5 Reasons to Join "Radical Genealogy"
The two-session training series begins this Sunday, June 22.
Each year, I teach the online training series, Radical Genealogy, and this year’s offering starts this coming Sunday. Though many attend live, lots of participants will also take the training asynchronously, going through session recordings and study materials at their own pace over the course of the summer. Additionally, no one is turned away for lack of funds (see more info about this at the end of this article).
But what is Radical Genealogy and why should you consider joining if you have European ancestry you’ve been yearning to make sense of? I’ve written an article for you (which includes multiple video clips from past iterations of the training) to answer these questions.
Here are five reasons to seriously consider joining us:
1. Learn a framework for cultivating a rooted, anti-racist identity based in a deeper understanding of your ancestry:
Radical Genealogy is not your typical genealogical research skills seminar. It’s an experience where participants of European descent (white or multiracial) are guided to form a liberatory political identity based in a deeper understanding of their ancestry. So often, Euro-descendant people seeking to learn about and address the harms of white supremacy in this country and in our world can be debilitated by feelings of shame, rootlessness, confusion about how to connect with their ancestry, and uncertainty about how to find their place in the work of social change.
This training offers a model of identity development to help us move past these barriers. We do this by rooting ourselves in the entirety of our ancestral story — integrating knowledge of the harms racism and capitalism led our people to carry out while also understanding how these forces dislocated our ancestors from the cultural and political traditions they once knew and coming to see how many still fought back within multiracial movements based in the principle of solidarity. Together, we will work to form an integrated sense of self tied to the totality of this history that can allow us to recover the sense of wholeness and political direction that whiteness was designed to take from us.
Here’s a short video where I describe this process of identity development — a process involving looking through three windows into our collective history: 1. Traditional lifeways, harm endured, and white racial socialization; 2. Harm caused; and 3. Legacies of resistance.
2. Get the genealogical research tools to actually build this rooted personal and political identity:
Other courses I have facilitated have involved similar models of identity development. What makes this one distinct is that it also offers genealogical research tools to make this process much more personal and connected to your specific individual family history.
After participants watch a “basic genealogical research skills” video I’ve recorded as a part of homework (on the basics of effective and accurate online research), our live sessions will focus on “applied genealogical research skills” related to each of these three historical windows. I share skills for finding records of ancestors who were enslavers or who carried out colonial land theft, for finding the specific locations in Europe our ancestors came from and identifying the cultural and political histories of those areas, for studying things like U.S. newspaper archives to find more information about our ancestors lives in relation to these three historical windows, and much more.
Here’s a video clip that is an example of some of this. It begins right after participants have been taught how to discern which specific European settler or immigrant groups they come from. In this segment, I offer insights and resources for studying these various groups’ unique stories of early culture, harm endured, and racialization.
3. Be part of a supportive learning community
One of the things past Radical Genealogy participants have appreciated is the opportunity to be in a learning community with likeminded people all connecting about their genealogical research processes together — in breakout rooms, whole group sharing, the zoom chat space, and within our student community platform, called Circle, for use outside of live sessions.
In each of these spaces, participants regularly share about the barriers and the progress they experience, both emotional and research-related, on their journeys of ancestral inquiry.
4. Build resilience and strength to remain grounded and oriented in the face of today’s political crises
In the face of numerous political crises in our world today, it is easy to get lost in anxious doom-scrolling, news consumption, and rumination on the mountain of political work required of us to get out of this mess.
In times like these, we need to interweave our focus on outward action with inward resourcing. This is the spirit with which we will hold this Radical Genealogy experience.
For me, the greatest gift of this training is the opportunity to form an embodied connection with the truth that we are the inheritors of a millennia-long legacy of ancestors who carried forward the spirit of love, community, and resistance in the face of incredible difficulty. “Whiteness” is a force that was given to us to separate us from this understanding. But when we can reclaim knowledge of this inheritance, we can realize just how much strength these ancestors can offer us today.
Here is a guided meditation from the training in which I support participants to connect with this legacy.
5. Get a sneak peak into my forthcoming book, Roots Deeper than Whiteness
One small final thing participants have appreciated about the training is that I include in the study materials the first chapter of my forthcoming, still-in-progress book, Roots Deeper than Whiteness. The book is an expansion of this 2018 essay I wrote and touches on many themes present in this Radical Genealogy training.
The chapter, called “Prelude,” begins 2000 years ago and describes the millennia-long class struggle of the European masses against the rulers and empires who sought to dominate their lives. It represents the “prelude” to the emergence of racialized capitalism as our world system (which is a key focus of much of the rest of the book). Capitalism, as scholar Silvia Federici describes, was the “counterrevolution” of the elite to crush this struggle for economic and cultural freedom that had begun to make significant gains (and “white” racialization would become a central tool of this system).
Here is the first page of this chapter:
Join Us for Radical Genealogy:
No one turned away for lack of funds: If you can pay an amount on the $70-$200 sliding scale, that’s great and helps us fund our work. If you can’t, we still really want you to come! Just reply to this email and I’ll send you a form where you can pay whatever reduced fee you are able (including a $0 amount for those who need a full scholarship). No explanation needed - just say, “Hey David - please send me the scholarship form. Thanks!”