This week’s episode features my conversation with artist and community organizer Amanda K. Gross. We talk about fiber arts, social justice work, integration, and Amanda’s new book, White Women, Get Ready: How Healing Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Anti-Racist Change. This is a powerful conversation that suggests we already have the tools we need to build the more beautiful world; we just need the courage to put them into practice. Amanda's Bio: Amanda was born in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia, to two white Mennonites. Raised in the social justice legacies of Dr. King and her Anabaptist ancestors, she was also raised to be a good little white girl in a system built for her advantage. Over the past two decades, she has committed to the life, study, and embodied work of social justice, including studies in Restorative Justice, Conflict Transformation, and Sociology, apprenticing with YogaRoots On Location’s Anti-Racist Raja Yoga School and the People’s Institute for Survival & Beyond’s Undoing Racism Workshop, and organizing with Youth Undoing Institutional Racism and the American Friends Service Committee. Amanda has a PhD from the European Graduate School examining the role of arts and culture in sustaining white settlers in long term decolonization and anti-racist efforts. Amanda is the author of White Women, Get Ready: How Healing Post-Traumatic Mistress Syndrome Leads to Anti-Racist Change. Inspired by Dr. Joy DeGruy's work on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome—and used with her blessing—White Women, Get Ready tells the story of how white ladies have been groomed to uphold overlapping systems of oppression, the harmful multigenerational impact, and how we can use our unique positioning to help upend and heal from these violent structures. White Women, Get Ready is one part of a larger body of collaborative work that emerged from the call within Black-led multiracial and multicultural spaces for white people, and white women in particular, to organize our own. Conceived out of multi-racial organizing community, this book has been nurtured, edited, and critiqued within relationships, and is now being birthed, read, and discussed as one interconnected part of ongoing movement work. Find White Women, Get Ready at https://www.mistresssyndrome.com/book. Follow Amanda on instagram, facebook, wordpress, and patreon. Find out more about Dr. Joy DeGruy's work at https://www.joydegruy.com and go to the book's Resources for Further Support to find out more about other BIPOC-led movement work. ~ Follow along with the pod on Instagram: https://instagram.com/oncominghomepod On Threads: https://threads.net/@oncominghomepod The Patreon is currently on pause.
