I mentioned this last week, but my readers jumped off on a discussion about other things in the post, which was great and enjoyable, but made me want to mention this again.
Something that troubles me in dicussing race and racism is that we are often (like in many other areas) poor listeners. We tend to have a lot to say regardless of how important it really is or how much it affects us. Like you learn in any basic communication class sharing your feelings is perfectly okay and important. It’s also important to listen to one another. The typical statement you’ll here suggested is the famous, “I Feel…When You…” It allows you to share what your feeling based on the others action and focuses on your feeling rather then just yelling or pointing out their action (the “You ALWAYS do this…” types of statements).

Martin Luther King day is just around the corner and I thought it would be neat to have a site dedicated to sharing our feelings about Race and Racism in a constructive way. The site IfeelWhenYou has been up for less then a week now and the traffic to it is slowly increasing. Traffic doubled yesterday and there looks to be even more today. Many people are coming back and browsing through the confessions to read what people have written. The statements are anonymous, so there is no way to react you just listen. You can post your own statements to and I’d encourage you to do so.