I’m the only Black person in a group. A fact usually less salient as my Blackness is generally accepted, acknowledged, and integrated into groups I choose. I distinguish genuine interest and awareness from performative or clueless interaction. So, I was discomfited by a group member’s appreciation in the closing … Read More
Diversity Equity & Inclusion / Racial Justice
We’re in This Together
This year I extended my annual sampling of Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches and writing to his birthday week. I am taken this year by the “interrelated structure of reality.” As King says, All life in interrelated. We are caught … Read More
How Do I Come Across?
A white colleague is enrolled in a racism awareness course. His program features conversation with other white people about their experience of race and racism. He is frustrated that he is not learning about his whiteness from people of color. … Read More
Sabbatical Dispatches: 2021!
Impatience, relief, almost glee greet the turn of the calendar. Glad 2020 is over! Whew! Quick, get it behind us. It was a rough year—for the world. Yet the understandable impulse to get “back to normal” denies that the emerging normal … Read More
Sabbatical Dispatches: Post-Election Thoughts
The neighbors celebrate with pot banging and dancing in the streets. I join for a time, to be neighborly and because I share in the collective relief, the lifting of an incalculable weight on the spirit. We have earned a … Read More
Slow Murder
As the country (and countries) take up the call against police and extrajudicial violence in the latest examples—Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Christian Cooper—I have been thinking that it is almost too easy to be shocked and appalled by … Read More
Addressing Structural Racism—In the Moment
In a group addressing structural racism in organizational operations and programmatic work, we are reviewing proposals for action. A person of color notes some language used in otherwise sound ideas could unintentionally reinforce the separation the proposal seeks to address. … Read More