The Spillway: How We Start

The Spillway

What does it mean to be a White person in the US today?

If you mention or see race, you're racist.

If you don't mention or see race, you're racist.

A few months ago, I (Loran) started an organization, The Spillway, around supporting White people to work through Perpetrator Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS) and interGenerational trauma. I offer the services within The Spillway with the acknowledgment that healing work is merely one mechanism within a larger network required to sustain our collective movement towards racial justice. I seek to grow the services available rather than redistribute where we put our efforts and funding. To get this message out there, I’ve asked one of the most compassionate, ferociously tender, hilarious, and incredibly smart humans I know, Jenny, to join me on this podcasting journey.

Jenny and I come from similar yet separate backgrounds. Importantly, we offer incredibly different perspectives, sometimes just by who we are as people and other times by the different identities we hold.

We are committed to building compassion, understanding, empathy, and patience into the present and future of Whiteness and White Culture. We cannot change the past. But, we can change the future through the actions we take today.

We seek to embody the work of James Baldwin, Sonya Renee Taylor, Kazu Haga, Resmaa Menekem, and Kai Cheng Thom and countless others asking for White people to (in so many words) get our shit together. Since starting The Spillway, there’s been consistent feedback—sometimes within the same space—that White people are engaging this work with closed hearts and minds

This work can be difficult and beautiful. It is an exercise in vulnerability, in unlearning perfectionism, with real-world consequences, in an age of 7-second judgments. We hope The Spillway and our living in it can give others the courage that is needed to join us in this work.

We know that attempting to be vulnerable and consenting to learn in public is incredibly terrifying work. And yet we have to start somewhere. Conversations of race and racism aren’t going away anytime soon. Given our incredibly different places in the world, we’re trying to create a middle ground where White people can get together to talk and create action around the paradox of being White in the US, where we are simultaneously the perpetrators and victims of the race and racism.

We seek to embody the work of countless activists of color who have been calling White folks to seek our own healing around race and racism. So here we are, two White people committing to the work of individual and collective healing around race and racism for white people. Healing ourselves is no one's responsibility but our own.

Let’s Heal together and Grow to stop the impacts of race and racism in the lives of People of Color, and our lives as well.

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Welcome to our podcast. We’re so glad you’re here refocusing on Whiteness without supremacy or shame. Listen. Like. Follow.

Instagram: @the.spillway | Facebook: @WithoutSupremacyorShame

For a transcript of this episode and more, please visit our website, www.thespillway.org

Mentioned in this episode:

The Spillway Community Guidelines

1. Engage sequentially. The show is a serial not episodic. We do this so we can build relation and find common ground and context. 2. We stay in our own lane. The Spillway is about White people talking to (predominately) White people about White people and White culture. We're not out here to critique anyone's actions but our own. 3. Our combined fabric of destiny. (3a) As Dr. King said, our humanities are deeply interconnected to each other. Racism negatively impacts me, too. (3b) The Spillway is one mechanism within a larger framework needed to sustain racial equity and justice. We're not a one-stop shop. 4. No one right way to liberation. We all share the same goals, but not every method works for every person. If this doesn't work for you. That's okay. Maybe it works for someone else.