Part V: Right Now What Cha’ll Want Gonna Lose to What Cha’ll Need to Hear
When the account stuff was finally resolved near July 2023 (as in the system started working; not that I or anyone else received an apology), I was relieved but still hurt. This had a huge negative impact on the organization. The DEIJ contractor I hired refused to work for us further because yet again she had gone unpaid for an extended period of time. Picture this: a Black woman (me) bringing in another Black woman (the contractor) to provide education for the organization to assist the space to be more amenable to Black people (myself included), all the while both get disrespected and undervalued. There was no apology issued to the contractor even though I put her in contact with the director in charge of changing over the account so we could pay people. No communication, nor explanation from that particular director. The accountant did apologize to the contractor, but not the director charged with changing over the account. And to put a cherry on top of it, that director later described the entire accounting incident as “small”. It’s not small: the entire organization ground to a halt operations wise because it took 6 months to get it sorted out AND we failed to pay a Black woman. Calling it a “small” incident further illustrates this director’s devaluing of Black labor. They never took responsibility and never attempted to minimize the negative impact.
As a Black woman/person of color, I can already be perceived as untrustworthy per every stereotype. Me going to the CoC partnered guiding companies and organizations begging for more time to pay them, begging for forgiveness was demeaning and embarrassing. I was happy to do it because, yet again: the only people who would suffer out of it would be the community.
And yet: I was going to just transition to be a Board member quietly without a fuss. I wanted rest; a chance to rebound yet be involved in a smaller capacity. December of 2023 I put in a proposal to transition. Not everyone on the board was present at the board meeting I put this forward, so naturally I sent an email asking those who were not present to vote as well. The director who blew deadlines and who was responsible for the prolonged halt in pay organization wide was not present at the meeting. They did not respond to it and instead sent me a separate message stating we had some conflict we needed to resolve.
Now, in the past month or so I had received two messages from this person saying things like “Hey do you have time to chat?” Me being in my petty era, I ignored them all. There was no statement akin to they had an issue with me or anything. So I continued business as usual. Again: not the right thing to do and I admit that.
However, I will say that I felt the timing of this was inappropriate. Suddenly now that I needed something from them, they were able to hold on to it until I engaged with them. I did not feel like this would be a conflict resolution session: when one has power over the other it pretty much guarantees I would have to appease this person in order to get a yes vote. And I didn’t like that: who would?
I am a believer in communication, so I did alert the board as to this new revelation. This director was basically withholding their vote until we engaged in a lop sided conflict resolution. Furthermore: if this person had an issue with me personally, in my mind it has little bearing on the vote because we are all professional adults. Surely they would be reasonable?
We both aired our frustrations at a board meeting in December. It came out that this director was going through an extremely difficult time with their family: they had a lot going on. I empathize with this as we all have a lot going on. However, I had two issues with this. One: they told no one they were struggling this year and did not elicit assistance from anyone, not even their assistant director. The assistant director even stated they had no idea this person was struggling. And two: I felt that these personal crises were weaponized as they were used at a very specific time and place. As professionals, we are supposed to ask for help from one another and be able to separate the emotional from the professional. And I do not feel like that was being illustrated here. If any of these crises were communicated to me I would have at least been able to convey that to the people I had to apologize to whom we promised to pay. But that never happened.
It also came out that the “blame and shame” cycle we ran in really made them uncomfortable. Well, that made two of us. And yet, we ran in this cycle because they never, not once in 5 years, expressed to me that they were uncomfortable with it. How am I supposed to change if I am never notified?
I think a big part of this is due to the structure of the organization we call Climbers of Color (CoC). The lack of a party to hold directors accountable made this situation ripe for a rift between people. However, all the problems apart from that stemmed from this particular director not doing their job aka their behavior. I played a part in this for sure, but the root of all the issues comes back to that.
We all started out as friends when CoC first started. But somewhere along the way, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for me to have these “friends” sit back and not lift a finger to help make the organization a safer space for Black people. It wasn’t enough that this director didn’t take the responsibilities seriously enough to follow through. In the end, we have become a professional organization and “friends” is no longer a path that can serve us, but professionalism is.
I apologized for my ignoring behavior during the December board meeting. I was the first one to: I wanted to move forward and put it behind us. Yes, I had become the aggressor one time in 5 years, but I thought this director would do the same thing I did when they behaved like this toward me: forgive and forget.
But that’s not what happened. I told them I could not move forward without an apology from them for grinding the organization to a halt but they could barely do it. I was stunned: how could someone not take responsibility like that? And to make matters worse, when we were done with the conflict talk and this director was asked when they would be voting on my integration into the board, they stated if they were pressed they would vote no “out of spite”.
I could not believe it: we had resolved things, right? I apologized for being petty. We were supposed to move forward. Why was there still not a vote after the meeting?
Final section:
Part VI: The Kind that Poems Could Never Capture the Longing Of
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