This week’s opening thought: some thoughts on performative white nonsense “in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” on MLK Day, with past and recent history and sentiments for additional context (not that it's needed).
Read More(Not so) hot take: legitimate equity and inclusion an acronym or committee does not make.
All of the BJEDI, JEDI, IDEA, DEI, EDI, and other assorted acronyms you can come up with will not replace action and initiatives that gradually build stronger and more sustainable workplace cultures. Acronyms don't matter if you aren't putting in the work. Acronyms are just words. Those words are nouns until you make them verbs and just verbs until you decide to put in the hard work that makes them action verbs.
Schoolhouse Rock taught a whole generation that but you wouldn’t know it by lookin’ at that generation running victory laps with their acronyms and committees.
Image Description: A picture of two people arguing. Silhouettes of their heads and hands can be seen in the foreground as they engage in a shouting match. In the background, a witness to the altercation can be seen covering their ears while wearing a blindfold.
Whiteness often looks at discussions about race as too confrontational, too heavy, too steeped in conflict. Many white people aren't looking to engage in this kind of conflict. It's scary. It's counterintuitive to the lessons of whiteness. But here's the thing: this work is conflict. It's a conflict with your values, your beliefs, your behaviors. It's a conflict with the white people in your life from whom you learned your values and beliefs. It's engaging in conflict with your history of perpetuating and participating in oppression.
It's conflict. Period.
There's no way you can talk about unpacking and unlearning 400+ years of white-led oppressive states, actions, and indoctrinated beliefs and have it be roses and kittens and kumbaya. It's not comfortable to talk about. It will never be comfortable to talk about. Nothing traumatic and generationally damaging will ever be comfortable to talk about. But we have to dive in and talk about this pain; we have to engage in this conflict. It's a matter of life, death, and breaking the chains of oppressive generational cycles - yours and mine. Avoidance doesn't promote change or make dealing with these conflicts any easier. It makes them worse and more untenable. Thinking that "somebody else will handle it" and that your whiteness absolves you of having to engage deeply has yet to yield long-term change for white people and white culture.
Does it suck that your white forefathers have left these conflicts in your lap to deal with? Sure. But don't do what they did and pass these conflicts on for the next generation to engage with and address. It might suck for you to engage in this conflict. But it sucks worse for Black folx, for Native folx, for people of color in the United States far more than it ever will for you when you choose to avoid these conflicts.
One of the best decisions I ever made in my life and career was deciding that the concept of “professionalism” was white supremacist thinking and that it was not for me. It’s not a coincidence that the only people who have ever questioned my “professionalism” were white folx with power and positionality who were uncomfortable with me bringing my full self into what they viewed as their workplace.
They can keep questioning.
I’m gonna keep rockin’ these Kamen Rider t-shirts with my nappy hair and my pop culture references while landing podcast appearances, clients across the United States, national conference presentation offers, and local EDI summit invites.
“Professional.”
Prepare yourself for Kyle Rittenhouse either getting off clean as a whistle or getting the most minimal time possible for murdering two WHITE people at a BLM protest that his mom dropped him off at in a state he didn’t even live in. It’s the American way, y’know.
See, if Kyle killed two white people “just ‘cause” he’d be deemed a monster, unstable. But he killed two white people trying to support BLACK people. And in the United States? White people like Kyle don’t do time for that. Once he turned on the crocodile tears it was a wrap.
White systems/institutions like the U.S. legal system will always protect white man-children like Kyle, especially when they kill people connected to Black bodies in any way. At that moment, the white men Kyle killed “forfeited their lives” as soon as they cared about Black folx.
Kyle wasn’t “in danger” that night. He went to that protest looking to harm someone. He just didn’t think he’d have to pay for it if he did.
And he likely won’t.
Truth be told, if he’d killed two Black men this case would’ve wrapped days ago.