Monday's Opening Thought: January 24, 2022

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This week’s opening thought, for Black folx and folx of color leading active anti-racism and equity work in organizations: for the sake of your mental, emotional, and physical health, you must fight the nagging internal and external pushes for urgency placed upon you.

Fight the calls for urgency from your white-centered senior leadership teams who want you to “quick fix” racism, exclusion, and inequity. Fight the calls for urgency in yourself as those around you and the society we live in make you feel like you are failing or not working hard enough because dismantling white supremacy “isn’t happening quick enough.” You are one person. Give yourself some grace. It’s going to take centuries to dismantle the centuries of oppressive mindsets and oppressive systems with foundations built on the original sins of whiteness on unceded land. It’s taken at least two centuries to get us to where we are now, where we have rights and opportunities that we have to fight to keep constantly. Just because whiteness wants their systems of racism and white supremacy (and the benefits said systems provide) to exist but for you to not “force” them to change themselves or sit with discomfort doesn’t mean it’s your job to give them that.

Our ancestors fought for us to get to this moment. We owe it to them, ourselves, and future generations to not carry the weight of dismantling white people’s ideology of classification and oppression by ourselves. We owe it to our ancestors, ourselves, and future generations to lead by example, establishing boundaries to ensure that this heavy work does not overtake our hearts, minds, and souls and sap us of joy. We owe it to our ancestors, ourselves, and future generations to not allow sink into the frantic urgency of white U.S. Americans who expect the people their systems have oppressed to alleviate their discomfort and “fix the problem.”

Breathe. You have time. It may not always feel like you do, but you have time. Our ancestors understood the urgency of the moment they were in yet realized change would not happen overnight or even in their lifetimes. So they took time to live and thrive as they could in the face of hate. You deserve that same time. You deserve mental and emotional peace. You deserve the time to live, to love, to embrace joy. We all do. Do not let these white systems and fearful white supremacists deprive you of this.

Breathe. You have time. 

On Anti-Asian Sentiments, Ingrained Anti-Blackness, Michelle, and Sandra

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We can't talk about the horrific murders of Michelle Allysa Go and Sandra Shells without examining the ugliness at the intersections of the patriarchal white supremacist national sentiments around homelessness and housing insecurity. We also can't talk about what happened to Michelle and Sandra without examining mental health advocacy and the perceived and perpetuated value of Black and Asian women in the United States. And we definitely shouldn't be having conversations about Michelle and Sandra's murders without incorporating an ever-evolving understanding of the deeply ingrained passive acceptance of anti-Blackness and anti-Asian hate that has permeated this country's mindset for hundreds of years.

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Monday's Opening Thought: January 17, 2022

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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).

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Monday's Opening Thought: January 10, 2022

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This week’s opening thought: Late last Friday night, I was winding my evening down, taking out some trash and recycling, when I saw a white male going for a late-night jog. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this man going for a late-night run; I’ve seen him off and on over the past year. As usual, he had his earbuds in and was in the zone. I’m assuming that the pandemic and its reverberative effects likely led to his night workout routine. His presence wasn’t peculiar to me, but I quickly noticed that it hit a nerve in me that night. Standing in the crisp night air, I felt sad for a moment because I knew why I felt the way I felt in seconds. Ahmaud Arbery’s murderers had been sentenced earlier in the day to life sentences.

And it was very apparent to me at that moment the amount of white privilege that jogging any old time of the day comes with.

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Monday's Opening Thought: January 3, 2022

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This week’s opening thought: I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. Never really have been. With that said, I believe that if you are going to resolve to do something over a span of 365 days that it should not be a toxic practice that could leave you feeling worse about yourself on day 30 than you did on day 1.

If you’re the resolution type, I implore you to look beyond the confines of 365 days and resolve to take care of yourself mentally, emotionally, and physically every day of the rest of your life with as little toxicity and societal pressure as possible. Make healthy life choices for yourself, societal and familial pressure be damned.

Use the next 365 days to start a lifetime of caring about yourself, because for many of us there will hopefully be life beyond December 31, 2022.