Ping

I want to share some thoughts but I’m scared. I want to keep the conversation going … past the Summer of 2020, past the election, past MLK Day. I’ve been told that as a white woman, I can’t talk about diversity. But it’s laying so heavy on my heart. So I do what I normally do and I say it out loud to see if the fear will go away or if God shuts me down. I did that several weeks ago by saying it out loud on my Instagram account. 

You know the drill. I watched. Who liked it? Did my white and black friends like it? Who commented? What did they say? Are people in my circle going to support me? Will they listen to what I have to say? Can I change their mind? 

And then, I called my friend Sidni. Sidni loves me. Sidni has also called me out on my thinking from the very first day I met her. We have developed a deep friendship over the past year. We have real talk about race and Jesus. Jesus unites us. We are both believers. But our backgrounds are very different and we are learning so much from each other. Well … I’m learning so much from her. 

In a two hour phone conversation on a Saturday morning, after two cups of coffee, I shared with Sidni what I wanted to do and I wanted to know if she would be on my personal board of directors. I knew I would need someone to review my writings so that I don’t say something completely stupid.

I want to write about diversity on my blog. Do you think that’s dangerous? 

Dangerous? No. I don’t think it’s dangerous but why? 

I want to share what I’ve learned. I think women that look like me have more power to change things. I want to share with them what I’ve learned the hard way. 

Maybe instead of telling them what you know or what you’ve learned, you could start by asking them if they want to talk about it. Because it’s going to get sticky. You need parameters. Where do you want to go with this? What will you allow? What do you want to happen? 

This conversation scared me even more. And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear … Stacey, that would be wonderful. Thank you for doing this. Thank you for helping. This will fix things.   

The same article Sidni sent me six months ago, the week after George Floyd’s death, had been replayed in real talk in our Saturday morning phone call. Six months ago, Sidni texted me a copy of “For White Voices” by Andre Vaughn. It was a note to white people who wanted to help. I could understand everything except the word “whiteness.” That term is something I had never heard before and it pinged me. For this blog, I didn’t want to describe it as a ping and then I looked up the word. 

In technical software terms, a ping is a signal sent to a host that requests a response. It serves two primary purposes: 1) to check if the host is available and 2) to measure how long the response takes. 

Sidni sent me a ping. Would I respond? Was I available … or willing … to have this conversation. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and offend any of my friends that were hurting way more deeply than I was. I don’t remember how long it took me to respond to Sidni’s text in May, but it took me about a month before I told Sidni that the term “whiteness” sent a ping. I decided instead that I would learn more about the term. I read the book Witnessing Whiteness by Shelly Tochluk. I learned a lot. There was an idea I had been carrying a long time. I was unaware. 

Do you want to talk about some of that? If I send a ping, will you respond? I’m ok if the response time is long … especially if it takes you a while to read, research and reflect before responding. 

#ThereIsRoom