Have you ever though how white is youth work in Europe? Are we as a community inclusive enough? Can we learn something from the people protesting on the streets for #BlackLivesMatter. I believe that at least they deserve our reflection on our role to contribute to inequality. And here is my reflection.
My struggle if white person can run activities on anti-racism
Let´s start from the beginning, I started working with the topic of racism and anti-racism something like 8 years ago, and for the past 2 years I am asking myself ¨do I have a right to teach others about racism¨? Yes, when I started I was very proud of myself, and when I read a lot, took additional courses, watched a lot of YouTube, I have realized that I was whitesplaining a lot. But I kept contributing to the European youth work community in the area of racism, I mean I had a project approved lasting for 3 years so I kept working, despite this internal struggle I am really entitled to do so.
In this process I was slowly (or very slowly) realizing that how we can talk about the equality and inclusion when our team is all white, and is it really my place to talk about it. In some discussion on feminism that I was participating it was always underlined that men who has been participating, even being ally, they are not supposed to talk, they should listen, because the female voices have been oppressed for so long, that whenever there is a chance we need to give the voice for females. And I was thinking, it needs to be the same with racism, maybe the role of white people should be mainly listening, learning, and supporting, which is not really the same as implementing the trainings on racism and invisible racism.
On the other side, I have learnt a lot during this process, and somehow dealing with the topic of racism I have found internal courage and motivation to work on the fatphobia, type of violence that I am struggling with on the daily basis, and I see that there is lack of voices from the community who are empowered enough to speak up. And it only has happened because I immerse into the world of violence, microaggressions, power relations, and the enormous consequences of oppression. Since there are a lot of similarities in the different types of violence, we can call it racism, fatphobia or gender-based islamophobia, in the end all of those things are the consequence of the power structures, are deeply rooted in our societies and cultures, are omnipresent in our societies, and their consequences can be mortal.
I was reflecting as well on the lack of representation of POC (people of color) in the youth work in general, and to be honest it almost doesn´t exist. And how we want to combat racism, if we don´t have from whom to learn? The issue of lack of representation is always a systemic problem, it means that there is something that does not work, and the world of Erasmus+ is predominantly white. And if there are POC in the youth work, normally they are on the lower levels of power structures.
How white is Erasmus+ field
I decided to try to check what is the situation of the European trainers, group that I consider on the top of power structure of Erasmus+ world, since normally they receive the highest fees for their work and somehow, they are the most recognized. Of course, this is my opinion only, but then I am reflecting how many people after the training comments that they dream to become a trainer, and well I rarely hear that they dream of becoming youth worker. But this is for another article.
So I decided to make a small research, although you cannot call it researchJ I opened the salto page and searched all the trainers who are based in the programme countries. In total seems that for today (7th of June 2020) I got 450 matches. And since most of the people have a profile picture, I was looking at them and deciding by myself if they look white form me, or not. Definitely it is not the best way to do it, and some mistakes might be included, but still it felt interesting. There were 12 people who did not put their photos, but then I just check their profile, scroll down till CV, and in 9 cases I was able to see that they are white to me.
So out of 450 trainers in the SALTO pool, there were 439 trainers that looked white to me, 8 whom I consider people of color, and 3 people that I was not able to evaluate. So based on my curiosity (I prefer to replace the word research by curiosity), there is only 1,8% of trainers who are coming from the racialized community.
And yes, there are a lot of institutions in Europe, which are more inclusive, and there are anti-racist organization run by the racialized collectives, and in some countries, there are youth workers who work directly with young people coming from racialized collectives, and we can as well find experts etc. But my question is, why having anti-racism as one of the objectives of Erasmus+ (and previously youth in action) for at least over 15 years, still there is no representation of the community almost at all. And since one of the things that I understood from the past few years, that one of the important things we must do as white people to battle with racism is to educate ourselves and ask ourselves these uncomfortable questions I am asking. Do we have a systemic problem with racism in the Erasmus+ activities? And why there is no representation of POC?
Will I work in the field of anti-racism in the future?
The answer is YES, I will be contributing to the field as much as I can and until it is needed. First of all because there is a need to keep discussing race and white privilege, and I think I have already learnt about my white privilege, and until we won’t have people from this collective I believe there is a need. Secondly, I kind of got my respond from the book of Reni Eddo-Lodge ¨Why I´m no longer talking to white people about race¨. She was describing a story of her white colleague contributing to the field, and she concluded with those words ¨So many white people think that racism is not their problem. But white privilege is instrumental to racism. When I write about white people in this book, I don´t mean every individual white person. I mean whiteness as political ideology. ¨
Finally, from everything what I have learnt in the past years I know that I want to work in this field but not focusing on one specific form of discrimination or violence, but rather understanding the microaggressions, understanding what role power place in the discrimination and especially structural violence and learning more and more about our privileges.
Those are just my thought. I am right? I don´t know. What I know is that it feels that there is still a lot of things to do and it takes a lot of empowerment to actually stand up for something. And I am definitely in the process of getting there, and I have a motivation to change something.
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