Balancing the Work

When I was a kid, my grandpa had a three legged stool in his woodshop. He built it himself and the thing was super sturdy. Unless, one of the legs happened to be resting on a stray piece of wood or other dropped item that caused the legs to be uneven and tilt. The stool then became useless for anything, aside from severely twisting your ankle if you stepped on it without realizing it was uneven.

We use a three legged stool as an analogy for the work needed to fight racism. Each leg represents part of what we need to do in order to be anti-racist and work towards transformation in society. However, if we only focus on “growing” one or two legs, our stool will become unbalanced, tip over and set us back. Therefore, we should aim to work on each leg equally to ensure the work we are putting in is sturdy and sustainable. The legs represent education, internalization and organizing and are further explained  below:

Education (Work on learning)

This is the lifelong work of self-education about your own racialized group, as well as learning more about other racialized groups. Think of this as fighting the racism of the past and present. This includes the history of racism against various racialized groups, the laws with racially-disparate outcomes for different racialized groups, as well as the social customs, artistic and culinary contributions, holidays and worship practices.

Internalization (Work on yourself)

This is the lifelong work of getting sober from the effects of racism on your racialized group. Think of this as fighting the racism in you at present. Caucusing is the recommended tool to accomplish this as the group process aids in moving forward with deeper understanding of how racism has affected you.

Organizing (Work on Institutionalizing Anti-Racism)

This is the lifelong work of addressing the long work of making anti-racist systemic changes in institutions. Think of this as fighting the racism of the present and forward into the future. Strategizing and advocacy work in groups is the recommended tool to accomplish these aims as working solo on this kind of long work tends to exhaust individuals who do this alone without the encouragement, companionship, and co-laboring of others.

For our future Ripple Resource emails, we will use the three legged stool analogy to frame the information we are providing, explain to which leg it most applies.

Reflection Questions:

How can you apply the three legged stool to your current anti-racism and anti-oppression work? Has this analogy helped clarify anything for you? In what ways? Is there any information we can help clarify for you moving forward?

Digging Deeper:

Looking at your own anti-oppressive work, what would your stool look like? Which leg would be shorter than the others? Which leg is longer than the others? Consider why those legs may be different in length. What steps do you need to take to stabilize your anti-oppressive work and even out your stool?