Pocket Truth Commission

source (n.)

mid-14c., "support, base," from Old French sourse "a rising, beginning, fountainhead of a river or stream" (12c.), …from assimilated form of sub "up from below" (see sub-) + regere "to keep straight, guide" (from PIE root *reg- "move in a straight line," with derivatives meaning "to direct in a straight line," thus "to lead, rule"). .. as is that of "fountain-head of a river." Meaning "person or written work supplying information or evidence" is by 1777.

source (v.)

"obtain from a specified source," 1972, from source (n.). Related: Sourced; sourcing.

Genealogies of Understanding

An integral part of this project is addressing the ways that each of us are formed by different genealogies of understanding, as much as or more than our biological heritages. Particularly at a time when information is used to control and divide us, this project supports people to discern what ideational inheritances we want to draw from or leave behind; change, or add to.

The book includes an exercise that readers can use to trace their own geneologies of understanding. By way of example, and also to honor and acknowledge, below is some information about my own. In addition to the values I received from family and community, I’m grateful for the following people and schools of thought or practice for their influence on this work:

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, BLACK THEOLOGY, WOMANIST THEOLOGY

In college I was fortunate to be exposed to Black liberation thinkers like James Cone, and womanist theologians like Katie Cannon, when I studied with Dr. Cornel West. And, more recently, through my friendship with Kelly Brown Douglas.

Reading Frantz Fanon, Kamau Brathwaite, and Edouard Glissant challenged me to address the realities of challenging power, the subterranean languages and breath that run like a stream throughout even the most dominated space, and the possibilities of relations via language.

Poets in the Black Arts Movement have been a model for me both on and off the page. Pulitzer-winner Gwendolyn Brooks left her NY corporate press for one based in her community in Chicago; Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez always combined activism and community-based forms with their work on the page. All of these poets taught me about a poem as a social space. And, as someone raised white, my apprenticeship to both Brooks and Baraka has been invaluable to understanding what I was taught, how it moves in me—- and what else is there.

Dharma lineages and systems-thinking have exposed me to interdependence as a practice, reachable through vulnerability and integrity. I began with the Drikung Kagyu lineage, then in 1999 began to train with Soto zen and Bernie Glassman’s Zen Peacemaker order through my teacher Gry Esho Gambert. However, it was not until I began to study with Thich Nhat Hanh and the Order of Interbeing, in 2013 through my dharma friend Marisela Gomez as well as other radical dharma teachers, that I learned to openly discuss racism in dharma settings.

In 2002 I began to study and apply Margaret Wheatley’s work on systems approaches, Ron Heifetz’s work on adaptive leadership, and Joanna Macy’s and Charlotte Joko Beck’s demystified applications of zen training to painful situations in the world. I also discovered John Paul Lederach’s work on conflict transformation, and the lessons of permaculture. By 2008 I had began to study the black and indigenous thinkers, often the roots of such systems-approaches, reading Grace Lee Boggs, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Fania Davis, adrienne maree brown, Mindy Fullilove, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

My faith in public learning began in a job at Parkmont School (in DC) in my early 20s, which exposed me to radical education experiments like Summerhill and critical pedagogy thinkers like Paulo Freire, as well as movement and relationship-shapers like Liz Lerman and Augusto Boal. I built on what I observed at Parkmont —- students supported to have more responsibility, not less, adults skillfully training the school community in communications and power-sharing. When I began to teach in Peace Studies I was given the chance to teach radically: students co-designed classes with me, I began what I now call “tilting the room,” sharing power so that they could co-lead, and gained a visceral understanding of the ways that power requires each of our consent.

Last, I count the free imagination of John Brown as a teacher in this way, about whom Frederick Douglass wrote, “Though a white gentleman, he is in sympathy with the black man and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” I’ve learned that the role of a teacher and learner, of a poet and a reader, are all seamless acts of not only of empathy but mutual accountability.

This project’s design is greatly influenced by conflict transformation and the practice of co-design. I’m grateful to have been a trusted collaborator with Seble Dawit and my colleagues in Peace Studies, Lester Spence, Marisela Gomez, Stuart Schrader, Lawrence Brown, Niki Fabricant, Nicole King, Robbie Shilliam, Mel Michelle Lewis, and others who are part of the Baltimore School approach. All of our projects, between 2012 to today, aim to bring together unlikely groups, in order to build knowledge and intervene on injustices, particularly across institutions and community groups.

A manifesto co-written with Lester Spence in 2018 articulated some of what I have learned from social movements, especially the concept of “translucency,” in which our role is kept hidden. This is a key design principle for me, particularly as a white woman writing about race: since I’m a member of the perpetrating group it’s important for my work to not simply work for my own gain.

Since 2013 I’ve learned much from the work of people like Rachel Herzing and Critical Resistance, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others who are articulating abolition as a practice. My understanding that much more is possible is grounded in my own life and experiences, but also in the courage and imagination of organizers and thinkers who assert this as something that’s available for all of us.