Antiracism: Student Confessions Series, with Nova Reid

I took part in Nova Reid’s series of Student Confession Interviews after graduating from her deeply affecting, life-changing course: Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid. The Course altered the way I live my life and transformed my attitudes and my core beliefs about racism. I discovered and dismantled so much both internally and externally, including the fact that racism is invented. White men from Linnaeus to Blumenbach and de Gobineau categorised human beings by their skin colour, and ascribed moral qualities to those colours. But as Nova’s Course shows us, not only is that nonsense, but we’re all descended from the same Black woman:

Mitochondrial Eve lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. She was not the first human, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, failing to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. As a result, all humans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her.

You can read my Student Confession conversation here, or an introduction to it here on Nova’s Instagram page. There’ll be more of these conversational confessions with graduates of Nova’s Antiracism Course on her Student Confessions journal in the coming weeks.

As I wrote here, for anyone wanting to become an ally to People of Colour, I highly recommend Nova’s book The Good Ally, but even more importantly, for white people who don’t know where to begin with antiracism work, who may even be afraid of beginning antiracism work (I was) Nova’s kind, compassionate, never-shaming, never-blaming, mind-and-heart opening, collectively-healing antiracism course about why the white race wrongly became the default race in so many parts of the world, and why so many of us well-meaning white folk still carry subconscious-but-enduring racism inside us that harms People of Colour, and how to unlearn our subconscious racism, Nova’s Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid is an essential mind- and heart-opener. A collectively-healing course for every single one of us.