A white camel in Mongolia

We’ve been joking about this blog post all week. We’ve battered the topic back and forth over text message and probably laughed inappropriately during a meeting while reading a text or two.

At various times many of us, including people of color, fall into the trap of ‘showing up’ in unfavorable ways. Sometimes it is a function of operating in systems not designed to focus on people of color, personality differences, or sometimes people are just asses and they like to exert power.

Let’s define showing up.

Showing up means how to do you interact and function with others, especially people of color and communities not typically seen as holding power. Such as how do you act, behave, what energy do you project to others. Another way to think about it is how do others, especially non-dominate communities and people, interpret your behaviors and actions, especially as it relates to race. The crass way of defining ‘showing up’ is how others judge you when you leave the room. Admittedly, some of us are flawed beings who judge and gossip, sometimes we call it ‘debriefing,’ but sometimes it is just gossip.

We brainstormed a short list of ways people ‘show up’ in less than desirable ways around race. If we’re being honest we thought about the most annoying things people do in meetings. Like we say in many blog posts, if you know us don’t get all paranoid we aren’t writing specifically about you, you’re not that special. We see these behaviors in many people and we think it is time to call out the behaviors and remind people to stop.

You cannot distinguish equity from equality. You’ve managed to attend a few workshops and now have a few words to throw out as an attempt to demonstrate you are showing up for racial equity. Your practices continue to promote equality. It is easy to think just because people of color will benefit the strategy is equity, but you stopped thinking and got lazy. If you dig deeper and listen you may realize the strategy serves everyone the same and is really equality which could hurt pocs by diverting resources away from people of color.

You believe your personal stories demonstrate your commitment to ally ship. We’ve heard many of the stories before, something uncomfortable happens and you swoop in and save the day, you’ve suffered too and you can connect, you were unfairly burdened and now you’re down with the cause. You make no mention of how you centered a POC in this situation and instead focus it all on you and your efforts. It is important to connect and to build empathy, but save the story for later. When you talk about it in the middle of a meeting ask yourself are you building a connection or sucking up space and time to put the attention on you.

You expect praise for your racial equity efforts POC’s deal with racism every day. Again, like the personal stories you choose to share, don’t expect praise for interrupting whiteness. This is your work!

You want to talk about everything but race. If we had a dollar for every time we’re asked why we are not focusing on other forms of oppression. Yes, intersectionality is real AND racial equity means we are leading with race.

Your strategies promote access. When pushed to elaborate on your practice actions, you run off the exhaustive list of the languages you have translated your upcoming event flyers. Access isn’t equity, this deserves a separate blog post so we’ll tease you with that one line for now.

You cannot take people of color at our word you need to show your white centered research that has lots of fancy charts and graphs. When we tell you disparities are real, believe us! We gain nothing from reliving our racialized experiences. Do we ask you to justify your white privilege? We don’t tell you to show us the data on how white people are performing well, why do we have to prove the system is holding pocs back? Maybe we should tell you to produce the data on how white people are performing, nah you’d come up with some lame excuse and never do it so we’ll save ourselves from the privilege-oppression-woke-off.

You want to show us what you know NOT what you are learning. Your vocabulary is impressive, high five on acing the SAT, GMAT, LSAT, MSW, MPA, PhD, or whatever letter combo you earned.  This isn’t a quiz, talk to POC folks about what you are learning, don’t show off what you already know. We want to know about your stumbles and how you used those moments to learn and grow. Being open to learning and stretching to accept new thinking is necessary to deepening our thinking about race. Even for people who do this for a living, we still should learn about new concepts and ways of thinking about race. We don’t know every nuance of every community so we should learn from each other.

You respond or interrupt every time a person of color brings up race. Just because someone says something about race you don’t have to feel threatened or show you’re an ally. Not every comment is a personal attack or recognition of you.

In Hawaii we have a term “high maka maka,” the closest English translation is high maintenance with an air of arrogance. If you show up this way, expect us to ignore you or make some comment that cuts you back down. You don’t need to prove you’re better than others. Quit being bossy too. Bossiness is a form of power we can do without. People of color sometimes do this too, we try to one up each other, let’s stop. We all need to check our privilege, stop name dropping, stop trying to prove we belong, and just be cool. If you act all high maka maka the aunties and uncles will put you in your place real fast. The white way of saying this is beware of your privilege and power and humble yourself.

Along the lines of being “high maka maka,” don’t roll your eyes, use jargon, talk down, or think you’re special. You’re not special, you’re just like the rest of us. Being white, or if you are a poc with privilege, doesn’t mean you’re better than anyone else. If you act like you’re better or special go for it, but don’t expect to be invited back or get an invite to the picnic where we gossip and talk quietly about how badly people behave.

This was a long list of what not to do. If you need to know what to do, it isn’t hard, be real, be humble, learn, do your own work about learning about race, go find your more woke peeps where you can be humble and ask them to help you.

Posted by CiKeithia Pugh and Erin Okuno

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