Antiracist Accountability: Belated Holiday Gifts from Black-Owned Businesses

Hello again!

After holding myself accountable for inconsistencies in my completion of these posts this year, I want to offer some further repairs with a quick additional Antiracist Accountability post before 2021 is over!

For anyone who has yet to complete all their gift shopping this holiday season, I would like to offer a second chapter to February's post encouraging shopping at bookstores owned and run by Black businesspeople.  As you may remember, part of the rationale for the original post was that our purchases can help buffer small, Black people-owned businesses against the deleterious financial impact of the pandemic.  Furthermore, choosing to shop at Black-owned (and more generally People of Color-owned) businesses can help hone the infinite range of gift options while also allowing us to enact our antiracist values.

Today, I'm uplifting one particular subset of Black-owned businesses for a couple of additional reasons:

• These businesses sell products that are finely hand-crafted, which means your purchases support skilled Black artisans,
• Because the products at these stores are made in-house, they are all unique,
• These products can be used for a variety of self-care and space beautification purposes through their strong sensory engagement and aesthetic appeal, and last but not least,
• The products sold at these businesses are excellent gifts both for people whose tastes you know very well, but also for people for whom you want to get something nice but who you maybe don't know super well--an unusual range of possible happy gift recipients!

I therefore recommend to you: Black-owned candle companies!

You can readily find Black-owned candlemakers by searching online, but I'd love to offer some specific suggestions of stores whose products I've purchased for myself and others.  They include:

Named for the owner's grandparents home, 228 Grant Street Candle Company is a Baltimore-based soy candle company whose collection "features scents for every mood and every season. Our curated fragrance profiles are inspired by nature and travel."  The beautiful aesthetic of their candles is simple, elegant, and timeless.

Short for Knits, Soy, and Metal, KSM Candle Company is another Baltimore-based shop that features handmade soy candles as well as other home goods, body products, and treats, like jewelry, books, and DIY candle making kits.

Lotta Scents Candle Company is based in Phoenix, Arizona.  They sell hand-poured coconut candles and wax melts through their Etsy store, including intriguingly-titled aromas like "The Gentleman", "Gray Sweatpants", "Reset", and "Unwind".

Happy candle shopping!

{Heart}

Antiracist Accountability Post: Accountability

Hey everyone,

I didn't write an Antiracist Accountability post last month.  

I'm not happy about that.  

In reflecting on why I didn't follow through with my goal to write at least one such post a month, I'm torn: 

On the one hand, as I shared in my Thanksgiving post last month, I've been dealing with some major revelations and doing some deep emotional work in the last few months.  It has been painful and draining, and it's depleted my ability to look outside myself as much as I would normally want to or be able to.  In the little tracts of free time when I haven't been working or with my Child, I've leaned hard on people who are close to me, I've reduced my consumption of the news to almost nothing, and I've relied heavily on comforting reruns and light, easy reality TV because I'm sad and exhausted.  I have to acknowledge that I have simply not had the emotional strength to engage in work beyond the limited scope of my self, while also acknowledging that I'm frustrated with and somewhat unforgiving toward my current limitations.

On the other hand, this turtling is self-protective in the hopes of ultimately being restorative.  If I'm not being overly self-excusing and if I'm in fact being accurately optimistic, I'm hoping that the work I'm doing will actually empower me to be a better antiracist ally in the long-term.  In other areas of my life, like my clinical work and my teaching, there have already been ways in which I've been more available to people and responsibilities because of the emotional work I've been doing and the healthier boundaries I've set.

And honestly, there have been many moments in my antiracist process when I've seen striking parallels between the psychological and interpersonal dynamics that perpetuate and perpetrate racism and the interpersonal patterns I'm working to extricate myself from.  The healthier I become and the more skilled I get at addressing these patterns in my life, the more effective I hope to become as a sustainable advocate and ally.

Still, I struggle with the way my white privilege manifests in this phase of my life: that I have the choice to check out of focused, concerted antiracism and to take my eye off the ways racism is still at work today.  While racism harms every corner of society and every person, no matter their race, it is easier for a white person to disengage from that truth and therefore be less responsive to the urgent need for persistent, active antiracist work.

Ultimately, each of these analyses of my current state can all be true at the same time.  I'm exhausted.  I'm healing.  I am not operating at my full strength, and my wounds must be attended to, even if they are inconvenient.  That will mean that I cannot give myself as fully to other things that matter to me.  That will mean I ask those things for grace, patience, and forgiveness, even as I struggle to offer that to myself and even as I know the larger struggle continues.  That will mean that even my attempts to heal transact with my privilege in ways that are uncomfortable and problematic.  Which means I must do my best to continue to hold myself accountable through it all, as best I can.

Here's hoping for more strength, clarity, and change in the new year for all of us.

{Heart}