Why share this? Because how we show up in community is shaped by our identities, privileges, and lived experiences. Sharing this is part of being transparent and responsible in our work as white settlers and educators.
One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are or where they come from."
- James Baldwin
Alex (they/she) is a queer, multiply-neurodivergent and disabled, German-English-American woman. They are a white settler on Turtle Island (North America) who grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, on Anishinaabe and Peoria homelands. A member of the Millennial generation, Alex was raised in a managerial/upper-class family and has been deeply shaped by their educational privilege, academic aptitude, and academic scholarships.
Alex is currently low-income and lower-middle / cultural middle class, working across the fields of child care, outdoor education, somatics, and classical music.
Alex brings a lens of disability justice, anti-colonial environmental education, and collective liberation to their work with children and community. They are committed to unlearning internalized white supremacy and ableism, and to practicing accountability, reciprocity, and repair—especially in their role as a forest school educator and community leader on Indigenous land.
Alex is working to understand more of their own ancestry and the European legacies of enclosure, colonization, genocide of women+, and loss of land, language, and culture—and how those patterns echo forward through systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy.
Alex is currently low-income and lower-middle / cultural middle class, working across the fields of child care, outdoor education, somatics, and classical music.
Alex brings a lens of disability justice, anti-colonial environmental education, and collective liberation to their work with children and community. They are committed to unlearning internalized white supremacy and ableism, and to practicing accountability, reciprocity, and repair—especially in their role as a forest school educator and community leader on Indigenous land.
Alex is working to understand more of their own ancestry and the European legacies of enclosure, colonization, genocide of women+, and loss of land, language, and culture—and how those patterns echo forward through systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy.
Those of us who are socially classified as white have roots deeper than “whiteness.” We are people – or, more accurately, peoples – whose identity and cultural center has been manipulated to serve a very specific function within capitalism. When we understand this story, we can more easily divest ourselves of the dysfunctional role we have been groomed to play, and join with people of color in the creation of a life sustaining society.”
- David Dean, "Roots Deeper Than Whiteness"