Should 2021 be forgotten? The answer is a resounding, “No … AND …” for me. As we enter 2022, our invitation is for you to consider the following: What am I remembering? What am I unlearning? What am I redefining? These questions allow for the honoring, learning, and contemplation of the past while also facilitating intentionality and imagination around the future. Sankofa.
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Yesterday, we learned that bell hooks, scholar, writer, poet, a woman I credit as one of my own intellectual foremothers, became an ancestor. I have always been drawn to her method of boldly acknowledging the influence of culture, system, and structural oppression while also lovingly affirming our individual agency, collective power and choice as we strive to “survive whole.” As we wrap up the year and continue our conversation on what it means to center abundance, it feels timely to offer a few rememberings by bell hooks that emphasize the role of and power in community as we work toward a more just and loving world.
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In my experience, “meeting people where they are” has long referred to and been limited to inquiry into the intellect, the mind. Likewise, “meeting people where they are,” as well-intentioned as it may be, in practice, has more often been applied with a “silent” white. In other words, “meeting [white] people where they are.” It is worth calling attention to the ways in which even our work – diversity, equity, inclusion, justice work – must be held accountable to its deference to the white gaze.
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We are experiencing a cultural shift, y’all. Simone Biles. Naomi Osaka. Dr. Nikole Hannah-Jones. Mental health. Black Women. Boundaries. In the mainstream, we are experiencing Black women unapologetically affirm their divine right to refusal and rest, and gift us with possibility for what it means to reorient our relationship with “work.” It is all fun and solidarity, retweets and hashtags, until someone we know models radical self-love and asserts their boundaries, and we experience inconvenience as a result. It hits different…and reconciling that, in my experience, is the work—that intrapersonal reckoning.
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Operationalizing justice absolutely requires pragmatism, practicality… AND it requires we reimagine. Operationalizing justice requires we re-evaluate what we deem “realistic” and practical. Operationalizing justice requires we push our mental model that focuses on “why things cannot happen” to an orientation that engages head, heart and hand to answer the question of “How could we make this be?” How can we be responsive to immediate needs while prioritizing strategic imperatives?
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