This Week's Opening Thought: June 10, 2024

This week's opening thought: It's wild to me how we constantly tell people to do work they love or are passionate about while consciously and unconsciously ignoring the privilege of finding work that feeds your soul and allows you to be human and vulnerable in community with others while making a wage that will enable you to break generational chains of poverty. We never get in the weeds and talk about how little the work of serving others pays and how much weight it puts on the brains and bodies of those doing it. Yet, those of us doing the work are stuck in co-dependence cycles because many of us have been the people who needed help at some point in our lives and feel driven to "pay it forward" now that our circumstances are somewhat different while not earning enough income to retire before our bodies force us to.

And we're doing all of this while swimming upstream in a society driven by white supremacy and forced individualism intended to halt and stymie collective liberation.

Oof.

It's hard out here, y'all.

On Byron, Jim Crow, and Identities

To all the Black people married to or in long-term relationships with people of pallor, especially Black men, I offer a piece of advice: never love any person or any concept of power and privilege more than you love your people and your identities.

I’m married to a person of pallor. We've been together for almost 16 years. I love her deeply. She is arguably my favorite person in the world. But I could never love her if it was at the behest of my blackness. I could never be with her if our relationship were built on distorting the historical oppression of my people to keep her comfortable with my existence. I have never had to minimize or suppress myself for her. I have watched her learn, unlearn, grow, and stand up against hatred, bigotry, and anti-blackness. That's what any relationship with a person of pallor should be if you're a Black person living in white supremacy.

Any other form of relationship with whiteness poses you and yours a clear and present danger.

Contrary to “popular belief” (”popular belief” meaning melanated folx who seek to curry favor within white supremacist ideology), let me tell you that there are no perks you'll receive from oppressing your people and yourself for the oppressors. The oppressors will never truly accept all of you. They will offer you no safety, defense, power, or privilege in exchange for your services. They will discard you when you no longer serve their purposes and no longer help them look acceptable and community-minded. That's not just speculation - that is history. Undistorted. Clear. Easy to see, established patterns of history with over 400 years of precedents.

To my Black people, I don’t know what self-hatred and generational trauma you carry in your bodies, but I wish you peace, healing, and a better connection with the value of who you are and what your people truly represent. I wish for you to find a love that doesn't have to be tethered to your identities but respects and uplifts them. Love who you love, but always love you and yours first.

Because when you're done acting like a rodent with a built-in bandit mask and the oppressors discard yo’ ass because you no longer serve a purpose, there ain't gonna be no one there who looks like you to help you get back home.

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

[Image description: a picture of U.S. State Representative Byron Donalds speaking to a crowd.]

Image description: a picture of U.S. State Representative Byron Donalds speaking to a crowd.

When You're Here, You're Family? Nah, I'm Tight.

Here’s your Thursday reminder to not pledge your devotion to your employer. Keep that sh— transactional. Please don’t get your feelings all up in it. You can care about your work, but do not buy into being a “company man/woman/person.”

No matter what they say, they do not care about you the way you care about your work or the people you serve.

Don’t let them hit you with the Dominic Toretto monologues and Olive Garden catchphrases to suck you in with that “work family” jibba-jabba.

You deserve better than anything they can ever offer you.

Look at how they treat your colleagues. Look at how they talk about the people you serve.

Do you think they deserve your unwavering allegiance?

[Image description: an exterior shot of an Olive Garden restaurant.]

Image description: an exterior shot of an Olive Garden restaurant.

This Week's Opening Thought: June 3, 2024

This week's opening thought for senior leaders in organizations: Your homophobic, biphobic, transphobic workplace should probably not be celebrating Pride Month.

Ain't nobody got time for all of that performative nonsense. Real sh-- is going on all around us to the point where we're tired enough without having to put up with a month of performative shenanigans that are nothing more than another weapon to harm folx who work for you while you pat yourselves on the back.

We need more than a shout-out to Pride in a company email or team meeting. We need more than a performative PR stunt.

We need y'all to take the actionable steps to bounce the homophobes and transphobes from your organization's roster.

We need y'all to stand on business and call in and out those who do LGBTQIAA+ communities harm while representing you in these streets.

We need y'all to check yourselves and hold yourselves accountable for contributing to harm to queer and trans folx and looking the other way when your queer-identifying colleagues are hurt so you can stay in good standing with the oppressors you consider the in-crowd at work.

We need y'all to hold your human resources department accountable for allowing homophobia and transphobia to be shoulder-shrug moments and not actionable offenses.

Trinkets and hollow platitudes mean nothing when your workplace reflects the world outside of it in the worst possible ways.

There's a list of things that do not look good with a rainbow motif.

Your company logo is at the top of that list.

Stand on something or let the month pass you by.

On Whiteboards, Learning, and the Fragile Male Ego

Image description: two pictures of the whiteboard on my office door. The second picture shows the quote of the week from Huey P. Newton (“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”) and the word of the week, weaponized incompetence (definition: strategically avoiding responsibility by pretending to be incapable or inept at a task so that someone else helps, takes over, or stops delegating tasks to you. This creates an entrenched level of imbalance in relationships. Weaponized incompetence is regularly seen in relationship dynamics driven by patriarchal, heteronormative societal "values" and "norms.").

I have a whiteboard on my office door at work. It has my on-site hours listed, as they vary from week to week. It’s also the home to my chosen quote and word of the week. I started doing this a couple of months ago, and it's been interesting watching my on-site colleagues’ reactions to what they see on my office door. This week's word of the week - weaponized incompetence - has been a real crowd-pleaser for everyone who isn't a cishet male. For the few cishet men in my office? Not the same level of enthusiasm.

Yesterday, I came into the office to find the whiteboard mostly wiped off.

What did I do?

I rewrote the entire whiteboard and put it back on my door.

I'm not that easily deterred. But, more importantly, everything can be a learning moment, even for the scallywag who used their fingers to wipe off my board.

Hopefully, they’ll learn that next time they decide to wipe away a message that brings them discomfort, they should use their sleeves as an eraser so their fingers aren't covered in low-odor, dry-erase ink. I mean, work smart, not messy? But I hope they eventually learn that just because someone doesn't want to see a message doesn't mean they don't need to. Maybe they'll learn to check in with their feelings the next time they get the urge to not sit with and unpack their fragility and make something "go away."

Also, last week’s word of the week was structural racism, but weaponized incompetence was the word that sent someone over the edge?

People never cease to amaze me.

[Image description: two pictures of the whiteboard on my office door. The second picture shows the quote of the week from Huey P. Newton (“Youths are passed through schools that don’t teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don’t exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.”) and the word of the week, weaponized incompetence (definition: strategically avoiding responsibility by pretending to be incapable or inept at a task so that someone else helps, takes over, or stops delegating tasks to you. This creates an entrenched level of imbalance in relationships. Weaponized incompetence is regularly seen in relationship dynamics driven by patriarchal, heteronormative societal "values" and "norms.").]