In 2021, New Friends New Life added Juneteenth to its list of staff holidays and we are proud to acknowledge the now federally granted holiday once again this year. As an agency that serves women and girls, 40 percent of whom are Black, and all of whom have been impacted by sex trafficking, (also referred to as modern-day slavery), it is important that we recognize and seek to understand the effects that slavery and other forms of violence continue to have on our collective psyche.
Fresh acts of racism, like the Buffalo Massacre, along with ongoing violence against groups because of their religion, political alignment, or sexual orientation, remind us of the discrimination and hatred that simmers below the surface, boiling over into moments of unthinkable tragedy until the next awful thing happens to distract us, or until enough time passes for us to return to our “normal lives.”
The respite is always short-lived though, because we exist in context of what is happening around us, meaning that we do not go unscathed by the exposure to or the repeated experiences of these evils. As the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “My humanity is bound up in yours, because we can only be human together.”
I’ve had many opportunities to raise these discussions about humanity with our staff lately, and I remind and affirm to them that while we cannot control what happens outside these walls, we can control how we behave within them. We get to create the world we want to see by how we treat each other and how we treat our members.
Those who have been overlooked, abused, and discriminated against are all asking the same question: do you see me? It is our goal at NFNL to answer that question with a resounding “yes!” every day.
