Walmart stores announced they are rolling back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative (DEI) and will no longer use the term. In response, I rolled over in bed. “Rest is resistance,” I repeated after Tricia Hersey, the Nap Bishop.
I hit the snooze button because this is the point, the gist, the aim. Toni Morrison made it plain: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.”
They can “roll back the prices,” but I won’t be there to bear witness. I refuse to bankroll oppression, so the list of stores I patronize continues to shrink.
More than a year later, Starbucks remains on my boycott list. Because I don’t believe there is any context or rationale for which genocide makes sense.
I don’t care what season it is, Advent or otherwise. It only took 30 days for me to lose my taste for their chai tea latte and banana bread.
And I love banana bread, but it’s too rich for my taste if it means that Palestinians starve to death. I can’t say, “Jesus is the bread of life” and stomach this (John 6:35).
CNN reported that Walmart decided to change course due to “right-wing backlash.” So, Walmart walked back its commitment, which reads in part (under the tab labeled “Belonging at Walmart”), “Our vision is simple yet powerful: ‘Everyone included.’ By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is – and feels – included, we create an environment where everyone wins.”
Diversity means “the state of being diverse” or “variety.” Equity is defined as “fairness or justice in the way people are treated.” Inclusion is simply “the action or state of including or of being included within a group or structure.”
Given that America is culturally diverse and has a history of inequitable treatment of racialized and minoritized groups, its institutions must be intentional to include them. But like “stay woke,” which means to remain aware of social and political unfairness, the term now halved to “woke,” has a forced “double-consciousness,” an unwanted “twoness” due to intentional and strategic political misuse. Now, no one wants to use it.
But that’s the point: to gain control of the meaning and the message, asserting semantic sovereignty, using the media to render the term useless and to take away its action word. You see what I’m saying?
Depending on what you were taught in school and at home, you know what’s happening here. My ancestors told me about these tactics were meant to deny their reality and delay just actions.
Instead of reframing it or explaining it, I’m just going to rest my eyes. Ignorance and confusion over the oppressive history of this country, feigned or felt, double as tactics of power and control.
Add tears, which have been weaponized. For my sanity and safety, I choose to stay out of it.
Morrison continued as a panelist at Portland University in 1975: “It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
So, I choose not to add solving their problem to my to-do list. Instead, I snore as Walmart fails lesson number four in Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”: “Take responsibility for the face of the world.” “When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable,” he wrote.
Remember that Advent begins in the dark. See this advance obedience from Walmart and other stores for what it is. Acknowledge and take inventory of it.
Resist the urge to dress it up, to rush the story to get to the good part. Yes, Jesus is coming, but not now.
“The more the world outside lights its trees, the more sparkle and glitter it throws about, the more it sings ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas,’ the more you will want to immerse yourself in the special mood of Advent,” Fleming Rutledge wrote in “Advent: The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ.” During these dark days and trying times, I am looking for the light in others, for those who are committed to shining it because they want to see what I’m saying. In the meantime, I am going back to sleep.
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
