Creating and Tending to Your Partnership
Creating Your Partnership
Who can be your white accountability partner? As mentioned before, it can be any white person you feel you can have honest, open conversations with. Your partner should, from the onset, be someone who is also invested in disrupting and dismantling white supremacy (in some capacity) and you feel you can be open, willing, and able to process whiteness in all aspects of your life. We are all in different places with regards to our understanding of whiteness, white privilege, and white supremacy and therefore, we think it's important that whomever you chose you make sure you are on the same page about your reason for establishing a white accountability partnership. Here are some other things to keep in mind as you create your partnership:
Determine your expectations from the very beginning. In that first hour of your first meeting, discuss why you want a white accountability partner and how you'd like to hold one another accountable. Outside of your meeting time will you keep in touch via phone, email, text, social media?
Set boundaries. Be clear and honest about your limitations and time. Establish your availability with your modes of communication.
Identify your goals and hopes. What do you feel you need to learn or unlearn at this time? What are concrete behaviors and attitudes you want to change? In what ways do you both want to grow in your white identities and antiracist practice?
Review and set norms for your time together. How will you tend to the airspace to ensure a balance of listening and speaking? How will you address giving feedback? Robin DiAngelo addresses giving feedback around white fragility. This protocol could be useful in thinking about you provide feedback to your partner.
Finally, expect and accept a lack of closure. This is a tenet we learned from SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) and keep in mind as we do this work together. You and your partner are processing together to unlearn the behaviors and habits of white supremacy and create new ones to disrupt and dismantle racism. This takes time and continuous work.
Tending To Your Partnership
You and your partner need to take care of one another and hold each other accountable.
Check in at the start of your scheduled meetings. This helps ground the rest of your time together.
Revisit your goals and hopes. They will change as you continue to do this work together!
Maintain your monthly meetings. A good rule to agree upon is that you only get to cancel a session if you have proposed a new time that you know will work (i.e., what you cancel needs to be replaced with a new session, no excuses).