The list of forbidden words keeps growing, building on itself. Driven by memos, fear, ‘getting ahead of it,’ word of mouth advice, by experience… The scrubbing of RFPs, web sites, bios, resources and toolkits. It’s comprehensive, exhausting, and terrifying.
Meetings with people whose urgent right to live is in question, people who are watching themselves being erased. They are turning off the camera, they are going quiet.
A sector that stumbled to the forefront in 2020 to make their intentions known, to reiterate their commitment to stand at the forefront of the fight. #BLM. Black. Lives. Matter. Leaders can’t or won’t say it any more. Or some will. But many won’t.
Organizations that have been at the forefront of so many fights are now on defense – proactive reactivity, scanning budgets and following the threads of government grants and contracts and subcontracts to their source. Scenario planning for any number of ‘what ifs’ to determine the span of risk they can literally and figuratively afford – before going out of business, before shutting down service lines. Before, by speaking, they render themselves unable to continue the supports they know people need, the supports we know people deserve. This work that strives and struggles and though we never quite get there – tirelessly reaches – for equity.
This is the nonprofit sector, at this moment. This is what it’s like in government. This is in my household, and yours. And theirs.
The affordability/ risk equation underway has left so many unable or unwilling to speak. And we cannot ask those whose rights are most in danger to do the talking. We never should have asked it, of them, in the first place.
So for every one of us who can afford to – it’s time to do so. We have to say the words, insist on them, put them in front of our every thought and every action. We have to give these words life with our very breath, we have to rage and push and persist and say no. NO. We will not self-censor. We will not rewrite history. We will not allow erasure. Not even one. single. inch.
We insist on the data. We insist on the services. We insist on the funding. We insist on the law. We insist on the evidence. We insist on accuracy. We insist on the truth. We insist urgently on the lives of our friends, families, strangers, and communities – we keep insisting like our lives depend on it. Because so many lives do.
The time to speak has always been now. It is, as ever, now – again.
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