I saw a photo of the Christopher Columbus statue in front of our state capitol on the ground, surrounded by state patrol guarding it.
I don’t know why that strikes me as funny but it seems so ridiculous - there’s nowhere to drag it, really, it’s all government buildings and hospitals surrounding the block. I’m assuming they were told to be there more from a safety perspective but the photo strikes my overtired funny bone.
In an interesting juxtaposition, Jacksonville may also end up hosting the Republican convention.
Also, NASCAR, friggin NASCAR!! banned the confederate flag!! I’m shocked and delighted!
I also heard bits of a serious conversation about police reforms on the news as I was driving around earlier. Some places are making efforts and serious conversations are happening. It might be a tiny smidgen of progress but it’s progress! I hope it keeps going!
Now to try to focus on work.
When I’m calling my rep and leaving a message, does it make a difference if I get put on a list to get a form response back or just say “no thanks I don’t want a response”?
You just won’t get a response back. The issues you mention and your stance are still counted and contribute to the constituent data.
The director of my agency issued a statement last week about George Floyd, and my Head Boss (the Governor, my boss many many levels up) of course did the same. Otherwise, my agency has been eerily silent.
My team is entirely white and horrifically silent about all of it (let’s talk covid but not about the state patrol plane flying too low or the police in our small town gassing our residents and posing with white supremacists). I didn’t have huge expectations, but the silence is deafening.
I’m not sure if it would be different if we attended in person? It’s hard to say. We have an agency-wide livestream today and it’s on the agenda to discuss deconstructing racism. It’s not necessary to tune in, but I hope most do.
Curious how that livestream went.
Our CEO sent out an email about BLM yesterday. The company started a Diversity and Inclusion task force probably about a month before Covid hit, and in a company meeting then, people criticized the fact that it was pretty white. He said they’ve since added more POC to it. Back then, I heard from a few POC that they had no idea that the task force even existed and didn’t know to sign up for it. So maybe some outreach happened?
There’s now also an internal “resource group” for African-American employees. To be honest, I don’t exactly know what a resource group is. We already had one for LGBT employees, but again, I’m not sure to what end.
And apparently we’re all going to get anti-bias training, and there is content being added to the books I am working on regarding “cultural awareness and diversity,” though I’m not certain what that entails as they’re still talking about what this should include. The books are almost due to the printer though so I fear it’ll be a slapped together thing. Better than doing nothing? I don’t know.
I see a lot of stuff about how companies need to show commitment to diversity in their hiring. We are on a hiring freeze, though, so I’m not sure how my company would accomplish that. We do have one C-suite executive who is Latinx and one VP who is African American; I’m not sure beyond that. The CEO said some stuff about recruiting more diverse populations but I feel like there’s no point if they can’t or won’t actually hire anyone right now. I guess they could collect resumes for whenever we come out of the freeze, if we do?
My tiny ass hometown had a BLM protest (link removed for privacy).
My tiny ass, rural, white af hometown in a region that has less than 5000 people spread over the three towns that make up the school district had a BLM protest.
I am flabbergasted, and also proud of them, and just… yes. This time is a little different from other times. I hope I hope I hope that people keep this momentum up.
<3 THINGS ARE CHANGING THINGS ARE CHANGING
I don’t think I posted this here yet - another small town in Florida also had a protest, more than 200 people showing up when the town itself has a population of 2,768 as of the last census.
My hometown has about 1,500 people (varies because there’s a college in the winter and a lot of summer people in the summer). ~140 people showed up for their protest.
Now we just need to start a campaign to rename an island with a very outdated name. If anyone knows who’s job that is let me know! I assume the trust who owns it plus the town have to agree?
The sad thing is that companies don’t need to focus on their hiring, they overwhelmingly need to focus on their promotion and retention. A focus on hiring a diverse group of people isn’t necessarily bad, but it is pretty useless if company culture drives them away after or if management continues to look overwhelmingly white and cis male.
It went really, really well! There was an address made by leadership of both the Black led employee resource group (I don’t remember what their acronym name stands for) and the Multi-Ethnic resource group, accompanied by a 20 minutes TED Talk on dismantling racism (by a speaker who was NOT white) and an invitation to open, scheduled discussions about combatting racism in the workplace.
My team may be silent, but my agency isn’t and nor am I.
I hope that your employee resource groups are similar to those in my agency. They offer a feeling of community and connectedness by being in a room (or on a call) of your identity peers, where you can discuss and collaborate ways of making your workplace better, and share information on other resources to help you individually.
Agreed, but if none are hired in the first place then there’s no one to promote or retain.
That sounds helpful. I hope our groups turn out like this.
Glad your meeting was productive. Apparently in the near future we’re having an African-American author speak about their experiences as a black CEO and about corporate social responsibility around race issues.Should be interesting.
Protested today with friend and her sister the city councillor! They did a decent job with physical distancing and the police showed up to put cones in the road and did literally nothing else. The city council voted to kick the can down the road on a pro BLM resolution on (bs) procedural grounds, so now they have hundreds of people calling and yelling at them to defund the police 
Next up: rally at the city council meeting Monday night!
Here’s a way to donate to a bunch of Black Trans groups all at once:
We are having a special meeting of my work’s diversity and inclusion group tomorrow to come up with a plan to present to our dean to address racial issues. I don’t expect us to solve anything, but maybe we can help make things a little less bad in our corner of the world. And then it will be easier for us to do the next thing and the next…
Reminder: (this) NEXT week is #academics4blacklives and they have a whole curriculum/lecture series set up.
ETA: I was wrong on the #academics4blacklives dates. It starts on Juneteenth, which is Friday. So technically this week, but more next week.
Also see: nursing.
Ouch. Truth though…
I saw a TikTok that said that what police do to black men, doctors do to black women.
I think this is the conversation able Jack was trying to start on our heads.
