Images from the project Inheritance of White Silence by Hannah Brancato
Workshop Description (scroll down for resources and links!)
Inheritance -> Transformation of White SIlence is an experiential, healing, anti-racism workshop offering an arts-based excavation into family systems to examine the following questions:
What are we talking about when we say “white supremacy culture?”
As people living in a racist society, how have we inherited and internalized white supremacy culture and/or how have we been impacted by its legacy?
How do family narratives and other inherited stories perpetuate internalized racism?
How can we resist this legacy in our spheres of influence and families, through connecting with existing antiracist movement building and community action?
The two-part workshop features discussion and a series of guided prompts to help participants explore these questions, as well as time to share and respond to one another’s art and to brainstorm how to translate this interior work into exterior action. This space is designed for anyone, from beginning artists to more experienced artists, and we will emphasize a beginner’s mindset as we experiment together.
This workshop is a collaboration between cousins Hannah Brancato and Ansley Clark, and inspired by Hannah’s project Inheritance of White Silence.
An exploration of inherited travel photos, colonization and whiteness, by co-facilitator Ansley Clark
Slides, Tools and Guides
Excerpted materials from Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Baltimore June 2021 collaboration:
Prompt: Identify a material object that relates to, represents, or is physically from your family. How might this object reveal how you have inherited white supremacy and/or white silence, and how you might resist it?
Based on that prompt and an initial day of conversation and community building, here is an Artmaking Guide that participants used to create their work.
Here are examples of works by Brockett Horne and Abby Fitzgibbon, created as part of this workshop.
As a follow up, we encouraged folks to use these Family Discussion Prompts to share works with their families.
Images from an exploration of monograms by Brockett Horne, Summer 2021.
Resources and Further Reading
(divorcing) white supremacy culture: Coming home to who we really are: 1999 essay by Tema Okun outlining characteristics of white supremacy culture, along with more contemporary analysis.
Me and White Supremacy: Workbook by Layla F Saad, leading readers through a journey of understanding their white privilege and participation in white supremacy, so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on Black, Indigenous and People of Color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.
My Grandmother’s Hands (see also link to interview): Book by therapist Resmaa Menakem; the first self-discovery book to examine white body supremacy in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.
Seeing White podcast series: Podcast by John Biewen, with Chenjerai Kumanyiki, investigating the construction of whiteness and structural racism in American history. Part 12 and 14 are particularly relevant to our workshop.
The Racial Imaginary Institute: The Whiteness Issue: Claudia Rankine’s 2017 curatorial and literary project centered around constructions, deconstructions, and visualizations of/around whiteness, white identity, white rage/fragility/violence, and white dominant structures.
They came, they saw, they reckoned?: 2021 episode of Codeswitch featuring political scientists Jennifer Chudy and Hakeem Jefferson about how support for the Black Lives Matter movement — particularly among white people — waxed and then waned, and what continued action against white supremacy might look like.
Whiteness is not an Ancestor: Essays on Life and Lineage by white Women. Edited and Forward by Lisa Iverson. Using the lens of inherited trauma and family history, Whiteness Is Not an Ancestor offers a hopeful, humanizing path for dismantling whiteness.
Images from an exploration of family stories by Abby Fitzgibbon, Summer 2021
Solidarity Donation and Land Tax
Thank you for visiting this page and engaging with this work! The Inheritance of White Silence project is focused on the internal actions needed to unearth and heal from white supremacy, as a means to moving to action to fight racism on a systemic level. One action you can always take is to make a financial contribution. Here are a few suggestions:
Those of us living in the DMV area are on Piscataway Land. You can pay land tax here.
Baltimore American Indian Center supports American Indian and Alaskan Native families in Baltimore.
Organizing Black is a Baltimore based organization on the front lines of the Black Liberation Movement.