This Week's Opening Thought: December 30, 2024
This week’s opening thought: As I walk away from my current day job and onto better things, I find myself entertained by how often Black folx, Black women, will leave a workplace after being overworked, unappreciated, and treated like less-than-crap for years while every person of pallor and pallor sympathizer who contributed to their harm come to the realization that those Black folx were the glue holding it all together.
Y'all treat us like refuse, and we still show up and show out.
Many of you probably thought that our work ethic and the use of our multi-faceted skillsets symbolized our allegiance to your organization. Nah, son.
That's our allegiance to ourselves.
What do we look like throwing our careers and dreams away because you think white supremacy, misogynoir, and anti-Blackness are imaginary friends?
Believe me when I say we know our value. We know it deep in our souls, straight from our ancestors. We also know you're using and viewing us differently than the mediocre people of pallor and yes-men you surround us with and make us report to.
So we use you while viewing you as what you are: abusers, users, racists, white supremacists.
We learn, grow, and evolve on your dime. Then, we use you as a launching pad to bigger and better things. And we walk away without guilt, knowing you'll learn nothing from our exchange. Of course you'll posit yourself as the victim, like somehow us leaving wrongs you. You lack the intangible humanity threads needed to acknowledge how your hate and ignorance earned your house of cards tumbling into chaos. You won’t see how the dominoes always fall: when one leaves it generates a movement of hope. You’ll begin losing the melanin that drives your organization forward. You’ll start to freak out when the people of pallor and pallor sympathizers you lauded for bending the knee are incapable of stepping up with the high levels of energy and knowledge that just walked out your front door. And you’ll blame everyone and everything but yourselves.
Que sera.
You didn’t “believe in DEI” anyway. You’ll “survive.”
Better go buy some Elmer’s, son.