If you want to serve others, to address injustice in any way, you need to understand colonialism as an ongoing event. You need to do your own anti racist work

This takes time. I get it. But if you don't do it then all your helping will just become another way to enforce inequity

If you volunteer with an organization that tries to address injustice or help others, it needs to offer training in this. And that training needs to be ongoing and constantly evolving because our understandings of these things, racist policies and colonial activities, is evolving

If it doesn't, then you have two choices,

1. Encourage it to start doing so.
2. Leave

That's it really. Because if it doesn't then it is part of a structure that promotes colonialism and racial inequity.

If you, or the organization, is unwilling to do that work then you/it will perpetuate inequity because you won't know any better.

And that's a damn shame because if you want to help and find out later that you've just been making things worse you'll wind up feeling bad.

This especially applies to churches and missionizing organizations. I get that your short term missions open your eyes and make you feel good about yourself and teaches you empathy and builds relationships and gosh those kids loved that soccer game and they hugged you.

But if the organization you are going out with it does not start your training with some serious work on how missionaries have been agents of colonialism and racist policies, then you will be part of the problem you say you want to solve.

And don't think that just because your leaders are people of colour that they have done the work and that it's all good. Sometimes we gravitate towards these things for the same reason you do and we become part of a system that perpetuates and relies on inequity.

Pastors and teachers. I really do want you to think about every passage/lesson you teach. Ask yourself, how will Black women hear these words? How will an Indigenous man hear these words? How will a 2SLGBTQQIA person who is afraid to admit it in this room hear these words?

I can recommend a long list of books to you.

Start with Aime Cesaire's essay on colonialism, written in the 50's in case you want to tell yourself this is all newfangled thought. Here's a thread I wrote on it to get you going. https://twitter.com/gindaanis/status/1162401189163622400?s=20

Oh, and another word to pastors. If passages/worship songs referencing slavery don't make you uncomfortable in front of your Black congregants, you haven't thought about it hard enough. You are using their relatives as a metaphor.