Facebook Publication Date: 43919.752083333
This goes for here too.
We call ourselves a community, and for about 400 or so of you at any given time, we are one.
But we are more like a community on the field of a coliseum, with 4000 spectators. This needs to change.
My next piece for Lace on Race will be the final installment of the ‘Notes from the Crucible’ series entitled ‘The Cure is Connection’. I really want this to sink in. Not just for the small percentage of you who have done the work faithfully with resilient reliability. But for those of you in the stands as well.
The community didn’t build those stands. The community was not created so the vast majority of you could just sit there eating Cracker Jack and watch the rest of us scrum on the field. But this is what too often happens. And that is white supremacy at work. Full stop.
If walking with intention is not something that you have any intention of doing, feel free to unlike and unfollow; in fact, I actively encourage you to so.
It is hard enough trying to write for 4000 lurkers; it is harder still to know that for 90 percent of you my words won’t land; they will slide off like the metaphorical fake cheese on your nachos as you watch from the stands of lurking that you built yourself.
Your being here without engagement is actively harmful to the community we are trying to create amidst the glare of your voyeuristic eyes.
For years now, we have tried, in softer ways, to get those in the stands to actually do more than pop peanuts and throw down the shells while the rest of us do the work of relational ethics and racial justice. You have slowed us down, and undermined our work. For those of you who cycle in and out, the same holds.
This community of walkers needs and deserves people who are putting in the same internal and external work that they are. On a personal level, I deserve that those of you who would enter my house honor me and the intent of this space.
Nowhere in the Guidelines will you find encouragement for lurking. Nowhere will you find cover for lack of engagement.
If this is something you cannot or will not do, very quietly, find another home.
Stop peering into the windows of this one.
We have work to do, and steps to trod.
Keep walking.
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