Minnesota

Let's show support

Below is an email I sent to my coaching newsletter:

Several of you replied to my earlier email this week—in which I cheekily claimed to have a “PhD” in code-switching as an immigrant—cheering me on and sharing your recent wins with me.

Thank you.

When you read my emails, take part in my open workshops, coach with me, or apply even a tiny morsel of inspiration gained here to your career and life...

Please know that you’re doing so thanks to a web of interdependence. It is this web that allowed an awkward South Korean immigrant kid to assimilate into American society, to freely learn its language and inner workings of the workplace, and to apply that knowledge to supporting other women around the world.

When you engage with my work, you’re encountering a web of people (many of them invisible and behind the scenes)—starting from my immigrant mom, who still speaks broken English and paints nails, to the school teachers who put aside their prejudices to teach me, and countless others who didn’t make me wrong for the color of my skin.

Tragically, this is not the case in Twin Cities, Minnesota.

There are many families who can’t go to work, school, or the grocery store. They need our help; the brave people who are bringing them food also need our help.

Please give—even if it’s just $5—to one of the many grassroots organizations listed in this thorough article.

Here’s why I’m emailing you about this:

It wasn’t until yesterday morning, when I opened an email newsletter from Penelope Trunk in my inbox, that the full magnitude of this humanitarian crisis hit home. She compared this crisis to her first-hand experience of surviving 9/11, and I realized then that this urgently requires our attention.

Real people—regular people like you and me—are besieged in their own neighborhoods. Entire blocks of local restaurants serviced by immigrant families (just like mine) are shuttered. Children are unable to go to school, and families are unable to leave their homes for fear of being kidnapped by ICE. Renee Good’s senseless death showed us that the harm isn’t just directed at people of color; white allies are targeted, too.

When my family left South Korea in the late eighties, there were pro-democracy student protests that were often violently suppressed. My earliest childhood memories are of watching the news and seeing the fog of tear gas in the streets. When we arrived in the U.S., I vividly recall how frightening the mere specter of an immigration raid was (decades before ICE).

Luckily for us, it was just a specter. For the people of Minnesota, that specter is a lived terror.

Real integrity comes from doing what is ethical, and right now, that means taking action to help fellow humans who are currently unable to meet their most basic needs. After all, hope is not a feeling we wait for.

Hope is an action we take, no matter how small to support the ongoing web of human interdependence.

Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting other humans.
Jamie