Posts tagged #truth
Post-election thoughts: what haven’t you learned, acknowledged or reckoned with?
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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Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#election2024, #history, #truth
Say the thing
Say the thing

We know that feedback can be hard to hear.

It is perhaps one of the hardest things we ask leaders and others who align with power and privilege within their identities and their organizations to do when we do DEI work.

However, it’s the organizations that can work through the tough process of hearing difficult feedback that often make the most progress in shifting workplace culture to better serve their mission. We do a lot of scaffolding so leaders understand that feedback is a gift, even if you don’t like the wrapping paper, that it isn’t personal, that systems of oppression, although they manifest differently, show up in every organization, and that in order to change something, you first have to be able to name it.

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Co-creating inclusionAlethea Fitzpatrick#feedback, #truth, #acknowledgethehurt, #workplace, #inclusiveleadership, #inclusiveworkplace
On Juneteenth and the racism of white confusion and denial
On Juneteenth and the racism of white confusion and denial

With Juneteenth now a federal holiday, a decision made on Thursday, the day before the Friday that would mark the holiday (I mean come on now!) many Black folks and others have been expressing mixed feelings about this development.

Unrelated to Juneteenth, our team has been having a lot of conversations lately with white leaders and their BIPOC staff about tokenism, performance, lip service, hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. There is a HUGE toll to pay when actions and impact are out of alignment with professed values. It is EXHAUSTING.

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Dismantling oppressionAlethea Fitzpatrick#juneteenth, #whiteprivilege, #whitefragility, #trauma, #traumainformed, #truth
Creating space for our own humanity
Creating space for our own humanity

One of the things I've been thinking about is how we can create space to show up in our full humanity.

Sometimes what this means is being able to take off our hat as whatever role we are playing - professional or personal - and allow more of ourselves and our humanness in.

In other words, letting ourselves, and each other, just BE can actually be quite revolutionary.

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Inclusive LeadershipAlethea Fitzpatrick#inclusion, #inclusiveleadership, #truth, #healing, #humanity