A Public Acknowledgement
“Ya’ll are healing the hearts of people that have been yelling for years. For centuries. ”
We have a road to go. We have over 400 years of undoing to be done. We have years of engrained systemic racism to trudge up, dismantle, and replace. We have to step in our roles as leaders, healers, and change makers. We have lives cut short to avenge. But before doing all of this, we start at step one.
As in any relationship where trust is broken, there is no place to start but from the ground up again. We start with acknowledgement.
If this step is skipped before we move onto concrete action, we skip creating the foundation. We skip the uncomfortable moment where we hold our selves accountable for the wrong that we did. We skip the opportunity to validate the experience of the people we’ve hurt. This step is crucial for any situation in which an apology must be made because by articulating what you did wrong, you are showing the other person that you understand your fault and you understand what it takes to not make the same mistake. We cannot bypass this step.
Before I put out any work surrounding these subjects, this is what I feel I must say first. This is my public acknowledgement.
I am acknowledging and apologizing to my Black brothers and sisters for a lifetime of complacency. I am also apologizing to my own people and ancestors as well.
Why now and what makes this time different?
My complacency and inaction stemmed from a belief that I was too insignificant to create any real change. (Its important to note that this complacency and inaction helps to uphold racism.) Now, I understand that if everyone had the same belief and mentality, we wouldn’t have any progress at all. I now understand that, though I may not see any concrete results from my efforts right away, the power of my work can influence one person who may go onto influence 10 more people and those 10 people may go onto influence 100 more people. Backed with conviction, good intention, and knowledge, my work and actions create a ripple. Lastly, and to put it frankly, I only cared about myself and my immediate realm of life. I thought that if one person can learn how to hack the system, then everyone could. I thought that the solution was individual upleveling (spiritual bypassing), not understanding that a person can only individually up level so much before hitting the cap of the system, before looking back and seeing that the rest of your people are still down.
The mission is no longer to hack the system.
The mission is to create a whole new one.