when you are a person that’s operating in a lot of fear with a lot of fear through a lot of fear particularly on a change that is forthcoming or looming and that fear knowingly or not is really rooted in loud ways inside of you and you are in community with people who have a similar fear and that fear is fueled by the messages you consume the social media posts you watch uh the television media and writing that you observe um and ingest then facts don’t matter I can’t think of really any occasion with any regularity work facts disrupt feelings and we are in an era and a generation at a time where we have all been taught and believed to be true that our feelings should rule the day and I would suggest that there is really no more dangerous of a premise than the idea that what you feel is the only thing that matters like it’s a super immature way to live your life um in general and yet the prevailing narrative of our country and this time is that that’s all that matters is how you feel and that should drive your yeses and noes which is super ridiculous so one of the reasons why I say that is because feelings and risk is a hard is hard for those to both coexist and yet healthy risk responsible risk um societally beneficial risk like the risk of racist co mingling the risk of racial equity the risk of Dei the risk of black and white people working in cohesion and with fidelity toward common ends the risk of organisations embracing their Dei work the risk of staying the course and that which is hard um so much of that just doesn’t feel good it don’t feel good and when you marry that I know this is a lot anyway stay with me when you marry this not feeling good in the context of racism racial equity in the context of Dei work especially with white males I mean males in general but this differently consequential with white men who have never on mass been asked to feel anything like nothing and so if they believe that the support of Dei or the support of racial equity or the support of black and brown people or the support of women um makes them feel uncomfortable feel indicted feel bad feel guilt and shame game over game over because we haven’t taught him how to feel especially feel any of those emotions they don’t know what to do with it and when you marry that discomfort with feeling with access to power structures politically economically and socially then you get restriction of rights you get restriction of communities who are ostensibly the architects of that feeling and this is precisely why in the rare Women collective the racial equity work that I do with white women that is now across the entire globe I mean we’ve got women thousands of women from all over the world who are part of rare radical action advancing racial equity this is for white women who wanna do this work and do it well we have to learn women advocates we have to learn how to lead in the space of racial equity what are the attributes what must be true of us to be ha to be impactful in this space what are the norming principles that we have to abide by which the normanclature that we should use or not what are the approaches and not what are the conversation starters right in terms of moving this work forward there is an art this is not about meeting anger with anger it’s not shaming people into any way of thinking and believing you can’t yell and fuss and condemn somebody out of their race rooted belief systems and ideology you have to be the light and darkness polyana as it is that’s what we teach and I’ll tell you what that’s what’s gonna get us there the best way to dismantle all of theseisms not just racism is to eliminate the boogeyman fear is at the root of all of it and we are a country that is super accustomed to responding to fear and pedaling it we all got skin in the game on that and some of us are contributing to it and we shouldn’t anyway join us with the Rare Woman Collective we’ve got a Town Hall Summit coming up September 17th and 18th we’d love to see you there link in Linktree