Eps 235: Solo – Educating ourselves to be better for people of color

Today I am solo.

I have a heavy heart this week, and a short show. I know I promised something on chores and allowance but you will have to wait a few weeks for that.

This week I want to highlight a few shows that I have done in the past and offer up some resources to keep learning and growing as humans – because that is what my work is about – Joyful Courage is about embracing opportunities to grow, even when it’s messy and wobbly.

As someone with an audience that is largely white women, I am going to step into THIS opportunity to share some thoughts and steps to be better. I am heartsick over here as I reach out to my friends who are also people of color, letting thme know that I see them and I stand with them. I am heartsick all the time when I think about the conversations that they need to have with their children that I will never need to have with mine, because of the color of their skin. I am heartsick when I consider the fear they hold every time their partner or child leaves the house.

Enough.

And white women… we have power. We have so much power. My intention here is to invite you in to your own learning about your power, about your implicit bias, about the conditioning that continues to lead us all through a system that is designed to lift only some of us.

And I get it, where do we start? What do we do? It is uncomfortable, we don’t want to say the wrong thing, we don’t want to add to the hurt and the micro aggressions with our unintentional ignorance. But doing nothing and continuing to say nothing is not ok.

Time to speak up. To stand up. To learn, to be corrected when we get it wrong and take it with humility. To be uncomfortable. Because guess what? The black people in this country have been uncomfortable since the beginning. They have been beaten down, silenced, abused, ridiculed, traumatized and more – since the beginning. We can be in the growing pain of learning to be better.