Resilience: Podcast 2.1: Reflection Question

In this episode, Vinita asks Reverend angel to offer steps to those inspired to have meaningful conversations about race but don’t know where to start. Reverend angel offers a journaling exercise to find in your own experience and history “the earliest and most potent moment that you recognised that race matters. That race is a thing, not that there’s a difference, that people have different coloured bodies and all of that kind of thing, but that race actually matters […] I call the moment you were racialized. And sit with that and I invite people to journal about it […] write the story down as if it were happening right now. So use the present tense and use I statements like: I walked in this room, a young white man turned and looked at me”.

This exercise can allow us to gain some perspective on the ways in which we respond to race and stories about race from the system we want to dismantle. It provides an opportunity to look at it without being in it; as Reverend angel puts it, we “have to be able to think, feel, know outside of this system” to be effective in making the changes we hope to see in it.

In the box below, reflect on and write in the present tense about the earliest moment you can remember when you were racialized.