This week's opening thought: If organizations spent as much time building, maintaining, and cultivating leaders and organizations that are actively equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist while removing toxic and harmful people as they do on writing up mission and vision statements with the "right words" in them maybe we'd all talk about the present and future of work differently than we do.
Just a thought.
Trigger warning: Anti-Blackness, colonization, genocide, oppression, talk of sexual assault and other forms of physical harm.
This week’s opening thought: Seeing how education in the United States is leaning into the narrative that Africans “benefited” from chattel slavery by “earning valuable skills” and Native and Indigenous tribes and communities “benefited” from the interjection of white colonizers instead of acquiring unwanted generational trauma and oppression, let’s talk about who “benefited” from the enslavement and assault of Africans and the near genocide of Native American tribes and communities at the hands of white colonizers.
Here’s a hint: it ain’t Black, Native, and Indigenous folx.
When the raggedy-ass pilgrims came to what we now call North America, they came here with no skillset on how to be stewards of the land. They damn near died during their first autumn and winter on this unceded land. It was Native Americans, the rightful inhabitants of this land, who saved their asses, shared resources and survival skills, and tried to share their land with their new neighbors.
The pilgrims repaid the decency extended to them by killing them, distributing their lands among white people they deemed more worthy of the land, and killing and harming generations of their children through residential schools. Why?
Because they felt that Native communities would “benefit” from being forced into assimilation and conformity to white supremacy.
Ultimately, white folx colonized the entire continent, usurped all its resources for their own needs, and rendered Native and Indigenous communities invisible through oppression and erasure.
Africans were kidnapped from the shores of their continent and sold to white colonizers throughout the Western colonies to be put to work through chattel slavery. Chattel slavery quickly became the primary labor force in the United States, mainly because white people still did not possess the skills and abilities needed to be stewards and keepers of the unceded land they stole through violence and viewed Black bodies as expendable and subhuman. They proceeded to enslave, assault, murder, abuse, rape, and work Black bodies to death for hundreds of years until emancipation made it technically illegal. Once chattel slavery was abolished, white colonizers struggled to maintain the plantations and farms that generated their wealth because they still lacked the skills and experience to be stewards of the land. White people damn near bankrupted the country they built on the land they stole. Black folx, meanwhile, would continue to face similar traumas and violence to their personhood by white folx who did not view them as human beings.
This treatment persists for Black communities in the United States through laws, unfettered hate crimes, and systems intentionally built to harm and oppress Black communities.
This treatment persists even though Black folx are still exploited by whiteness on every level you can think of with no sustainable advancement for generations of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
Does it look like Native and Indigenous tribes and communities “benefited” from what white people have done and continue to do to their people?
Does it sound like Black folx have “benefited” from chattel slavery, abuse, murder, and oppression?
The resounding answer is, “Hell no.”
White society thinks that acting like the heinous crimes their ancestors committed and they currently benefit from allows for the space to rewrite history to make themselves feel better. But like a peanut butter and dookie sandwich, they’d be dead wrong to the point where you can smell how wrong they are from a mile away.
You can use as many alternate facts as you want, white people. It does not change the legitimate and well-documented facts of colonialism, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, racism, and trauma your people continue to maintain and benefit from.
No matter how hard you try, you can’t burn or rewrite all the books. You're going to miss a few.
And most of y’all would benefit from reading some of the ones you miss, comparing notes, and opening your eyes and minds to the idea that white ain’t always right.
This week's opening thought: I'm very explicit with sharing with other white people that I have six white friends. The few white people I consider good friends are around because they are invested in the lifelong work needed to be better people. They are actively anti-racist, humble, and can take being called in or out if they drop the ball without positing themselves as victims and turning on the tears. Real talk?
I only kick it with real ones.
Real ones don't view their relationships with melanated folx as some form of credibility for doing the bare minimum to not be "as" racist. Real ones don't collect melanated folx as a defense for being racist (see: I have a Black Friend). And real ones don't expect the Global Majority folx they know to defend their white supremacist, racist, and anti-Black rhetoric, beliefs, and behaviors when someone calls them in or out.
To the white people who know me in some capacity personally and expect me to protect or save them from getting checked: you want to swim out into the deep waters of white supremacy and anti-Blackness? You can go for it. But you best wear some floaties because I ain't David Hasselhoff. The only bay watching that's gonna happen is me sitting on the dock of the bay watching you sink. I don't care how long you've known me; I will never defend you when the thing you want me to protect you from is atoning for your hateful beliefs, actions, and rhetoric toward the melanated masses and my people. And if that is your expectation for our relationship?
Time to bone up on your breaststroke and butterfly.
And to the white people who know me offline: if you have to ask if you are one of the six? You aren't. And we're currently not accepting applications.
Image description: a four-panel meme. In the first panel, a white hand reaches out of an ocean, looking for help. Next to the hand is the caption, "White people I know hoping I'll defend them when they do or say something racist because they think we're close friends." The second panel shows a hand with a chocolate hue reaching toward the white hand. The third panel shows the chocolate-toned hand giving the white hand a high five. The chocolate-toned hand is captioned with the word "Me." The fourth panel shows the white hand sinking underwater with a few fingers still cracking the surface.
[Image description: a four-panel meme. In the first panel, a white hand reaches out of an ocean, looking for help. Next to the hand is the caption, "White people I know hoping I'll defend them when they do or say something racist because they think we're close friends." The second panel shows a hand with a chocolate hue reaching toward the white hand. The third panel shows the chocolate-toned hand giving the white hand a high five. The chocolate-toned hand is captioned with the word "Me." The fourth panel shows the white hand sinking underwater with a few fingers still cracking the surface.]
This week's opening thought: It is wild to me how often people of pallor respond with vitriol toward melanated folx who don’t want to consort with them all the time or become their lifelong friends.
Who said I had to be your friend or anything outside of a surface-level colleague or neighbor, especially if I’m navigating life in ways that protect my mental, physical, and emotional well-being after a lifetime of lived and generational harm at the hands of white supremacy? Why are you not willing to digest and understand this?
Who said it was mandatory for me to be the Nigger Jim to your Huckleberry Finn?
Did I miss the memo?
And how are you mad that I’m exercising the right not to foster a close or intimate relationship with someone I don’t want a close or intimate relationship with? We teach children early on that they don’t have to be close friends or share themselves with everyone who “submits a request.” This doesn’t become null and void once you enter adulthood. Y'all know that, right?
Make it make sense.
Something inherently built into whiteness as a concept and societal construct of control leads many members of the unmelanated masses to seek to create a homegrown United Colors of Benetton advertisement for themselves. There is a mentality in white Western culture of treating the melanated masses like a curiosity, a collectible, a knick-knack. This mentality is unconscious and connected to the original roots of anti-Blackness, colonialism, and racism, primarily the belief that Black people, Indigenous people, melanated people, are property or inanimate objects and not human beings, and it is still a current and present danger to the Global Majority folx who are living and existing in white spaces. Because many white people don’t want to acknowledge or unpack this, there are way too many white people who seem to be less interested in building relationships with melanated folx centered on the lifelong work of breaking down the barriers and phobias embedded in the white supremacy and racism they have lived their life deeply enmeshed in, and more intent on collecting us like Pokemon. Many melanated people recognize this, so we do what we can to minimize placing ourselves in conversations and situations that allow the unmelanated masses to add the Blue-Eyes White Dragon they see before them to their Yu-Gi-Oh deck.
It’s 2023. After witnessing the intentional erasure of history, the repealing of rights and protections, and the year-by-year escalations in hate crimes in the United States, with all of these events mostly perpetrated by white bodies or those who long to appease white society, how can you consider yourself a “good” person and not understand that maybe your people and the power they wield is a persistent danger to Black, Brown, Indigenous communities, AAPI communities, and Global Majority folx in general? And that maybe we can’t be as close with you as you’d like to force us to be because your power, privilege, and positionality are potential trauma triggers? And that maybe you need to take the time and energy needed to build legitimate long-term trust and faith in any potential relationships with the melanated people you want in your life who do not have white supremacist ideology on their side? And that maybe the way you go about trying to “connect” with melanated folx is a little creepy, forced, and filled with a certain level of privilege and power that denotes you believe you deserve to have me as a part of your “collection” and that you don’t have to earn my friendship?
I don’t know.
I’m just spitballing here.
I just wanted to give you something to think about before you pulled out that Pokeball.
This week's opening thought: Today is the 56th anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen U.S. states.
Today is also the seventh anniversary of the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which led to the murder of 49 people.
A celebration and a somber observation.
Separate events steeped in generational trauma and hate crimes.
That's as U.S. American as apple pie.