Dismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK Day

In this short ad hoc episode that was originally recorded as a Facebook Live, I discuss ways that my family is working on dismantling both White supremacy and patriarchy (and having a go at capitalism while we're at it!) this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The best part is that this doesn't have to be heavy work that brings with it a huge sense of guilt. It's about building community that lifts all of us up, and gets us out of the 'stay in my lane' mindset that White supremacy uses to keep us in line. And it also doesn't have to happen only on the holiday itself - this work is just as relevant and important the rest of the year. Prefer to watch rather than listen? Click here to join the free YPM Facebook group and watch the video recording of the episode   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:01 Hello, everyone, it's Jen. And I just wanted to do another live episode as it were in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group because I did one recently for the events after the US Capitol siege. And responding to that, and actually looked at the analytics on it and found that it was one of my most recently downloaded episodes. So, this is sort of just another informal episode. And we'll be back to regular programming next week, but wanted to share some thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is today here in the US. And I think this is actually the special—the first holiday recorded an episode that I've done ever. So it feels kind of cool to be doing it for this particular day for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I wanted to share some thoughts that actually I concepted on a bike ride, which tends to be how these things come about when I have some time to think. And I'm really sort of thinking, “Okay, what is it that parents need to know in this right now? What's important about continuing Dr. King's legacy?” And I talked in the episode from last week about the events in the US Capitol, about the anti-racist work that we're doing, and that is so necessary that has to continue, yes, we have to keep doing that. We also need to do things like learning about the achievements of Black people, both in history and today. And at all that I really enjoy for that is, if you're not watching on Facebook Live, I'm holding up these Black history flashcards. They're published by an organization called Urban intellectuals, which I believe is a Black-owned company. And we've actually been storing them in a little teacup on our dining room table, and my daughter will request that we go through at least one and up to three of them, I draw the line at three because then I don't get to eat dinner at the dinner table every day. And we talk through not just sort of the what are the bullet points on the back of the card that each of these individuals on the cards did.   Jen Lumanlan 01:55 But what does it mean? What does it mean that to say that they were entrepreneurs, trappers, and traders in the 1700s is one of the people that we read about last night was what kind of circumstances came into place to even make that possible when the vast majority of Black people in that period who were over in the Americas were enslaved. What kind of circumstances and personality and situation were involved in this? And so I think that that is really helping us to put some kind of context around. It's not just that there were millions of Black people here in the US, and they were all enslaved, and they were sort of this monolithic entity. But these were individual people who had individual lives and individual concerns, and they made incredibly valued and undervalued contributions to our culture, you know, inventing things and setting up one of the people we read about last night set up the city of Chicago, he founded a settlement that turned into