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We're going around the world again this month, with multiple pieces from Global South perspectives. This month's edition looks at racism, in built biases and expectations, how to heal and not just survive, and much more. Read on...
1. We Cannot Keep Calling Survival Leadership by Latrice Torres
As Latrice points out here, we deserve much more than continued resilience or mere survival:
“a day off does not fix a life that has no room for recovery. A bubble bath does not undo chronic emotional labor. A vacation cannot heal the damage of being unsupported...for years.”
This one hit home because it details saviourism on a global scale:
“The hidden cost of excellence in development is that countries and NPOs must learn to behave like the perfect scholarship recipient - obedient, grateful, polished, high-performing, emotionally contained, always proving they deserve support. This has to change”
3. The Hierarchy of Inclusion by Romain Muhammad
This author is making the often unseen, seen, and it's one of the many reasons why nobody can guarantee safe spaces:
“The conventional understanding of bias in institutional settings focuses on its presence in hostile or indifferent environments. What is less theorised, and far more consequential in practice, is how bias operates in spaces that have already undergone what we might call an equity inoculation: the adoption of diversity statements, protected characteristics frameworks, unconscious bias training, and the broader grammar of inclusion as institutional identity.”
4. Racism Isn’t Going Away. So How Does Black America Heal? by Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier
This report on a conversation with “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome” author Joy DeGruy and others looks to the future, and shares insights about what's already happening in terms of healing:
“Last December, Word In Black’s Insights & Research Division surveyed nearly 700 Black adults nationwide about racial healing. One finding stood out: nearly 95% of respondents said that the concept — repairing the damage that anti-Black systems do to individuals and communities, transforming societal structures in the process — is important.”