Dear Community:
Welp.
Everything is fodder.
I invite you to hold on to the above maxim as we have a very tough and tender conversation, and I talk about my, and our, way forward after Holly’s engagement in these last few days, including in our inaugural Board post, which should have been a celebration, but turned into something quite different indeed.
I am still celebrating though; yes, for our forming as a legal entity, and for the women who shepherded it through alongside me. I am celebrating all that has happened in the last three years that has brought us here. I am celebrating being able to flesh out and live out convictions, theories, and an overall thesis I have been cultivating for the last 35 years since I first began my career in change work.
This celebration, my celebration, is muted however.
A lot has happened over the last 17 days. A worker abandoned her job, but still felt entitled to leadership. That did not happen, and we have all seen the fallout.
But allow me to tell you what has affected me the most.
Not Ms. Raines so much, though I am surprised at how far she has gone, and will no doubt continue to go.
No.
What I have been most affected by is the sheer number of you, almost 100% of you, both on my personal page with friends and followers, and here at Lace on Race.
On paper our losses are not much; we lost about 50 out of approx 10k across all platforms.
But that does not tell the whole story.
From my perspective, only about 5 people (outside my staff and leadership team) have stood up to challenge and confront. There has been equivocation, and justification, and attempts at neutrality.
There has been abject silence.
People have misinterpreted my own relative silence for cowering in a corner; for a tacit endorsement of Ms. Raines’ accusations. They are neither. What it has been is walking through a crucible of an intense threshing time.
This will be talked about in subsequent posts, but for right now, I have to face hard truths.
Most of you, both friends and followers on my personal page, as well as here in the community, have aligned yourselves with Ms. Raines.
We need to confront this squarely. Alignment with the actions of Ms. Raines is absolutely out of alignment with our North Star. It is out of alignment with our ethos of kind candor. It is out of alignment with our Five Tenets.
It is out of alignment with Hesed.
I cannot control any of your choices. But I do have control over and responsibility for my own.
We will talk about these next two concepts more, as we have these conversations about what all went down, but for now I want to briefly introduce them, because they are so very relevant here.
They are justification and proportionality.
They are actually somewhat self explanatory; still I will outline them here for ease of use.
Justification: Given the harm Ms. Raines said that she endured at my hand at the staff meeting of 1/24/21, would action directed toward me be justified?
Proportionality: If you come down on the side of yes, justification: have the actions taken by Ms. Raines been proportional?
We are in the thicket of applied relational ethics. Right here. I was planning on starting The Good Place series, and we will get there, but for now we have applied ethics right in our laps, steaming and fetid. And we will face it.
So, we will have a series of strong conversations on all platforms: on the Facebook Page (takeout window); the website; The Bistro, and in all of the Dining Rooms. I will be providing queries as prompts.
This will be hard work. Most of you will abandon it. So be it.
That is not all that much different than what has happened in the last six days.
It already feels like I lost 9,995 of you. I am already mourning you, even as I look ahead at those who will show up at the takeout window and then the Bistro in the days and years to come.
I hope it’s you. But it is ok if it is not. I cannot and will not live in fear of you–or of Holly–and I cannot and will not write to placate or pander to you, or to her.
If that means that I am feeding stew and good bread and orangeade to *literally* few enough people to sit around my actual kitchen table, so be it.
Three years ago, I had no idea that Lace on Race would be where it is. A year ago, I never thought we would have a funding source for which we are grateful, which we will steward well (that anyone thought that was and is something to be ashamed of or to hide, I simply cannot imagine. Ms. Raines herself knew we have to wait to accept the funds until we were a formal entity and could have a stand alone bank account so all best practices would be conformed with. Her depiction of it as subterfuge was unfortunate). While the funds are unrestricted, we have resolved to treat it as a true endowment, using whatever interest accrues and placing it in general fund, while resolving not to, as much as is absolutely possible, touch the principal. That is best practice. We are fortunate that a family has seen what we are doing and want to be in alignment with our Western Star, the long range health, viability, and longevity of the Lace on Race Center for Racial Equity.
And now, in these times, when I fully expect to lose the vast majority of you, it allows me to continue to write and speak and engage without fear.
We will talk more. There is so much that happened in the last few weeks. There are many lessons that are actually serving to supersede the theoretical of both relational ethics and attachment and trauma theory, in favor of the visceral actual. As well, the fun exercise of watching the Good Place will be pushed back so we can take a good look.
I expect to lose most of you. But then, I have already, in many ways already lost most of you.
Relationship is broken. But it can be repaired and restored. If you want it to.
This will be a reckoning for all of us. For lurkers. For those of you who follow me on my personal page who are currently rubbernecking.
For my friends and my friends of friends who have been, to a person, silent.
To the two inaugural Board members who resigned.
To my contributing writer who stepped away.
To Holly herself.
The relationships are dead. Long live the relationships.
Whatever relationships I have with any of you, individually and collectively are to be reexamined and reconfigured and reimagined.
It will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
But I will still be here, pruning and watering our shared tree.
I am the same woman I was three weeks ago. If you feel in alignment with Holly’s words, that I am indeed a charlatan, a liar, a fraud, who suffers under multiple personality disorders and an inflated sense of grandiosity even as she fleeces unsuspecting white people. (That’s how you call a thing a thing.)
If you are not in agreement with Holly’s distorted vision of me, then I am still the same zaftig, goofy, balding, committed, Hesed woman with a hankering for Chips Ahoy and perfect red lipstick, a heart for justice and praxis and a small but real gift for living it out and leading others.
If you still can somehow see me, and can cherish and walk with this woman–me, as she, as I cherishes and sees and walks with you, Welp.
Good.
Let’s keep walking.
Look for more in this series. I am pretty battered and discouraged, even in my resolve. But I am also strengthened and galvanized. (Three cheers for paradox and dissonance) We are going to examine every part of this. This *is* the work.
This *is* the work.
Comments welcome; in fact, Comments *REQUIRED*.
Absolutely no reacts.
Leave a Reply