Shetin Adams on Undoing White Supremacist and Colonial Beliefs
Meet Shetin Adams
The CDLI team sat down with Shetin Adams, a local activist and founder of SibConnect, to discuss her anti-racism and decolonization journey. Note, the interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Interviewer: Could tell me more about yourself and how you got involved in anti-racism and decolonization work?
Shetin: I'm entering into my fourth year at the University of Calgary where I'm majoring in International Relations. IR is pretty much Political Science, but with a global perspective. My classes focus on religion, society, community development and the economy. It's more holistic than Political Science. I think that degree program called to me because I belong to many marginalized groups. I'm a dark-skinned Black woman and I'm a member of the LGBT community. I was raised by a single mother and my brother and my sister both have cerebral palsy, they’re both nonverbal. I've had so many lived experiences, and being born and raised in a province that sometimes leaves a lot of people in the margins.
A province that sometimes forgets to acknowledge shared humanity. It made me passionate about doing what I can to mitigate some of those negative effects and educate people. Even in high school. High school was a very traumatizing time for me because I was outspoken about social justice like anti-racism decolonization. I used to print out posters and put them up in my school. My school is just very bigoted in a lot of ways and I had the biggest target on my back because people did not like me. But now, years later, a lot of people have reached out to me and said that some of those seeds that I planted were part of the very first seeds of their social justice journey. Now they understand what I was trying to say.
It's important to be active and consistent with anti-racism and decolonization work because it does take a long time for people to start listening to you. I think you would be doing a disservice to yourself and the people around you if you didn't commit yourself to it. And I know that not everyone is built for it because your mental health comes first. If you feel like you can't reasonably sustain any of that kind of work, then it's completely fair, not to engage. But I do think that if you can, and if I can, it's something that I always strive to work with.
My focus for my degree is sub-Saharan Africa. My family's from Ghana, so Africa is something that I care about and it has been completely ravaged by colonization. It's not just Africa but every corner of the world was destroyed by colonization. And I think that now people are waking up and we're seeing that it's possible to undo a lot of the things that we've been taught through white supremacy and colonization. I also think that it's important to embody some of these principles. For example, one area of decolonization that I've been interested in is an organization called the NAP Ministry. Their whole message is to take more naps like rest more to slow down and not be a slave to capitalism. A lot of these ideas come from white supremacy and colonization, which is the capitalist mentality of productivity equaling your value as a human being.
To undo those beliefs and to see the value in dreaming and sleeping is a huge slap in the face to these white supremacist ideals. I'm so committed to this work because people don't realize just how deeply entrenched we are in these colonizer mentalities. My siblings have special needs, they will probably never be able to work a “normal” job. They’ll never really be able to “contribute” to the economy in ways that we've been taught are necessary to validate you as a human being. I wrote a whole paper about how that comes down to white supremacy. The belief that you're only as valuable as you are productive to your society’s economy is a white supremacist belief, it's a colonizer belief. Undoing a lot of that will make you realize just how brainwashed you've been.
You can keep up with Shetin on Instagram @Shetinadams @Sibconnect