Who Will You Become in the Meantime?

(This is a copy of the speech I delivered at the Fontbonne University 2018 Commencement.)

Good Afternoon. Thank you President Pressimone, members of the Fontbonne University Board of Trustees, members of the faculty and administration, loving families and friends, and most of all members of the class of 2018!

What an honor it is to be here. Thank you so much for sharing your important day with me.

To be honest, I’ve never given a talk like this before. And I know I’m not a very traditional commencement speaker. I’m not famous. I don’t have a PhD. I’m not a universally renowned expert. I’m not at the top of my field or even my career. I’m not a St. Louis Native, nor am I a Fontbonne University graduate. But I have had the privilege of attending many meetings on campus over the last few years…which is why when I got a voicemail from Dr. Pressimone in February, the first thing I thought was: “Oh no! I’ve been caught…I knew I should have used those visitor parking passes!”

But Dr. Pressimone has assured me that the president of the University doesn’t call people about parking violations. Phew! And for the record, I DID use my visitor parking pass today.

No, he was calling to ask me to speak to you this afternoon.

And to be honest again, I didn’t say yes right away.  I wasn’t sure that I had something useful to share with you. After all, this is your day. You have worked so hard to get here. You deserve a speaker who can share an important message.

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I HAD to say yes. Because in the 6 years I’ve lived in St. Louis, I have learned something important, and I do want to share it with you today.

What I have learned is that everyday people, citizens, parents, and students can make a big difference.

I think intellectually, I always knew that. I think intellectually, you probably all know that, too. But my experience has made that idea real to me in ways I never expected when I first moved here.

*********

My family moved to St. Louis because my husband was matched here for his residency after medical school. The program here had been his first choice, but not because of St. Louis – because of the quality of the program.

So we were excited when he matched to his first choice, but once the reality set in, so did anxiety and unsettled feelings. We knew St. Louis would be an affordable place to raise our family … but I owned a business in New York City, which I would now need to manage remotely. And we’d be very far away from friends and family, which is a terrifying prospect when you have a 20 month old and an 8 week old.

When you move somewhere for a medical residency, you don’t expect to stay there. I figured we were coming just to pass through … not to be part of something.

And I effectively knew nothing about St. Louis. I’d lived all my life up and down the East Coast. If you had asked me a year before we moved here what state St. Louis was in … I’m honestly not sure I could’ve come up with Missouri. That’s how East Coast-centric I was.

*********

So we arrived in St. Louis, got settled in, and went about the business of making a life. We made friends, found favorite places to eat and play, and began to make use of the position of our new home base to explore other parts of the country. We made trips to Michigan and Nashville and Birmingham.

Because I am a bloom where I’m planted kind of gal, the new-ness and the learning and challenge were comfortable for me. But I was living and learning about St. Louis through a lens of non-ownership. St. Louis would be one place I lived - one stop in our family’s journey. I had decided I wouldn’t really belong here. Or seek to.

And then on August 9, 2014, all that changed.

For me, the death of Michael Brown, and the response by this community, caused me to completely reinterpret my role as a mother, as a citizen, and as a resident.

My own educational and professional background allowed me to see the events of Ferguson through a lens of systems, policies, and power. But I couldn’t help but also see this event as a mother. I couldn’t help but think of a child laying on the pavement for four hours out of the reach of his own mother.

And I couldn’t help but think: this would never happen to my family. This would never happen to me.

Like many in our region I spent the following months trying to make sense of the events in our city, both as a resident and a mother. And more than I ever had before, I found myself thinking and talking and reading about race: about what it meant to me, about what it meant to people in the region who don't look like me, and about what it meant to St. Louis.

I had twin realizations:

●   What my children see and experience here will forever define their normal. It will be the baseline that they always compare other places to. It may be a stop in my larger life journey but St. Louis will always be their “I’m from” place.

●   By extension, I also realized that what I see, show, say and most importantly DON’T say to them will also forever define their normal.

Even as I began to realize how much what I do and say impacts my kids, I became increasingly aware that I didn’t know what it was I should be doing and saying. They don’t cover how to talk about race with your children in parenting books - at least not the ones that I had read. So I began to research and the more I did, the more I understood how problematic NOT talking about race and racism with our kids is.

The more I read, the more it became clear that parents like me doing nothing was not simply avoiding the problem — it was part of the problem. I became determined to do something different than nothing.

That determination – as vague and insufficient as it was at the time, to simply do something other than nothing – changed the course of my life, and has now impacted the lives of thousands of families here in St. Louis.

I didn’t immediately see myself as part of the solution to our region’s challenges. I wasn’t trying to put on a superhero cape. I had no illusions that I alone could make any kind of difference outside of my home. All I wanted to do at first was to stop being a part of the problem.

For me

That first meant learning to talk with my young children about race and racism

Then it meant learning how to talk about race and racism with those around me,

Then it meant thinking about the decisions I make about where I live, where I eat, and who I interact with -- and how those decisions reinforce the racial divides in our region.

Those of you who may have already encountered We Stories will know that this personal journey didn’t stay an individual one for long. Although I was prepared to journey alone, I haven’t had to. In my early days of wondering and exploration I met my co-founder, Laura Horwitz, and we began to share our family experiences with each other and then with friends and acquaintances. And over the last 2.5 years, nearly 700 other white families have joined us. And we are still growing.

So what is “We Stories” anyway? We are an organization that helps families have honest  conversations about race, deepen their civic engagement,  and organize to support racial justice efforts in our region. We start our relationship with families by introducing them to diverse children’s books because we have found these to be the best catalysts for creating rich and appropriate family-wide conversation about a range of topics from skin tone, to the meaning of race, to the history of discrimination.

Children’s books are an appealing and safe way to start this work. But they aren’t where it ends. Since launching we have been overwhelmed not only by the number of families who have joined us but also the momentum they have created -- in their homes, in their extended families, in their schools, workplaces, municipalities, and beyond. Laura and I feared that we would have to coax people along every step of the way. Instead,  we find ourselves running to keep up.

This journey - my personal journey moving from silence to action, and We Stories’ journey, growing from 2 families to 700, has reshaped my understanding of the greatness that is possible when everyday citizens decide to act. It has also helped me to understand: WHEN action matters most, WHAT I can contribute, and HOW progress is made.

So, WHEN DOES action matter most?

I used to think that progress, and pursuit and achievement and accomplishment were punctuated by obvious pinnacle milestones. Promotions, selections, graduations, celebrations, and even crisis. Knowable moments that counted more.

What I’ve learned is that those moments celebrate achievement or accomplishment, and they reveal character. But the traits that enable us to celebrate those milestones — honesty, leadership, responsibility, courage — cannot be saved for special occasions. They must be practiced in private moments, in what we do and what we say, every day.

Honesty is about how we answer questions about race when they come up unexpectedly in the grocery store or when our kids, seemingly suddenly, ask why only brown kids ride the school bus.

Leadership is about bringing up racism in a conversation with friends, or in a candidate forum when it’s clearly relevant and obviously important, but none of the other white people in the room want to bring it up.

Responsibility is about resisting the urge to over-simplify our complex and still painful reality with knee-jerk platitudes such as “but things are better now.”

Courage is about recognizing all those teeny, tiny moments of opportunity that we each encounter and choosing to somehow meet them instead of saying “not today.”

WHAT can I contribute?

This leads me to another important lesson. In early 2016 I was part of an angsty multi-racial conversation on the heels of the release of the Ferguson Commission report. We were stuck in the “but what can we do?” place. A now-friend had a simple reply: Do anything but nothing.

Do anything … but nothing.

I used to think that addressing issues as big as racial inequity had to be done in massive, heroic steps — and that I wasn't in the position to take those steps. After all, I wasn’t in charge of anything big enough or important enough to have any real impact. At that point I still had a business in New York, a 4 year old, a 2 year old, and another new baby. As I’m sure most parents can attest - most days, I felt like I was hardly in a position of influence, even over my own kids.

But once I decided doing nothing wasn’t an option...being “busy” was no longer a valid excuse for inaction.

I admit, when I reflected on the enormity of the problem of racial inequity, I felt overwhelmed. And I still do. But when I considered my unique role in the mess...a path became clearer.

White parents like me make individual and institutional decisions every day that shape our region and reinforce social patterns. We are also actively raising - every day - the next generation of white adults. Research shows that racial bias begins to cement by age 7. And these early years in a person’s life are the ones where parental influence matters most.

Meaning that the way I talked about race, and the choices I made about where and how we spent our time as a family mattered to at least the three little humans and future citizens in front of me. So my friend Aliah was right...I was in a position to do something.

Of course this alone will not solve for racial inequity in our region, because no one, alone, can solve for racial inequity in our region. But in taking the steps that I am uniquely capable of taking, I have become a part of a larger movement of people working together toward a solution. And you can too.

HOW is progress made?

Now, I should tell you about another important lesson I learned the hard way. We knew that there was no perfect time to act, and so we needed to act in that moment. And we understood that we didn’t need to contribute with giant steps, but that we could contribute in our own unique way, in small but persistent steps.

But what I’ve learned is that even when you decide to act, and act now, that doesn’t erase the doubt. Looking back now, you might think that what we’ve built was obvious, that the steps forward were clear, or maybe even that our success was pre-determined.

But the steps were not clear. The way forward wasn’t obvious. Our success was most definitely not pre-determined. Yet we acted anyway.

Because progress doesn’t come from certainty. It almost always comes from the opposite — from uncertainty. Progress comes when we are willing to learn and wonder out loud. It comes when we are able to admit that we don’t know. When we are humble enough to ask for help. When we are bold enough to take risks and make mistakes.

In fact, at this point, that’s how I know I’m making progress — not when it feels certain, but when it feels uncertain. Not when it feels easy, but when I feel a little uneasy. And the more I’ve embraced a practice of uncertainty, the more comfortable I’ve become with discomfort. It doesn’t get easy, talking about difficult issues like race and inequality. But it does get easier.

Every parent who joins our community does so with a leap of faith. They come with questions and uncertainty. Talking about race and racism isn’t often something they did in their childhood homes and it’s not often something they do now as adults. BUT...they want to do something different. They want to do something other than nothing.

And in less grandiose terms, they want to know what to say to their children when their children ask them about race — because they will, and they do. They want to know what to do when someone says something on the playground. I know from our experiences that we help to answer those questions but we also raise a whole lot more. And part of my job is to help our families not only be OK with that, but to actually embrace the continual uncertainty as evidence of progress.

Last year one of our participants shared this with us:

“I’ve learned that I have more learning to do. I thought this program would help me talk to my child about race. I didn't think about how much was lacking from my own knowledge to have that conversation. The work I am doing is changing me for the better more than anything I have done in my adult life. What a privilege to have never needed to show up before … now I am grateful for the opportunity to change that starting today.”

******

As I mentioned before, when we moved to St. Louis six years ago, I came as a non-owner. Someone passing through. Someone here ... in the meantime.

The events of Ferguson and the leaders that raised their voices as a result changed that for me, forever. St. Louis may not be our family’s final destination, because such is the life of a medical family. But no matter where I end up, I will always feel like I own a part of St. Louis. And I know that St. Louis forever owns a part of me.

All that was possible because, even though I was scared, even though I was uncertain, even though I didn’t know if I would be all alone, I decided to do anything but nothing.

And once you decide to do anything but nothing – now – it changes your perception of “in the meantime.”

I know when I was in college, I figured, my time didn’t count as much. It was a “in the meantime” before I reached “the real world.” Maybe that’s what you thought about your time at college, too.

But in the meantime can be a trap.

It’s too easy to feel stuck in an assembly line of firsts: first job, first apartment, starter home. Especially when our eyes are on the horizon of desired opportunity. And even after those firsts are accomplished, it’s still too easy to stand back and look for the “real grown ups.”

That’s how you get stuck in the meantime.

Because here’s my truth you actually become who you are in the meantime. It’s not the big decisions you make at the key milestones that shape your life, it’s the little ones you make, one day, one hour, one moment at a time.

Which is great news for us all. Because the meantime is now. It requires no credentials. It requires no grand plan. It asks for nothing more than our everyday selves. And it is always waiting for us to show up and make the most of it.

So on this very important day I leave you with these questions:

What could be gained if you let yourself focus on the little moments instead of the big?

What is the cost of doing nothing about the issues you care most deeply about?

What becomes possible to accomplish if you begin to share your uncertainty – what you don’t know – instead of what you do?

And most importantly, as you look ahead to your bright futures, who are you going to become in the meantime?

Congratulations to you all. Thank you.

In order to unharm we must tell a fuller truth

I'm so honored to share my comments from the STL Women's March for Truth on Saturday Jan 20, 2018. It was an amazing experience, and I'm so glad I brought my daughter. We've got to start growing our courage young!


Good Morning!

I’m Adelaide Lancaster and I’m so honored to be here.

And to be here with my sweet Eloise – who at age 7 ½ has been to more marches and protests – probably in this year alone -  than my entire first 35 years combined.

How lucky we are to be here – in this place, at this time, led by these amazing women, and with all of you!

What I want her to see today is PROMISE.

It brings me to tears to know that this is HER NORMAL. This is what her introduction to feminism and womanism looks like. This is her America. This is her St. Louis.

Look at what a beautiful, powerful, and promising view she has!

But as a white mom, and a white feminist I know that I cannot just feed her a diet of promise.

I must also feed her a diet of TRUTH.

You see, promise can only ROOT IN TRUTH. And promise can only BLOOM IN TRUTH.

In that spirit want to share with you today the words of one of my favorite poets, Nayyirah Waheed.

She shares:

“unharm someone
by
telling the truth you could not face
when you
struck instead of tended.”

These words make me think particularly about the work that my white sisters and I face.

I think about

How often we harm. 

How easily we strike.

How little we tend.

And the role of truth in all of that.

So my ask today is of white women in particular.

My hope is that we can learn to tell fuller stories.

In order to UNHARM we must tell a fuller truth.

When we tell a story about under-resourced schools and city services, we must also tell the story of white flight and redlining.

When we tell a story about school segregation, we must also own the role that white moms have played in creating and maintaining that.

When we tell a story about suffrage and voting rights for our mothers and grandmothers, we must also tell a story about exclusion and false promises and how often we say to our black and brown sisters - “next time it’ll be your turn.”

When we tell stories of our own resistance, we must also tell the stories of our own defense, distance, and denial.

When we imagine ourselves part of the solution, we must also see ourselves as part of the problem.

I’m so glad that when I hear stories about last year’s march that it includes stories about learning.

And when we tell the story of today I hope it includes stories about followership, kinship, and how we are learning to honor our fuller community.

I believe that our greatest promise still lies ahead, but first we must start with truth.

What Would it Take to Believe?

I'm clear that Im asking a whole lot of my fellow white people right now.

I'm not trying to convince you that I'm right or that I have better facts or the best words or even that black people aren't treated with the humanity they and we all deserve (they aren't.)

What I'm asking from you is to suspend your understanding of the rules of engagement and your knowledge of "how things work." To ignore your past experiences...to silence the "well I just would haves"...and the "I don't thinks"...and resist drawing inferences from the time something sort of seemingly similar happened to you or someone you know.

Then I'm asking you to put yourself in another persons shoes. Someone who hasn't been afforded the many privileges that you have - privileges that are so reliable and broad and sweeping that it's nearly impossible to see or imagine your life without them.

Then I'm asking you to imagine how you might feel and act in the face of grave and life-of-your-children-threatening injustice that's been present and willfully ignored and denied for generations. And I need you to imagine how you might feel in these circumstances AFTER you stripped away much of the (unknown to you) race-related socialization that you've been bathed in your whole life...socialization that likely encouraged you to value conformity, individual perseverance, conflict avoidance, and faith in systems and processes.

What would you do then? What would you feel? Could you even imagine? If you can't...or if you can even just see how complicated all that is...what would it take for you believe someone else who can imagine or doesn't have to?

Also what does it mean for us all that what I've just described really only speaks to our limited ability to engage in perspective taking...This doesn't even begin to address the real internal damage and soul-warping that racism does to both us and people of color.

This work is big and foundational and it is a lot. But it's also really necessary.

This is what it takes for us white folks to really listen to what we don't and can't know but have to begin to believe for us to move forward.

To the Beneficiaries of Protest

to clarify:

If you are a white woman who votes, a member of a union, or a citizen of this country you benefit from protests that were disruptive, and during which people were brutalized...for the rights and protections and freedoms that you enjoy.

The vast majority of white people did not support the actions of the civil rights movement, nor did they think of Dr. King favorably. Only now is he memorialized as a hero.

***
Here's what I want everyone to know about protest:

1. Protest is Part of Our National Identity – and Always Has Been
Protest has been a part of our national fabric and national identity from the very beginning. Specific acts of protest, from the Boston Tea Party on, lead to the very creation of our nation. Protests have continued to be a part of every single social change and advancement across our national history, including civil rights. Our founding fathers protected the act of protest by including these two important rights in our constitution: the right to “peaceably assemble” and the right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

2. Protests are Intentionally Disruptive – and Always Have Been
Disruption is often the explicit purpose of protest. They can disrupt narratives, process, the economy, or even traffic. Their disruption is rooted in the principle of non-violence. The disruption serves to not only garner attention but also to represent accountability when it’s perceived to be missing from the system. It’s a method to share the burden of the injustices being protested when no other consequences are available.

3. Direct Action is One Form of Non-Violent Protest
Other forms of non-violent protest include economic boycotts, organizing collective buying power, awareness and advocacy campaigns, storytelling through art and dialogue, particularly those that lift up stories that are not often heard. Sometimes an act of protest can be sitting where you’re not supposed to, or kneeling when you’re expected to stand.

4. There Are Usually MANY Leaders
Protests are usually part of movements that include many leaders and many, many different people. Often movement leaders are memorialized differently later, usually in a way that supports a “hero” narrative. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X worked together. They also had different approaches. They were not rivals. Martin Luther King was surrounded by other leaders, like John Lewis, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer whose participation was essential but who are often left out of the full narrative. Our familiarity with “hero” narratives sometimes causes us to miss the leaders in our midst because they have not been memorialized yet.

5. How Movements are Memorialized Often Doesn’t Match What Really Happened
Our understanding of history also shifts as time progresses and citizens’ perspectives change. Martin Luther King Jr. was not popular in his lifetime. Many of us know that he was assassinated, under constant death threat and that his home was bombed. We often attribute that hatred and dislike only to the white supremacists at the time and forget, or don’t learn, that the majority of the country didn’t hold a favorable view of Martin Luther King Jr. A 1966 Gallup poll showed that only 36% of people had a positive view of him. Yet, in 1999 he was second in a list of Americans that other Americans admired most.

6. Social Change Movements Take a Very Long Time
The seeds for Brown vs. Board of Education were planted decades beforehand. There were 8 years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington. The complex nature of social issues and the this long-term view can make it difficult to recognize crystallized moments of “success” even if there is movement and shifting happening in many places.

7. Protest Movements are Intentional, Purposeful, and Organized
Sometimes stories about protests push forward a narrative that they are spontaneous or develop organically. While there are certainly moments that are unplanned, protest movements tend to be intentional, purposeful and very organized…even if you can’t see it. Sometimes the organization, plans and decision making is intentionally not made transparent in an effort to protect those in leadership roles. Sustained protest campaigns take a lot of pre-planning and are often a part of larger change strategies.

http://www.westories.org/…/parenting-in-a-time-of-protest-p…

***
If you are getting stuck in conversations about so-called "black on black crime" you're getting off topic.

If you are getting stuck in conversations about what rights alleged drug-dealers have, you're getting off topic and may be misinformed about what is actually known about Mr. Smith.

Knowing what you know, it's important to consider where you stand...and what protections you will want available to you when you want to petition your government for grievances.

I'd rather your heart hurt when you see the images of Rev. Karla Frye and her grandson. I'd rather you believe the reports and stories and pictures that demonstrate the depth of racial injustice here in St. Louis. I'd rather you want to join us in the fight for a more equitable city and for our own humanity...but at the very, very least you should be very worried about the threats being posed to your own rights as citizens under our constitution.

Rethinking Perspective in the Time of Protest

If you’re inclined to think the justice system works, then you’re likely under the impression that the facts were known, weighed and ruled upon. You might be missing the systematic ways that the justice system tends to favor those who created and uphold it while harming those most marginalized.

If you’re inclined to pull from your own personal experiences to consider how you might have behaved differently than a particular victim, then you might also be missing the long-held truths from communities of color about how their experience of the justice system is vastly different from that of white folks.

If you haven’t done a lot of first hand reading about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, then you’re likely to “remember” him as a leader quite different from those of today and you might be wondering why we don’t have leaders like that anymore. You might be missing leaders of the same ilk all around us, the civil rights heroes of our day and age.

If you’re stuck on the monitoring whether or not the protests seem “peaceful” enough, then you might not be considering the distinctions between non-violent and peaceful and you might be getting only a partial story.

If you’ve found yourself concerned about a window or a cancelled concert today, then you might not be fully appreciating the tragic, unnecessary, constant, and abrupt violence that is occurring to real humans in our community daily. You might not be able to imagine what it is like to be stop, frisked, roughly handcuffed, knocked about, strip searched, jailed, beaten or shot. You might not have heard enough parents tell first hand stories about these real fears and experiences with their children.

If you’ve found yourself imagining how you’d feel if you were a law enforcement officer at a protest, then you might be playing out the very real in-group bias which allows you to more easily humanize and personify the character you’re more likely to be (white officer vs marginalized protestor) in the given situation while continuing to disassociate from those who are in real and chronic pain.

If you’ve found yourself scared about the protests or protestors, their proximity to you, or worried about what they might do or what might be damaged, then you might still be burdened by the racist messages that accompany seeing a large group of black people. You might not have suffered from the same fear with regard to the women’s march or the most recent march in Boston or the protest at the airport about the immigration-ban. School districts cancelled school on Friday and cancelled all school and sports activities. Big box stores miles and miles from downtown or any location of significance also closed on Friday. This is an example of racism.

If you’ve thought of the protests as violent and imagined the protestors to be the aggressors, then you might not yet appreciate what it looks like and feels like to have hundreds of unarmed people, walking in public, loudly and proudly, carrying signs, kids, microphones, water, and little else strategizing about which pieces of pavement they can walk on met by a completely militarized police force or soldiers in riot gear, with vehicles and tanks, carrying semi-automatic weapons. Note how the militarized group is praised for using their restraint when chanted at. Was it really so tempting to shoot and hurt us?

If you’ve gotten fussy about the protesting tactics used, and extended empathy to those inconvenienced by waiting or not getting what they want when they want it, you might not yet appreciate that protests are meant to disrupt the normal flow of traffic and business in order to call attention to grave injustice…because that is what non-violent people are willing to continually do when they believe it is a matter of life and death.

If you have a picture of protestors in your mind OR YOUR MEDIA that doesn’t include artists, teachers, students, professors, the elderly, strollers, baby carriers, friends, families, mothers then you aren’t seeing the full picture.

If the injustice doesn’t bother you then protest is not the space for you and you should have probably stopped reading at the top. But if the injustice is making you crazy and yet you’re finding yourself getting stuck in one of these other places, you may want to consider joining and seeing for yourself. I don’t think I’m that scary. And I’m not violent either.