Urgency at Every Step

When it comes to DEIJ (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice), people are prone to underestimating just how difficult change actually is. It’s harder than a moment. “It’s a slow payoff earned with hard work, not shortcuts with high and quick rates of feel-good returns.”

Black-and-brown folks and well-intentioned white people, however, want instant results, but arrive so from different places: the former out of an understandable sense of urgency from having been marginalized and victimized for so long; the latter from a privilege that allows them to remain naive about the true harm of racism, the damage of which is nearly impossible to undo, but which they nevertheless feel is within their capacity to fix with a mere snap of the fingers. Of course, in some ways, the issue can be fixed with their snap, and it should, especially given how much racism is the white world’s problem, a problem the white world created and which is within its power to address in a way that is, in fact, total. Still, while much of the change we hope to see is, from my vantage point as an educator, necessarily generational in nature and scope, thereby demanding a certain amount of forbearance in the short term, such belief and knowledge concerning the protracted nature of the process does not come at the expense of urgently aiming for the achievement of tangible milestones along the way.

When it comes to matters of race and the most well-intended white people among us, privilege risks entitling them to naivete regardless of approach, urgent or protracted—a belief that racism and its harm can be undone instantly or that, under a more protracted timeframe, the matter can be relegated for extension. Stopping just short of equating protraction with patience, urgency actually exists at every step along a path that, nonetheless, remains generational in arc.