DAY 1 of the 12 Days of Christmas Gifts...

Each day for the next 2+ blog weeks I will be listing 12 gifts we can give ourselves and others directly from the article of "12 Things White People Can Actually Do After the Ferguson Decision" Huff Post Black Voices. 

Remember if you miss one day, you can always view previous entries... for example yesterday's  intro of "12 Days of Christmas Gifts" under this entry titled older post.

GIFT #1:

 Listen. 

"What are activists of color and organizations on the ground in your community asking for? What do they need? If you don't know any organizations locally, the internet is a great resource. Activists in Ferguson have been vocal about their needs. Listen, and then do. "

Look into the work of Black Youth Project, Dream Defenders, Blackout for Human Rights, Ferguson Action, Organization of Black Struggle and Black Life Matters. It's not about our needs and our desires, but about listening, and then as @prisonculture reminds us, actually doing the work."

Below a little about the authors of  "12 Things White People Can Actually Do After the Ferguson Decision" Huff Post Black Voices.

"Joseph Osmundson is a scientist, writer and educator born and raised in the rural Pacific Northwest. His research focuses on protein structure and function while his writing explores identity and place and sexuality and class and race and all sorts of messy, complicated stuff. His work has been published on Gawker, and he will have an essay included in the upcoming anthology The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press) due out in the Fall of 2014. He has taught at The New School and Vassar College and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Systems Biology at New York University. You can follow him on Twitter at @reluctantlyjoe and read his writings at www.josephosmundson.com.

David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. Leonard's latest books include After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (SUNY Press), African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings (Praeger Press) co-edited with Lisa Guerrero and Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture with C. Richard King. He is currently working on a book Presumed Innocence: White Mass Shooters in the Era of Trayvon about gun violence in America. You can follow him on Twitter at @drdavidjleonard."