David Dean: The Deep Roots of Solidarity

Healing Conversations from the Front Lines of Activism

Greetings Friends. In this month’s blog, I am pleased to introduce you to David Dean. His work on issues of identity, justice, and social healing lifts up an unbroken legacy of multiracial resistance to oppression throughout US history—a legacy that can offer us inspiration as we face the concerns of the present day.

David Dean is a political educator, writer, and speaker advancing the growth of transformative alliances in movements for collective liberation. His particular emphasis is supporting white people to work for racial and economic justice with, as he puts it, emotional strength, political clarity, and fierce purpose. David believes that all of our freedom is interdependent and that when we can bring this wisdom into the center of our organizing, we will be unstoppable.

The titles for his online courses give a window not only into the focus of his work, but into his own ongoing journey of healing and activist engagement. For example: Foundations of Radical White Anti-racism: Reclaiming a Lost Legacy of Solidarity and Class Struggle, and Radical Genealogy: Research Skills for Liberatory Ancestral Recovery. The word “radical” means going to the root, and this is a consistent feature of David’s approach. His excellent essay, “Roots Deeper than Whiteness: Remembering Who We Are for the Well-being of All,” recounts his extensive research into the construction (and manipulative uses) of whiteness in the United States, the multiracial movements across generations that have sought to resist it, and his own ancestral relationship to that history.

I first met David when he was Associate Director of the organization White Awake, and a co-facilitator for their trainings. I was impressed with his integrity, his historically informed analysis, and his ability to connect the dots in a way that invites people into a multiracial lineage of justice-workers. As we begin our conversation, David explains, “Racism and white supremacy are not natural. This was something given to our ancestors to separate them from lineages of cultural and political resistance to empire, to pit them against people who should be their comrades in struggle. Understanding those things, finding ways to integrate those understandings into our sense of self, and tied to that—in the type of political education that I've been focused on for white people—is really understanding the connection between racism and capitalism.

“Empires forever—and our current dominant system of capitalism—thrives on division, thrives on getting some of us to perpetuate oppression against others so that we can't come together to fundamentally change this system. And so, both on an individual level and on relational levels, healing is necessary. Remembering who we are is necessary. Recovering our connections with each other through relational healing is necessary if we are to build the coalitions required to actually create political change on a broad scale.”

He continues, “The book I'm working on, and the research and writing and teaching that I've done, has been figuring out on a much deeper level than I had found elsewhere, what happened to those of us who have been socialized as ‘white’ and how do we get out of it. Really understanding the processes by which this entire system was built, so we can understand how to begin to undo it.”

In “Roots Deeper than Whiteness,” David shares some of the fruits of his exhaustive research into these questions through the lens of his own ancestral heritage. Many of his forebears came from the British Isles to Virginia as indentured laborers in the 1600s. Some of his ancestors became part of armed militias that stole Indigenous land, and some even became enslavers themselves. Their story mirrors that of so many European migrant groups who were the victims of displacement, disenfranchisement, and persecution by aristocratic elites in their home countries, yet who later became complicit with the project of white supremacist domination in what is now the United States.

However, there were always those who resisted. David discovered ancestors who were active in the Socialist and Communist Parties of Texas in the early 1900s. They organized workers, fought against lynching, and wrote about their visions for a different world. David hadn’t known their stories until coming across articles about them in the newspapers of the time. He says, “Unlike what J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy would have liked us to think, Communist organizers in the U.S. were not trying to create some totalitarian state in this country. They had unique political agendas that were trying to—in the South, especially—replace the fascist Jim Crow system with a multiracial democracy that uplifted the entire working class. They were doing this really powerful antiracist cross-racial organizing. I have some ancestors who were involved in that. One great great uncle was the 1940 Communist Party candidate for governor of Texas. Because of McCarthyism, so much of this stuff was intentionally left behind and the propaganda turned parts of the family against him. My great grandmother tried to burn some of his books. My great grandfather reported on his activity to the FBI.”

In his archival research, David came across a poem written by another one of his ancestors in a Texas Socialist newspaper published around 1915. The poem is called “At the Gate.” David points out, “It shows some of the connections which a lot of Southern people had in these movements to the Social Gospel, a largely Protestant form of liberation theology, and a progressive spirituality of social change.” Here’s an audio clip of David reading the poem.

It’s clear that he has a deeply personal relationship to the work that he’s doing. It's been a disciplined—almost forensic—excavation that has not only provided his inspiration, but profound insight and a pathway toward transformative work with others.

He quotes one of his mentors, Dr. Bonnie Duran—a professor, Dharma teacher, and Indigenous activist—who says: When we heal ourselves, we heal our ancestors, too. This intention is central to David’s work. For example, his course on Radical Genealogy guides participants in exploring their own family’s relationship to what he describes as “three historical windows into our ancestors’ collective story: 1. Traditional lifeways, harm endured, and racialization, 2. Harm caused, and 3. Legacies of resistance.” (This framework is a variation on one used by White Awake in their trainings.)

David elaborates, “It involves supporting white people to form a deep connection to all these windows into their history. First, at least a broad understanding of the traditional lifeways of precolonial and precapitalist Europe—seeing the ways in which capitalism displaced so many people from their traditions of cultural and political resistance, and from cultural traditions that tied them more closely to community, and to the Earth. And not to romanticize, but there are elements of value that were intentionally severed because they were counter to the political agenda of those in power.

“Next looking at how so many of our ancestors did participate in direct racial harm.  Understanding how we can face that, and seek repair as part of our political work today. And finally, realizing that there has always been a legacy of multiracial resistance that persisted all along the way. Whether or not we can find direct ancestry of ours that is within it, how can we see that those ancestors are calling us to carry forward their work? How can we form a meaningful connection with them? How can we see that legacy as what the white Southern revolutionary, Anne Braden, called her ‘spiritual home’?

“What does it mean for us as white people to understand and form an identity based in the fullness of all those windows into our history? In a lot of ways, whiteness and the broader system of racialized capitalism was always designed to sever us from those histories and even from knowledge of their existence. And so, reclaiming that knowledge is also part of preparing ourselves for engagement in social change.

Anne Braden is often remembered as telling other white folks, "The fight against racism is our issue. It’s not something that we’re called on to help people of color with. We need to become involved with it as if our lives depended on it because really, in truth, they do.” With this in mind, I invite David to share a story about a time that he experienced healing in the context of his activism.

“It’s more than just one moment or episode of a story,” he begins, “it's a longer trajectory that I found my way towards. I think it starts 10 or 11 years ago—as a white person trying to participate in racial justice activism, working at people of color-led organizations and Native-led organizations that were justice-based. Learning to say all the right things. Really building genuine relationships as well, but learning all the things people think of as what it means to be a ‘conscious white person’ and being able to embody that in a way that people could see. But realizing that underneath, there was a lot of shame thinking that maybe this legacy of white racist violence is all that I am and all I come from.

“Also, honestly, being stuck in a prevailing dynamic that was tied to this call-out culture where people who knew how to say the most revolutionary thing were given status, and those who couldn't fully figure that out, or hadn't figured that out yet, or didn't know how to say the thing that you just learned to say three months ago—you were supposed to tell them how wrong they were.”

David describes an experience of being publicly shamed by someone he considered a mentor on issues related to race and social justice, and how completely devastating that was… Yet it became the catalyst that pushed him to find a different approach to the work he was doing. He recalls, “I needed to find an understanding of myself, an understanding of society, an understanding of how we create social change that can have a firm stance against all of these forms of bias and oppression, but that deeply affirms everybody's fundamental stake and belonging and role in movement building.

“I really think that protecting your belonging and remaining connected to self-acceptance is the only pathway towards any productive engagement with the world. Restorative Justice practices teach that self-acceptance is really a prerequisite to accountability. Self-acceptance is a prerequisite to any type of learning, growth, or personal change that we seek to engage in.

“You can't just shame somebody into authentic change. You can't punitively push someone into authentic change. When we understand our history and when we understand the connection between oppression and ruling class power, we can understand that essentially every time there is divide and conquer, there is also the potential for collective liberation. All of our well-being is tied together.”

I contemplate how much of this journey toward transformation comes down to fracture and wholeness. Whether it's the fracture within ourselves—parts of ourselves that we have rejected, and therefore we're not whole within ourselves—or in the collective, how we fracture from one another, and we fracture from Earth and from ancestors. It's like microcosm and macrocosm; the same dynamic is reproduced. And healing, to me, is synonymous with wholeness.

Both David and I take a breath as we pause and reflect. Given all that is unfolding in the world as we navigate a dying empire that is unleashing everything it has to survive, I ask all my conversation partners what it is that sustains them.

“It's really protecting that sense of belonging,” David replies, “protecting our sense of self-acceptance as individuals, and building community that also affirms that as a foundation for being a healthy human who can move in the world. One thing I've noticed lately that has kept me going—especially related to the genocide taking place in Gaza, and trying to be engaged in both political education and direct action related to that—when sometimes I feel so overwhelmed with despair and inundated with images of trauma and violence, what's been helpful is turning my attention to the incredible expression of global solidarity that has emerged and that is so beautiful. And that’s also reflected in the chant you often hear at Palestine solidarity rallies: In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.

“There’s an emerging movement of millions of people who are coming from a place of deep humanity and solidarity, and who get that this system serves nobody. Connecting to that has been really important for me… I think when we can feel that reality of collective liberation in our hearts and in our bodies and in our souls, and be driven from that place—when we can be driven by an understanding of our shared liberation—we can do so much more. We can build deeper comradeship across lines of difference. We can shift from the head to the heart, and create movements that are more powerful than we could have imagined.

“In terms of practices, one thing that has been healing for me has been song circles—going to song circles that are politicized and where people sing together, freedom songs. I think there's something physiological and spiritual about that process, as well, that just brings us wholeness.

“Part of it, too, is that I'm a Quaker, and that's how I was raised, in various Quaker communities. The meditation practice that is central to Quakerism is something that has sustained me at times in life. I have this little card I got from a Quaker meeting 15 years ago that says, Quakers find, amidst the noise and haste of modern life, there is in silent worship a healing and creative power.”

As David shares all this, I’m struck by the common thread of collectivism and communal relationships that has run throughout our conversation. That collective entering into silence in the Quaker community fits in, to my mind, with some of the other things he was saying about staying alive to our connection with one another through political analysis and historical exploration, as well as in the streets feeling the magnitude of this movement, and the shared commitment toward justice. The communal experience within group silence at a Quaker meeting feels like such beautiful, very different, expression of a common intention. And singing, of course, is yet another expression of collectivism as our voices join together in harmony. I hadn't put them all together that way with such elegant clarity before, and I end our session by thanking David for the richness of our time together.

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To learn more about David’s work visit:

David’s website: https://www.davidbfdean.com

Toward Solidarity (David’s substack blog & email list): towardsolidarity.substack.com

David’s essay “Roots Deeper than Whiteness”: https://whiteawake.org/2018/10/27/roots-deeper-than-whiteness

“The Other America: A Legacy of Multiracial Resistance” (5 min)