This Week's Opening Thought: July 18, 2022

This week’s opening thought: When did your manager or supervisor last ask you how you were doing? Like, not the everyday pleasantry “how are you” where you know that your answer needs to be a surface one, but an empathetic, vulnerable how are you where you feel they genuinely care about you?

When was the last time your manager or supervisor talked with you for more than 2-3 minutes about something other than work that wasn’t small talk or a “water cooler” conversation?

When was the last time your manager or supervisor had a one-on-one with you that started on time, touched on work for a few moments, then touched on what you need to feel supported and successful?

When was the last time your manager or supervisor rescheduled or canceled your one-on-one because “something came up?”

When was the last time your manager or supervisor chatted with you from an empathic place about a performance or work-related issue that they wanted you to address and offered their legitimate help and support? You know, talking to you like a person that, like all people, makes mistakes and deserves not to have their dignity trampled on by a herd of vitriol?

When was the last time your manager or supervisor notified you of a performance issue in a timely manner? Like, when the matter first became an issue and not weeks or months after the fact?

Many things can be cited as the driving forces behind the so-called “Great Resignation” movement: inequitable and unequal pay, heteronormative white supremacist workplace culture norms, sexism, a severe lack of flexibility in work hours, I could go on. But the common thread in all of this, the one thing every driving force shares, is a disregard and disrespect for people. People have left companies and are likely currently plotting how they can leave your company without taking on financial hardship because they do not feel valued as people.

Yes, workplace policies and systems leave many of us feeling like nothing more than interchangeable cogs. Yes, Human Resources departments leave many people feeling they have no support if they are being harmed and mistreated at work. But the one person who is often at the center of people feeling invalidated, verbally abused, neglected, and minimized are managers and supervisors. And real talk?

In my experience, managers and supervisors are often the people inflicting the harm or the person who has known about the harm taking place for some time and don’t want to be bothered to “go the extra mile” and support their team members that need support.

There’s a reason people say that clichéd “employees don’t leave companies, they leave bad bosses” line as much as they do. It is legitimately one of the core reasons people share in their exit interviews about why they’re leaving, right behind citing an unhealthy workplace culture and feeling devalued or undervalued by the company. We leave companies because we’re at our breaking point and want to care for ourselves. We leave companies because we’re at our breaking point, and we know we deserve better: better treatment, better pay, better time off and flexibility, and better workplace culture.

And some of y’all managers and supervisors do more than your part to get us to that breaking point, whether directly or indirectly.

If you’re a manager or supervisor reading this, I want most of y’all to take a moment to check yourself. I’m sure some of y’all are feeling some kind of way right now. I’m sure many of y’all have gone into “not me” territory. I want you to ask yourself why you went on the defensive when you read this. I want you to unpack why you’re trying to deflect the high possibility that it is you for someone under your supervision that you are passively or actively causing them harm. Then I want you to think about the last time you asked your team members how they were doing. Like, not the everyday pleasantry “how are you” where you’re only seeking the surface answer, but an empathetic, vulnerable how are you. And I want you to be honest with that answer. Why? Because that answer will dictate how you view the five questions after it.

And that’ll give you a pretty good window into the kind of manager or supervisor you are.

It’s not a good feeling to realize that you’re the cliché, is it?

I’m guessing you’re feeling a need to ask your team members how they’re doing now, aren’t you?

I’ll leave you to it. You’ve got a lot of trust and faith to rebuild.

This Week's Opening Thought: July 11, 2022

This week's opening thought: I took a five-day vacation recently. Coupled with that was a six-day stint away from technology, social media, content posting, and all that jazz. It was terrific, y'all. Wonderful. I relaxed. I ate some bomb-ass food. I wandered around San Diego. I read books for pleasure and not for learning and anti-racism knowledge for the first time in a long time. I almost forgot how nice it was to read for fun. I recommend it.

I also recommend walking away from this internet sh—as much as possible.

I'm going to be taking a week off from all of this online sh-- at least once a month from now on. I'm also planning to disconnect from it all in the evening.

Real talk? Identities, self-worth, and the quest for validation permeate so much of the internet experience for many of us. We're so tethered to this surreality of social media and the internet that it starts becoming a parallel existence for too many people. I know I threw myself into using social media as my platform for my work during the pandemic when the in-person opportunities disappeared. At some point during it all, I lost the focus and purpose of my work on these social media platforms. I got lost in the comments and the "debates." The opportunities to share knowledge would routinely devolve into soapbox moments. Around six or seven months ago, I caught myself in this quagmire.

I realized that I got stuck in a surreality.

I realized I needed to get my ass unstuck real quick.

I began focusing on making sure the things I posted were back to being intentional and informative. I silenced the "debaters" by deleting their comments and blocking their access to my work. I deleted the DMs and reported many of the folx who sent me hateful messages. The truth is, my online content is now at a point where it displays my voice and views in more impactful ways than it ever has.

And that's right around when the hateful DMs became more of a regular occurrence, to the point where I had to ensure messages from people not on my friend's lists would be blocked.

That's when the reports of my posts about white supremacy being "racist" began to increase.

That's when the temporary bans for "hate speech" content, i.e., posts pushing for white people to be responsible for their upholding of white supremacy, started to happen with more regularity.

So I took six days off from any interactions with social media and content creation around race, inequity, and human resources issues.

I returned to an inbox of hateful DMs and seven people I needed to block with comments I needed to delete.

I returned to see that LinkedIn decided a post I made about white people not understanding Black communities' trauma when Black people are murdered by the police was "hate speech" after I appealed to have it reposted. The usual pattern of LinkedIn is if you're a Black person,  once they've decided something you've posted is "hate speech," your days on the platform are numbered. Either your posts will get lost in the ether, or you will be removed from the platform altogether.

In other words, I returned to another week on social media as an unapologetic Black person who isn't looking for validation and "debates."

So I'm going to return my ass back into an extended vacation from social media.

I'd rather sit on my porch with a La Croix and read a good book than entertain the thought of putting my whole self on platforms built on pushing legitimate hate speech and silencing Global Majority folx. Some of y'all prove every day that you are the reason we all can't have nice things, so I'm going to make sure you don't get to have a place to be a white supremacist on my time.

From now on, my primary content will be built for my website, a possible newsletter, and an eventual paywall at the beginning of 2023. I will no longer post complete content pieces on social media platforms, just off-site links to said content pieces. And even though I'll be creating more regularly scheduled content, sharing the links to that content on social media won't be a regular occurrence. If you want to continue following and engaging with my content, you can always add the RSS feed to your RSS reader or bookmark my website.

Now, lemme get off this internet and back to my Tangerine La Croix and The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix because this book is messed up, and this drink is refreshing as hell, y'all!

Live your life on your terms.

This Week's Opening Thought: July 4, 2022

This week’s opening thought: Hey, y'all! I hope this post finds you and yours able to take the time to heal and support one another. If you're privileged enough to be off of work today, even though being off today is a loaded situation, I hope you can use this time to be with family, friends, or even yourself for rest and re-centering. Ultimately, I hope this post finds my Black and Brown folx, Indigenous folx, AAPI communities, and communities of color able to embrace joy, love, and happiness as we navigate a hostile world.

I wanted to drop y'all a line today to touch on what I just touched on above: taking care of yourself, your community, and those you love. But I want to focus on the first part of the last sentence: taking care of yourself.

Starting tomorrow at 12:00p, I'm going to be off the clock until Tuesday, July 12. I'm going to take a little time to disconnect from everything, hang out with my wife, eat some good food, and go on a trip for the first time in a little over two years. I'm looking forward to it.

Also, starting tomorrow at 12:00p, I will no longer be taking on any new clients, consulting, moderating, or training gigs for the rest of 2022. I'm closing up shop to focus on myself for the rest of the year. The truth is, I've got two comic-related projects, a podcast, and a more regular website content schedule to which I've wanted to devote more of my time and energy for almost a year now. Those things bring me joy and power, yet I've neglected them to focus on white supremacist workplaces that are not interested in change. I owe myself more than that. I plan to use the second half of 2022 to do everything I mentioned above. Will I be reopening my services in 2023? Maybe? We'll see how I'm feeling at the beginning of 2023. I refuse to continue doing things that harm my soul, including dealing with white supremacist workplaces and white leaders who like the idea of me but not the skills I possess in helping them unpack their sh--.

Co-dependence ain't worth my happiness.

Here's the thing, y'all: many Black folx suffer from the weight of co-dependence. The truth is, many Black people are indoctrinated into cycles of co-dependence early in their lives. We see our parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles overextending themselves and putting the weight of making sure everyone is OK on their shoulders. They do this because that is what was modeled for them by the adults in their lives when they were little. These adults in our lives passed this obligation on to us, telling us overtly or covertly that this is "what you're supposed to do."

They were wrong.

They didn't realize it at the time, but our parents passed the generational trauma of their parents onto us. Their parents passed it on to them from their grandparents and so on. This is rooted in co-dependency. Co-dependency is a learned behavior often passed down from generation to generation. It is an emotional and behavioral condition that affects an individual's ability to have a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship where they don't feel like they have to overcompensate to be seen as a whole human being and supported. Most Black folx are trapped in a chain of multi-generational trauma. And that generational trauma stems from the deep-seated traumas of chattel slavery, from mental, emotional, and physical abuses at the hands of whiteness on unceded land for centuries. That co-dependence was a tool of survival against the machinations of whiteness that many of us have never been willing or able to unpack. The result is Black children being parentified at times and growing up fast because we're conditioned to help without question. The result is Black parents consciously and unconsciously placing the responsibility of somehow taking care of and uplifting the family to pull the family out of poverty and pain. For many Black people, we look at this as the necessary relationship we must have with our families to ensure they are taken care of, even if that means we feel like we're constantly failing when they aren't taken care of or stepping up to the plate themselves. We are conditioned to believe we should be helping family members who don't want to help themselves, like somehow our actions will "turn it around." Many Black folx will tell you that this is healthy, that this is us helping our own. But these relationships we have with our family members aren't healthy.

This is the base of generational co-dependency.

We have to break the chains so that the generation after us has more of a fighting chance to have healthy boundaries, healthier relationships, and a belief that they can care about themselves in more than superficial ways. And this doesn't mean just our inner circle relationships, mind you.

Co-dependency often dictates our career paths and happiness in the work we choose to do. This affects our relationships within our careers as well. And you know who exploits this co-dependence just as much as many of our family members do?

White-centered organizations and white workplaces that hire Black people to fix their problems.

That's why equity, diversity, and inclusion work is one of the most dangerous traps Black folx and many people of color can find themselves in.

It's an entire field built on exploiting the co-dependence that many Black folx, many people of color, carry in their brains and bodies. And it was unwittingly created by co-dependent people who felt it was their job to fix the litany of white supremacist societal issues we did not make. We turned our civil rights work into anti-racism and "EDI" work because white people have never felt the urgency or were interested in doing better beyond performative actions. We took this work upon our brains and bodies because our ancestors passed the generational trauma of their survival co-dependence upon us. We didn't even realize what we were doing to ourselves, y'all. And so many of us doing this work of equity, inclusion, diversity, and anti-racism? We're not as OK as we like to present ourselves. We're hurting. We're struggling. We're constantly questioning the effectiveness of the work that we're doing and grappling with feelings of failure. We're worried that we're failing the people of color in the companies we work with and for. We're not OK, y'all.

I'm not OK.

But I'm way better than I used to be.

I've spent the last year and a half in therapy. It has helped me see the co-dependence I've been trapped in since I got my first job at age 13 to help my family survive. It's helped me see how my co-dependence led me into the work I've dedicated my life to for the past decade. And it's helped me understand that if I'm going to do equity, inclusion, and anti-racism work for another decade and beyond, I need to do it on my terms. And my terms no longer allow me to be preyed upon and used by anyone, especially white companies and organizations. You cannot and should not try to save people and institutions who don't want to change or evolve by yourself. If it ain't legitimately a collective effort from now on? I'm not in.

So what does that mean? Does that mean I'm done with "EDI" work?

I'm done with it in its current form and function.

In the next few months, I'll spend a second or two thinking about what 2023 looks like for me, but I can guarantee that there won't be too many seconds spent on it. As I said earlier, I'll be spending the remainder of 2022 putting energy into projects that energize me and allow me to do equity and anti-racism work from different angles and new directions. One of the comic-related projects is a graphic collection of the things white people have said to me or in my presence for the past twenty-odd years of my life. My podcast will start in the fall; it will be a podcast centered on telling stories to promote change without interruptions. I'll be moving toward creating some regular columns and content scheduling for my website. I'll still be using my social media networks to speak truth to power, but it will be much more organized and scheduled. Hell, there might even be a Patreon on the horizon. What matters is that it will all be about me doing this work in ways that don't place me in co-dependent traps and drain me mentally, physically, and emotionally.

I implore anyone doing "EDI" and anti-racism work with organizations as a consultant or in-house staff member to seek therapy. Find ways to do this work that isn't dictated by co-dependence or white supremacist ideologies and standards. Unpack the roots of why you carry the world's weight in this work like you somehow must do so. Take care of yourself so you can take care of others with boundaries that allow you to be healthier. Make this work what you need it to be, not what companies or other people tell you it needs to be. That's what I'm doing now.

I can't recommend it enough.

See y’all in a week. Take care of yourselves.

HR, Equity, and Inclusion Blog RSS

On Independence, White Apathy Masquerading as Empathy, Black Bodies and Policing

TW: anti-Blackness, murder, police violence.

To white “professionals”:

Jayland Walker.

Say his name.

Quit acting like the murder of Black bodies at the hands of the police isn’t a regular part of U.S. American life. You know better than that by now.

Quit questioning why this keeps happening. You already know the answers to these questions.

Quit offering condolences or making performative social media posts. There ain’t enough black squares and “we need to do better” posts in the world that will ever supplant white people taking legitimate action to unwrap the lack of accountability and white supremacist ideology the U.S. was built on.

Quit watching and sharing the video of Jayland being shot by Akron, Ohio police more than 60 times. It’s not the “liberal” flex you think it is. No one needs to watch that pain. You sharing the video of that pain is a symbol of your lack of care for Black people’s trauma.

Quit thinking the Black people in your workplace or community only need a few days to heal and will be OK because they have the 4th of July off and/or a 3-day weekend. Most of us haven’t healed from the last murder by police in our cities or in this country, let alone everything else that has transpired lately in this country. And most of us hate the 4th of July. We’re using it as a day to stay the hell away from y’all and get into a headspace where we can exist for a few days at work around y’all to get back to another weekend so we heal some more.

Quit doing all of the above and start asking yourself why you do all of the above. And unpack that sh— on your time. Don’t put the labor of your messy white supremacist sh— on Black folx as your white fragility/violence sounding boards.

Enjoy your ribs and your small explosives that harm veterans and pets.

Independence.

On White Women, Handmaids, and (Maybe) Stepping Up

As we end June 2022 and wind down Pride Month and Juneteenth celebrations, we walk away from a month of tumult with a hazy horizon in front of us. I’ve seen a lot of joy and pride in embracing oneself and celebrating culture and perseverance in the face of hate and oppression.

That joy and pride conflicted with the hard-to-miss fact that the United States is trending toward becoming more dangerous and harmful to most of its citizenry than it already is.

As Roe v. Wade was overturned, as the religious right began its long-gestating power play to obliterate the line between church and state, I’ve seen many white people shocked at what’s happening around them. Many white women are suddenly distraught at the future ahead of us if the citizenry doesn’t collectively stand up and fight for rights and safety. Bodily autonomy is officially on the chopping block, and the future of women’s rights and reproductive health looks a little murky. I’ve seen many white women with tears in their eyes, sharing their stories of needing reproductive health access and saying their eyes are now open. They’re proclaiming they’re ready to stand up and fight on every social media platform they can find. Because I’m human, I can feel for those white women and their fear and anxiety, at least a little bit. But as a Black man in the United States?

They can miss me with their shock.

And they can Matrix miss me with those tears.

In the 2020 election, among White women, according to NBC News, 43 percent supported Biden, and 55 percent supported Trump. There was little meaningful change from 2016 when the same exit poll showed that 43 percent of White women supported Clinton and 52 percent supported Trump. Other significant polling data found the same or similar percentages, give or take a couple of percentage points.

You can miss me with those tears, white women.

More white women are in the U.S. House and Senate than at any point in United States history. They are primarily Republican, and a sizable portion of them are Christian conservatives. Those who are Democrats are mostly moderate or centrist in their voting habits. And most of them have voting records that set the stage for everything we’ve seen over the past week by supporting and enabling white supremacist and oppressive policies, bills, and laws.

On top of all those mentioned above, Black women and Black, Brown, and Indigenous movements have warned white women of the dangers of aligning with white supremacist patriarchal values since before the Women’s suffrage movement. We’ve stressed the need for understanding the intersectional impacts of siding with whiteness and white Christian dogma over the unethical and hateful treatment of women and people with uteruses in the United States.

You can miss me with those tears.

You have nothing to be shocked about, white women. What are you shocked about? That the safety you thought you had by aligning yourself with white patriarchal nonsense doesn’t exist? You thought they were only coming after the “colored women?” You thought these repeals and Supreme Court decisions would skip you as a white woman and oppress everyone else?

That’s a dangerous game to play, white women.

But you already knew that, and many of you played it anyway.

You played the game, lost, and now it’s time to do more than cry. Mourn a little. Mourn the loss of your conscious obliviousness. Feel the weight of the moment. Begin processing the trauma and anxiety of it all.

Then step your asses up to the plate and fight for EVERYONE. Not just for white women. Not just for white people with uteruses.

For ALL people with uteruses.

For ALL women.

Are you going to step up now? Or will you keep comparing the current state of things to the Handmaid’s Tale and posting your personal stories for sympathy while levying microaggressions toward Black women who aren’t coddling you now?

If I shake my Magic 8-Ball, something tells me all signs will point to no.

How about you prove me wrong?