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I struggle between the accountability of one's words and actions and the forgiveness that teaches progress and change.

I think that we should all be held accountable for the words and actions that we do and say. I do not think that should be a fireable offense necessarily. But, what kinds of things can we do in a workplace and/or school setting with kids to teach the lesson and know for the most part that it won't happen again.

Forgiveness leads to grace and with that grace comes dignity. If we are living with dignity and grace then we are living with value and care about how we use our words and actions.

I think this summer was a wake up call to all the things wrong with our systems (systems, not people) and that we need to find that pathway to change. There were so many things wrong with these systems from the beginning and now people are reacting - and when we have these visceral reactions - we almost always direct them at people. We really need to find a way forward so that everyone can live with grace and dignity.
- ORTEGA

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If I see you fall, will I help you up or continue to push you down? Shay

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If I see you fall, will I help you up or continue to push you down? Shay

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I think that we are living in a time where people are choosing to take the "easy way" out, by cancelling people instead of choosing to help them grow. My initial reaction after watching the video for a few minutes, is that Teen Vogue took the easy way out. I honestly don't feel like they fired her because they were upset with her tweets, but instead fired her out of fear of losing their millions and stocks. How many times have we all said or done things out of our ignorance or lack of understanding, that we wish we could take back? I feel like this company missed a great opportunity to use her and the experience to educate many who may have did the very thing that she did. What Teen vogue did is teach their millions of teen viewers that they can't make a mistake ever.
*We can't call out hypocrisy, but don't allow people to change

This made me think of the time that I chose to have a restorative circle with the teens and their parents, due to the racist snapchat that was sent to my son. It would have been easy to punish them, but it wouldn't have helped to change their hearts. Using that moment to help educate them, is something that I truly believe will help them in the future.  I wasn't interested in them losing scholarships or embarrassing them. I was interested more in getting the confusion or hatred out of their hearts, so that it didn't continue to grow .

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FORGIVENESS AND GRACE - RANDOM TAKEAWAYS FROM COLEMAN

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FORGIVENESS AND GRACE - RANDOM TAKEAWAYS FROM COLEMAN

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"WE CAN'T BECOME THE VERY MONSTERS WE'RE FIGHTING AGAINST." - JIMMY BALDWIN

GRACE- GIVE PEOPLE SPACE

FORGIVENESS IS PART OF GROWING.

"WE'VE GOT TO DEAL WITH HOLDING PEOPLE ACCOUNTABLE BUT NOT DESTROY PEOPLE BECAUSE YOU END UP DESTROYING YOURSELF" - REV. AL SHARPTON

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"A world in which McCammond apologizes for her old tweets is better than one in which she sees nothing wrong with them..."

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"A world in which McCammond apologizes for her old tweets is better than one in which she sees nothing wrong with them..."

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-Graeme Wood
YES.

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I like the idea of "leading the conversation through their own experience..." How impactful are our personal stories? And nothing invites people to the table more than sharing who we are.

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Cancelling is the easy way out and should be a last resort applied only when a person/institution/organization has demonstrated no interest in joining a productive conversation and taking corrective action.  We all stumble.  We all fail.  I would hate to think what the human experience would be like if we aren't afforded the opportunity to grow.  If a person stumbles, is confronted about the poor choice and is open to GROWTH, accepting responsibility and corrective action moving forward then they may become a powerful force for change.
In the case of Alexi at Teen Vogue I feel like the parent corporation (Conde Naste) took the easiest but absolutely least productive way out.  She could have been a powerful force for good at Teen Vogue.
James Baldwin's eloquent words about creating ourselves without having to create an enemy are powerful and applicable here.

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America Has Forgotten How to Forgive

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If Teen Vogue, even in its current woke incarnation, does not exist to celebrate this period of still-expungeable error, then it may as well be calling for the abolition of the teenage years altogether. Its staff, as well as many of its advertisers, evidently think its readers deserve no bonfire, no sin jubilee, and should be hounded eternally for their dumbest and most bigoted utterances. This suggests an intriguing editorial mix of beauty tips, celebrity news, and vengeance. Who wouldn't want to read what a modern 20-something Torquemada thinks about Zayn Malik's Netflix queue or a new brand of facial cleansers? Because I am no longer a teenager, I have no teenage years to lose. Although if Teen Vogue has its way, I suppose I should consider myself hostage to the idiocy of my wayward teenage self until I am safely dead.

Teenagers lose from this decision. Asian Americans do too. I know nothing about the racial composition of the staff of Teen Vogue, but the policing of anti-Asian tweets, no matter who does it, is a cheap exercise in identity construction. In an interview published Wednesday, the writer Cathy Park Hong told The Atlantic that fixing political problems requires that we "talk about our racial identity, because people feel intimately close to that." The solution is to "build an Asian American identity that's beyond loving boba tea and K-pop."

The coup d'état at Teen Vogue is the result of a debased form of identity building-one that mistakes an identity worth having for one founded on the pitiless prosecution of offenses by members of other races regardless of whether they are large or small, intended or unintended, ongoing or long-disavowed. I see little harm, and some good, in the various Asian-hyphenated Americans celebrating their communities, and even their wider pan-Asian community. Like everyone, Asian Americans should meet racism and violence with the contempt they deserve. But they should decline to model their outrage on the vindictive excesses that have become commonplace. They should do so independently of existing structures, which originated in categories of Black and white, and don't work very well for discussion of those races either. Nor is it any failure of allyship with Black people, or for that matter white people, to opt out of these structures. Black identity and white identity are lamentable realities, difficult to unravel because they are legacies of America's original sin. If, as Hong says, Asian identity is something still being built, a real act of allyship would be to reject the defective templates of its predecessors. No one wants to be stuck in a prison of racial identity, but the prison walls do not crumble because some people volunteer to be inmates with those who have no choice.
Read: What stories of racial trauma leave out

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racial composition of the staff of teen vogue

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result of a debased form of identity building

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If Teen Vogue, even in its current woke incarnation, does not exist to celebrate this period of still-expungeable error, then it may as well be calling for the abolition of the teenage years altogether. Its staff, as well as many of its advertisers, evidently think its readers deserve no bonfire, no sin jubilee, and should be hounded eternally for their dumbest and most bigoted utterances.

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Amid the rise in anti-Asian hate incidents, I reached out to the boy who bullied me 20 years ago. This is what happened.

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The recent rise in anti-Asian hate incidents, mostly against women, has rattled my senses. I now walk more quickly down the streets, looking over my shoulder. My heart hurts. I've tried to think of something I can do to feel less powerless, how I can make meaning out of the meaningless. So, I decided to turn to my own past and reach out to a boy (now a man) who was cruel to me for years, all because I am Asian.

I grew up in North Carolina and attended a perfectly fine public high school that was about 70 percent white and about 3 percent Asian. I excelled in advanced courses, which had the structure and support of good teachers. But I rode the bus to and from school most days, and there were no adults to call the shots. I was a small girl and the only Asian kid on the bus. Therefore, I was easy prey for the few mean kids who ruled the roost. They would call me a "chink b----," tell me to cook them "white lice," pull their eyes sideways at me and sidle up into my seat and shout "ching chong" at me. And none of the other kids intervened. Not once.

The most frequent offenders were two boys whose faces and names I'll never forget. They were each almost twice my size. I got so tired of choking back tears. The memory of their twinkle-eyed sneers still haunts me.

My dad is an immigrant from Malaysia, from a province on Borneo called Sawarak. His family is ethnically Chinese; they fled China in the early 1900s to escape religious persecution. He grew up in a longhouse, up on stilts to survive the frequent rainforest floods. He learned English in a nearby village, which he reached by crossing the river in a canoe each morning.

He immigrated alone to the U.S. to attend college at Ohio Wesleyan. He met a fiery blond freshman named Ann, and they hit it off. They married several years later, despite protestations from her family that she had chosen a "damn foreigner." A few years later, they moved to Durham, North Carolina, and had me, the first of three daughters.

After college, I struck out for New York City. But being a professional 500 miles north didn't spare me from racial comments. But the murky nature of those comments have often left me wondering if I'm crazy to be offended. When strangers in the street have yelled "Me love you long time," that's obviously bad. But what about when loved ones call me "exotic," thinking it's a compliment? Or the hundreds of times someone has asked, "What are you?" Or when a past manager once told me I was a "beautiful China doll" when I wore a red dress to the office?

Ten weeks after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which was perpetrated mostly by white men, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said that he "never felt threatened" by the invaders, but he might have been afraid if they had been Black Lives Matter or Antifa protesters. The racial implications were obvious. In another interview that day, he said that the armed insurrection "didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me." That word "seem." His bias, conscious or not, was so strong that he denied undeniable facts.

On Tuesday's "Morning Joe," Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis suggested that Sen. Johnson, in his heart, "does not believe he is a racist." He called the comments the best case study for unconscious, subliminal racism. That got me thinking about the boys on the bus. Were they really racist, or were they just angry, mean kids, grasping at whatever insult felt easiest?

I took to the Twittersphere.

"I wonder if the kids who pulled their eyes at me and mercilessly yelled "ching chong" at me on the bus even remember doing it," I wrote. "The two worst offenders are both parents now. I wonder what they teach their children."

A few minutes after I posted, I decided "wonder" wasn't enough. I would go to the source and ask one of those school bus tormentors if he remembered being unkind to me. I opened up Facebook Messenger, gulped hard, and hit send. I thought he would probably say nothing, and I prepared myself for the possibility that he would lash out at me or gaslight me with denials. But my driving force was curiosity, not vengeance.

After 10 chest-pounding minutes of seeing the three dots bubble in his corner, I received one of the loveliest, most vulnerable apologies I've ever gotten. And my suspicions were founded: He didn't specifically remember being cruel to me. But he didn't shy away from taking responsibility. "I'm really sorry for making you feel that way. I was def an a-hole kid! Not making excuses at all because I feel horrible knowing I made you feel that way!" He added, "I acted out thru much of my younger life because honestly I wasn't happy and peaceful with myself ... There are a lot of things in life I wish I could take back and this is definitely one."

I sat on my couch and cried. My heart healed more in an instant that I thought possible. He and I went on to chat for more than 30 minutes and agreed we wish we could hug and introduce our children to each other someday.

Matt Lewis nailed it. That boy on the bus didn't hate me because I was Asian. He was a mean teenager, and I was an easy target because I was Asian. That's what society allowed to happen, so that's what he did.

On social media, many well-meaning people this week have repeated a common refrain: We all can and should do better. Solidarity is an important first step, and it helps those who have felt alone and attacked. But what can we do to get at the root, to stop the systemic bias before it hardens to racism and metastasizes into violence?

What moved me most on the Twitter thread were the handful of people who took the opportunity to confess being racially mean to other kids growing up. They ache about it. They aren't racist, they say, and they know better now. And I'm inclined to believe people who are willing to expose themselves like that.

So I'm curious: Do you want to do better? Is there an acquaintance or friend who might be open to having a frank but open-hearted chat about race? Consider taking an awkward social plunge yourself. As I've learned, it might be well worth it.
Cat Rakowski is an Emmy-winning journalist and a booking producer for MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and "Way Too Early with Kasie Hunt." She lives in Queens with her son, Lincoln. Follow her @catrakowski.

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Amid the rise in anti-Asian hate incidents, I reached out to the boy who bullied me 20 years ago. This is what happened.

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The recent rise in anti-Asian hate incidents, mostly against women, has rattled my senses. I now walk more quickly down the streets, looking over my shoulder. My heart hurts. I've tried to think of something I can do to feel less powerless, how I can make meaning out of the meaningless.

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One of the points that most resonated with me was when Eddie Glaude Jr shared the James Baldwin quote: I would like us to do something unprecedented, to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy. It makes me ask myself how I can grow in becoming a more just person without casting judgement or condemning others. It is easy to think we are the "woke" person because we are shutting down others for their mistakes, but the real work is in forgiveness, is in supporting others as they grow, is in becoming advocates. When we create a society where there is zero space for mistakes and forgiveness, we are not creating a society that allows people to learn from their mistakes and to do better.  I do think people need to be held accountable for their actions and words, but accountability does not equal being cancelled. - Deanda

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Cindi Abbott - There were so many points that stood out to me in this segment.  Many of them reminded me of my own class contract and the way I handle issues with students and my own  family.      

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Cindi Abbott - There were so many points that stood out to me in this segment.  Many of them reminded me of my own class contract and the way I handle issues with students and my own  family.      

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* Forgiveness is part of growing.
* Consequences should be connected to the behavior.
* We should hold people accountable without destroying them.
* Our words should be to build up, not cut down.
* Create yourself without creating an enemy in others.