The Call That Changed My Voice: How a Pandemic-Era Conversation Ended My Token Era

If your peace depends on my silence, it’s not peace; it’s privilege.

In 2020, during the height of the pandemic and the racial reckoning across the U.S., I received a phone call from a white woman I’d once considered a colleague. In the years prior, we had discussed the lack of diversity in the parenting world. We had done telesummits as experts on how to be more conscious in raising children. And, I’d even written a book blurb for her poetry book. However, after I was alerted by another colleague that her tone-deaf “All Lives Matter” poem had gone viral, for all the wrong reasons, there was a reckoning in my system. What’s funny is that in the backlash, she decided I was the safe person to turn to.

In the call, she didn’t want to get political; she wanted peace. She wanted to bring people together with her poetry and her positivity. She wanted to be seen as spiritual.

But what she really wanted, and what so many people want in moments like these, was a Black person to soften the blow. She wanted me to co-sign her intentions so she wouldn’t have to face the harm of her impact.

Instead, I gave her my truth.

I told her that her peace was a privilege. That Ahmaud Arbery, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, to name a few, would never get to see this kumbaya world she envisioned. That if she truly wanted to be an ally, she would have used her discomfort as a portal to awareness, not a call to comfort.

She ended the call emotionally.
I ended it shaking.

But I also ended it renewed.