12 responses to “Remembering Lace Watkins”

1. 

   Julia Tayler

   March 26, 2023

   I still can’t believe that you are gone. It doesn’t seem real. Thank you for everything you helped me see that was right in front of me. Foundational beliefs that just weren’t right. Behavior seemed in white supremacy. The difference between nice and kind. I will remember you and your lessons forever. I really wish I had gotten to San Diego. To be able to sit and talk to you in person would have been amazing. Much love!

2. 

   Kelsi Watters

   March 25, 2023

   Thank you, Lace. Thank you for your wisdom, your love, your bravery, your authenticity, your deep compassion. You had something to say to the world, and you kept walking even through all the lumpy crossings. May the seeds you planted continue to blossom into the beautiful, nourishing orange trees. Your legacy will live on. I hope you have found a place to rest your tired feet, to bask in the fragrance of the heavenly garden, where you will always be seen and loved. I pray you are in the arms of God and Bobbye Jean, and that they are both saying, “Well done, my good and faithful daughter, well done.”

3. 

   Debbie Kinsinger

   March 23, 2023

   Lace’s work in the world will continue to be expanded through the lives of all those who she mentored, taught and loved… people like me who she pushed toward insight and self recognition and encouraged to follow my passion with cautious reserve to be the best human I can be and inspire kindness and thoughtfulness in in others. I’m grateful to have walked in that uncomfortable liminal space long enough to lose the awkward and find the authentic in myself and within my new relationships. I’m very sad to learn of her passing. I am holding her and all her friends and family in the light.

4. 

   Becky

   March 23, 2023

   I met Lace back in 2000, and felt that she was a most exceptional person on the first meeting. It is rare to meet a person like that. She had a way of penetrating your soul without you being aware. There was a unique goodness in her. And so, she was a person to love in soul, spirit, and intelligence. Our paths were different, and I am so thankful she crossed into my path for our journey, sometimes together, sometimes divergent, but always with love and respect. I will remember her always, as my dear friend.

5. 

   david tran

   March 21, 2023

   From my giddy, hilarious, and poignant theological conversations with Lace, here’s some anti-racist wisdom I’ve learned from her:
   ——
   1️⃣ Be f*cking uncompromising when it comes to addressing white supremacy in the church and your spheres of influence.
   2️⃣ Make overt what is covert. Jesus reminds us to make hidden what is plain. White supremacy is addictive, it easily hides beneath the currents of our thinking, habits, expectations, and way of life. Speak plainly and openly, naming its displays in your daily life.
   3️⃣ Speaking and honoring truth is a holy, spiritual act, and we need to commit to it daily. There is nothing more powerful that disarms racism than speaking truth: This means creating ongoing spaces for BIPOC folks to freely share their experiences – yes, without the white gaze, without the tone policing, without the whatboutisms. This means learning history. This means believing and following the leadership of women and queer people of color. This means not sugar-coating the harms of Whiteness when calling White folx into deeper allyship.

6. 

   Christin

   March 6, 2023

   I found Lace and LoR through NPHH several years ago. Her voice, her insight, and her character shone through and continued to challenge me and inspire me as I became a part of the Board – and will continue to do so as I cherish her words and lessons even after her passing.

7. 

   Varda Mercurio

   March 6, 2023

   I think what bothers me the most is that Martin Luther King received all this adulation. We just went through Black History Month. People like Lace should be in the textbooks. Lace should be in the textbooks!

8. 

   Dani

   March 5, 2023

   It’s been almost a month now of mourning Lace, or struggling to believe she’s actually gone – but either way, a month of remembering and reflecting on Lace and my knowing and loving her.

   Lace and I are very, VERY, different people and while we absolutely disagreed plenty of times, she changed who I am and how I “do” relationships. I learned so much through my relationship with her about how to live with and love those who are very different from ourselves (I love order for example, and Lace was much more free spirited). How important it is not to hold up MY way as THE way. How to be more flexible than is comfortable. We butted heads and loved each other fiercely. She passed away less than two weeks after my resignation from the board of Lace on Race. My resignation was ENTIRELY personal in nature and not related to any fissure in our relationship. It was something in which Lace supported me wholeheartedly, while also grieving the loss of our day to day presence in each others lives. I couldn’t have asked for a better friend in the midst of a difficult decision process.

   When it comes to my own racial justice journey, I have other teachers and friends and folks who speak into my life, but Lace was the one who helped me work past a major hurdle I didn’t even know I had – which my partner calls plausible deniability. It’s white woman “good intentions” to such a deep point that we (work to) believe it ourselves. I don’t really know how to explain it better but Lace was the one who kept encouraging me to dig deep. To keep excavating when I felt sure there was nothing insidious there. To find the absolute harm and violence in my “othering” behavior that I endeavored to believe was all good and right and loving.

   Lace taught me so much about relationships and how to continually bring conflicts or situations back to the question of who do I want to be, and is my behavior congruent with that?

   I can’t really imagine where I might be now without her and find that many phrases or lessons from Lace on Race have worked their way into my day to day vocabulary.

   I love you Lace and have regrets that maybe I didn’t show you that as well as I could have – especially in recent months.

   You won’t ever be forgotten, and you were so very full to overflowing with energy that I’m sure pieces of you will be bouncing around in our lives for many, many years to come.

9. 

   Lee C.

   March 4, 2023

   Dear Lace,

   You were the most humble person that I have ever met, perhaps the most on our fragile planet. With every obstacle you encountered, you did not focus on yourself or your own feelings but how it impacted others. Thank you for devoting hundreds of hours weekly. Thank you for pioneering an approach that people will use for hundreds of years, if we make it that long! Thank you for being an example that Jesus would find inspiring. And thank you for always remaining optimistic and positive.

10. 

    Meghan Hanebutt

    March 4, 2023

    I think of Lace, her work, and her purpose at least once per day. Her gentle candor and North Star are both models for me in my life. I am grateful to have been a small part of her community and plan to honor her memory by continuing to walk, shoulder to shoulder with her and the Lace on Race community.

11. 

    Rebecca McClinton

    March 4, 2023

    I was sitting down for breakfast with a friend this morning, and we were talking about Lace’s death and the vast impact she’s had on my life the past 3 or so years since becoming a community walker at Lace on Race. My friend heartily agreed, ‘you’re a totally different person.’ She said the biggest shift she’s seen is confidence and openness. Leaning in…I definitely have Lace to credit with that.

    I was immediately drawn to Lace, being ‘straight, no chaser’ (as she reflected of herself in her last video). She helped me recognize there’s a courage and discomfort I have a responsibility to embrace. In how to show up and how to live out who I say I am. In how to investigate deep inside…to see how easily I can weaponize my own pain, or all too easily become silently complicit in harm. In how to mitigate harm in every moment of every day, at the grocery store, at work, as a parent and partner, on the streets and in legislative halls. She imbued this with intelligence, wisdom, elegance, insight, wit, and every ounce of herself all in, ‘morrow deep’ as she would say. She led, as the best leaders do, by their own example.

    I will forever be humbled and honored to have been mentored and taught by Lace. Her hesed-heart and integrity shone through all she did. I hope from her resting place she can continue to observe how she DID move the stone she worked so hard to, and how she forever changed so many through her love, wisdom, and presence. And as a woman who loved her Maker above all else, I imagine her being welcomed home with all haste and all joy.

12. 

    Laura Berwick

    March 3, 2023

    I had begun educating myself on racial justice and racial equity when I found the world I thought I lived in wasn’t how the world actually was. But I was really only working on my brain and my factual knowledge. Which is a good start.

    But when I found Lace on Race, I found the key to my effective next steps in Lace’s unique and revolutionary approach to cultivating not just a mind, but a heart and a gut attuned to the harm caused to people who look like her, by people who look like me. Her focus on relational ethics, insisting that I expand my ability to form and foster mature and caring relationships with people I know, as well as approach people I don’t with an ethos of kind candor, was so crucial. She helped me recognize my “slosh”, the overwhelm of emotion that hits when I’m confronted, agitated, defensive, and gave me tools to manage it. Her focus on following black women and practicing what I was learning out loud on line in a supportive community inculcated in me a value for relentless reliability and resilience. I learned so much from Lace about myself before she ever spoke specifically to me.

    Then she asked me to be on her admin staff. And as she faced some of her heaviest challenges as an online community leader, I stood beside her and navigated that with her, under her leadership. I hope I helped mitigate the harm caused to her, with my support.

    I am a better, less harmful white woman because of Lace. Without following her leadership, I might be more knowledgeable and better read than I was, but I would not only have probably not been much more than that, I might never have realized that I NEEDED to be more than that.

    And without knowing Lace, I would not feel little sparks of excitement when I see something about a snazzy lace-front wig. I would not grin in delight when I see a package of Chips Ahoy. The scent of roses, which she loved, would be just as floral, but much less evocative. There are so many little things now that make me think of her. Light things. Joyful things. She was more than my leader. She was my friend. She was more than my friend. She was my leader. I never felt like I lacked a purpose in life, but she gave me one, and my life is richer for it. I hope every day to honor her and what she taught me, for the rest of my life. I just wish she were still here to see me do it.