This Week's Opening Thought: July 13, 2026

This week's opening thought: A whole lot of y'all seem to be, for some reason, distraught that people aren't handin' out thoughtful eulogies to a man who spent around 30 years of his life doing more harm than good to countless melanated and queer communities.

Note: When I say a whole lot of y'all, I'm talking about large numbers of people of pallor and the melanated and/or queer pallor apologists who long for pallor to embrace them and use them to fight their own people like Pokemon (i.e. the Cory Bookers of the world).

So, because some of y'all are really on one about how many of us have chosen to dogwalk a man who weaponized his internal self-hatred and chose to devote his life to legislative violence and harm, I thought I'd take a moment to offer you two thoughts so you can hopefully digest the tea better and basically shut up. And by "basically shut up," I mean that we will not be taking questions or engaging in "debates."

Alright? OK.

One: you can be a crappy human being AND someone who did one or two nice things here and there for a couple of people in your orbit. You can be both. But when you've spent a chunk of your adult life being more crappy than helpful on a large scale? Yeah, people are definitely gonna talk about the crappy things you did way more than anything nice you did. You've earned that kind of eulogy.

And if you aren't the crappy person in question but you decide to exercise a VERY selective memory to only focus on a couple of nice things the crappy person did while chastising others for focusing on the crappy things the deceased person spent their life engaging in?

You should be willing to take the L for defending a crappy person and be ten toes down with your eagerness to defend crappy people.

Two: I've lived a life that has allowed me to impact people's daily lives in a myriad of ways. I intimately know how the simplest of decisions/indecisions can dismantle a person's life. With this in mind, I have always done the work that I do from a place of humanity, acknowledging my privilege, power, and positionality while making sure I don't weaponize those things to harm others and/or benefit myself. Because of this, I know that when my time comes, the likelihood of thousands of people hopping on the internet or finding any platform they can to dogwalk me for being a hateful bag of crap that did harm to their lives is practically non-existent.

Every day, I get out of my bed and choose to live my life this way because I know the damage I can do...and I don't have anywhere near the power to alter lives that politicians have in this country.

Can you say the same about yourself and how you navigate the world? And if not, why would you expect people to "only remember the good times" when they look back on the crappy life you've led?

You can take all of that and swallow it as you see fit.

This Week's Opening Thought: February 23, 2026

This week’s opening thought: I find it very interesting that after what appears to be three instances of a particular Black-centric racial slur being shouted out by Tourette’s Syndrome activist John Davidson at this past weekend’s BAFTA Awards (when Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo stepped onstage to present an award, while Oscar-winning production designer Hannah Beachler was on her way to dinner after the show, and a third was aimed at another Black woman minding her Black business) that suddenly so many people of pallor are experts on Tourette Syndrome.

I’m not an expert on Tourette’s, but I do understand it. I understood it before these incidents happened this past weekend. Unlike the many “concerned citizens” out there who suddenly have an opinion on Tourette’s because Black folx are collectively side-eyeing John Davidson, I didn’t need to become a Google Scholar to understand how it manifests and the struggles that folx who have Tourette’s endure. Still, I know enough about the condition as well as white supremacy to understand that a word like the one John shouted out multiple times to multiple Black people has to be a regular part of your vocabulary to use it so effortlessly three times in one night, so clearly and pointedly during a tic.

Let’s not belittle those with Tourette’s like that.

Let’s not bolster stereotypes of people with Tourette’s as a cover for a person of pallor’s likely ingrained racist beliefs.

Tourette’s targets the neurological filters that restrain language, the same filters that allow people to make concerted decisions about how they word and say things. But Tourette’s is still governed by a person’s vocabulary: words they use casually, thoughts and ideas they routinely chat about with others, beliefs they have about people, race, gender, culture, you name it. Tourette’s affects inhibition, not whether or not saying racist things is something you have no issue with saying.

I’ve known people who have Tourette’s. I’ve known people of pallor who have Tourette’s. Some of them likely had Coprolalia as well. And none of them ever said to me or around me what John said to Michael B., Delroy, Hannah, or the other Black woman he verbally assaulted this past weekend.

John may or may not be racist. That ain’t for me to judge, regardless of how it feels in my brain and body. But let’s not use his disability status as a pass for absolution. He should still be held accountable, and BAFTA should’ve done better. As for the sudden experts? Don’t be hoppin’ online, trying to check Black folx for calling out what we see or act like we don’t understand Tourette’s Syndrome or other nervous system disorders. The majority of us speak truth to power based on facts.

And don’t expect Black folx to stop side-eyeing you if you want to keep throwing another racist apologist log on the fire.

This Week's Opening Thought: February 17, 2026

This week’s opening thought: I’ve spent this month trying to protect my peace, embrace rest, and take care of myself. That has primarily meant keeping my thoughts to myself, processing my feelings, and moving them out of my body. It’s gone fairly well, but honestly?

Being Black, legitimately trauma-informed, actively anti-racist, and actively anti-oppressive while working in HR is not helpful in my pursuit to prioritize all of the aforementioned things for myself.

Truth be told, the years I’ve spent developing and continually learning about my body, my brain, my emotions, my personal, professional, and generational traumas, and the weight of the world around me have lessened how much I end up carrying in my brain and body. But there are days where I watch Black and Brown folx, Black women, people of color, folx with disabilities, and folx from LGBTQIAA+ communities get mistreated or ignored and then get equally ignored, disregarded, or told I’m being “unprofessional” when I amplify their voices and stand with them in real time that literally make me want to punch the air like Tre in Boyz n’ the Hood. And some days it hits like a brick when I’m attacked or mistreated, and no one who witnesses my harm is willing to stand with me in solidarity.

Today has been one of those days.

Real talk? HR, when you’re not doing it “by the book” and upholding white supremacist workplace culture, is a lonely profession.

It’s doubly so when you’re doing it as an empathic, empathetic queer Black person.

If you’re marginalized, invisible, and/or melanated, and living authentically in a world where you don’t fit? I want you to know that I see you. I know there are many days when it’s hard, when this world seemingly finds glee in doing you harm. Please know you’re not alone. Please take care of yourself. Please do not prioritize these workplaces or anyone who claims to love and care about you over your health and well-being. You deserve to be able to be openly, verbally, and physically you. Don’t let them dim your light.

WHEW. Just needed to get that out of my system.

Back to mindin’ my Black business and resting as the ancestors would want me to rest.

Take care of yourselves and each other.

This Week's Opening Thought: February 2, 2026

This week's opening thought, directed toward people of pallor: It's Black History Month. I usually prepare some knowledge to drop all month, some calls to action, things of that nature. But this year?

Nah, I'm tight.

I don't feel like doin' this with people of pallor this year.

I don't feel like educating y'all, or correcting y'all, or dodging online "debates" with y'all, especially the "well-meaning liberals" out there. At this point, the white supremacy has been white supremacy-ing in such visceral ways on this stolen land that I'm not going to spend my Black History Month dealing with y'all and your "big feelings" and "hot takes" about the abuses even the nicest of y'all inflict on Black bodies, how U.S. history is legitimately Black history (whether y'all want to acknowledge it or not), and how y'all don't want to read a book but want to have us teach you for free about the same concepts over and over again.

Nah. I'm tight.

I've educated enough of you. WE have educated enough of you for centuries. We've shared enough of ourselves with y'all over the years with the hope of getting through to you, even during this most critical of times in this country's racist, hateful history, just to watch y'all butcher Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes while making the concept of "helping" melanated people oppressed by y'all's systems sound like a chore you deserve allowance or restitution for. And through all of that, we're expected to spend an entire month - the shortest month of the year - continuing to hold your hands and "giving y'all grace" as you don't learn or unlearn anything?

Nah. I'm good.

And I know I'm not the only one.

So instead of spending the month of February doing what is essentially unpaid outreach work with people of pallor, I'm gonna spend Black History Month chillin' in my beautiful Blackness and embracing joy, giddily bereft of the need to sit with y'all's messiness as the world burns. Maybe I'll see y'all in March? Who knows?

Try not to homogenize or water down any quotes from Black people to force them to appeal to pallor sensibilities while I'm gone.

On "Survival"

I've seen a lot of talk about what the U.S. will look like if we "survive" this moment in time. And because I prefer to live in the space of an honest assessment of the situation, I'm gonna level with y'all:

The United States of America is not "surviving" this.

If we're honest with ourselves and take a moment to examine the trajectory of the past 20+ years, this moment of authoritarian white supremacist oppression was inevitable. We've been inching toward this moment since 9/11, and we barreled into this after the elections of Barack Obama. These moments in time broke whiteness so severely that whiteness as an entity felt driven to do the one thing its excelled at for generations: preserving its tenuous grasp by vilifying anyone who opposes the comfort of white supremacy and assert that whiteness is the dominant power in the culture. So people of pallor with power and influence began inching toward rigging the legal system and the highest court in the land, removing laws and regulations, enacting policies and laws that exploited loopholes intended to oppress and subjugate, and essentially figuring out how to give an acting president of pallor the powers of a dictator. And now?

White supremacy has reached an apex that this country hasn't seen since its infancy. And honestly?

We will not "survive" this.

We are not coming back from this. There is no "return to normal" or "go back to [insert timeline here]" because we never LEFT white supremacy. What you're seeing right now is quintessentially the United States and its colonizer mentality resurfacing in the ways of the "forefathers" to give people of pallor enough comfort to once again openly normalize them believing non-white citizens are theirs to oppress, blame for the current state of the country (although people of pallor are predominantly in the positions that impact the state of the country), and feel superior to. And it took people of pallor being viscerally murdered by systems they thought were intended to only harm non-white citizens to get some of them to question what many of us have lived with for generations.

Unless people of pallor suddenly have a damn near collective awakening that lasts more than a moment, this is where we're at and where we'll remain: regression with uphill battles that many people of pallor will use their privilege to step in and out of as they see fit, ensuring we never inch forward. And I have no reason to have faith in white U.S. America reaching a tipping point that pushes the majority of them to stand up, keep fighting even when it's hard to see a light on the horizon, and use their power and privilege to help those who have spent their lives fighting to change the system make something happen.

Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx? Most communities of color? We'll "survive." We've grown accustomed to the state of things and we've learned how to fight and stay in the fight for the long haul. But white U.S. America?

Y'all got a long "survival" road ahead.