Reflect before reaching out to your Black colleagues.
Get daily actions in your inbox. Subscribe Now ›
Happy Monday,
As social distancing restrictions ease across the U.S. more people are going back to work today than weeks prior. Many subscribers have asked how they can support Black colleagues and friends through this, so here's a collection of resources.
For some subscribers, there was an incorrect link in yesterday's email. The comprehensive list of resources to continue your anti-racism learning created by Tasha K can be found here.
If you haven't already, consider investing one-time or monthly for this community to grow. Please note that I'm not responding to emails asking for individual support or guidance at this time.
Nicole
TAKE ACTION
Reflect and respond to these questions below before you reach out to a Black friend / colleague:
What prompted me to reach out to this person?
What do I know about this person's emotional state right now?
What assumptions am I making?*
What burden am I putting on this friend I care about?*
Would I normally ask this question?*
Did I, say, wish this person a happy birthday?*
What would I do if they really aren’t okay?*
*These prompts are from Priska Neely's article Please Stop ‘Checking In to See If I’m Okay in The Cut.
GET EDUCATED
To understand a bit more about how thoughtful, empathetic check-ins (or none at all) are important right now, we're going to learn a bit about intent vs. impact, a concept critical to social justice work.
Intent vs. impact is a practice of decoupling our words and actions from how they impact other people. Oftentimes when addressing race, our words and actions don't land the way we intend, especially in times of deep emotional pain and trauma. And regardless of what we think we're doing, there's still harm in what we do. Or, as Rebekah aptly said in a blog post from January 2018, "if I punch you in the face on accident—you still got punched in the face".
Watch this 2:30m video by Diverse City by Dr. Cheryl Ingram on the importance of intent vs. impact in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Although we can never be fully responsible for how someone responds, we need to get critical on our impact can cause harm to people, especially when they are already in pain, and our intention is to acknowledge that pain without causing more.
The questions in today's action should help you do two things. The first is to get clear on what your actual intention is for reaching out. Are you actively willing and able to support your Black colleagues? Or are you instead looking alleviate some guilt that you're feeling with the weight of this moment.
The second is to understand what the impact of your outreach will be. Does your outreach add burden, or feel disingenuous? Are you in a position to actually support this person?
As long as we continue to engage with societal issues in which there is an agent with intentions and a patient receiving the consequences of those actions, we must all struggle to tease apart these issues of intent and impact. We must all focus on how actions that harm others -- regardless of intent -- need to be addressed, not pushed under the rug because the agent "didn't mean" to do anything wrong.
― Melanie Tannenbaum, “But I didn’t mean it!” Why it’s so hard to prioritize impacts over intents in Scientific America
Read these perspectives on how or if to reach out.
"So please, stop sending #love. Stop sending positive vibes. Stop sending your thoughts. Here are three suggestions on more immediately impactful things to offer instead."
Chad Sanders, I Don’t Need ‘Love’ Texts From My White Friends in the NYTimes
"So if this is the first time you’re asking me how I am, if this is the first time we’ve talked about my existence as a black person in America, you are definitely not the person I’m going to call if I’m not okay. And that is okay! It’s also the reason I don’t need you to check on me now."
Priska Neely, Please Stop ‘Checking In to See If I’m Okay in The Cut.
"If you're a white person, you want to try to understand how you might be feeling if you were in the kind of crisis that your black colleague or friend is in right now," she explains. "What would I want to hear?" Dr. Breland-Noble also points out that if they were really our friends — if they were really coworkers that we valued — we would always be coming from a space of trying to understand, whether in a crisis or not."
Elizabeth Gulio, Before You Check In On Your Black Friend, in Refinery29
"She wanted to make sure she was not creating an emotional burden for her friends, she said, but also that she was not missing an important moment to help if they needed anything. She settled on a simple rule: She would only check in with people of color she already interacted with on a daily basis before the protests, those who she felt would receive her message with a sense of relief and not as an additional burden."
Jose A. Del Real, White people are pouring out their hearts - and sending money - to their black friends in the Washington Post
"So what should I do?! Reach out or not?!"
You may start to notice through these emails that there's no easy answer. And that's because this work isn't easy. Reflect on a traumatic experience on your life and consider: how would you want your friends to help you? How about your coworker? A person you haven't talked to in four years? How would that change if you happen to be on holiday? If they reached out a day after it just happened? Or ten years, because something popped up in the news? What if your trauma didn't happen in a moment, but through a lifetime of consistent negative experiences?
Is there a simple response that fits all the nuances above?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Although we can never be fully responsible for how someone responds, we need to get critical on our impact can cause harm to people, especially when they are already in pain, and our intention is to acknowledge that pain without causing more.
Read perspectives from black people and others in different relationships
Don't look for one best way to answer this, because it doesn't exist
PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT
Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.
Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza