Eracism Minute 4/15

Hi, my name is Linda Fels.  I'm a fairly new traveler on this path toward antiracism work.  As such, I've been doing a lot of reading, exploring and pondering.
This past week, I came upon a new term and concept, at least for me.
Social Locator Questions. Let me repeat that.      Social Locator Questions
What the heck are those?
These are questions I have been taught my whole life to use to get to know people I've just met.  Ice breakers.  Connector questions.  In fact, they are still being taught at business trainings I've attended in the last few years.
So what are these questions, you may ask?  Things like . . .
Where do you work?  What do you do for a living?  What part of town do you live in?  Where are you from?  What did you do on your last vacation?
Wait a minute! What's wrong with those questions?
As Debby Irving writes in her book “Waking Up White” and I quote “Though, at the time, asking someone, “So what do you do for work?” felt as normal and polite as saying please and thank you, I now see a clear connection to my boxes and ladders mindset.  I needed to be able to fit someone in a box in order to engage with them.  My social skills were based on finding out where people lived, worked, had grown up, and had gone to school so I could place them in a social context, not get to know them as individuals.”  End quote
Wow!  That is exactly how I was raised!!
Thing is for people of color, these questions can trigger a stress response because they have experienced strange reactions to their answers like “Wow, really!  You're a professor!” or “Hmm, what's it like to live in THAT neighborhood?”.
No wonder they consider even the QUESTIONS “microaggressions”!
Definitely not a good approach when trying to build a multicultural congregation or society. 
In fact, in many parts of the world, what you do for work is not considered all that important.  Come to find out it's a dominant white culture thing.
There are lots of beliefs and attitudes that are imbedded in our white culture that seem normal to us but work to separate us from others. But that's a subject for my next Eracism minute.
Think about this question even in a white persons' setting: “So when are you and your partner going to start a family?”  Could be a minefield if they have been struggling with infertility or they decided not to have children for a very private reason.  Think about what your question could bring up for this person you've just met.  And yes, I've been asked this often when my husband was in the military – a perpetual baby factory.
So what are better conversation openers?  Remember, even white people do not want to be put into a box.
How about something you both have in common?  If you are attending a conference, how about “Which workshop did you attend? And what did you think of it?”.  Or at BUF coffee hour, “What attracted you to BUF?” Or even “What was the most interesting thing you experienced this week?”
Try to connect with the person.  We don't have to resort to just talking about the weather.
Don't worry!  We will make mistakes.  This takes practice.
But best of all, we can practice with other white people.
Thank you.