Monday's Opening Thought: June 14, 2021

This week’s opening thought, for white people and people of color with power and privilege: If you do or say something racist and harmful to a Black, Brown, or Indigenous person, a person of color, they do not owe you the opportunity to explain why you did or said what you did or said. That’s not how this works. What you’re exhibiting are abuser mannerisms and behaviors. The harmed party does not owe you the space to explain away your harmful actions or rhetoric.

Understand that. Digest that. Your actions are your cross to bear and not the burden of those you harm. You will need to atone for your words and actions on your time and not off of the backs of those you’ve harmed.

And guess what? You lashing out at the person you’ve harmed because they won’t give you the opportunity to “explain it away?” Yeah, that’s abuser behavior too. Just sayin’.

Monday's Opening Thought: June 7, 2021

This week’s opening thought: If you are white and you’re against Critical Race Theory being taught in schools but have never actually read any credible CRT essays and the only things you “know” about CRT you read on a Twitter or Facebook thread or heard from a conservative politician or talking head? Congratulations!

You are your white ancestors’/colonizers’ wildest white supremacist dream.

Embrace who you are the way your ancestors openly embraced their hate and views around melanated people existing. Don’t be shy! You might as well go all in and embody the beliefs and support the oppressive states and laws that CRT was created to analyze and educate people on.

And if you’re Black or a person of color and you’re against Critical Race Theory being taught in schools but have never actually read any credible CRT essays and the only things you “know” about CRT you read on a Twitter or Facebook thread or heard from a conservative politician or talking head?

You’re choosing lies and talking points over educating yourself against being some white ancestor’s/colonizer’s dream. That’s a dangerous soapbox to stand on. And it’s a perilous hill to die on.

Monday's Opening Thought: May 31, 2021

This week’s opening thought: The discussions around “getting back to normal” have been ramping up lately. In the workplace, on the news, from the lips of the President of the United States. So many people just want to “go back to normal,” to roam free and do whatever they want with no restrictions. What some folx still refuse to acknowledge is that what they want is a particular narcissistic kind of “normalcy.” They refuse to see other people’s “normal.” “Normal” for way too many people - Black people, Brown people, Indigenous communities, AAPI communities, people with disabilities, queer communities, trans folx - is dangerous on multiple fronts. It’s a world of gaslighting and liabilities that many of us are not looking forward to diving back into.

You want “normal?” Well, let me share with you a piece of my “normal” that I wasn’t looking forward to engaging with again as we collectively are forced to segue back into “normalcy”: my “normal” experience shopping for groceries.

As I shopped this past weekend for groceries for the week it was the first time in 15 months where I found myself facing all of my pre-pandemic woes around shopping:

-White people practically pushing past me and damn near through me to get to something on a shelf when I’m not obstructing their ability to grab items in any way.

-White women invading my personal space, often going under my arms while I’m grabbing items from high shelves or trapping themselves between me and a shelf.

-White people taking up entire aisles with their carts, oblivious to my existence or need to get down an aisle.

-White people acting like me saying “excuse me” to move past them obstructing movement is egregious behavior and looking at me as such.

-Security guards following me around sections of the store.

-Self-checkout cashiers watching me like a hawk, counting my scans to see if I’m ringing up all 10 yogurts in my cart and wanting to look in my cart.

I haven’t had to deal with most of these things, especially not all in one trip, for over a year. But we’re “getting back to normal” so here we are, back to oscillating between feeling like a criminal, invisible, and a person people view as an inconvenience on a grocery run. “Normal” represents oppression for me, and not just in the supermarket. And I know I’m not alone. I’m not the only one viewing “normal” as a return to being disregarded, ignored, harmed, killed on a broader scale.

I’ll take a few more months of “not normal” please and thank you.

Monday's Opening Thought: May 24, 2021

This week’s opening thought: It’s 2021 and we’re still having to publicly call companies out for not putting salary ranges in their job postings.

It’s ridiculous that this is still a “debate.”

There are no excuses strong enough to explain away why your company’s job postings should not have the salary range present and easy for applicants to find within the first few lines of your job posting. And you should also be honest about what the actual starting salary will be, so candidates are clear on what kind of room for negotiation they will likely have if any.

On top of all that, your salary range should not be massive. Your range shouldn’t be larger than a $5,000 - $6,000 window, especially if you know good and well you aren’t even willing to start a new hire at the higher end or even the midpoint of your salary range.

What many companies don’t seem to care to understand is that how you handle salary discussions and salary transparency is a window into how you value and treat those that work for you. And not doing all of the aforementioned?

That’s a freshly polished bay window on a clear and sunny day.

It’s that clear to candidates how you feel about them.

Monday's Opening Thought: May 17, 2021

This week's opening thought: At the age of 38 I just learned about the Detroit Wall, also known as the Birwood Wall, the Detroit Wailing Wall, the Eight Mile Wall, and Detroit's Berlin Wall. My mother, a Black woman in her 60s, told me about the Detroit Wall over the weekend after she had just learned about it herself.

The Detroit Wall was constructed in 1941 to physically separate Black and White homeowners on the sole basis of race. The primary concern of white Detroit residents was maintaining racial homogeneity, so local white politicians and the local officers of the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) interpreted the federal policies of the New Deal in their own way to engage in red-lining. They also created local policies to allow for the prevention of Black "infiltration" into white neighborhoods due in part to the HOLC members serving as federal appraisers. The HOLC identified areas that were "safe" for banks to issue loans to by giving each neighborhood a rating: A, B, C, or D. An "A", or "green" if you will, was practically guaranteed a loan; these areas were homogeneously white and affluent. In turn, a "D," or "red," neighborhood was occupied by Black residents who were systematically prevented from receiving a loan.

Due to redlining, the Eight Mile area of Detroit was extremely poor, predominantly Black, and viewed as a "blighted area". After World War II, a developer saw the area as a prime location to construct an all-white subdivision. HOLC appraisers viewed this as a risky proposition. Why? Because of how close it was to the "red" neighborhood occupied by Black people, of course. Because of this, FHA was unable and unwilling to lend out loans for home construction. But a compromise was made: home loans and mortgage guarantees for white folx in exchange for the construction of a foot-thick, six-foot-high wall, running for a half-mile on the property line separating the Black and white neighborhoods.

Contractors and realtors were able to attract whites to this area because the wall would "protect them". It served to keep property values high on the white side of the wall while keeping the neighborhoods racially segregated. The area is no longer segregated (both sides of the wall are predominantly Black now) but the wall still exists.

Why am I talking about the Detroit Wall?

It’s a lost and forgotten piece of the history of redlining and segregation in the United States.

It’s also a symbol of how we as a nation refuse to grapple with and learn about the truths of the pain whiteness has caused.

I grew up in Detroit. I lived on Eight Mile for seven years. I’ve never heard of the Detroit Wall or even seen the wall. None of my teachers in elementary, middle, or high school talked about the wall during U.S. History classes. We didn’t talk about it during Black History Month. There were no field trips to the wall with my fellow Black students, although there were plenty of field trips to the Henry Ford Museum. The Detroit Wall never came up.

I lived right next to this symbol of segregation in the United States until the age of 22 and I didn’t hear about its existence until I was well into my 30s. The fact that this new nugget of understanding isn’t a one-off situation for myself and many melanated people in this country isn’t shocking…but it is sad.

It’s 2021 and I learn something new about the history of racism and white supremacy at least once a week. And I get the feeling that I will be learning a new painful segment of untold/censored/silenced U.S. history at least once a week for the rest of my days. I’m a lifelong learner but constantly finding a new layer of generational trauma that our society and national culture has swept under the rug is honestly a traumatic experience unto itself.

It’s time for whiteness and our national culture to get comfortable with addressing the skeletons in the closet. I don’t want the next generation, my nieces and nephews, to have to continue the tradition of nonconsensual impromptu racist history classes at least once a week that my generation and generations before mine have and had to endure.

Learning while melanated should be growth and evolution, not pain and trauma.