In a world cowered by what other people think, my superpower is authenticity. I know who I am, I know what my purpose in this life is, I know what I value. I have done the inner work necessary to grow as a human being. I hold no one accountable for what I feel. Strong feelings about something are my cue to get introspective and try to pinpoint why I am reacting in a certain way. I have no fear in being me. If someone else is uncomfortable with me, I don’t take responsibility for that, and I don’t hold it against them.

Regina Jackson

Living in a white supremacist society, Black people are conditioned to “Code Switch,” for our own safety. I do not feel the need to do that at this point in my life. I worked in a corporate environment for twenty-seven-plus years, and yes, I had to tiptoe around white people’s feelings. I could not be happier now, that I work for myself. My opportunity to become the person I am today came in 1994. I was working for US WEST Communications, a former Bell System regional company. I live in Denver, CO, which I call Whitekonda. I was very uncomfortable around Asian people because I had no lived experience of interacting with Asian communities. Our parent company needed someone to go to Maylasia and set up a new call center. I was the only person in my market unit who had both Operations and Technical experience, I got the job. I spent six months in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. What my experience really taught me was that my fear was irrational and that I needed to work on myself.

I took a course on defining your life on your own terms. I know what I want my life to look like, what I will not compromise on, who I want to be, and what I want to do with my life. My life is mine; I live it the way I want on the terms that I choose. “I give myself permission to evolve as often as I need to be the human being that I am meant to be.”

When Saira & I started Race2Dinner in 2019, it was out of the frustration of white women not wanting to acknowledge that they are racist. If Black people raised and educated in the US can be self-loathing and have all this internalized racism, how is it that white people could be anything else but racist? White people will Defend, Deflect, and Deny any racism on their part. We still have a huge problem with white people not wanting to acknowledge the truth about the horrors that they have enacted and continue to enact around the world.

Take Palestine; I am committed to the humanity of every human being. I will not stay quiet about why Palestinians are being subjected to genocide. When I say that, I often get asked, “Well, what about the Israelis? As far as I can see, Israel is now the aggressor, they have the weapons, the money, the military strength and the desire for the land of Palestine. “Well, what about October 7?” There is a term called proportionality which asks the question what is proportional punishment for the offense? In my mind, it is not wiping Palestine off the map and murdering innocent civilians. My Jewish friends try to tell me that I don’t understand, and they offer to send me reading material. I read for knowledge and my own pleasure. By the time I was thirteen years old, I had read all the great books. I worked in the library in high school, so don’t ever try to lecture me on reading.

All of this to say, this is who I am, my voice matters, I will not silence myself to make someone else comfortable. I make no apologies for being my authentic self.