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.
