Identity, Power, and Action: Resilience in the Community
Cross-Racial Empathy Talk
In the fall of 2022, I gave a talk at an all-faculty meeting, sharing my experiences so far at NMH as a person of color, and urging the predominantly middle-upper class faculty to do better.
Our theme for the year is empathy, which has a working definition of "finding a feeling within oneself that someone else is feeling, and connecting with them through that feeling". I raised the following question: if every time a white person apologizes to a person of color, they operate under the assumption that "as a white person, I do not and will never understand what you are going through", a script that we hear all too often, then, it seems that cross-racial empathy is by definition impossible.
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You can read the script to my speech below.
Other DEI work I'm involved with on campus include the faculty voice committee, where we work on creating and highlighting representation for faculty on campus such that we can support the institution to make more informed decisions.
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Outside of that, I try to be a constructive destructor on a daily basis in all settings. As someone once told me, you are not doing antiracism right until you are ticking off white folks everyday. My work is built on the foundation of the work of many others. My thinking is influenced by all those who came before me. I will recommend a few books and helpful resources from the last two years below that have significantly altered and shaped the lens of which I view the world today and my operating principles when it comes to doing DEI work.
