Racial Audit Reflection
Paloma Rodriguez-Rivera
A racial audit? What is a racial audit? Many things came to my mind the first time I heard about what a racial audit was in one of the MFSA board meetings. I wonder who, how, when, and how again. I have never heard of such thing. What does it mean? Are we having to change everything that we do? Do we have to reimagine our ways of working, or would we just have to question what is missing? How can we do better? Who are we missing? Who should we work better for?
After a few meetings with our consultants, I understood the strong, heavy, difficult, and complicated, but also rewarding job a racial audit would be. I understood that we actually really needed this in order to put things into perspective and affirm our mission of working towards justice.
Nevertheless, coming from a latinx perspective, race has always been a struggle. In my island of
Puerto Rico we battle with the idea of race. We are the descendants of Spanish, Taino, and African communities. Our race is mixed, but there are no “mixed” check boxes in any state form, there is only white, black, etc. We struggle to find our “box” and people just simply end up checking “white” as a colonized perspective has been brought upon us.
Talking about race as a Puerto Rican is hard. Sitting to discuss what we are mostly told not to talk about, because it makes someone uncomfortable, is harder. We struggle, understanding our identity, but it also feels beautiful to be related to so many cultures and ways of thinking.
I am glad to have found a safe place to talk about race, where we sometime laugh, but we also cry thinking about how we could do better or questioning what we have been doing so far for the past 100 years or so. We share, we commit, we search for solutions. Together this helps us understand our mission, what our people think of the work we do as MFSA, and what we can do better in the future to uphold our beliefs and calling towards justice seeking.
Therefore, there is hope. There is hope in a Board committed to change. There is hope in a group that meets every week to discuss the racial audit. There is hope in waiting for what will come out of this audit. Just as the disciples waited for Jesus after his crucifixion, we also hope for a better future for this organization that I love so much. For justice, for equity, for the Methodist church, for our world.