The Courage to Go First

When You Don’t Have a Map, Find Fellow Travelers

These portraits by Meg, The Film Artist, hang behind my desk. I call them “The Ladies Who Have My Back”

I grew up moving back and forth between cultures, in a world that was always bigger than me. Human hopes, dreams, wants, and needs looked remarkably similar the world over, but our ways of helping, healing, hating, and harming one another wore many faces. We all had our own crossroads to contend with. In my early adulthood, Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “Borderlands” captured this spirit for me:

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads.

My coming-of-age years included attending Civil Rights rallies and marching to Take Back the Night. I wrote my first letter to the editor opposing racism when I was 18 and was hosting interracial dialogue groups soon thereafter. I worked in group homes with young women who’d been court-removed from their families for being poor, or for not having a community of support, or because they were from the “wrong part of town.”

I saw how deeply all manner of institutions drew those divisions even more starkly along racial lines. I witnessed how systems were skewed in ways that could swallow people whole. My commitment to building more just systems was born early and has deep roots.

I’ve spent a lot of my life working to solve problems without easy answers and seeking out…