Social Justice is the driving force in my life.  For me dismantling white supremacy within myself and my community is a path that is about the journey rather than the destination. However, I have not always been this version of Cassie.  A few years ago I could not comprehend why “All Lives Matter” does not encompass All people and why “Black Lives Matter” was, and is, necessary. 

My journey to understand inequity surprisingly began in the wake of the school shooting  on February 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida.  It is embarrassing and important to admit that it was a shooting in an upper middler class, predominately white, community (much like where I live in Ashland Oregon) that impacted me.  Watching the parents on the news who looked like me, I felt that it could have been my husband or my children killed in that school.  It did not take long for me to begin making the connection that the reason I paid attention to Parkland was that I could identify with the white parents who had lost their children in the shooting.   I began to realize through reading articles and listening to other parents tell stories of losing their children to gun violence that this was a reality which mothers of Black and brown children feared for their youth everyday.  Within a few months of the shooting I was shedding the first of many invisible layers of my whiteness.  Although since I’ve come to learn that somehow the more layers I shed the more are present in their place, like a never ending onion.   That seems be the way of becoming aware of racism, the more you see the more there is to be seen.

The waters that we have stepped into are muddy and deep.  And a big part of the journey is self education.  That is what prompted our family, my husband, Jay, and our three kids, Aziza (10), Kofi (8) and Paikea (8), along with our little dog Tico, to take a journey into the heart of the Confederacy to truly face the history that is the lineage of most African Americans.  A history that we have had to face on our own since it has been swept under the rug of society and been banished from the teachings in traditional classrooms.  E-raced.  Seeing the horrors of our collective history is something that I will be processing for the rest of my life.   It will simultaneously be a driving force on my  journey to inspire change for racial equality and also be the root of deep pain that will live in my heart for all time.

This website will tell you the story of our travels across the deep south, how it impacted us and how you might take the same journey someday.