Save the Dates: Gathering for Collective Liberation and Anti-Racism with Chris Crass
April 15, 16, and 22
Registrations opening soon
Chris Crass is one of the leading voices in the country calling for and supporting white people to work for racial justice and men to work for feminism. He’s a social justice educator who writes and speaks widely on courage for racial justice, feminism for men, lessons from past movements, and creating healthy culture and leadership for progressive activism. His Unitarian Universalism grounds his liberatory vision and his approach to justice which is rooted in love.
Chris spoke at UUC in 2015 and we are excited to be inviting him back to Seattle! UUC is collaborating with University Congregational United Church of Christ and a number of other faith communities to create a week of programs designed to nourish and connect activists and allies for racial justice. These events are intentionally multi-religious and open to all people of goodwill whose call to anti-racism is an embodiment of their values or faith.
Praxis: a workshop for religious/spiritual leaders to generate lessons, culture, and power for collective liberation
Saturday, April 15, 1–5 p.m. at UUC
Chris Crass Preaching at UUC
Sunday, April 16, 9:30 and 11:15 a.m. services
Anti-Racist Parenting for Collective Liberation with Chris Crass
Sunday April 16, 4:30–7 p.m. at UUC
Convergence: Heart and soul nourishment for anti-racism and collective liberation
Saturday, April 22, 1–4 p.m. at University Congregational United Church of Christ
Detailed Descriptions
Praxis: a workshop for religious/spiritual leaders to generate lessons, culture, and power for collective liberation
April 15th, 1:00 – 5:00 pm
Location: UUC
** Registration Opening Soon **
Led by Ayoka Turner and Chris Crass
Praxis is a space for making meaning and drawing out lessons from our practice of moving ideas into action. We are coming together as religious and spiritual leaders who have a commitment to ending the nightmare of structural inequality and supremacy systems that have devastating impacts in our communities, and in our lives. This workshop aims to strengthen our abilities to defy the divide and control strategy of white supremacy, and build anti-racist/racial justice/collective liberation power.
Praxis is a workshop led by longtime justice movement leaders and political educators Ayoka Turner and Chris Crass. They are both deeply committed to developing and supporting leadership, culture, and power, for racial, gender, economic justice. Ayoka has answered her ministry through justice work in working class communities of color. Chris has answered his ministry through working to build anti-racist capacity in majority white communities. They operate from a shared vision of collective liberation.
We will come together to create spiritual/religious nourishment for the work we do. We will place our efforts in historical context and make space for reflection on our work, drawing out lessons and insights, to strengthen our work moving forward. We will learn from and with each other, in the service of building the power of the “we” in justice work.
You are invited into a space for our hearts, minds and souls to be nourished and fortified, and to build momentum for collective liberation in our religious/spiritual communities.
Anti-Racist Parenting for Collective Liberation with Chris Crass
April 16th, 4:30 – 7:00 pm
Location: UUC
*** Registration Opening Soon ***
Love and Rage: a workshop for parents committed to anti-racism and collective liberation
With love for our communities, our families, and our planet. With rage for supremacy systems and the devastation they cause on what we love. We will be gathering as parents who are committed to anti-racism and parenting to share and learn together about ways we can both support our children in their social justice journey, as well as how our families can join with others as part of racial, gender and economic justice movements for collective liberation.
This participatory workshop with focus on sharing stories and insights with an understanding that there are many ways that we do this/can do this in our families, and that sharing and being in community together can help us feel more connected, grounded and capable.
Convergence: heart and soul nourishment for anti-racism and collective liberation
April 22nd, 1:00 – 4:00 pm
Location: University Congregational United Church of Christ
A workshop/worship for members of spiritual and religious communities and people working for racial, gender and economic justice to come together for nourishment in our work for collective liberation. How do we honor and grow our capacity to live and act for our values? How can we cultivate resilient culture for collective liberation?
Chris Crass works with spiritual/religious communities around the country to build up social justice leadership, culture, and infrastructure with a focus on developing anti-racist/racial justice capacity in majority white communities. This is a workshop for people of all backgrounds, spiritual/religious traditions, and progressive justice efforts, to strengthen our work, be in larger community, share lessons/insights with one another, and connect to the power of our purpose.
This will be a spiritually rooted space to build our capacity to work for collective liberation, in these times.
I would like to see Sexism addressed in all churches as a worldwide horrible, systemic and even covert at times bias against women across the world, throughout time. So much so ,that we don’t even confront it in various ethnicities. Then I can finally support anti racism ideologies, but won’t ever stop wanting to confront the problem in people of color as well as in whites.Not all people but many.
Lynn, it really hurts to see a message like this.
I’m not sure how your message relates to this event. Chris Crass has worked and written on not only antiracism for white communities, but also feminism for men.
As a new member, I’ve chosen UUC to be a spiritual home and a communal home. I yearn to bring my community, my friends, my family to UUC.
I was really excited to invite friends to this event, and I was about to send this link to them before I saw your comment.
Seeing messages like this make me very hesitant about doing that. I don’t want to bring my communities to a place where they are told that our experiences don’t matter.
Hello all, Rev. Beth here.
Thank you, Ali, for sharing the impact of the post. My heart hurts with yours that you feel hesitant to invite members of you community, family and friends to UUC, unsure of what experience they would have. I am grateful to be in spiritual community with you. I see you. I hope that as a church, we can keep doing the hard work of sharing from our hearts, acknowledging how larger systems of harm too often play out between us, and fumbling our way towards repair.
Hello, Lynn, I hear that sexism and its impacts on women is one of your core concerns. I imagine this is informed by your own lived experiences as a woman here in the US. Even with progresses made, the oppression of women still shapes society as the overturning of Roe made all too clear. At the same time, I believe that racism is also a critical issue that we need to address and shouldn’t be dismissed. Racism, much like sexism, is embedded in the very foundations of this nation and continues lives out in the systems that shape our lives, causing deep harm. Furthermore, the systems and ideologies of racism and sexism are tightly woven together. These are complex, deeply ingrained issues that affect people in different ways. I hope that we can explore these intersections more as a community and seek deeper understanding of one another’s experiences as we go.
As Ali mentioned, Chris Crass brings together the work of racial justice with the work of feminism as essential to the dream of collective liberation. You can see some of his writings on the blog, Every Feminism. I think you would be interested to read this article, Soldiers No More in the War Against Women: A Call to Men. https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/06/soldiers-no-more/