Hey friends,
The kids have been away all week, and two out of the five nights, we’ve gone out in the evening and eaten dinner after 9pm. It doesn’t make for great sleeping but it’s pretty awesome nonetheless. Last night on our way to a late dinner we stopped in Copley Square, one of Boston’s great public squares, for a Donna Summer Disco Party. YES.
A woman in an orange sequined bodysuit and roller skates was doing the most. A tween boy in a bright green t-shirt was deeply in the zone. I don’t think I was the only one in the all ages, all races crowd that felt overjoyed to be fully in my body, singing and dancing outside on a summer evening with a bunch of strangers.
And on the periphery of the joyful dancing crowd were a lot of people who need help in this world. Unhoused people, people with mental health challenges, people with substance abuse issues. More people than usual, or maybe I just saw them more clearly because I haven’t seen so many folks in one place in a long time.
It can get overwhelming when you trace in your head the people who are living on the street to the structural systems that have failed us all. What does one human do?
Over the course of a few months this past winter, I was part of a white parents’ discussion group that was convened by a couple of parents at our kids’ school. We talked a lot about the history of structural racism in Boston when it comes to schools and neighborhoods - a rich and varied topic smh, we barely scratched the surface. At the end, we had a consultant who’s been working with our school facilitate a discussion about how we’d move forward with our work.
She suggested we use a framework of mitigation. In the case of structural racism in public education (or structural problems in housing or mental health care), it might not be possible to reform or dismantle it. Instead, she suggested we think of our work as mitigating the harms of racism (in this case) and make them less severe.
Personally, it was a galvanizing re-framing of how to approach big problems. When you’re staring at a complex system with a long history, it’s often challenging to know where to start.
Harm mitigation helps us understand social change as something we can see and touch, something we can manage. It means not discounting Venmo-ing someone 20 bucks, or dropping off a few bags of groceries for people who need food, or watching someone’s kids so they can go to a community meeting, or other acts that sometimes feel insignificant in the face of such huge issues.
It asks us to show people we care, in ways that are focused and purposeful - and are also a means to an end - the end of homelessness, the end of untreated mental health problems, the end of inequity in public schools. More getting down to disco on summer nights for more people.
Happy summer, all!
XO
Leigh
ps, amazing image grabbed from Caught in Dot.