I (Eric Dobbs) reflect on many years of local activism and the jarring experience where I stopped. I now see it as a journey of growing awareness of racial and other identity and deep challenges to my idealism.
One solstice marked a turning point for me, but my telling of it was stuck in the gloom and disillusionment. I was excited to be moving my idealism in more local directions, but you wouldn't know it. "Truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques." blog 
(Tangent: It's a little bit of a relief to re-read that post 18 years later for the similarity of those political fears to today's political fears. Maybe today's doom and gloom is not as close at hand as it seems.)
Some months later, not long after an equinox, I left a little evidence of local community activism for my future self by publishing Volunteering at Columbine Elementary School (Race, Income, Stratification, Oh my!). It also features a hint of my first efforts at practicing anti-racism, though I did not have that vocabulary yet. I wasn't very good at it (maybe still not very good at it). blog
I tried to use my publishing power to respond to The Rocky Mountain News, a now defunct regional newspaper, on the topic of white flight, stratification, and more clumsy learning out loud. blog
Briefly, my volunteering switched to "teaching a weekly Challenge Math class to fourth graders. And I also volunteered to write some software for Impact on Education for their classroom mini-grants and online donations. I got started on these projects in part because our invasion of Iraq really angered me and ranting here didn't bring much peace of mind about it." blog
As the political pressures around the school continued the next couple years, I got to see racism directly. Someone in my neighborhood asked about illegal immigration in a community meeting and was shouted down. I still didn't have the vocabulary, but was trying to do something anti-racist in this reporting. blog
Within months of that I disclosed my own ambitions for the school. blog
One day before another solstice, my guest opinion celebrating the school was published in the local paper (and of course also self-published) blog
Oh my relentless optimism! Near the next equinox, I reflected on my previous experience volunteering in open source projects and excitedly anticipated how seeds planted with other local volunteers might grow. We were in the programmatic visioning team identifying shared values and such. blog
Tribalism and Belonging. A month later, in one of those visioning meetings, I was the white guy in the public meeting getting publicly shamed—and rightfully so. "I tried to make a point about the challenges of being in the visible minority. That proved to be volatile coming from me (as The Rich White Male in the room)." blog
That experience marked the end of my volunteer work with Columbine Elementary. Paradoxically, I stopped volunteering just about the time our first kid entered the school.
I didn't know I was describing the near future with these words:
"Integration might be the more noble path, but whatever our rationale for our choices, given the choice, most of us choose our own tribes. The district's goal of destratification is The Right Thing™ to do, but incredibly difficult because we are working against our own nature, working against the powerful force of feeling like an outsider."
The two neighbors who had volunteered the most with me chose to move to different schools where their boys would not be outsiders. My public shaming after all the years of volunteer work convinced them that their young white boys were not welcome at the school. I understand and respect their choices, though we kept our kids at the school. It still makes me sad. When I turned to local activism, I hoped to have a tangible influence on my community. But this outcome is not what I had in mind.
.
Along the long journey, I read the book "Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?" and other conversations about race. In the second chapter, Beverly Daniel Tatum introduced the complexity of identity in part with a quote from Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference by Audre Lorde. This quote challenged me in my own identity.
"Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows 'that is not me.' In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women's movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist."
I cruised right past, nodding along, and then stopped in my tracks when the idea landed. Wait. Mythical norm? White? Check. Thin? Check. Male? Check. Young? Check. Heterosexual? Check. Christian? Check. And financially secure? Check. I'm a myth. "Each one of us within our hearts knows 'that is not me.'" But that is me. I'm not "one of us."
As I wrote when reflecting on tribalism and belonging: "Although I enjoy every dimension of privilege and status in our
society: I'm white, male, blue-eyed, a college graduate, a native
English speaker, a US citizen, tall, athletic,
and wealthy (not relative to the rest of Boulder, but definitely
relative to the rest of the world), none of that privilege makes it any easier for me to face the feeling of being the outsider." blog
Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? And other conversations about race. wikipedia book
Audre Lorde wikipedia
There was a researcher who had been working with the school. I have vague memories that they were studying the school district's efforts at destratification. In a private conversation she explained that my own ambitions for computational thinking at the school were "what is known in the literature as benevolent racism."
What I remember of that conversation doesn't match what I find at Wikipedia about benevolent prejudice. Perhaps time has shifted my memories into the wrong vocabulary. Or I have remembered a different idea and mapped it to the wrong term. wikipedia
The gist of what I took away from the conversation has mixed with other things I've learned over the years. History is full of examples where people did extraordinary harm in the name of education. Some of that work was done maliciously and some of it was done benevolently. But one example outcome included forcibly separating children from their family and culture.
The sincerity of my intent was not enough. I hoped to empower people who are not like me with skills and insight and power of computational thinking. But coming from someone like me, that looked exactly like colonialism to people in my community who didn't already understand the value of computational thinking.
I gave up my local activism and switched back to open source software development in federated wiki. I hold out hope that people may find in wiki tools that support self-organized communities of learning where they can discover computational thinking in their own context and emphasizing their own values. It is far more indirect and may not land at all in my own community. And sometimes it feels just self-indulgent. But I sustain idealistic belief that the value of this work will become evident.
~
Some segregation results from the practices of organizations, some from specialized communication systems, some from correlation with a variable that is non‐random; and some results from the interplay of individual Choices. This is an abstract study of the interactive dynamics of discriminatory individual choices. One model is a simulation in which individual members of two recognizable groups distribute themselves in neighborhoods defined by reference to their own locations. A second model is analytic and deals with compartmented space. A final section
Imagine you are a reviewer for a (so far hypothetical) journal that publishes papers with accompanying software and actually asks the reviewers to verify that the software faithfully implements the methods described in the paper.
For a link to a javascript explorable based on Schelling's paper, see Parable of the Polygons and Exploring Polygons.
DOT FROM two-level-diagram