feeling the impacts of racism is more powerful than acknowledging them

​I had a zoom meeting with my work team today.

Actually - I'll correct myself - this is more appropriately called my work 'family'.

Early in the call, my boss was talking about a meeting she'd had this morning. She told us she shared a picture of our team at the end of the meeting. Someone commented that we are a diverse team.

We are diverse.

We have several people of color on the team, including my boss. We have old timers and new timers. We have a little bit of everything. Most of us have been together many years.

We had a couple of consultants on the call who've been working with us on a project. And the truth is, we've adopted them as family too.

I think they could sense some of the emotional toll yesterday's Derek Chauvin verdict had taken on the team, and one of them asked if we wanted to process it for a bit.

So we did.

You know, I've said zoom calls take away from the personal connection we feel when we're actually in a room together. But today, even through a screen, I couldn't have felt any closer to my team.

Because as one after the other the team talked about how they were feeling, you could look into the eyes and into the hearts of all of them at once. Every face - every look of fright and frustration and hurt - and thanks to yesterday's verdict, a few faint glimpses of hope - they were all collapsing through the screen and onto me at once.

Uncomfortably so...

I wanted to look away from my friends of color, but I couldn't. As I watched them talk and I watched them listen - it all hit me. The emotions overwhelmed me. And as I took my turn to talk, the tears came.

I told the team how blessed I was. That over five years ago when I joined this family, I would never have argued that racism isn't real; intellectually I knew it was at some level.

But it's a very different thing when you intellectually know something and when you watch people you love hurting because of that thing you know. Over and over and over the past several years - I've witnessed my work family hurt because of something I and many others have owned up to, but not deeply felt.

In my tears today, I deeply felt it.

In my tears today, I realized something. I've experienced a ton of hurt the last few years. And whether someone believes it was for right or wrong reasons, whether people believe the hurt was real or not, I still experienced that hurt. It was and forever will be real.

And when I looked at my work family today, it struck me. It struck me with the kind of violence so many of them have experienced or lived constantly threatened by all their lives. They don't care what I think about racism. What they want, what so many people of color want, they just want to stop hurting.

I think it's time we all start considering the pain too many people around us are experiencing. It's time for us to get beyond the debates about right or wrong or real or not and start letting some faces stare at us.

Because I'm pretty sure that you and others, like me, you've experienced enough pain to know pain isn't debatable. Oh, if we get close enough and look hard enough, we recognize pain.

That's why some days, I think we're afraid to get close enough to see that pain in our friends' and in our work family's eyes ...

Today, I realized more than ever why the last year or so I've fought harder than I ever have in my work and in my personal life to make sure we all get equal treatment in this world. And why sadly, most of my life, I could have cared less about that equality.

It's because when you start to feel someone else's pain, you're far more driven to do something about it than you are when you simply snarl at the source of it.

Seeing someone wronged - it's easy to say, that's life.

Seeing someone hurting - especially someone you care about - well for me, there's just nothing easy about that one.

Especially if you've ever wanted to stop hurting.