The Race Story ReWrite Project is a movement to understand and transform the story
we’re telling ourselves about race in this country – not to misrepresent the past or to minimize present challenges, but to change the direction our current story is heading.
Our goal is to assist people in co-authoring a future that is worthy of our nobility as a human family.
The mission of the Race Story ReWrite Project is to create sustainable social change by elevating the discourse on race and empowering individuals to access their authentic capacities to transform cross-racial relationships. We offer a new model for racial healing built on the foundational principles of the oneness and interconnectedness of the human family.
The history of race in America has led most people to believe that racism is a given, that the tendency toward disunity is innate, that injustice and oppression are inherent in any human endeavor, and that sacrifice and forgiveness are ineffective tools for healing racial wounds. This narrative originated from a materialistic consciousness and has been driven by a sense of otherness. A power-based, dominant/subordinate paradigm took hold, which over time has created conditioned responses based on anger, fear, suspicion, and distrust. This story is leading us to a future in which the potential of our country is limited by dysfunctional patterns of behavior, where our ability to solve our own problems is crippled by entrenched and debilitating beliefs about who we are and how we should interact, where violence and chaos erode the fabric of our society.
The Race Story ReWrite Project proposes a radically different approach, based in part on the premise that we cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. When people tap into their higher – or spiritual – selves, new insights
and motivation surface and our nobler, innate capacities of trust, humility, compassion, and love emerge. Our programs are designed to assist people in accessing those capacities and applying them in their institutions, communities, and personal relationships.
The project was created in February 2012 by Tod Ewing and Phyllis and Gene Unterschuetz, when we realized the similarities between our two recently published books, Seeing Heaven in the Face of Black Men and Longing: Stories of Racial Healing.
We conceived our vision of a just society based on healthy cross-racial relationships and articulated our desire: to spark a movement to reframe and transform the way Americans perceive race, both individually and collectively.
Currently we are developing the Race Story Rewrite project in three areas: facilitating workshops that draw on our more than
50 years of combined experience in the field of race relations; creating an online community of individuals engaged in rewriting
their personal race stories; and building a network of organizations whose work is aligned with our mission.
We invite you to support us in this endeavor. Join the movement and become co-authors in writing a new story – one that will transform our collective understanding of who we really are and what we can accomplish together.
Please visit RaceStoryRewrite.org for more information.
