These offerings and musings are currently taking place on the ancestral, traditional, and stolen lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta First Nations. These lands known as Miami.
These are stolen lands built by stolen people
"Are You the Leader for this Moment?"
Throughout the pandemic, work as we know it has been undergoing a major makeover. It started with The Great Resignation. The Great Resignation was mainly made up of front-line essential workers and low wage workers who concluded that the work they were doing was no longer worth being exposed to premature death. Some people quit their jobs due to suppressed wages and simply changed their minds and wanted to do something different. Secondly, we had what Kara Swisher, a tech journalist and co-host of the podcast Pivot calls The Great Reassessment, which speaks to how people are reassessing how they work and their relationship to work. For example, many people who never worked from home realized that they liked it and wanted to be able to work remotely permanently or have a hybrid model in which they spend some time at the office but not a significant amount of time. And now, we have entered the phase called Quiet Quitting, a term that many white-collar workers are truly embodying. Quiet quitting is the phenomenon in which mainly white-collar workers are no longer leaning in and overextending themselves at work people are making the deliberate choice to care less.
Last year one of the most popular essays I wrote and heard the most about was the essay in which I talked about work not being your sociopolitical home. This essay came out of the many restorative justice circles I held for many non-profits last year. As a facilitator, I noticed that people were bringing too much of their desires and radical freedom dreams into the workspace, causing them great heartbreak when they realized that their job could not satisfy and fill such a sacred space. I witness people expecting more justice from their jobs with a 501(c)(3) tax designation than their government. I still stand behind this thesis. Many people whose opinion I care too much about weren't feeling my analysis. Although it pains me, I still stand behind my initial thoughts.
The essay centered on non-profit workers whose sociopolitical ideologies are precisely the thing that led them to work at a non-profit. I think you can do good principled work in line with your values at work and still not need to make or require that your job be your sociopolitical home. You can and should be able to grow your consciousness at work, do work that you are proud of, but your job that you work and that exists because under capitalism, everyone must work and because non-profit jobs exist because there is no justice in the world, I think it's dangerous to link your sociopolitical fate to a non-profit job. Non-profits cannot bring about justice; they can only ameliorate and help manage injustices. Non-profits are not equipped to solve major issues, but do you know what the institution is equipped? The government.
So many of us are not wealthy, which means we must work somewhere, and although non-profits and for profits with a social good mission will not liberate us, I do believe people should work at a place and report to people who do not abuse them and at very least are serious about operationalizing their mission and values.
When people quit, they are usually breaking up with their direct supervisor, CEO, or Executive Director. This means these are the people who need to be doing the most self-reflection, taking the most responsibility and accountability. We are rapidly approaching the three-year mark since we have been living inside a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed our planet and us as a species. In the United States alone, we are dangerously close to hitting a million deaths from COVID. I talk to leaders all the time, and I am astonished by how many leaders have refused to be transformed by this moment and let it reshape them. Many leaders across races, ethnicity, cities, and ages are still using a leadership model that only works in a pre-COVID world.
The world we had before COVID is never coming back. How people think about work and define work will never be the same, yet many leaders struggle to redefine their leadership to meet this unique moment and time, causing unnecessary suffering for themselves and the people who report to them.
If you are a CEO, ED, or middle manager, when was the last time you assessed your leadership and fitness? In other words, when was the last time you asked yourself, "am I the leader for this moment?" "Do I have what it takes to lead a team during a time of great uncertainty and during a period when work is being redefined in real-time?"
Below are some questions I think leaders and middle managers should be asking themselves as it concerns work:
How are you managing COVID fatigue - COVID fatigue is real and has real material consequences. How are you helping the people and teams you lead to account for COVID fatigue? How have you recalibrated your metrics of success to account for COVID? It's not enough to have a COVID safety protocol that only accounts for physical space and people's bodies. What about the psychological and emotional needs of your team? What are the COVID learnings that will guide your team? How are you helping your team gain back the many skills that COVID has robbed them of? COVID has deskilled us. Therefore, how will you help your team regain the skills that will allow them to be emergent and work within a hybrid model?
Checking your empathy gas tank - Is your empathy tank full or empty? It's dangerous to have too much empathy, and so is not having enough empathy. The leaders who will lead successful teams and organizations understand that they must bring the same softness, curiosity, generosity, and a clearly defined love ethic to their leadership as they would into their romantic relationships, parenting, and platonic realm. This does not mean we are attempting to get into inappropriate entanglements or enmeshment with the people who report to us. The intervention here is how do we attempt to truly see the humanity of our colleagues and attend to their humanity with precision and care. Any effective parent will tell you if you have more than one child, you cannot parent them all the same. Therefore, how can you have a one-size fits all model of management? Leadership is not only found in vision it's also found in the details.
Psychological safety - Is it safe to think and experiment in your organization? How are you fostering a culture where people can be creative, think outside the box, fail quickly, and pivot? Leading a team during a global pandemic requires more emergence and a commitment to being flexible and adaptable. Check out the book Emergent Strategy for more on this topic. How are you fostering psychological safety that will lead to more emergence in your teams?
Redefining work - Work on a societal level is being remixed and redefined. How are you inviting your teams to redefine their work plans and schedules? Is it safe for people to express a new vision of work for themselves, which involves only doing the job they were hired to do? Are you open to adopting a generous work from home policy/? 35-hour workweek? Unionization? What needs to change at work to keep your most loyal and hardworking employee happy, and what conditions need to be created to call in more talented team members? Leaders who refuse to break with the model and ethos of work that they inherited from Boomers will not survive in this new era. Work as we know it has changed. Have you?
Is your leadership infused with an anti-racist feminist ethic?- What sociopolitical ideas undergird your leadership? After the racial reckoning of 2020, does your leadership thinking, strategy, and behavior rooted in an anti-racist feminist ethic? We cannot redefine work without looking at power and how domination and oppression shape how people enact power at work. I believe that only through an anti-racist feminist ethic can we seek to build a less harmful and violent workplace. Under capitalism, a workplace will never be unproblematic. With that said, it does not mean an organization must be a flat power structure. I don't believe that hierarchical leadership is always bad. I do not think everything should be a meeting or put up to a vote. It's okay to designate a leader to handle things and report back to the group, but ethical oversight must be in place. Each leader should be engaged in the principled struggle when defining how anti-racism and feminism will shape the culture of work. An anti-racist feminist ethic is something that all organizations should deeply consider practicing, no matter their racial makeup.
Leaders must be more clear, compassionate, and forgiving during this epoch. Workers are undergoing a major identity shift and political awakening that is informing their new work demands. Being a leader is not easy, and it is often lonely. If you are too angry, burned out, and cynical to surrender to the transformational energy of this moment, then step down from leadership. If what millennials and Gen-Z bring to work culture offends you RESIGN boo. There is no shame in leaving a CEO or Executive Director position and going back to a less stressful position with less power. Leaders who refuse to adapt will be pushed out by their staff or board. People want more from work. I implore us all to get curious and listen to what we are being told.
VIEWINGS AND READINGS:
west elm caleb and the feminist panoptican - “here’s a reflection question: imagine the person in this world that hates you the most. maybe it’s someone from high school, a boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, a friend you hurt when you were at your lowest — if they had a platform of millions to tell their version of the worst thing you’ve ever done in the least flattering light possible, who would you be to the internet? what would you now deserve?”
The Pandemic Tried To Break Me, but I Know My Black Disabled Life is Worthy - “If I learned anything about myself during these unprecedented times, it’s that self-love is an ongoing, nonlinear practice. I’m never going to reach a point at which self-love simply exists, especially when my personhood is held up against racial, mental, bodily, and desirability standards I will scarcely ever be able to meet. But I no longer feel guilt about what I am not. Instead, I choose to accept and celebrate what I am, however fragile that acceptance might be. For Black disabled people, self-love is not simply an aesthetic or a trend but a fundamental lifeline we tap into through unapologetic advocacy work and collective support and remembering. As our ancestors have taught us, we are all we have.”
iWTNS.com - iWTNS connects drivers with live legal representation during an encounter with law enforcement after being pulled over in a traffic stop.
Africans in Ukraine: Stories of War, Anti-Blackness and White Supremacy - “In The Devil and the Good Lord, Jean-Paul Sartre said “When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.” Ukraine is fully within their rights to protect their sovereignty from Putin’s invasion, and the global community is welcome to stand beside them. The failure to not only embrace the Black diaspora within Ukraine, but to silence them in service of warfare as they fight to survive, reflects an astonishing level of cruelty in a time when every moment matters. No matter how many iterations of ‘racial reckonings’ we contend with, Blackness is continuously assessed on a subhuman level, denied the basic dignities afforded to the ruling class. Russian information doesn’t need to foment that simple truth; white supremacy perpetuates it on its own accord.”
Tennis Does Not Want Naomi Osaka Around - “There’s no other sport on Earth that actively demeans their stars as tennis does. Ironically enough, between the dominance of the Williams sisters and Osaka’s transcendence, tennis is the only global sport that’s been ruled by Black women for the last three decades and counting. The irony is even more infuriating when you realize what happened to Osaka was just days after International Women’s Day, which takes place during Women’s History Month, and she was heckled by… a woman.”
Race, Anti-Blackness, and the Cherokee Nation: A Reading List - “In the past week in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we’ve watched as cities, towns, and villages have risen up, marched against police brutality, and demanded that Black Lives Matter. If the Instagram stories and twitter threads are any indication, many are waking up to issues of racism and inequality for the first time, and it’s simultaneously frustrating and beautiful to watch. While many white folks have a lot of learning and un-learning ahead, we in Indian country do as well, especially in my own tribe.
We in the Cherokee Nation have work to do.”
Citing Indigenous Scholars and Knowledge Keepers - “For decades, Indigenous scholars have called for better ways of acknowledging Indigenous voices in academia. Many of our structures within the academic world today are rooted in Eurocentric systems that have always placed a higher value on Western knowledge rather than Indigenous oral traditions and ways of knowing. Citation is undoubtedly one of these structures.”
LISTENING:
FANTI 110. Fatphobic (ft. Amber J. Philips & Da’Shaun L. Harrison- “This week, jh and Tre’vell invite filmmaker Amber J. Phillips, and author Da’Shaun L. Harrison (Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness) to the show for a conversation about fatphobia (read: jh’s fatphobia). Regular listeners may recall jh’s response to an email calling him out for expressing satisfaction that his beard hid his “double chin”. The critique was that “double chin” was code for fat, and that jh’s fatphobia was showing. Amber and Da’Shaun were both given permission to drag jh, so that he, and FANTI listeners, can confront their own fatphobia, which is Anti-Black as well. Strap in!”
Inner Hoe Uprisings- I found a new podcast to listen to. It’s all about sex, it’s raunchy, and I am kind of hear for it. It is hosted by four Black 20-somethings in NYC.
All My Relations: Black Native History with Dr. Tiya Miles -”Back in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and during the Black Lives Matter uprisings that followed, All My Relations started a journey to support the Black community and Afro Indigenous relatives through having conversations on police brutality, anti-blackness, Indian Country’s connection to chattel slavery, and Afro-Indigenous history. This first episode in the series features an interview with Harvard professor Tiya Miles. Professor Miles is a scholar, historian, and writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American and women’s histories. With Dr. Miles, we focus specifically on the history and structure of Black and Native interconnection. Through the lens of early Cherokee interactions with Black people, we talk about Black and Indigenous peoples first relationships that were shaped in a settler colonial landscape. We talk about how some southeastern Tribes like the Cherokee bent to colonial standards and acted in ways antithetical to Indigenous values by owning enslaved Africans, and how this legacy of pain and abuse has effects today for the descendants of those who were enslaved, and our communities as a whole. We touch on current conversations around the recognition of Freedmen Descendants by the Five Tribes.”
Movement Memos- Harsha Walia: “To Become Ungovernable Is Central” - Organizers Kelly Hayes and Harsha Walia talk about “how we remake the world.”
New Books Network - Myisha Cherry “The Case For Rage” - “According to a broad consensus among philosophers across the ages, anger is regrettable, counterproductive, and bad. It is something to be overcome or suppressed, something that involves an immoral drive for revenge or a naïve commitment to cosmic justice. Anger is said to involve a corruption of the person – it “eats away” at them, or plunges them into madness.
Maybe anger has been under-appreciated. Perhaps we have failed to make the right distinctions between different varieties of anger – thereby overlooking kinds that are productive and appropriate. In The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press 2021), Myisha Cherry argues that we need to give anger a chance. After identifying distinct forms of anger, she defends a kind of anger she calls Lordean Rage, which she argues is central to antiracist social progress.”
Intersectionality Matters with Kimberlie Crenshaw: Drag at the Intersection - “In this episode, Kimberlé is joined by Bob the Drag Queen for a conversation full of critique and celebration of all things drag. Having once existed at the margins of legality and social acceptability, drag has now moved into the mainstream with the popular success of shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race, Dragula and We’re Here. Even with this moment in the limelight, drag’s inherent subversiveness, fearlessness and resilience shine through, posing fundamental questions like: What is gender and how it is performed? How does race interact with the performance of gender? What are the transformative possibilities and the limitations of this as an art form? And ultimately, what can drag do to contend with and push back against social injustice?Through laughter and honest reflection, Kimberlé and Bob answer these questions and more as they explore drag's ability to be a tool for intersectional activism, their favorite figures in Black and queer history, what it was like being a child of the South, and the vital need to protect Black stories.”
Under The Influence : Where’s My Village - “It’s no secret that all of us are in the midst of a mental health crisis. And women, especially mothers, have been hit the hardest. But what is an entire generation of mothers to do when they live in a country where any kind of health care, especially mental health care, is largely inaccessible and unaffordable? A lot of moms turn to Instagram. Mental health creators have been around for a while, but should they be trusted as a source for psychological well being? Do these creators really help or just make people who are already broken more vulnerable? Maybe both can be true at once. This is part one of two episodes. Today we explore why we turn to social platforms for comfort in the first place and discover that looking for answers to our mental health and self care quandaries in the media isn’t exactly a new thing at all.”
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The Politics of Disposability: On Cancel Culture and Accountability ~ A Teach-in on April 26, 12 PM EST:
In collaboration with the Association for Size Diversity and Health, I will be doing a teach-in on how to become more ethical and not throw each other away. This will be a virtual class and offers a CEU credit. Here is the link to register.
"Women Authors Across Cultures: Where Are We Going 2022" ~ Panel on May 1st, 2 PM EST in the University of Miami Newman Alumni Center:
The world has been turned upside down by the pandemic, climate change, gender inequality, political upheavals, racial unrest, and even threats to democracy. So where do we go from here? Join us as four acclaimed women authors offer their unique visions for the future.
Patreon Shoutout: We want to give a special shoutout to our patrons who pledged this month!
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