between urgency and speed?

I love to look words up in the Webster's Dictionary app on my phone, even the ones I thought I already knew the definition for. I love how a word can have various definitions (separated by numbers) so that I can learn something different about a word I thought I knew.

Urgency, for example, is defined first as 'importance requiring swift action'. I like the importance, but I'm not so sure about the swift part, especially as we have been re-learning in the weeks since George Floyd's murder that urgency can cause harm. (For more on that, check out Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, and alternatives to the 'fire hose' approach.)

The second definition of urgency is closer to where I begin to feel that divergence between urgency and speed - it says urgency is 'an earnest and persistent quality; insistence'. 

Listening to a conversation between the brilliant therapist and writer, Resmaa Menakem, and racial and social justice educator, Robin DiAngelo, on the On Being podcast, I heard Menakem summarize the experience of confronting racism this way: 'I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I know I can't continue to do this anymore...and I'm going to make other choices.'

I connected so clearly and immediately with that statement, I had to pause the podcast for a second. Why was it so familiar to me? Because it's exactly how I felt when I left my job in design and architecture to pursue a career in food. 

Notice in Menakem's statement that the urge to change things - whether it's your own life, the world, or something in between - is not a solution in and of itself. In fact, he begins by saying 'I don't know what I'm gonna do', a feeling so many of us can relate to, and which is not about hope, or answers. The 'answer' is in you, as an individual; the answer is the urgency.

But how do we ensure progress?

The commitment to responding to urgency with a slow, sustainable course is not about a singular action, or even a set of actions (although both are important) - it is a process. And just as we have experienced the uncomfortable work of building our livelihoods outside of traditional measures of success, we're reminding ourselves that true change will only come about when we look to different markers of success than we have in the past. What do you want you life to look like? Your career? Your community, and country?

We're starting here at GFJ, a business that you, if you are reading this right now, are a part of. We're working toward something Darnisa Amante-Jackson, founder of the Disruptive Equity Education Project, so beautifully articulated in an interview for the New York Times Magazine, a future education system 'built around students’ "telling their stories and listening to the stories of others” and creating “in us the feeling that we belong to each other as people."'

If you missed our recent advice on writing a more equitable job post, check those out here and here. 

If you haven't read LeeAnn Morrissette's newsletter takeover, or Jasmine Michele's instagram takeover, catch up on those here and here. 

In food, justice, and food justice, 

Dor + Tay

Roy Mitchell photographed by Andrew Plotsky for GFJ Stories