Black Lives Matter
This newsletter is going to have a more serious note than our regular programming.
The United States is in a state of reckoning after 400 years of violence against Black & Brown lives. I’ve spent the past few weeks oscillating between high-energy action & complete paralysis when confronted with the depth and breadth of the problem of white supremacy. I have had my fair share of defensiveness and anger but also moments of clarity and hope that this time it’s for real.
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from companies large and small stating their commitment to the Black Lives Matter movement. I want to say loud and clear that we stand in solidarity. Black Lives Matter.
I also want to say that reading those same emails from businesses listing their anti-racist to-do lists does not sit quite right with me. Or at least, I don’t feel like that’s the right move for us. While we are a business, and we can be held accountable for our actions, the deep work of anti-racism is personal and internal.
Deconstructing white supremacy is a balance between internal work on yourself: becoming conscious of your bias, facing the fears we as white folx may have about losing our place at the top, being incredibly kind to yourself throughout that process and external work such as marching / protesting, evaluating our recruiting and hiring processes, promoting folx from all backgrounds and identities, making recurring donations to organizations, representing artists from a wide range of racial backgrounds and holding ourselves accountable to paying living wages across our company.
Part of the foundation of this business is a radical stance on the 40-hour-workweek. I spent a lot of years thinking that challenging that status-quo was enough. What’s been made clear to me now is that we need to take a radical stance and make radical moves in many directions at once.
So with that, I am not going to make a bulleted list of commitments because we’re still collectively doing internal work. So, I am going to share some resources we’ve been referencing for our internal work, and some things to check out if you are also ready for the external part. We’re here for this movement for our lifetimes.
With much love and humility,
Bekka