I’ve been putting off writing this blog post for nearly 2 years. Mostly because it’s complicated to talk about.

Representation burnout.

I first came across this term via Shine’s article “Why We Need to Talk About – and Recognize – Representation Burnout” by Martha Tesema.

The article was posted a year before George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. The day after his murder, I facilitated a partnership meeting for a client organization. I joined the Zoom meeting several minutes early with the partnership co-leads, after spending the day looking at news coverage of George’s murder.

I admitted to them that I wasn’t fully present, yet I still wanted to fully show up. I also admitted it at the start of the meeting with the partners.

In Nonprofit Quarterly article “The Hidden Cost of DEI Work –And What to Do About It,” , co-author Tiloma Jayasinghe asks questions that perfectly sums up how I often feel:

What if I, the professional facilitator, break down in tears in front of a full Zoom room of clients because this work, and the stakes if it fails, feels like I am letting BIPOC people down and ruining this small opening for workplace liberation?

How am I supposed to cope with race equity work when another Black trans woman was murdered today, and/or last night another Asian elder was hit and painfully injured on the Lower East Side of New York City, and/or how many hundreds of Black people have been murdered since brother George Floyd took his last breath? Where is the outrage for them?

When and how do I just pause and stop so that I can rest, recharge, so that I can be on this journey for the long haul?

“The Hidden Cost of DEI Work–And What to Do About It” by Andrea J. Rogers and Tiloma Jayasinghe (Nonprofit Quarterly, 2021)

When people see me, they see a Black woman, because we’re visual. Getting to know me, you’ll discover that I’m a Black cisgender heterosexual woman. Going deeper, you’ll discover that I’m a Black cisgender heterosexual woman, from the south, an identical twin, has a bachelors degree from a HBCU and a masters degree from an Ivy League, became motherless at age 17, grew up in Christianity, full time self employed for 6 years, a New York City transplant for 11 years, now resides in Washington, DC, and so on.

Like you, I have multiple identities and lived experiences. Also like you, the identity that gets the most prominence largely depends on the space I walk into.

And sometimes, these identities are the only reasons we’re allowed into spaces in the first place.

How do we deal with this?