The centering of Whiteness, White experiences and White feelings is excruciatingly apparent in those books. Thinness is mentioned often throughout the pieces along with the tying of monetary hoarding to success. There’s absolutely no mention of race, sexual orientation, gender beyond the binary or life outside of marriage, motherhood, business and?

In my work on psychological safety, I constantly note the needed foundations for safe relationships: trust, honesty, respect and the prioritization of safety throughout. They are all intertwined and it is almost impossible to have one without the other. Yet we see these seemingly basic human needs being dismissed by people in positions of power daily.

This article on how the Holocaust is being weaponized to justify the suffering of others is a glaring example of what happens when we don’t acknowledge and heal from harm that’s been caused to us and our communities. Similar to the way Black communities globally have had our healing excruciatingly prolonged because of re-written history that refuses any true acknowledgement of the atrocities our ancestors experienced or that we continue to experience. In my piece I Want a White History Month, I write about this large gaping hole left in White people that they attempt to fill with appropriation, deceit and more recently the support of genocide. All these uncared for wounds are bound to be internalized or spread to others.

Netflix’s recommendations along with animated shows from my childhood are products of “the Two White Girl Rule” which itself is a product of White Supremacy. It creates imaginary scarcity and pits people who are not White against each other for these usually stereotype-filled roles that often refuse to allow people to exist outside of several binaries. It also almost always doubles down on the big ass racial umbrellas, never giving any depth to the culture, values or traditions of girls featured that are not White because what else is there to know about them other than their skin color and/or eye shape?

Without space for White people to do what they need to do, we are constantly expected to hold this space and to tolerate their stunted emotional maturity around their history. I want and they need a White History Month.

It’s literally titled How to deal with remote work microaggressions but goes on and on about “allyship”. It basically just lists all the microaggressions they can think of for various communities and drops BIPOC as many times as possible. Who are y’all talking to? Lola Bakare (She/Her) shared similar feelings after receiving an email entitled “Want to Be an Ally to Black Women? from Lean In. Lola shared that “another great way to be an ally is to acknowledge your Black subscribers exist.” Both examples credit the writing to the brand and not a specific writer or group of writers. If your target audience is cis White people, you should say that.

Last year I was a guest on a podcast focused on racial ambiguity, Our True Colors. I shared that “ambiguity only exists when specificity isn’t present and assumptions are prioritized in exchanges.”

In real life people are proud of where they’re from and who they are. In real life people poke ambiguity with a “stick” often. People, White people, are always asking “where are you really from?”

This leads to one of the top questions around Bonnie being about her ethnicity.

The artist, Nadia Snopek, is White and likely did not consult a single Black person before publishing. In the originally mentioned conversation, Ku’ulani Keohokalole (She/Her/‘Oia), shared something I’ll never forget. She shared that “When people say they ‘don’t care if people are blue, purple, or green’, I tell them there are no blue, purple, or green people. People don’t come in those colors, so what are you really saying?”

No one knows for sure how or where Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) originated but the origin of Women of Color (WOC) has been described by Loretta Ross, cofounder and national coordinator of SisterSong -Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. It was originally used to establish solidarity and a deep connection amongst women from different cultural and racial backgrounds. People of Color (POC) finds its roots from “groups like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Brown Berets came together in solidarity as people of color, which was a new instantiation of the idea of people having color.” These terms have have since their origin been carelessly turned into acronyms and used in every fashion imaginable under capitalism.

This thinking stems from the frequent use of the Body Mass Index (BMI). The same system used by the military. Heather Irobunda, MD, FACOG (She/Her) and Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. (She/Her) speak frequently on how this system is outdated, rooted in White supremacy and not an indicator of health or wellness.

They created a video describing the history of the system and how it still causes harm til this day. This video not only promotes self-advocacy in all spaces but also solidifies the fact that….. Fatphobia is Anti-Blackness.

The next time someone says PTSD and your brain automatically pulls up a cis White man who is also a combat veteran , challenge it to think of anyone else. Challenge it to think of a trans person who has been disowned by their family for transitioning or a Black person who just had to watch another Black person be murdered. Think about who is defining trauma and why they are defining it this way.