Reflecting on how this week’s nearly unrestrained White supremacist insurrection is landing differently, more heavily and yet more familiarly on my friends and colleagues of color, and a memory flashes back to me: I’m in the back seat of the wood-paneled station wagon with my sister, maybe 10 years old. My father, Nurn, pulls the […]
It started officially here on April 28, 2016. Trump launched his presidential campaign in CA at the OC Fairgrounds, a mile from my house. We biked over to protest – but my voice is quiet and the crowd was loud, turning violent as the sun went down. There was another option, though, and we took […]
Angry and disgusted. Not so much at Trump himself for blatantly and undeniably attempting to force Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger to commit election fraud. Trump is nothing, has never been anything but a blustering bag empty of all except hate, selfishness, and cunning. No, the only thing that makes him more than pitiful, that […]
In the blur of stretched-out yet strangely compressed dayweekmonths that was 2020, one moment comes back to me now. Early March with the lockdown looming. I had stuffed my cart up and down seemingly every aisle of the grocery store except pet food, ending up in the back corner with the booze. As I hurriedly […]
My friends, especially those of you in philanthropy: as the clock ticks down on this chaotic year, I’ve been reflecting on whether there’s a New Year’s Resolution that could help guide me forward into 2021. And I was considering maybe something like, “I will do everything in my power to mobilize the philanthropic sector in […]
My dears, as much as I do sincerely wish you a merry Christmas, today I need to share a holiday memory that is twisting my heart with truth I didn’t see at the time. Forty-four years ago tonight was my very first Christmas, and it was a White Christmas indeed… but not because of snow, […]
“Here comes the lady,” I hear a voice say. I’ve just come through the gate into my beloved neighborhood park on my daily morning coffee walk, and the every-Sunday pickup basketball bunch is on the court. We always smile and wave — yes, smile, because I’m sipping on my travel mug of caffeine so I’m […]
Thanksgiving reflections on this morning’s coffee walk: 27 years ago, I was a very green college grad struggling in my first “real” job at a management consultancy in Silicon Valley. I just didn’t fit in with my ladder-climbing, MBA-worshipping peers and it was making me miserable since I hadn’t yet been able to imagine a […]
Today I stumbled upon this brilliant letter written in 1865 by Jourdan Anderson to his former enslaver, Colonel P.H. Anderson. Spoiler alert: Surprise surprise, the enslaver did not respond by paying back the wages of $11,680 owed to Mr. and Mrs. Anderson for the labor stolen from them. I just did the math, and with […]
We liberate before we unite. That’s how we do this. White folks, let’s wring our hands less about inclusion for the people who oppose our values, and work much more to include the people we supposedly value whose voices have always been suppressed. One ballot dropbox per county and we shrug and say “Texas went […]