Dear "Woke" White People
As I stated on my personal social media accounts a week ago, now is not the time to be hearing from white women pontificating on how the current social injustice crisis, we need to sit down and hear from our black sisters. Before making an action statement from GRRRL, we all want to have as much set in stone regarding our commitments so that we know we can deliver on our promises. In the meantime you can visit our brand social media accounts which speak for us collectively until such point.
But as I stood in the kitchen cooking my plant based snags, I thought about a post I'd read on IG a few days back and felt compelled to write this. The post was in regards to people in the Vegan community not wanting to talk about "political issues" because it causes division.
I almost choked.
Before I continue, you may have noticed I put "'s around the word woke in the title. The reasoning is because the word derives straight from the Black community, and is just another drop in the bucket of things borrowed from Black culture that white people don't want to recognise. Seems petty to some, but in actuality, people forget that every day we profit off the blood, sweat, and tears of Black lives.
Back to my snags...
How many of you reading this have ever had the experience of thinking of someone when all of a sudden they text or call you? Or you casually wondered how someone you haven't spoken to in almost a decade was doing from your high school days, then the next day they find you on LinkedIn and decide to reach out and touch someone? At this rate, I'm confident 9 out of 10 of us have had this experience. Multiple times.
At first, you might have chalked it up to coincidence. Then, after the second or third or fourth time, you started to recognise that we might all in fact be connected energetically.
Which brings me to the point: This is exactly why I nearly choked when I read that post from someone in the Vegan community.
Vegans believe (Evidently there is no such thing as being 99% Vegan. I learned that the hard way via comments on a past IG post) that animals are sentient beings. It's not hard to argue this belief when a pig has as much smarts as a 3-year old child. Science has more or less proven this, and can easily be digested by watching, "What The Bleep Do We Know" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6G3-Zc9mtM
Aside from said statement by someone in the Vegan community, I've witnessed a handful of witchy groups (one with 45,000 some odd members on Facebook) mostly comprised of white women, share their "thoughts" on the "atrocities" of the current situation.... "despite all of the madness, I will stay grounded and hold space for mother earth until it passes". (insert massive fuck-off LOL)
From Vegans to Witches, the thing that every "woke" white community member needs to recognise right now, is that you of all people should know that we're all connected on this planet energetically. Until Black people have liberty and justice for all, as they've been promised, none of us will be energetically free.
It's incredibly easy to not make this "your fight", but the reality is, this IS your fight. It is ALL of our fight.
Just like your text messages sync at the same time with a distant friend "coincidently", to my step-dad who used to play Mozart to his pot plants so they were grow robust, everything in this world is energetically connected. You feel it when you smile at a passing by car and a total stranger smiles back at you. You feel it when you walk into a humid room but something feels cold and dark within the walls.
I will leave you with this thought until I come back with a statement and enforced call to action for our staff, ambassadors and volunteers.
Nobody knew that the revolution was going to start in Minneapolis except Prince.
To get a better grip on when, why, what and how of this... take the time to listen to Black people.
Visit www.grrrl.com/resources/ to pick up tools to check yourself. We cannot give away what we don't have, and we don't know what we have until we take our inventory. Taking our inventory means doing the work.
Kort