Hey Apexian – Last Friday, J.D. shared how he lost readers when he spoke up about social and racial issues.
No matter what position you take, even the most innocuous ones, someone will hate it. Many someones will hate it. Then suddenly, they will turn on you, call you horrible names they’d never have the guts to say in person, and then unsubscribe. It will not matter how much you’ve helped them, sometimes those animalistic instincts take over.
But I don’t mind losing people this way. I’d rather not have them in my life.
Then there are those who are just as passionate but are willing to have a conversation. Those conversations are important because that’s how you learn and grow. They may be uncomfortable because you are forced to reconsider your world view but it is necessary to lean into them because they are rare.
How the Personal Finance Sphere Upholds Systemic Racism [Our Next Life] – “Words mean things, and debt and slavery are simply not comparable on any level. An enslaved person could not declare bankruptcy and escape slavery. A person in debt does not transfer that debt to their children and their children’s children the way all an enslaved person’s offspring were owned as chattel from birth. And with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, even escaping a slave state for a free state didn’t guarantee a former enslaved person’s freedom. They could be forcibly returned to their “owner” by the “good guys” in the abolitionist state. There is no world in which you can equate that to debt, something that can be paid off and eliminated and which does not deny you personal liberties beyond simply having to dedicate some of your income to its service.”
You can walk away from that post thinking “I don’t mean that when I use that word,” but closes your mind to the possibility that the words you use are hurting people. It speaks to your intent and not to the result of your words, which ultimately is what matters.
Embracing Conflict- my talk at the EconoME conference [rich & Regular] – “As a first generation immigrant of Jamaican parents, I’ve had to pick and choose the aspects of the culture I wanted to carry forward and what parts I’d rather leave behind. Naturally, my selective adoption of cultural practices created an internal conflict because the more I let go of my born identity, the less I identified with people who’d nurtured it…my family.”
Here’s his talk (it’s 9 minutes and the first few mirror his post, but keep going):
Powerful.