The book White Fragility blew up a few years back and got everyone investigating “Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”

But here’s the kick, it was by a white person.

It didn’t take long for people to start to critique the book, the premise, the author. I’ll be honest I didn’t read it…I don’t read books on racism by white people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But here’s what I want to talk about today, while the book was popular among who you would think it would be….the phrase seems to have become popular with everyone.

Language is alive and impacts pretty much everything we do. How we talk about things, the labels we use, they matter even when they are messy and ever-changing. I began using BBA and BBIA instead of BIPOC several years ago. Here’s why.

I learned silence early.

As a queer, fat, Black, multiply neurodivergent woman, I learned that my voice was too much. Too loud. Too honest.

Even when I whisper, even when I covered my words in flowers and acquiescence, even sometimes when I was silent I was still too loud.

So I read a book about leadership recently. It was written by a white woman who’s worked for huge companies like Google and Apple. The book is called Radical Candor by Kim Scott and I really enjoyed it.

The premise is basically this: for leaders, there is an axis of caring personally and challenging directly. You want high levels of both to run an effective team.

Let’s break the axis down…