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I wish I could start this morning with another happy tweet about science. Instead, a thread:
Start listening to Black people in your workplace!
Start listening to Black people in your workplace!
It’s become obvious to me that even allies are unwilling to acknowledge when they have done things based on race. When you, even gently, try to point it out, they immediately go into defense mode. “That wasn’t my intention”, “I would never”…but you just did.
What people fail to see are patterns, which are so obvious when you really look. Ok, you say that you only asked me if I had done my job because you wanted to be supportive, but did you ask anyone who was not Black or female if they had done their job?
You asked to look at my data to offer advice because you care, but did you interrogate anyone else’s data that was not Black and/or female, because you care?
You say you helped do some of my work in the background because you wanted to help me without burdening me. Did you offer this sort of ‘help’ to anyone else who was not Black or female or did you undermine just my role as a leader?
We are forced to give everyone else the benefit of the doubt, instead of being believed. I definitely do not know how to fix this, but I do ask that ‘allies’ stop worrying so much about being right and get comfortable with being wrong.
As we watch amazingly talented and prominent Black women, such as Timnit Gebru, lose their jobs in a fashion that would never happen to their white peers, our ‘allies’ watch in horror
Those same allies are the ones talking over us at meetings, asking for our ‘help’ but never acknowledging our work, and assuming we are less than competent to do our work without their help.
Look, no one is perfect, I’m just asking you to really listen and do some introspection. The same way I have to think over and over and over again about whether or not I really just experienced something because of my race or gender.
Because, despite what you may think, for me to ever suggest something was associated with race to an actual person, means I am just about certain, because I have replayed the situation in my head a thousand times.
Until I take up as much space in your head as you do in mine, we are not the same.
