How I Spent #BlackoutTuesday
If you didn’t know, yesterday was #BlackoutTuesday. The idea started in the music industry and spread quickly across social media. Among the purposes were to interrupt business as usual, and to use the time to read, reflect, and take action in support of Black Lives Matter and the fight against white supremacy and racial injustice.
So that’s what I did.
I postponed the work I had planned to do yesterday and spent the time however I could think in order to become a better, more informed, more motivated advocate for racial justice.
The list below isn’t perfect. It’s just how I figured out to spend my day with no chance to plan. But I’m hopeful that these resources will be helpful to other white people and other nonprofit leaders. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
I know I do.
1. I watched George Floyd’s murder.
I begin with a confession: I hadn't seen George Floyd's murder until yesterday. Just like I hadn't seen Amaud Arbery die. Or Sean Reed. Or Steven Demarco Taylor. Or Eric Garner. Or Eric Harris. Or Philando Castile. Or Walter Scott. Or Sandra Bland. Or Alton Sterling. Or Botham Jean. Or Pamela Turner. Or Eric Reason. Or Tamir Rice. Or Marcus-David Peters.
I thought that I couldn't bear to watch another person die. But this morning, I realized how disgustingly privileged that was. I was choosing not to watch a fatal event because it would make me uncomfortable. If I were a family member, I'd have to watch it. If I were Black, I'd have felt I needed to watch it. So as a fellow citizen, a person who professes to act toward racial justice, how could I explain my failure to endure the simple act of respecting George Floyd's life by watching as it was taken away unjustly?
I had heard countless descriptions of what happened on NPR and other podcasts, and seen a few images and videos that gave me context. But watching it happen in real time, over nine minutes, gave me such a deeper understanding and profound sadness for what Black people go through every single time this happens. What we all should feel every single time this happens.
No justification could explain it. The blatant, almost casual, disregard for another person’s life; the clear signs and many warnings from onlookers that something was wrong; the coordinated failure of human decency by the other officers who had power in the situation.
If you choose, you can watch a full, reconstructed timeline of Mr. Floyd’s murder assembled by the New York Times.
2. I listened to an eye-opening episode of the Code Switch podcast.
The NPR podcast Code Switch is a show hosted by journalists of color that “tackles the subject of race head-on.” Another confession: I used to listen to Code Switch regularly, but stopped in favor of, frankly, lighter podcasts.
On Sunday, in the episode “A Decade of Watching Black People Die,” hosts Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji invited Rolling Stone contributor Jamil Smith to read his essay from 2015 in The New Republic titled “What Does Seeing Black Men Die Do for You?” and to add context on the relevance of the article in 2020.
The point of revisiting this article five years later is that nothing has changed. I listened to most of Mr. Smith’s reading without realizing that it was a five-year-old article. It felt like it was written yesterday. History on repeat.
3. I read this week’s post from one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Vu Le of the Nonprofit AF blog, that made me ask, “Am I the ‘white moderate’ that Dr. King warned about?”
I love every post on the Nonprofit AF blog, but Vu Le has never written a post more urgent and timely. If you have asked yourself, as I have, in the last week whether you’ll offend someone or lose a donor if you say too much, you need to read this post. If you have wondered if it’s too political to use the phrase "Black Lives Matter," you need to read this post.
And if you are in a position of power in the nonprofit sector, you need to read this post.
Get the point? Go read this post. Here's an excerpt:
Nonprofits, helping people, animals, and the environment is crucial, but it is not enough. Your work must be grounded by racial equity and social justice, no matter what your mission is. We must stop our intellectualizing and equivocating, a hallmark of white moderation, and be louder and take more actions to end systemic injustice, even if they are risky and piss people off. ...
For Dr. King, the biggest threat to our Black community members’ safety and freedom, and thus safety and freedom for us all, is not the KKK bearing torches and burning crosses, but the white moderate standing on the side insisting on “civility,” insisting on the oppressed cooperating and working within the system that oppresses them. White supremacy is propped up by white moderation. This is a critical lesson for us in nonprofit and philanthropy. All of us must ask ourselves and our teams what actions have we been taking that are aligned with white moderation, and what actions we must now take to get on the right path.
4. I spent the afternoon working to advance SPARC’s new draft plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
After working for several months in 2019-2020 with Dr. Derrick Gay, renowned consultant in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) with personal experience in arts education, SPARC assembled a team of staff and Board members to draft a new, thorough DEI plan. Our current strategic plan affirms our commitment to DEI, but the strategies are outdated and need to reflect current thinking and strategies in a bolder direction.
The DEI team created a set of goals and drafted strategies to get us there, but unfortunately we finished our draft shortly before the Coronavirus pandemic hit. Admittedly, the plan has gathered dust for three months while we focused on keeping SPARC alive through the pandemic. Maybe we couldn’t have made progress during the initial months of the pandemic, or maybe we could have. It doesn't matter now -- now we must make progress, beginning today. And it’s worth noting that the initial draft of the plan had started to receive some “white moderate” feedback that is going to challenge the boldness of its goals, and -- another confession -- that feedback somewhat deflated my strong advocacy for the team’s draft.
So I worked yesterday on preparing the draft for the Board, and thinking through the processes that can center the voices of our students and community in the plan and its implementation.
It’s not perfect, and it’s not done, but it is progress. And it’s not just my job, but my responsibility to our community, to get it done. I know that advancing SPARC’s DEI plan isn’t going to bring about racial justice in the big picture, but it feels like one small but tangible step that I can work on right now.
Where do we go from here?
Alex, my eight-year-old, asked me this morning why we can’t just pass a law to stop racism. It was an enlightening conversation for both of us.
Honestly, I have no idea today where we go from here. The problems we face are beyond my comprehension to see solutions. But just because I don’t know how to solve it all doesn’t mean I get to sit on my hands and wait for other people to do the work. We all have a responsibility to act, and we’ll find the path together.
But that requires commitment that lasts beyond this week, this month, and this year.
We all need help keeping each other accountable for real and lasting change.
I know I do.
Question:
How have you been educating yourself on racial justice and ending white supremacy? What have you been reading, watching, and listening to? What enlightening conversations have you had that brought you to a new level of understanding? And a week into this latest chapter of the anti-racist movement, what do you think comes next?