Taking the 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge BY JUDGE JAN SOIFER
The Hon. Jan Soifer serves as the presiding judge of the 345th Travis County District Court.
I
did not anticipate learning anything new in the Austin Bar Association’s 21-Day Racial Equity Habit-Building Challenge. Like many of my open-minded friends and colleagues, I have diligently attended multiple diversity trainings, prejudice awareness courses, and other programs designed to help fight hatred of all kinds. I have a wide circle of friends of various races, ethnicities, religions, LGBTQ status, and national origins. I have proudly donated to and supported Black, Latinx, interfaith, LGBTQ, and various other social justice and progressive organizations, authors, and movies. I thought this challenge was a good idea, and I wanted to support it—but I didn’t expect much. I was wrong. Participating in this challenge was a remarkable experience. The readings, podcasts, and videos that make up the curriculum are excellent, and the perspectives it provided were thought-provoking and helped me understand other ways of looking at racism, white privilege, and their impact. While some portions of the curriculum had stronger or more immediate impacts on me than others, there was a lot to reflect on. A May 28, 2020 article in Re12
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provided suggesfinery29 titled, “Your Black Coltions for action leagues May Look Like They’re while challenging Okay—Chances Are They’re Not” me to lower my reminded me to consider that, defenses, consider “over the last few months, Black my responsibility people have not only watched to acknowledge their friends and family members my privilege, and die at higher rates from the corowork harder to fight navirus, they have also watched racism. These are people who look like them be challenges I will gunned down while going for a meet. It’s not too jog, be murdered in their homes, late to take the chalthreatened while bird watching lenge—I hope you’ll in Central Park, and mercilessly AUSTIN LAWYER joinAme. choked on-camera.” It suggestL AL ed, “on behalf of your Black colleagues: we’re not okay. And The curriculum you shouldn’t be either.” for the entire 21-Day An article by Peggy McIntosh, Racial Habit-Build“White Privilege: Unpacking the ing Challenge, as Invisible Knapsack” originally well as other anti-racism resourcpublished in 1989 in Peace es, can be found at austinbar. and Freedom Magazine, stated org/anti-racist-resources. The that she “was taught to see curriculum, shared by the Bar racism only in individual acts Association of San Francisco, of meanness, not in invisible was developed by one of their systems conferring dominance on [her] group.” That struck me as accurate in my life as well. She also said that although she knew racism puts others at a disadvantage, she was slow to recognize the corollary of white privilege that puts her at an advantage. She listed conditions in her life that have resulted from white privilege, many of which I had to acknowledge that, I too, have taken for granted. In addition to these articles, the curriculum includes a variety of materials, including a number of videos, a law review article on race as property, and Implicit Association Tests (IATs). I should have known that the IATs would make me uncomfortable—which they did—since before taking them, one must acknowledge, “I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed.” Those test results stung. The twenty-one days of readings, videos, and other materials
member firms, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, whose Employment Practice Group curated the syllabus following the model established by diversity expert, Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr.
