Making Change Through Awareness: Workshop with Jodi Pfarr

Lia Rivamonte, Beloved Community Staff Team

All you Black folks, you must go All you Mexicans, you must go
And all you poor folks, you must go
Muslims and gay boys, 
we hate your ways
So all you bad folks, you must go
— "We the People" by A Tribe Called Quest, from the album, We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016)

I confess, I have to make an effort these days, not to give in to a sense of hopelessness — a sin, according to the nuns who taught me. The all too prescient lyrics above by the hip hop band A Tribe Called Quest, written prior to 2016, now seems to serve as an anthem by the current Administration. All that I value is being challenged, tossed into the wind like fragile tissue. I am heartened that Jodi Pfarr, author of The Urgency of Awareness, came to Unity Church to help us figure out a way to make sense of our world and its cruel inequities; determined to change the status quo workshop by workshop. 

Working through the various lenses of individuals, institutions, communities, and, ultimately, policymaking, Pfarr has built an accessible framework through which we can better understand ourselves and others outside of our own narrow cultural and societal groups. Facilitating with humor and blunt vulnerability, she provides tools to help us visualize how our identities have been informed by our experiences and situations beyond our control. 

We live in a society that normalizes certain things or groups. Normalization means not having to think about how we are perceived, or worry about how we navigate the institutions and systems in our daily lives, or be misinterpreted or merely dismissed. 

Pfarr imagines groups as triangles that either point up or down according to their having been “normalized.” Left-handedness is considered a down-pointing triangle; right-handedness is a triangle that points up. A person with three or more up or down triangles is typically generalized by individuals, institutions, and communities in the dominant norm. As a consequence, individuals lose their personhood, and their needs are dismissed. The alternative is to become aware of our biases and assumptions, own and process them, acknowledge our emotions, and hit the “pause” button when we experience an emotion such as anger or shame in the process. 

It is becoming apparent to some of us that the dominant norm is moving us further away from a just world at an alarming rate. We need to start listening to those in non-dominant spaces who appear to be better positioned to tell us what is needed for true justice.

In reflecting on Pfarr’s engaging workshop, I am struck by the trajectory of Unity’s antiracism efforts, and sometimes wonder how much the needle has moved — if it has moved at all. For 25 years now, we have participated in workshops, read and discussed judiciously, listened to sermons, taken pilgrimages, educated our children and youth, taken cultural audits, and formed partnerships with moral owners. Our Ends Statements embed antiracism into every aspect of church community life. And yet, I know there are some who struggle with this work, even question its relevance, and/or effectiveness. 

I can recall a time, years ago, when an antiracism workshop experience would inevitably end in tears and even shame for some. Pfarr’s Urgency of Awareness takes a different approach, one that is relatively gentle. It is no longer a needle, tortuously sharp, that needs to move, rather, it is a noodle — a soft, slippery one that slides along a continuum. I am getting anxious. If we are to move that noodle, more of us need to share our stories of growth, discovery, and failure. 

Please do read, and share your stories (written or on video) with, the All Our Fullness project. This is an ongoing communal spiritual practice, all of it in service of the antiracist, multicultural world we profess to long for. 

For more tools to help you understand your inherent biases in the ways that you perceive others and how you can build the capacity to truly see others, visit Jodi Pfarr’s website, listen to her podcasts, and/or read her book, The Urgency of Awareness.
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Thanks to Ray Wiedmeyer for our conversation that helped to inform this article.