Getting to Work

Containers outside of Elmhurst Hospital filled with dead New Yorkers;

Food lines with thousands, in New York City on foot, elsewhere in lines of cars;

George Floyd’s public lynching and marching in the streets for George, Breonna, Ahmad, and so many more;

Medical professionals pushed to the limit beyond human capacity; and

They and other essential workers given a standing ovation by a grateful City.

Most of us couldn’t help but be moved by participating in or observing any one of those experiences. Perhaps the team at Equity in the Center may plot us on the Awake side of their Awake to Woke to Work continuum.

Folks tweeted; posted on the gram; sported a message T; donated to a food pantry; read Caste and talked to everyone they knew about their revelations; contributed to a political campaign; or even participated in a march for change, aka known as a protest, for the first time.

COVID-19 and its disparate health and economic impacts and the resulting social unrest have put historic race-based inequities back in the spotlight. My hope is that the pandemic has created an urgency for all of us to take action and have impact.

 If this impulse is to be more than an emotional response;

If donations are to do more than assuage our guilt or provide a tax write-off;

If a capital siege and an officer's death are to become more than another empty “this is not who we are” moment or example of unprecedented news for the media to recite endlessly;

If moved is to become movement, an inflection point rather than a moment, then we must be about the work.

Some Work: Not THE Work. There is so much to do to dismantle and build new, equitable policies, practices, and systems. Here are a few that we can do alone, by influencing our immediate circle, or more broadly with accomplices. 

• Check your circle. If everybody looks and thinks like you, it reinforces our own notions, confirms our self-perceived brilliance. An echo chamber does us no good in building strategies for change.
• Learn more about how our democracy works. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t understand we were one Secretary of State or elector away from an overthrow of the vote. We should have listened to Stacey Abrams when she warned us about Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp and his work to corrupt the electoral process. We all need civic education, not just young people.
• Vote and make sure everyone in your circle does as well. Volunteer to support the electoral process. Poll workers, registration drives, your own preferences aside. 
• Make our government at all levels accountable to people and not donors (back to voting again) and its work transparent. Withholding, coloring, spinning, or altering facts, aka lying, has become the norm as well as preaching one thing and doing another. It isn’t the campaign promise, it is the budget that is adopted. It isn’t the pronouncements of horror at seeing police misconduct on video, it is swift consequences applied.
• Redefine public safety to include public health, youth development, mental health, housing, and police accountability and fund accordingly. This policy would assuage both the right and the left. The right would see it as addressing the impossibly expansive nature of a police officers job or pro-police; and the left would see it as minimizing the occasions for community to have to engage with systems of historical oppression, not just an occasional bad actor. The historic investment in social services resulting from redirecting some (not defunding) police funding would make communities safer – a win for all.
• Fund public health. Yes, that is repetitive. Same idea, different context. Besides poor public leadership, we have lost so many in this country and are bungling the vaccine effort because we stopped investing in public health at all levels. You can’t build a fire department when the house is on fire.
• Fight for a minimum wage of at least $15 per hour. If frontline workers are essential, pay them as such and $15 an hour is indeed the minimum. 

Many are professing to be newly woke, especially our corporate leaders and government officials. Now everyone needs to work, including me. In this space I will share my efforts, successful and not over time and highlight the work of other accomplices in this shared mission to build a more just and equitable society. 

I'm kicking it off using my Outside Voice: to share beyond my circle to keep this conversation going beyond the news cycle and ever-shorter attention spans.  My Mom spent years telling me to use my inside voice. Sorry, Mom, time for me to speak out loud.