An Open Letter to Our Community
As an organization, we have been reading, listening, and reflecting on ongoing issues of white supremacy and violence, and working to amplify other voices first. This open letter represents our shared, actionable commitments toward anti-racism and building communities of collective healing, accountability and repair.
Dear Art Not Shame Community,
There is ongoing psychic and physical harm being done to the Black community here, in Canada, and abroad. For some, this statement reflects their daily experience; for others, born into racial privilege, the idea of anti-Black racism is often contested, disbelieved, or perceived as a threat. However, as Natasha Henry and many other scholars have revealed, anti-Black racism is a “particularly pernicious, borderless, and unique form of racism” deeply rooted in Canada’s history of enslaving Black and Indigenous peoples. While this is a history that has been intentionally and systematically erased, it is one that is still very much being lived out in the present.
The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, D’Andre Campbell, George Floyd, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and many others, are reminders that anti-Black racism and transphobia live on, embedded within state institutions, law enforcement, and social service agencies that are meant to serve and protect us, and emboldened by individual acts of fear and hate. The families, friends and larger communities of each of these people are mourning deaths of loved ones that shouldn’t have to be mourned at all; and no death should ever have to serve as a reminder of our collective and widespread failure to undo the white supremacy that is so deeply ingrained into the psyche and foundation of this country.
We believe that anti-Black racism and white supremacy are incompatible with community justice, collective liberation, and racial healing. Anti-Black racism and white supremacy go hand-in-hand: whiteness maintains its position of dominance through anti-Black racism.
As a non-profit and charity, we work within a system that is dominated by the logic of whiteness and white supremacy, and one that has violent and harmful consequences for Black, Indigenous, and racialized people.
We endeavor to build communities of care and creative expression at Art Not Shame that work to resist, undo, and speak back to the often invisible, divisive, and shame-based logic of white supremacy. Because white supremacy is foundational to both the system within which we work, and a mindset that has to be continually interrogated, our work in this regard is never done.
For us, this means that we will:
Continue to examine ourselves and our organization, and the ways in which we perpetuate anti-Black racism, through ongoing training, listening, (un)learning, and acting;
Continue to offer arts-based anti-oppression experiential learning workshops to our local community of artists and practitioners;
Connect with white leaders of arts and mental health organizations, and white artists to engage in and hold ourselves accountable to critical learning together around whiteness and white supremacy;
Seek greater representation of Black leadership within our Board, our artist facilitation team, and within our programming;
Simultaneously, address the inherent and implicit barriers we uphold, as an organization that is majority white-led, to greater representation of Black leadership and participation;
Continue to question and address the racial bias in our programming and operations: Who are our programs for? Who do they serve? Whose voices and worldviews do they amplify? And whose experiences do they reflect?
Be aware of and name when white safety is being protected at the cost of harm to Black participants and team members in our programming and work environment;
Attempt to repair the harm when we miss the mark;
Promote the work of and learn from Black and Indigenous artists and practitioners who are leading the way and working toward decolonized and anti-oppressive arts and healing spaces;
Continue to deconstruct the logic of white supremacy through our programming that creates hierarchies between self and other, self and world, self and nature;
Continue to work against toxic individualism and capitalist notions of care, and build caring, intersectional communities that value, learn from, and amplify difference.
We see these commitments as the work of transformative justice and community care; these ideas uproot outdated and exclusionary ways of policing and being together, and signal a (re)turn to a sense of community that is predicated on collective healing, accountability, and repair.
We write this from a deep belief that liberation and solidarity is an ongoing commitment that happens both in public when being silent is not an option, and in private, in our homes, with our friends, families, and neighbours. This is ongoing work that ought not start, or end, with a statement, but be a lifelong commitment to undoing the violence of white supremacist logic and systems that affords humanity, privilege, and safety to only a select few.
In solidarity,
The Art Not Shame Team