Reckon With Practice: Acknowledgement

Reckon With’s foundation is our Acknowledgement Practice. Every day, participants track each time they notice a myth of racial hierarchy emerge in their minds and alert their groups via text. When meeting, groups identify where in our history those myths originated and replace them with reality. This creates a record of personal complicity, develops truthtelling muscles required for repair, and clarifies that we can’t avoid racism but we can choose how we respond.

In our pilot with 15 people, hundreds of false myths were logged. For example, a participant was driving down the street and saw 2 black men on the sidewalk. Her hands tensed around the steering wheel and she thought, “What are these Black men doing?” Milliseconds later, she registered the mens’ workout clothes - they were on a walk. Our Acknowledgement Practice builds participants’ capacity to pause and recognize these false ideas of racial difference that, uninterrupted, create destruction.