The Email I Wrote/The Email I Wish I wrote

 

As I talked about in our last class (thank you again for listening btw), I'm dealing with a conflict between myself and members of my organization's board of directors. To recap, an older white male board member took issue with my suggestion that future members of the board be actively anti-racist, and has since threatened to resign and withdraw his financial support. 

The webinar about abolitionist education was a well-timed resource for me while dealing with this conflict, as it affirmed the dynamics I am currently attempting to navigate. 

Values of equity and diversity have been specifically named as values of our organization- starting long before my time.  However, while my organization has been comfortable using the language of liberation justice and equity, it has been resistant to addressing the white supremacist culture within its operational structures. 

Examples of this include:

• Failing to create a program that is structurally responsive to the needs of our community because of a desire to conform to neoliberal measures of success. 
• Articulating that "career and college readiness" is our goal without acknowledging the racist and classist education structures that oppress the students we work with. This also includes defining success using a white, male, middle class lens. 
• Exploiting youth trauma and capitalizing on white savior mentality in fundraising narratives
• Using terms like "revolution" in our branding and fundraising copy without any consideration of abolition. Much like socio-emotional learning without anti-racism is "white supremacy with a hug", this is just white supremacy with an hipper font.  (My predecessors job title was Exe. Revolutionary which I felt was very inappropriate as a white woman working in Black and brown spaces.) 
• Not prioritizing board diversity and inclusion, or the anti-racist capacity building of white board members. 
• A sustainability and staffing plan that is exclusively reliant on the intellectual, physical and emotional labour of one woman, exploitative of her natural tendency toward empathy and perpetual imposter's syndrome,  as well as her need for uninterrupted health insurance and salary and the base level safety therein.   

So I've been working on this stuff for the past five years- at first, in my limited influence as a program manager, and now as the Executive Director.  Change is slow, hard work, but I thought we were getting there.  And now this thing with the board.  I am feeling my fight or flight response rising. 

There are two things at play, when I break it down. The most important is the content of the disagreement.  Yes, of course the board of a youth organization that provides programming to an almost exclusively BIPOC population should be anti-racist.  In 2020, and we've seen the good points made by the memes and tweets and the protest posters.  It is not enough to not be racist. We must be actively anti-racist.

I must have been extremely naive to make the assumption everyone on my board understood this.  

The second is the way the disagreement went down. The process.  I was demeaned in a professional space by a person who holds considerable social power, as well as professional power, over me.  This person used all the tools and tricks available to him to shame and silence me. He put words in my mouth. He embarrassed me and threatened me in front of a group of colleagues. He made something that wasn't at all about me and him, about me and him. 

Something I just realized as I'm writing this, which is clarifying for me is:  I was pushing on behalf of a community that I am not a member of, but who's voices I seek to amplify. He was pushing back on behalf of himself, and others like him. 

When processing this conflict with my friends in colleagues, a constant affirmation that was offered was "If you are not pissing off old white men, you aren't doing your job."   And that is 100% that's true.  And I know I have to stand my ground. 

But I have to do so in a way that that doesn't make things worse. Today, I was asked by board leadership to write an email offering an olive branch, inviting him to a restorative conversation. 

So I did. I while I was careful not to apologize or take on blame I didn't hold, I was still conciliatory. I used words like "saddened" "regret" and "unfortunate."  I thanked him for his long standing support of our organization, and expressed his value to the community. I spoke about misunderstandings and the different languages used in our differing worlds. I threw in some stuff about mutual respect and shared values. 

So far, no response. I'm not surprised. 

What I wish I had the courage to send was a checklist of the behaviors of white male fragility, and for each one, a detailed paragraphe about how he's ticked the box. I want to spam him with reading from this class, readings about toxic masculinity, readings about abolition and liberation. I want to scream. Smash my computer. Set it on fire.  

But then, my kids. And the work.  

And my salary. And my health insurance.