Facebook Publication Date: 10/31/2021 14:10

Lace on Race sez:

We cannot ask more of the people who look to us as leadership, sacred or secular, if we are not willing to provide the model and standard of behavior that we are exhorting others live out.

We simply cannot.

Full stop.

That this is even up for debate floors me.

I need to be clear here.

I am not at all speaking of perfection.

I think it’s good when people can see those in the public eye, again, either sacred or secular, are vulnerable, transparent, *and complete (no vaguebooking for their own protection, aggrandizement, and or cover)* with their foibles and mistakes, and can see what the steps to repair can look like, to see what self-accountability without either self-abasement or self-flagellation looks like, and likewise to see what accountability without deflection or minimization look like.

People need to see it happening.

In my younger days, both in my faith life and in my activism life, that dissonance almost made me leave both arenas.

And what I found all together too often was that people blamed the person with the very real problems with the systems, because, to be sure, this is not just an individual thing. It’s a systems thing.

The metrics that we insist upon using for what makes for efficacious programming, or for persons worth our collective esteem needs to be turned on its head.

I felt that a lot in these past 8 months or so.

I have had to deeply examine what success means.

And, what repair really looks like.

And what modeling a consistent ethos looks like.

It’s not what I was taught. It’s something completely new.

And then there’s the question of: do you talk about the modeling, or do you just plain live it out without fanfare?

These are the questions that I’m asking myself and that I’m also proposing to us as a community.

I cannot wait to hear your thoughts.

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