Monday's Opening Thought: December 14, 2020

Monday’s opening thought:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.”

- Maya Angelou

That’s it. That’s the opening thought.

Stop expecting your racist uncle, transphobic sister, and ableist co-worker to show you something other than who they are. What they’re showing you is ultimately who they are, and you have to stop expecting that these people will change unless you see a sustained consistent effort from them to change that convinces you otherwise. And even then you should temper your expectations. Be willing to give some people a chance but don’t get hoodwinked.

Monday's Opening Thought: December 7, 2020

This week’s opening thought: Familiarize yourself with the characteristics of white supremacist workplace culture. Then make a plan to actively be a voice in opposition to it, not only in your current workplace but in every workplace you work in for the rest of your work career. Why? It’s literally a system of oppression that doesn’t actually benefit anyone in the workplace outside of a subsection of white cis men and women. Hell, it doesn’t even benefit all white people in the workplace. If we want equity in our workplaces, real sustainable equity, then it is long past time we chucked this large piece of white supremacy in the bin and held ourselves accountable for putting the can on the curb for pick-up.

Monday's Opening Thought: November 30, 2020

This week’s opening thought: There are 32 days left in 2020. After all of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests this year, all happening while police officers were still harming Black bodies daily. After seeing a massive increase in reported hate crimes aimed at the AAPI community. After seeing how COVID-19 has impacted Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives, after all of the talks about this moment in time being a “movement” and not just another moment. After all of that I just have to ask:

Where you at?

Where y’all at now?

Where is your employer at now?

A lot of y’all who were trying to check me and inform me that I was too pessimistic about your “handling” of the 400+year-old ongoing situation at hand back in late Spring/early Summer are suddenly mighty quiet. The organizations you work for are mighty silent also. Where’s all of that gusto y’all had, posting things on your social media channels and websites saying that you stand with Black lives? Where are all of the organizational initiatives y’all were talking about to make your companies start their work on being more actively anti-racist?

Don’t worry. You don’t need to answer. We both know the answers to all of the questions above.

Maybe it’s time that many of the organizations y’all work for threw their cookie-cutter diversity statements and messaging from Summer 2020 in the waste paper basket and owned up to the fact that they only care about the lives of people of color/culture when it affects their bottom line.

Maybe it’s time many of y’all personally and professionally did the same thing.

All this frontin’ and faux empathy is not a good look.

Y’alls “wokeness” is starting to show up your obvious ambivalence about dealing with your connections to and perpetuation of racism and white supremacy. Might wanna tuck that in. You wouldn’t want it to get snagged on anything as y’all walk out of 2020 patting yourselves on the back for caring about persons of color/culture for a brief minute or two.