Judy Blair
Over the past two weeks I have been posting daily on Facebook and LinkedIn some ways in which white supremacy culture, as described by Tema Okun, Kenneth Jones, et al., might be showing up in the midst of this pandemic. The following is all of those posts in one place. Note: the values and norms […]
I offer coaching for white leadership as part of my services because I believe that real change can only happen when executive staff is on the same path to inclusion and equity as the rest of the staff. Some of the things I coach leadership in are soft skills, things that I’ve written about in […]
A current experiment involving universal basic income in California and a recent large study using cash transfers in Kenya show that giving people money without conditions on how they spend it often contributes to a better quality of life for those people. It turns out that trusting people to do what’s best for themselves in their specific situation results […]
I was speaking with an acquaintance recently, and he shared with me that he has discovered the beauty of small talk. He had been talking about how much he hates small talk when someone had pointed out to him that small talk fosters social cohesion; it is a way for us to find commonality and […]
People are often suspicious of racially-segregated space, with good reason. White folks don’t have a good history with regards to segregation, and many people believe no good can come from white people meeting together to discuss racism. An often-posed question about race-based caucusing is, “Doesn’t segregating by race make things worse?” The short answer: It […]
This piece is inspired by Lauren Michele Jackson’s September 4, 2019, article on Slate, What’s Missing From “White Fragility”, specifically this quotation: Writing on “whiteness qua whiteness,” to borrow from Richard Dyer’s influential 1997 book White, can so often veer toward whiteness pro whiteness—whiteness in the interest of whiteness, whiteness for whiteness’ sake, whiteness to […]
Last month I had the honor of participating in a webinar for the Adventure Nannies Summit Sessions series, a set of monthly webinars tailored for their audience of childcare providers. We talked about white cultural values, as presented by Tema Okun et al., and how those intersect with domestic work. At the end I took a few […]
Part of my work as a white person is to uplift the voices of people of color, so I’m letting you in on this not-so-secret list of great podcasts. I don’t subscribe to all of them (my weekly podcast list is long, and my podcast listening time is short), but I have listened to at […]
I was facilitating a caucus the other day, and the topic of discussion was apologizing: the pieces that need to be in place for us to make a sincere apology and how we can quell our natural instinct to defensiveness. About half way through the session, one of the participants turned to me and said, […]
Equity Matters, a Seattle-based consulting firm, has a set of ground rules they use for workshops and discussions. One of those ground rules is, “Put relationships first — Work to build community and trust with an awareness of power dynamics.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently and what it means to put relationships […]
Judy Blair 