavery took different forms based on region and time period. Slavery became less efficient and less socially accepted in the Northeast during the eighteenth century, and those states began passing laws to gradually abolish slavery.
– By 1860, in the fifteen Southern states that still permitted slavery, nearly one in four families owned enslaved people.
– The racialized caste system of American slavery that originated in the British colonies was unique in many respects from the forms of slavery that existed in other parts of the world. It was permanent, not a class distinction that could be overcome.
– The myth of black people’s racial inferiority developed and persisted as a common justification for the system’s continuation. Ending slavery was not enough to overcome the harmful ideas created to defend it.