Working Our Commitments
by Emma Thomas, Racial Rec Faculty and MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School
On a sunny fall afternoon last Wednesday, our 2021 Racial Rec crew gathered, masked up and thrilled to be together, in the Southern Jamaica Plain Community Health Center. It was the first time since we began this season when young people and faculty could be together in the same space. Despite the challenges of reading each other’s facial expressions behind masks, we dove into some powerful work together: workshopping and questioning and dedicating ourselves to our Commitments.
As a classroom teacher and facilitator, I was excited to see how this process would go. I’ve often witnessed or facilitated spaces where the group constructs their agreements from scratch. Sometimes, that cocreation can be a good process, but many times it results in lots of time workshopping the wording of a particular agreement that doesn’t do much to build trust in the group.
Significantly, agreements also carry a different energy — a tentativeness, perhaps even an assumed adversarialness (“we came to an agreement”) — than commitments. Committing to something makes space for it to be a constant practice, full of mistakes and learning. It is more robust, longterm, and active than agreeing to something.
So right away when the process of workshopping our commitments started, I knew it would be different. Abigail and Dennie asked us to form two concentric circles facing towards each other so that we were paired up. One by one, they revealed each of the commitments, pausing to allow us to discuss it in partnerships. How did it land with us? Did we see any major challenges or obstacles to committing to it? Were there big questions coming up for us that needed clarification before we could commit? Before moving onto the next round and switching partners, we would go around the circle, each of us signing on or naming our obstacle or question. Young people brought insightful, challenging, self-reflective questions and concerns, and our discussion deepened the dimensions of each of the commitments. This felt so different from classroom “agreements” I had seen in the past, where students sometimes begrudgingly agreed to something they didn’t really see the importance of. More than anything, in our Racial Rec circle, the young people’s integrity and building of trust in each other and themselves shone through; if someone had an issue with one of the commitments, they named it and we dug in together, weaving our web of interdependence and realness with each other in the process.
“Moving away from niceness, disembodiedness, and a worry that we’ll be disposable if we say the wrong thing, we move towards realness, relationships, and belonging. Moving away from punitive culture, we move towards truth, honesty, and the ability to repair our connectedness when it’s harmed. Moving away from perfectionism, we recognize that each of these commitments is a commitment to PRACTICE, recognizing that we’ll mess up or fall short and then can try again.”
Which, of course, is just what these commitments were inviting us into. The young people were already practicing them. When I first encountered the list below, I was present to how these commitments invited really different kinds of practices than what white supremacy culture has trained us all in. Moving away from niceness, disembodiedness, and a worry that we’ll be disposable if we say the wrong thing, we move towards realness, relationships, and belonging. Moving away from punitive culture, we move towards truth, honesty, and the ability to repair our connectedness when it’s harmed. Moving away from perfectionism, we recognize that each of these commitments is a commitment to PRACTICE, recognizing that we’ll mess up or fall short and then can try again. All of these commitments are possible within the strong container of belonging and engagement that Racial Rec creates, and I’m so excited to see how they transform us over our year together.
You commit that this group will always be safe (no one is yelling / screaming or throwing chairs), but you also commit to feeling the discomfort.
You commit to saying what you feel and feeling what you say. You can’t control how it may be received.
You commit to hearing what comes back as a result of what you have said, as it needs to be.
You commit to the fact that your ability to be true and honest is not conditional on the reactions of others. We can’t make it all seem nice.
You understand that you may hurt other people, but recognize that this happens all the time in the “real world” and that here it can actually be addressed. THEREFORE…
You commit to making the implicit explicit.
Thanks to the young people of the Racial Rec community for showing us what it looks like to build trust by digging in, being real, and trusting the strength of our relationships and our container together.
