Breakthrough Thinking
During the pandemic lockdown, members of my church community were invited to offer video reflections about what LGBTQ+ Pride Month means to us. I recently stumbled upon mine again, and I offer this reflection in the spirit of the growth and healing it was intended to reflect.
While I’m a little late to post this on International Women’s Day, my intention in posting this at all is to highlight the challenge that Black girls have in school before they even grow into women where they’ll encounter similar challenges in the workplace. And while we can’t altogether stop our cognitive biases, we can take steps to mitigate them by learning about them, slowing down our decision-making processes when we’re in situations when we know we could be prone to bias, and collaborating with people who are different from us.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. In this post, I discuss some of the implications of my father’s bipolar disorder on his career. I also contrast my father’s experience with my own.
While it’s true that Martin Luther King, Jr. stated that the white moderate of his time was “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” with which I do not relate in the big, I can definitely see myself in his accusation at the level of the day-to-day. In a corporate setting, have you held your tongue as you’ve been the recipient or observer of a micro-aggression? I have, and I regret not having spoken up while it was happening.
With the United States so divided while in the throes of a pivotal election and being in the wake of a summer in which our country was grappling with its foundation deeply rooted in structural racism, the passage assigned for this past Sunday from the Revised Common Lectionary about the interwoven instructions to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves couldn’t be timelier.
As the seasons have changed, so too has the news cycle. Now, news of the U.S. general election, spikes in the pandemic and the SCOTUS nominee confirmation hearings crowd out space for continued dialogue about systemic racism and unconscious bias. However, we cannot consider the former without reckoning with the latter at both macro- and micro- levels.
