Bits and Pieces
We are experiencing a minor thaw in my area. Chicago has been in the midst of a normal winter, with occasional snaps of cold bluster but nothing like I remember from my childhood when winds snatched children up, spun us around, and placed us back on the sidewalk with tears lining our eyes. Winters seem stronger from back then.
During this season and this thaw, I’ve negotiated a thick, stubborn slab at the back steps of my building. An annual stream of water fell from the gutters weeks back, froze in a long dazzling icicle, pooled and spread along the walkway, and has slowly begun to loosen. Me, Bryce, and Brooks have traversed the thickness with Bryce stepping out with all the confidence of middle school and with Brooks waiting with his kindergarten-sized hand extended as he waits for me to walk with him. In the last few days, the thickness had decreased and little bits of ice and smaller puddles of water are forming.
For two years I’ve been part of the Anti-Bias Working Group (ABWG), and in a recent ACPE newsletter, Danielle Buhuro wrote of how the group’s work has focused and will be focused. As we’ve worked to resource ACPE, we’ve met together, talked of bias in its many forms, discussed the roots of it in society and the flowers of it in our organization. We’ve leaned into the deep and imaginative work of creating things to share with our colleagues.
Our recent meeting had me considering the bits and pieces I’ve learned along the way about the backgrounds of ACPE. There are the things I know. How this organization has assembled over the decades from other groups of caregivers and educators. How our community of practice has grown beyond the, largely, white and male Protestant persons who began this work. I think to named and unmentioned people who have provided care, compassion, and transformative education in the directions of care and compassion. I think of REM and our elders who have represented courageous, prophetic dedication to the instantiation of anti-Black bias and all the biases reflected in and refracted from white supremacy. I think about how much I don’t know and how much there is to learn.
Our discussions around the aims of the ABWG have had me considering my roots and traditions in evangelical spaces, Baptist spaces, Pentecostal spaces. The conversations have given me more courage to continue the careful, progressive, powerful, and transformational work of serving this organization as it claims the best parts of its background and as it reaches around as with hands grasping for the unseen.
As Dr. Buhuro wrote in the group’s summary, we are engaged in an effort to create a culture of feedback, to create opportunities for just collegiality. At the root of these things is creation. We, together as a group and as an organization, are making something. I learned in a classroom years about one view of creation, namely, creation out of nothing. That is not the kind of creating the ABWG is doing. Indeed, it isn’t what ACPE is up to either.
Rather than beginning before a beginning, ACPE is creating from something, creating out of the bits and pieces of before and out of the bits and pieces of now as those bits come together or, better, as we bring those bits together. In the spirit of Sankofa, isn’t it good to turn, take from behind us what is vulnerable, and bring it forward? I invite you to imagine how we might step on the paths ahead, forging new paths with parts and pieces of old paths. I invite you to reach back for useful bits in your befores, pull those pieces forward, and use them as our organization embraces its season of embedding and enacting anti-bias and antiracism at every level.
Rev. Michael Washington is an ACPE Certified Educator at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He can be reached at mwashin4@nm.org