Post-election thoughts: what haven’t you learned, acknowledged or reckoned with?
In 2016, I told myself I NEVER wanted to feel that way again - shocked, betrayed, and most of all ANGRY at the ways at which I had learned to deny my race, even to myself, in order to buy a kind of safety that was NEVER on the table, because safety that requires you to deny parts of who you are, safety that is offered up at the expense of others, a safety that props up a system of advantage and privilege based on genocide, enslavement and colonization is not actually any kind of safety at all.
Today, I am saddened and dismayed, but my work over the past 8 years means I am not surprised. Because what I’ve learned is - this is who America is.
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Trading success for survival: the hidden cost for Black women in leadership
Black women are incredible. They lead, they innovate, they stabilize entire industries—often while juggling more than anyone should ever have to. And yet, the numbers tell a darker story: Black women are paid just 63 cents for every dollar earned by white men, and even with advanced degrees, that only rises to 69 cents. Despite making up the largest percentage of women in the workforce, they hold just 1.5% of leadership positions in industry.
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The continued invisible and unpaid or underpaid work of women
I’ve been thinking a lot (again) about how women continue to do a disproportionate amount of caregiving work… invisible, overlooked, devalued, under or unpaid emotional and administrative labor in the home, the workplace, and all around. And sometimes it feels like white women do it so cheerfully it makes it that much harder for women of color.
At an event recently, I heard a horrifying statistic - apparently 98% of food shopping is done by women!!!
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Another school shooting, another week in America
Another school shooting. Another week in America.
An eighth grade friend of my son said to me this weekend about his school’s new cell phone policy something to the effect of “why do they care more about keeping us safe from our phones than keeping us safe from guns?”
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Breathing and recalibrating for the US election
Much as it seemed to be becoming more and more of a possibility over the past few weeks, I wasn’t prepared for the shift last week from Biden vs Trump to Harris vs Trump.
I’ve trained myself to set realistic (ie low) expectations over the past 8 years and… it felt like we were a lot further away from electing a Black and Asian woman as President than we suddenly find ourselves.
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Patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and diet culture
This may seem like a bit of a non-sequitur, given that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about diet culture and fatphobia on the blog or in our work… at least not extensively.
It’s something I’ve been on a personal journey with that isn’t entirely my story to tell, and so I am realizing it is something I have held back on.
This morning, though, I stumbled on a social media thread in a group I’m not very active in that reinforced just how deeply indoctrination into patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and fatphobia goes.
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“No judgement”
You ask for no judgement when talking about race.
But when you lined us up on the auction block and determined our monetary value, when you bought us and sold us and traded us like livestock, was there no judgement?
When you spat at us, slurred racial epithets and told us to go back to China, was there no judgement?
When you chanted “build that wall” or profiled us as terrorists, was there no judgement?
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Entitlement as a form of learned helplessness
There is a phenomenon that I’ve been thinking about both in personal and professional contexts.
It’s when entitlement leads to a certain kind of helplessness, ignorance, incompetence or even misconduct.
For example, it’s when someone, usually a man, “doesn’t know how to cook” even though they would have been quite capable of learning if they’d ever had to, rather than lived their entire lives expecting and having others (women) to cook for them.
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Every memory hurts. Everyone is traumatized.
My computer has a screen saver that shows a dynamic array of all my favorite photos, which are mostly of my kids over the years. My 15 year old is now significantly taller than me, and my 12 year old soon will be.
Seeing their smiles and little bodies from past years brings me so much joy. These photos capture priceless memories that are some of my most treasured.
And yet at the same time, every memory hurts.
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The Mask You Live In (documentary)
The Mask You Live In (available for viewing here) is a powerful documentary that explores how boys and men “struggle to stay true to themselves while negotiating America’s narrow definition of masculinity
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The work of healing
There is so much magic in creating a space for people to speak and be heard. It’s not always pretty. It’s often uncomfortable. But I find such relief and healing in truth telling… in a world where we are socialized to do anything but.
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Equity can feel “unfair” to those who already have advantages
The support that other folks need that we don’t can feel unfair because that support is very visible, whereas the support that comes to us in our privileged identities is often invisible, especially when that advantage often comes in the form of a lack of obstacles and barriers.
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Letting go of external validation seeking
I’d always thought of myself as a fairly confident person. However, there was a time in my life, a moment of sudden realization that so much of my confidence and worth was based on what other people thought of me.
Is self-worth based on external validation truly self-worth?
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What progress sometimes feels like
There’s a moment in our work, whether it’s during a particular meeting or whether it’s over the course of a more extended period of time, where the containers that we work to build create space for hard truths to be spoken or revealed.
Things that have been swept under the rug for niceness, people pleasing, fear of conflict, denial and avoidance become visible.
It’s progress, but often it’s so painful, an opening of Pandora’s box, that it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like things got worse.
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Self-righteousness
The obvious microaggressions are easy to spot. The anger flares inside immediately and past similar incidents rise to the surface unbidden.
It’s painful but it’s clear cut.
It’s the subtler ones that eat at you, almost on a time delayed extended release. At first you’re annoyed but not that bothered. But then it slowly sinks in. It feels familiar but you can’t quite put your finger on it. You’re irked, but you’re also irked at yourself for being irked.
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We are not all equally harmed but we are all harmed
The devastation I have been feeling at a cellular level in my body this week is a recall of my personal journey of grief as I realized that aligning with whiteness (as a system, not a people) was not going to keep me safe, and that any privileges I gained by aligning with whiteness were not for my benefit but for the purposes of oppressing others.
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No one is free until we are all free
My heart and mind and entire body really is heavy from the past few days of news about the horrifying attacks in Israel, the impacts, and the ripple effect of shock, grief and trauma even for those not directly impacted.
It feels out of my lane yet also very relevant to the work I do.
For now I am reading, listening, learning, and engaging in conversation where I can.
Here’s what I know: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arabism are all pillars of white supremacy. If destroying one pillar depends on fortifying another, white supremacy prevails.
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White people gain from dismantling white supremacy culture too
Something that has been particularly striking to me recently in our work is how white people often have a hard time understanding what they have to gain from dismantling white supremacy.
There’s a certain approach to DEI that is about white people recognizing their privilege and that they need to give it up in order to “do the right thing.”
Often white folks have no idea what they themselves have given up or how they have been harmed in aligning with whiteness.
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What does friendship have to do with it?
We talked a few weeks ago about people pleasing, and we’ve been talking on the CCI team about how this leads to folks trying to make friends and develop “personal relationships” in the workplace.
We want to work with people that we like, right?
And so it makes sense that we would hire people that we like, right?
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Should hard work be rewarded?
For those of you following along at home, NYC public high school decisions came out this week (on Thursday after school). Miraculously and unexpectedly, decisions were released in a relatively thoughtful and orderly fashion although not without various mishaps - I’m just saying, it could have been a lot worse after going through what was for many a harrowing, complex and inequitable application process.
One discussion struck me today though and reminded me that I feel like what is often not taken into account is that some kids work hard and don’t get good grades, and some don’t work hard and do get good grades
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