S2, Ep 5: When Fatigue Sets in
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:01] JSS: Hey, everybody. This is Joanna Shoffner Scott, and you are listening to the Race in the Workplace Podcast, a show for DEI organizational leaders that explores race, racism, and racial equity in the workplace. I am a racial equity consultant and Founder of the Stamey Street Consulting Group, a consulting firm that specializes in partnering with organizations to help them meet their racial equity aspirations. My goal for you is to move your organization from being colorblind to equity-centered through sustainable step-by-step changes.
[EPISODE]
[00:00:39] JSS: Hi. It's Joanna Shoffner Scott here. I am so excited to be with you today. Thank you for allowing me to join you in your day, no matter when you're listening. As a reminder, this second season of the podcast will focus on leadership and the opportunities, strengths, and challenges to maintaining racial equity as a practice.
In this week's episode of Race in the Workplace, I want to talk about tiredness, time, and takeaways. This episode is for executive directors, HR directors, chief DEI officers, and folks who don't have DEI in your title, but you're doing work that reflects those same expectations. This week, I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about time, I want to talk about tiredness, and I will leave you with three takeaways.
Let me start with the tired. I had a conversation with someone who named being tired as part of our conversation. We were talking, and the person just said, “You know, I'm tired. And I know other folks are just exhausted right now.” My thought around that is so many people doing advocacy-centered work, DEI work, leading organizations, and managing boards of directors are just wiped out. This state of fatigue really resonated with me because I'm tired too. So I want to say upfront I don't have a magic remedy in this episode. I only want to give you some words of encouragement.
I think of the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, speaking about the economic conditions and obstacles to voting in Mississippi that she encountered when she said, “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.” That resonates with me so much, as does her activism. She's a person in history that I look to for inspiration often, and that resonates with me being sick and tired of being sick and tired. Between the everyday news cycle, my personal life, work, and COVID, it's exhausting right now.
Related to COVID, some of us are past it. Some of us are still very much in it. Some of us have long COVID. Some of us are sick. There’s suffering and struggle that is coming at all of us from various sources. I also think that we as a society are operating from a place of trauma because of the pandemic itself and the shifts in life from pre-March 2020 to now. I don't think we're really over that as a society. I think on top of everything else and the every day that I just mentioned, I believe people are navigating the world from a place of unwellness, and that's just my opinion.
In this conversation I was having with a colleague, I started thinking about being tired and what does that mean. So as I think that through, and I've been sitting with that for a little while now, I think that there are different kinds of tired when you're doing DEI work and specifically my work around racial equity.
I think there is exhaustion that is caused by unsupport, under support, undercompensation, and being undermined — so those three unders. Unsupported, people can feel unsupported, and that causes you to be exhausted, undercompensated, and undermined, being undermined at work.
I think those things, when they are present, can create a very deep sense of fatigue. I've been there. I felt that way before. So what is it when I say people are unsupported or undersupported and undermined? What does that mean? Well, it means that you're not being supported by the organization that you're working in. When an organization has asked you to do something, particularly DEI-related work or from a racial equity perspective, when an organization has asked you to do something to make it better, you try to do that.
Still, you're not getting supported, and you're undermined every step of the way; that's tiring. It's exhausting.
In the first episode of this podcast, I asked a question. How do you know when it's time to leave your DEI gig? I'll link to it in the show notes. But that fatigue is what I was getting at in that episode.
I think there's also tiredness from the weight of the work. So the other kind of tiredness I want to talk about is a broader fatigue that is from our work and our world. Recently, I was talking to another colleague and just checking in with them. This person used to do child advocacy work like me. So we connect on that. We've known each other for years. For folks who may not know, my background is in public policy. I’ve worked in that space for years in a number of roles.
So my colleague and I were talking and just saying, “Gosh, it is so tough to do that work now because child advocates are fighting so hard to protect the gains made over the last 20 years for children and families, and it’s such a hard place.”
And I would imagine advocacy in other areas is the same. I know that child advocacy space because that's the space I'm from. But I would imagine other types of advocacy as well. Whether you're doing climate change or education policy, whatever your topic is, it's a challenging climate right now to do that kind of work. I think partly because we are in a total onslaught against experts, which makes the core tenet of advocacy — education, more complicated, and even exhausting.
We're in this moment where whether you kind of know what you're talking about or not, everybody's opinion matters the same. Now, I'm not talking about community engagement because that's a key piece of the work. But I'm talking about when it comes to the specifics and the mechanics of public policy. That is a highly technical area. People are fighting daily to have their voices heard and to advocate on behalf of vulnerable populations and vulnerable communities. It's tough. It's tiring, so I get that.
But as I promised, I'm recording this episode not to complain but to encourage. I want to share with you the perspective of a dear friend of mine. My friend, Jen, has a deep and demonstrated commitment to anti-racism in her life and work. She always centers issues of equity. I learned a lot from her. She approaches both anti-racism and equity from a place of theology, which is important to the story, and I also find it inspiring. So we talk about the work of justice and equity all the time.
I remember raising this issue with her from the perspective of being tired. I remember saying, “Geez, Jen. It seems like there's always one struggle or another, all of the time.” I was referencing Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about the arc of the moral universe. The quote is, and I'll link to it in the show notes, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I remember asking Jen, “Does it then, though? Does it,” and just talking that through as two friends who care about this work.
But what's interesting is she approaches history from a very, very long arc.
She told me, “People think the arc of history is short. They think about it in the context of their own life, as defined by this day, this month, or this calendar year. When in reality, the arc of history is actually quite long. It's very long. And that we, as people who are on this planet, in this space, at this time, have one tiny space on this huge arc.”
I remember saying, “Well, how do we bend it? How do we make it right?” I remember her saying, “We can't possibly bend the whole arc of history in our lifetimes. But what we can do is pull it in the way that we can in the spaces that we're in. If we're all doing that together, then collectively we bend the arc.”
I sat with that for a long time, and she was clear that we may never see the full arc bend. Here I am at my big age. I'm slowly accepting that but also accepting that I can do my part to make my contribution. I remember that perspective giving me so much encouragement, like whenever I'm really tired physically or really tired of the work or tired of just the conversations that I have to have to do my work effectively or when I just don't want to do anything, I think about this conversation that I had with my friend.
I want to say that I am all about big systemic change. Like I'm with it, but I also know that I can only control what I can control, and I can only do what I can do in the spaces I'm in. So I just wanted to say that.
The other thing that Jen talks about all the time is being present and doing our own work in our own spaces whenever we can. That’s important to me too, is how I can do my part. How can I do that in community with other people to pull in such a way that the arc bends? I'm deeply committed to that, not just as an idea but as a way of living my life, and I do live my life that way.
For me, it's all of us working together toward a shared outcome, which I hope and aspire to a more just world, a more equitable society, where people are treated fairly, no matter how they present, and people can navigate public space equitably in the same way. So when I think about that, I think, “Wow, okay. I'm going to put a little asterisk here.” I don't always call the question every single time and every single space. So there's some nuance here, right? I do it a lot of the time. But sometimes, I don't. Sometimes, I don't feel like it, and I don't feel obligated in every space and at every time.
Shout out to my dear colleague, Paola Maranan, formerly of the Children's Alliance, who I learned that term called the question from years ago. It means asking hard questions, even if you don't know the answer. So I share all of that as an encouragement for tired folks, and I include myself in that number. I think that there is a need for rejuvenation, whatever that looks like for you. Whether it's sleep, it’s healthier eating, it’s movement, it’s ice cream, it’s spending time with your friends, do those things that bring you joy, and do those things that make you smile.
If we borrow from Jen’s perspective, this is long work, and we need everyone in it. So that means you got to take care of yourself to be in it. I think we all need time to step away, to reflect, rest and rejuvenate our bodies and minds for the work ahead. So I want to offer this episode as an encouragement because I see folks are tired. Another thing too, I'm just going to keep it real, folks are tired of the bullshit too. This is a nice segue into this piece I want to talk about about time before I share takeaways.
All right, let's talk about time. Privilege shapes how we see and experience time. So for leaders, executive directors, and others who are still playing around with equity, people are tired of that too. So for those of us who experienced marginalization in our society, in our targets of violence, time means a lot. The stakes are quite high for us. Executive directors and boards, y'all got to get clear about the work you will do and how. I think be honest.
I tell prospective clients who come to my firm for help, to be honest about what you can commit to and what you can't. Be honest when you can't fully commit to showing up in the work for marginalized people. We already see it, like we already know. We just need you, as our organizational leaders to be honest about it. Because I always say this work takes at a minimum, courage and willingness, and both of those are free.
We have different perspectives on time and, in my opinion, based on our connectedness to marginalization. So what does that mean? That means, for me, as a black woman, I don't feel like I have a whole lot of time to mess around with these topics and these issues because my rights can disappear just like that, like with a snap of a finger. So I confront those issues around justice and rights and legislative issues, those kinds of things with a sense of urgency. So that means I am looking to organizational leaders, nonprofit leaders, philanthropic leaders, and government leaders. Step up and into leading this work quickly and expeditiously. Because we all don't have the same kind of time. I don't see time in the same way, and I don't necessarily mean in terms of justice, given what I just said about the arc of history being long. But I mean in terms of danger.
I wrote a blog called The Safety of the Journey, and I'll link to it in the show notes, that lifts the experiences of trans people and anti-trans legislative actions happening in this space. Trans people need the rest of us to support them right now. So as a group, they're experiencing vulnerability and physical danger. So there's no luxury of analysis paralysis. The luxury of sitting with and thinking with and thoughts and prayers, that's not what we need right now. That's a group of folks who need people to take action to protect them right now.
Going back to leaders of all types of organizations, I want to let you know that we don't see time in the same way based on how dangerous the environment is for us right now. So, yes, while I'm tired, I also recognize that time is important and that I don't have time to play around when it comes to doing my part to bending that arc. I think sometimes, these differences in the everyday live reality of people creates tension in organizations around how fast things move. We don't experience time the same way because we're not in the same danger.
All right. So as my time wraps up with y'all today, I want to talk about takeaways. I'm a person that always gives people practical things to do.
So I want to pivot to the takeaways.
Takeaway number one, what kind of tired are you? Be honest with yourself. You don't have to share with me, but be honest with yourself. Are you tired because you're unsupported, you're undersupported, you're under-compensated, or you're being undermined at work? What kind of tired are you? Because from there, decide what you can do to move forward. That might mean you're not at that same organization anymore, and that's just the reality of it.
Takeaway number two, what can you do right now in the space that you're in to bend that arc to speak up for someone else, to name an inequity when you see it? It doesn't have to be every single space you're in. I'm not asking you to do that. What about one space? Let's start there. For folks like me who do this work, who always speak up, how can we encourage someone else so that we can give ourselves some space? So for me, that's what this podcast episode is. It's about trying to help you see a little bit of how I cope, and maybe some of what I share can help you too.
Takeaway number three, I would also say for those of us who are more experienced in this space to think about how we can better care for ourselves and also encourage others in the work.
Someone just told me this week, “We are who we've been waiting for. No Calvary is coming. We are the Calvary. So how can we contribute where we are?” I've seen different attributions of this quote, including Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., but that's right. We are who we're waiting for. Nobody is coming to all of a sudden make the world that we're living in better. It's up to us to make the world that we're living in better.
All right, off the soapbox now. I hope these thoughts help you. This is a little bit different than a normal podcast. But I feel it's important to acknowledge not only the tools, the policies, the practices, and all the things I usually talk about but also the context of the moment we're currently in. It's also important to name and plan for when we get tired and acknowledge and call the question when we see time differently because we do experience time differently because the urgency is different. Our connection to danger is different. All right. Remember to rest, reflect, and rejuvenate. Until next time, take care.
[OUTRO]
[00:18:16] JSS: That's this week's episode of Race in the Workplace. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast, and share it with a friend who may be a DEI professional who can use these strategies in their work. My hope for the podcast is that it reaches every person who needs it. Until next time, take care.
[END]
