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talking to statues
what do you do when you get to the party and everyone's staring at you and also they want to take away people's rights?
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grafted ways of being
How do I perceive the world? My frame of reference is by default a colonial one. I often think and speak in English, which is a language not native to the land I live on. My parents and most of my family members are not white. We belong to many
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gentlemen's disagreements
Throughout his term, Barack Obama had a call for the activists agitating for change. He recalled what Franklin Roosevelt told his activists pushing for their own reforms. FDR said, “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” Then-President Obama met with members of the
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three tales of courage
Last week, I said that our success in a system often means it’s tilted towards us. What I mean to say is that the systems that we live, work, and play in are arbitrary. There’s no reason they have to stay the way they are. For centuries, these
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what is a room to a person uninvited?
This post is narrated! Listen below… I hate being othered! My brown skin is often the first thing a person notices about me. I was once in the office (when people worked in offices together) talking to a friend (when people did that too). A coworker we both knew approached
working
affinity groups and caucuses
Many of us spend our entire lives simmering in white dominant culture. These days, so many people are working to change the balance of society. We want a just, inclusive society. No group of people should hold the choking dominance that white supremacy has over all of us. This work
working
the andon cord
I heard a story years ago about a strange partnership struck between Toyota and GM. In 1984 they came together to create a factory called NUMMI. This factory ran under the Toyota Production System, whose principles by now are world-famous as Lean Six Sigma. (Emphasis here that I’m suspicious
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the unbearable being of whiteness
In an earlier post, I shared a resource I use by Tema Okun. People suspicious of phrases like “white supremacist culture” will dismiss it immediately. But even for someone who believes we live in an anti-Black racist society, I struggle with it sometimes. “Really??” I ask myself. “Being on time
