bio . . .
I have spent over 40 years working with and for organizations, schools, and community-based institutions as an educator, facilitator, mentor, and coach focused on issues of racial justice and equity. I currently facilitate, consult, mentor, coach, and offer talks for and with leaders and organizations nationwide.
I am the author of the award-winning The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know (2010, IAP), as well as many other book chapters, articles, and opinion pieces. I am also the author of the widely used article White Supremacy Culture, and in 2021 published a revised version of this article on an extended and expanded website at www.whitesupremacyculture.info.
I am a fierce Jewish advocate for Palestine solidarity as a member of Triangle Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. I am honored to sit on the boards of Solidaire and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. I belong to the Bhumisphara Sangha under the leadership of Lama Rod Owens. I am a graduate of the Spiritual Guidance Training Institute. And I have been so honored to be a mentor for the Catalyst Project's Braden Program for many years.
Finally, and most importantly, I am an artist, a poet, and a writer. I live in Durham NC where I am fortunate to reside among beloved community. My current project is deepening my ability to love my neighbor as myself. I am finding the instruction easy and the follow through challenging, given how we live in a culture that is afraid to help us do either or both.
I am the author of the award-winning The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know (2010, IAP), as well as many other book chapters, articles, and opinion pieces. I am also the author of the widely used article White Supremacy Culture, and in 2021 published a revised version of this article on an extended and expanded website at www.whitesupremacyculture.info.
I am a fierce Jewish advocate for Palestine solidarity as a member of Triangle Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. I am honored to sit on the boards of Solidaire and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. I belong to the Bhumisphara Sangha under the leadership of Lama Rod Owens. I am a graduate of the Spiritual Guidance Training Institute. And I have been so honored to be a mentor for the Catalyst Project's Braden Program for many years.
Finally, and most importantly, I am an artist, a poet, and a writer. I live in Durham NC where I am fortunate to reside among beloved community. My current project is deepening my ability to love my neighbor as myself. I am finding the instruction easy and the follow through challenging, given how we live in a culture that is afraid to help us do either or both.
and . . .
I have been on this planet for many decades and I know a thing or two about a thing or two, including white supremacy and racism. And, as you might guess, there are hundreds, thousands, an infinite number of things I don't know and still wonder about.
I was born into an upper middle-class family, my father the son of first generation Jewish immigrants escaping the pogroms in Belarus, and my mother the daughter of a postal clerk father and housewife mother, both with immigrant roots in Scotland. She grew up in a very small town in Texas. By the time I was born, my father was a college professor in a Southern college town and my mother worked on and off in the public schools. I grew up during the last years of Jim Crow and the first years of school desegregation, both enactments of violent white supremacy and racism. My parents were liberals in the best sense of that word and very active in the local Civil Rights Movement. I was well cared for materially; emotionally the grounding was less solid and that's a longer story for another day.
I am a white woman, currently cisgender and able-bodied, upper class, queer. I am older, sometimes an elder.
I am also a spiritual anarchist, meaning simply that I am not attached to any particular religious form even as I am a student of Lama Rod Owens, a self-described "Black Buddhist Queen." That said, I welcome whatever spiritual traditions or forms that offer grounding, solace, and meaning to those with whom I work.
I have lots of so-called credentials - degrees and a book and articles and poetry and art and curriculum and talks and speeches and teaching and consulting and mentoring and ... my hope is you would care more about my heart than anything. I am conditioned to be fearful while determined to be open-hearted and I live in that ongoing tension each day with as much grace and humor as I can muster. I am deeply puzzled by why and how we seem to value profit over people and why and how we base our belonging on who we can keep out rather than who we welcome in. And by we, I mean our culture, our white supremacy capitalist patriarchal ableist heteronormative fool of a culture. I am deeply moved by how so many of us do all in our power to refuse the invitation into such toxicity and I admire both up close and from afar all engaged in the solidarity effort to live into the world we all want and deserve. I am lucky beyond words to be well loved by a community of people, which is why I have any kind of open heart at all. I aspire to remember every day that I love you as I love myself, and we all know, or most of us do, what a struggle it can be to love ourselves well. Learning to love well is my current project.
I was born into an upper middle-class family, my father the son of first generation Jewish immigrants escaping the pogroms in Belarus, and my mother the daughter of a postal clerk father and housewife mother, both with immigrant roots in Scotland. She grew up in a very small town in Texas. By the time I was born, my father was a college professor in a Southern college town and my mother worked on and off in the public schools. I grew up during the last years of Jim Crow and the first years of school desegregation, both enactments of violent white supremacy and racism. My parents were liberals in the best sense of that word and very active in the local Civil Rights Movement. I was well cared for materially; emotionally the grounding was less solid and that's a longer story for another day.
I am a white woman, currently cisgender and able-bodied, upper class, queer. I am older, sometimes an elder.
I am also a spiritual anarchist, meaning simply that I am not attached to any particular religious form even as I am a student of Lama Rod Owens, a self-described "Black Buddhist Queen." That said, I welcome whatever spiritual traditions or forms that offer grounding, solace, and meaning to those with whom I work.
I have lots of so-called credentials - degrees and a book and articles and poetry and art and curriculum and talks and speeches and teaching and consulting and mentoring and ... my hope is you would care more about my heart than anything. I am conditioned to be fearful while determined to be open-hearted and I live in that ongoing tension each day with as much grace and humor as I can muster. I am deeply puzzled by why and how we seem to value profit over people and why and how we base our belonging on who we can keep out rather than who we welcome in. And by we, I mean our culture, our white supremacy capitalist patriarchal ableist heteronormative fool of a culture. I am deeply moved by how so many of us do all in our power to refuse the invitation into such toxicity and I admire both up close and from afar all engaged in the solidarity effort to live into the world we all want and deserve. I am lucky beyond words to be well loved by a community of people, which is why I have any kind of open heart at all. I aspire to remember every day that I love you as I love myself, and we all know, or most of us do, what a struggle it can be to love ourselves well. Learning to love well is my current project.
Websites related to my work.
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