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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Lately, we have been diving into the impacts of people pleasing, and there is a lot to unravel, especially when you consider that we have all been socialized into people pleasing a little bit differently, depending on our various and intersecting identities.
We’ve been having conversations with each other on our team at CCI as well as with our clients about our identity stories through the lens of people pleasing asking questions like:
How has people pleasing shown up over the course of your life? To what extent are you or are you not a people pleaser? Have you been around people pleasers? How does this show up now in your role at work?
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Imagine a system of violence that doesn’t just turn white people on Black people, but Black people on Black people, Asian people on Asian people, and white people on white people?
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We’re down to the wire in this dystopian process known as the NYC public high school admissions process.
It’s hard to explain exactly how complex and overwhelming this process is, from uncertainty as to whether we would be returning to the pre-covid schedule or the more delayed covid schedule (it’s the earlier pre-covid schedule - but this was only announced two weeks before applications opened!) to the undecipherable hexadecimal “lottery” number that each student is assigned that is a) very hard to find and b) once you find it, impossible to understand what it means based solely off information shared by the DOE.
And that is barely the tip of the iceberg of what is confusing about this process. In fact, I don’t think you could make the process more confusing or stressful if you tried.
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NYC high school admissions season has begun. For those of you unfamiliar with this process, it’s a unique and “interesting” opportunity to get up close and personal with one of the most segregated school systems in the country - I’m talking about the public school system but of course, the way it interfaces with the private school system is part of what makes it so segregated.
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Staff, usually those least aligned with power and privilege whether because of their identity, position in the organization, or both, are often expected to carry a heavy workload without appropriate compensation or support, and they are expected to do so with little complaint or pushback either.
The assumption is that they will work miracles with little time, money or other resources. Those who raise concerns about unrealistic expectations or lack of resources risk being characterized as “not a team player” or “divisive” or a “troublemaker” or they are blamed for being poor performers. Meanwhile, those with more privilege, usually white men, are the first ones to get money and other resources thrown at them to fix crises that they are rarely held accountable for.
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Rage.
Rage for me is a sense of helplessness, of banging my head against a wall, of having arguments in my head with people who are not present.
Rage for me is a kind of insanity internalized from living in a deranged world.
Rage often comes from the kind of systemic gaslighting, the hypocrisy and audacity of trying to pretend that being anti-abortion is about being pro-life. That it is about babies, or some kind of religious or moral high ground, when clearly it is not.
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In 1705, a Virginia law was passed requiring masters to provide white male servants whose indentured time was up with 50 acres of land, 30 shillings,10 bushels of corn and a musket.
Whose land were they given? Why was a musket deemed a necessary part of the deal?
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I’ve had this blog post brewing in my head for a while, since before I read Ijeoma Oluo’s piece “We have the right to not be annoyed” where this passage hit home:
Y’all (the white people out of pocket in my comments and DMs) keep thinking that this is all for you.
The books, the talks, the work - all of it is for you. You are sure that I and others who write and speak on race wake up every day and think, “how can I help white people today?” I’m not being facetious. You really do view us, in our anti-racist work and in our very existence, as “the help.”
Oooof, yeah this hit home.
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A friend shared some wisdom a coach had shared with her once - some wounds are not ours to heal.
This stuck with me because for the longest time, I thought ALL wounds were mine to heal.
I’ve become very conscious of how women of color, and especially Black women, are socialized to taken on everyone’s emotional burdens and healing except our own, when really the only wounds that are ours to heal are our own.
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