I have to tell you, I appreciate your response on today of all days. I’m sitting with the absolute hardest part of this process for me: explaining how extraordinarily painful this kind of help is.

What makes it so hard is that so so so much of it comes from a good place. I really mean that. I suspect that’s why Black folks stay silent on the crippling defect of the WA approach — who wants to tag an addendum onto “thank you,” for goodness sake! We see you. We know you are trying so friggin hard. Like everyone, we know what’s it’s like to have genuine expressions of affection received poorly. We appreciate the effort. We’re kinfolk in the struggle. And on and on.

But … well, it’s a little broken, this method. As long as we were going on the right direction, meh. But we stopped. And I think maybe we’ve back tracked. And there is no better time to reset ourselves so we, as a family, go farther. So we, as a family, get better. So we, as a family, become stronger and more unified and smarter.

So that we, as a family, become a family.

That’s why I broke away from the silence. I had to. I hate it, but I had to. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t just take a break because my current section was just a bit too overwhelming. I broke my “no playing on the internet while you have writing to do” rule. And ESPECIALLY no reading comments while writing rule. And I saw this, saw you.

And I owe you a debt of thanks.

Thank you.

~Catherine