Overview: We share two pieces from our collaborative, creative white anti-racist project, honoring the Coffins and the Partisans, with visual art by Leah Jo and poetry by Caroline. We share some framing and some inquiries of how practices of cultivating relationships with chosen white anti-racist ancestors might strengthen our ability to relate to our blood ancestors in their wholeness, and help us be braver and more human in these times of empire and collapse.

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In Fall 2022, we began a collaborative white anti-racist ancestor project out of a longing to connect to the lineage of white people who have joined multiracial movements against white supremacy and racial capitalism. As long time dear friends and comrades who have organized for over fifteen years (including working with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) groups to bring white people into movements for racial and economic justice), we wanted to commit to creative practice towards a more just world AND grow authentic felt relationships with movement ancestors to sustain us for the long haul. We read books, watched videos, built altars, dressed up as, dreamt about, talked about, spent time with, did ritual with, and created art inspired by these people in our anti-racist lineage. Our relationships with these chosen ancestors have moved us to greater joy, rigor, humanity, grief, and commitment to collective liberation, and we continue to build our kitchen cabinet of chosen kin who offer us tools, ways of being, and models. 

Without many living elders, we see our relationships with chosen ancestors as a way to buoy the collective capacity of our white kin to sustain liberatory movements. We feel these relationships with our chosen ancestors can also help us hold our own blood ancestors in their wholeness and complexity. We have experienced the process of sitting in reverence and reconnection to chosen ancestors who sided with humanity over white supremacy as a portal of connection to the possibility and the messy wholeness of all of our ancestors, as Lyla June shares, “even those who caved beneath the weight of systemic destruction and became conquerors themselves”. 

We still don’t have answers, but we may have better questions. Questions like:

How does/can this practice of cultivating relationships with chosen white anti-racist ancestors strengthen our ability to relate to our blood ancestors in their wholeness?

How do we build lines with ancestors as mentors, to help us be braver and more human in these times of empire, colonialism and collapse? 

Through this project, we’ve spent time connecting with nearly a dozen white anti-racist ancestors. We each had an experience of connecting to our own blood ancestors through proximity with chosen anti-racist ancestors, who unlike our own, actively broke ties with the enactments of white supremacy they lived within.

For Caroline, this happened with the partisans who fought against Nazi occupation in Europe, listening to recordings of elders who resisted, speaking in Yiddish accents like her paternal, Ashkenazi Jewish grandparents. Her own ancestors had survived concentration camps but were unable to speak of that time because of their trauma and grief. Mira Shelub, one of the partisan fighters whose oral history we spent time with, talked about how being in the resistance built resilience to process their devastation. “In the forest we did not only fight a physical battle, but also a spiritual battle,” she said. “We were sitting around the fire, singing songs together, supporting each other and dreaming about better days and a better future — a better tomorrow.”  

Communing with people so like her own who chose resistance during this time helped Caroline connect more deeply with her blood ancestors, even as most of her blood kin who survived the Holocaust chose Zionism, re-enacting genocide on Palestinians and coping with their trauma through enacting the violence of colonization, instead of finding safety through solidarity.  

Leah Jo, spent time with Levi and Catherine Coffin, a white Quaker abolitionist couple living in Indiana and Ohio in the mid 19th century. The Coffins were active in the underground railroad, and helped an estimated 3,000 enslaved Africans escape to freedom. Learning about the Coffins, and their creative, humble, dedicated and daily practice of feeding, clothing, and hiding those traveling the underground railroad was a deep source of hope and inspiration. Less than an hour away from the Coffin’s home, Leah Jo’s settler ancestors were complicit in the land theft and displacement of the Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami peoples, while some extended family members enslaved people. When Leah Jo learned of their proximity, she asked the Coffins to be her chosen ancestors. Cultivating this loving ancestral relationship with the Coffins, provided Leah Jo with more capacity to feel, reckon with, and hold her own ancestors in wholeness amidst the harm they caused. 

Connection and creativity are some of our sharpest tools in fortifying ourselves and each other, and for building the bridges to reconnect or strengthen connection with our beloved dead. Below are two pieces from our project.

May we learn from their leadership, their humanity, their boldness, their imagination, their mistakes, their commitment, and their love.  May they remind us how much we are never alone. If they speak to you, may they help tether you to the many generations of white anti-racist ancestors who came before us and are still supporting our work and our movements. 

Thank you to Lynn Burnett of the White Anti Racist Ancestry Project for inspiring us to make this project happen, to SURJ for providing us with political home for many, many years and continuing to grow and shape our belief in what is possible for white people in multiracial movements for justice, and to our families and communities for getting us here and keeping us going. 

With love and hope for our people and the world we dream of and fight for,

Leah Jo and Caroline

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Deliverance  

For Catherine and Levi Coffin, who organized dozens of neighbors to help over one thousand people escape slavery through the Underground Railroad, or as Levi called it, the mysterious road. 

In the daily rhythm 
of washing sheets, 
stirring pots,
cash exchanged,
children growing,
invite the neighbors in.

Become a minyan, 
an ocean, 
a sewing circle. 
A plumbing system 
in which water runs freely 
back to sea.
Offer precisely what is owed, 
sanctuary held open
like an unpoled tent. 

Be ready for the next knock, 
then one hundred more. 
Carry on like workhorses 
who can only go the speed 
that they can go, 
who keep moving forward 
relentless, together. 

Wake early because birds,
because the list never gets done,
because the times of day 
when light collapses 
are when trees 
offer safest passage,

because the knock on the door 
begs ushering, begs waystation,
begs that we all make our lives 
a portal onto freedom. 

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Once you resist, you have already won

for the partisans

Our people have done this before,
have hid each other by the hundreds,
survived by tiny fires and rabbit meat,
blown whistles in the faces of kidnappers,
come forward blazing and furious, 
even when we were armed
with nothing but cast offs, 
too little target practice, 
our drumming hearts, and each other.

Our people have lived in times like these,
where there was no choice to be a dove,
have pulled the nets tight, carried news,
arms, songs to wage the spiritual battle
of hope for a future with survivors.
We have become silent trees patrolling the night, 
been scout and saboteur, seen by moonlight
what was coming, and became who we needed
to strike the axe wherever we saw weakness.

even as we shook, we shook their confidence.

even as we were outnumbered and outgunned 

we were always free

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