This is a (only slightly edited) response to a community member on one of the more recent threads. I thought it deserved to be featured and not buried in a subthread. It’s important.

I know that we talk a lot about issues people twitch about and clench hard over; most importantly for these purposes, we talk a lot about money, and we talk a lot about ‘how the sausage is made’; how we administer and serve up Lace on Race.

And, crucially we talk about something that is almost never explored in other spaces: we talk about, both on an individual and on a collective level, we talk about your all’s relationship to and with me. This definitely includes, but in no way is limited to, the community’s response to Holly. 

All of the above is not a distraction or a deflection from the work we do here. To the contrary, it is much like the way the meat of fodder is so often to be found in the comments rather than in the original post or article or meme. 

We, in Feb/Mar were supposed to be taking a deep dive into both Terry Real and The Good Place, talking about applied relational and contractual ethics. But both of these (which we will indeed get into) took a definite back seat to what we were confronted with in real time, in real life. This was and has been an extended practicum in applied ethics and Full Respect Living. Hard lessons indeed. Many of you abandoned the car at full speed, along with Holly and Annie and Chris, when confronted with the actual instead of the theoretical; the applied rather than the hypothetical; the visceral versus the dissociated.

I will say more about this later, but I do want to take a moment to talk about attrition and churn, not least because I am struggling with writing the ask for early April, and this is, even more than usual, proven to be both a distraction and a big clench for me. 

*Every time I do an Ask I lose people.* Every single time. 

Every time I talk about money I lose people. Every time I talk about racism as an economic construct I lose people.

So the most hated task of the last three years for me has been having to do the ask, knowing that I am going to take some practical and emotional hits. And knowing that y’all know it too. 

The fact of the matter is that the average tenure of someone who comes into lace on race and sticks around and doesn’t lurk is between three to six months. 

*that includes people who call themselves my friends. Both online and in my offline life. I can count *exactly* 0 friends that I had before lace on race who have stayed with this process. Yes. I feel it hard. But they still want to stay friends with me; on their terms. 

Here is a truth: I am one of the few people you will encounter who can and will give you a recipe as to just how to relate to me and hold me well in a two person dyadic relationship. It’s right there in all my writings, especially in the guidelines and the pinned posts. None of my friends have read them in their entirety; certainly none of them have applied them in their dealings with me. If they had, either here, or on my personal page, or in my offline life, there would have been a vastly different outcome over these last two weeks. I feel that too. 

When I talk about that attrition it could be that they’re active and then they go back to lurking because we don’t lose eyeballs, people tend to think that they’ve done all that they need to do and then they kind of fade back into the background. 

But in any case, they stop being active.

And that is absolutely analogous to how white people live out whatever they feel is racial justice work.

We shouldn’t be surprised that that’s how it shakes out here.

But whether or I’m actually surprised, I still definitely feel it.

There is no way that anybody inculcated into 20 or 30 or 40 or 60 years of racism and white supremacy is going to have enough under their belt in the time it takes me to use up a lip gloss. 

It just doesn’t work that way. 

However. 

That *is* the way it plays out.

I think that other spaces have better retention rates than we have because they ask less, or more accurately, they ask differently than we do.

But yes. If I just started posting up memes and allowing people to make pithy/pissy one  statements and beat up on each other we would attract a lot more folks and they would stick around because people like the scrum. 

If that makes sense to you. 

We actively reject that. 

So what we are hoping for is out of 10,000 people a small cohort that sticks around, an even smaller cohort that does the work in The Bistro, and an incredibly small slice of people that do the deeper work that will be required of them in a chef’s table. 

And it makes the ask even that much more difficult, because we are keenly aware of the limitations I just touched upon.

Notice I didn’t talk about the relational.

Because the last two months have been incredibly too raw for me to speak of it in ways that are informational, entertaining, and instructional. 

I feel like I have no skin. 

So eventually we’ll talk about it more, but yeah this meme speaks to me and for me.

I’ll talk about it a little bit more later. 

I have to force myself to go back to the ask.

But let’s talk about this; confront this; eye-to-eye this, right now. No holds barred. 

I will lose a ton of you. Even before Julie and I present two different asks over the rest of this week (and it is worth exploring just how much bandwidth has had to go into two pre-Asks (this and the video from this weekend, and the two upcoming Asks) Why am I forced to do this?

But as I have said so often in these last few weeks, if I lose you over this I never really had you.

The rest of you, lurker or not, power user or not, confront and comment. I want to see no fewer than 100 comments, and 300 replies. 

This is the crux, folks. Don’t fall down. Do the work. 

Join us in the Bistro for discussion here.