A CURRICULUM OF COMMITMENT: All of Us or None of Us: A White LGBTQ Intersectional Antiracism Organizing Workshop

All of Us or None of Us: A White LGBTQ Intersectional Antiracism Organizing Workshop (AUNU) aims to inspire and empower white LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) leaders in North Carolina to take up antiracism and become involved in LGBTQ racial justice movement building. This three-day community education program has two primary goals. The first is to help participants understand how racism operates in the mainstream LGBT*[1] (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) movement. The second is to understand the ways those leaders can take up antiracist and intersectional movement building in their LGBT social justice work. [1] Queer, genderqueer, gender non-binary and/or gender nonconforming folks are often not explicitly included in mainstream organizations and their mobilization efforts. AUNU facilitators, white queer and trans*[2]folks who take up intersectional antiracism, challenge participants to envision and make actionable LGBTQ movement building that is anti-racist and intersectional through individual, relational and collective organizing efforts. Workshop facilitators of AUNU seek to empower white LGBTQ leaders in attendance to take up the work of learning and growing in intersectional antiracism as an authentic, creative, connecting and life-long commitment. Therefore, AUNU’s Curriculum of Commitment does not have predetermined learning outcomes, as such a design would limit authenticity, embodying control instead of liberation. Instead, AUNU facilitators take the approach of transformative educators, engaging participants in a curriculum that encourages them to be active agents of their own learning (Henderson & Hawthorne, 2000, p. 87) and growth as organizers. With a design replete with content and learning activities that fosters participant development of critical, feminist and antiracist inquiry and analysis, the AUNU curriculum is intended to empower participants to investigate and approach the real-world problems (Henderson & Hawthorne, 2000, p. 87) in white centered, mainstream, LGBT organizing in ways that are meaningful to them and the communities in which they live and organize (Eisner, 2002, p. 75). [2] The asterisk is used to indicate the spectrum of all the different genders of people who do not conform to the either/or of male/femal