Hey y’all!

My friend, April Baskin, was on a panel in San Francisco recently and was talking about white supremacy, anti-semitism, and anti-Black racism. April mentioned a quote from an artist and organizer, Ricardo Levins Morales: “The work we do should be slow, deep, and irreversible.”

Slow, deep, and irreversible.

This phrase has not left my brain or my spirit. When April said these words, I felt something shift deep within me. What would it look and feel like to do work that is slow, deep, and irreversible? This type of work directly goes against the demands and nature of white supremacy.

White dominant culture wants quick wins no matter who or what is sacrificed even if that’s language, culture, tradition, community, or our colleague sitting in the cubicle beside us.

The US Western culture of whiteness favors and rewards a false sense of urgency, optical allyship, and opportunistic campaigns with communities of color whether that’s a Pepsi commercial commodifying activism or large corporations offering discounts by co-opting the momentum around pressing social justice movements. Our institutions would rather make Juneteenth a holiday instead of having real conversations about power and anti-Black violence within their own walls.

Our institutions and organizations are microcosms of the larger systems of domination and harm we find ourselves in.

We work hard every day to build an equitable world, but it feels like for every one step forward, we have to take three steps back. This kind of labor is insidious and endless because we let it go unchecked. Then, the work of creating concrete, material change becomes demoralizing and exhausting. We become numb, desensitized, and stop challenging the status quo. We ignore our physical, emotional, spiritual, and social needs. Simply put, we lose our humanity.

There will always be diminishing returns without collective care and joy. Movement and justice work cannot be done in isolation.

Now, what does irreversible change look like?

It looks like us creating a future where work doesn’t equate to harm, extraction, and burnout but rather the work of our institutions and our movements are built upon a foundation of collective care and dignity. To do work that is slow, deep, and irreversible, we must nourish and protect our individual and collective empathy, humanity, and imagination.

We get free together!

PS: I wanted to share with y’all that I plan to devote time this summer digging deeper into what irreversible change could look like. I am bringing back my self-paced, on-demand writing program, Sister Summer. Registration opens in May, and we write in June! Stay tuned for details!