On Account of Skin: More Thoughts on the Power of White Privilege

The individual DEI worker must walk the line between dual tasks—one task would be that of challenging the community and the other, that of healing the community.  Entire groups, which, too, work in this DEI space, must also strive for the same aspirations—that is, the same challenging-healing quotient required and pursued by individual DEI workers.  

For the newly minted DEI working groups that happen to involve white “allies,” such DEI working groups now find themselves in this all-too-delicate state so familiar already to DEI workers of color.  What might equally come as a shock to these white allies is how routinely the DEI work they do as individual persons is routinely dismissed by the powers-that-be, yet how much greater the impact when their individual voices are mobilized as one—a fact we, as people of color, have discovered and utilized to great effect historically, but never ever as great as what white allies stand to achieve given the power associated with privilege that remains stubbornly conferred upon them on account of their skin.