Here is the deal: so many people I know HAVE been called in, kindly, firmly, with hurts and harms shared in a modulated way and with a clear route back toward relationship and relatedness - and they RESPOND as if they have been cancelled and attacked.

This is old old labor in the transracial adoption community. Adult adoptees of color trying to reach their own parents, or other people’s parents @WeAreKAAN conference or other adoptee centered orgs ie: https://www.alltogetheradoption.org/about/ 

I’ve spent decades de-escalating white adoptive parents who flip out and start attacking or imploding at the gentlest or most compassionate of confrontations.

There have been many times when corralling those folks was explicitly my job.

And after literal lifetimes of tiptoeing and mixing the medicine into a spoonful of sugar - with limited success people get TIRED of the drama and the labor and feel burdened by so much cautiousness.

I absolutely do not begrudge anyone who has the energy and the wherewithal and the patience and the values to call folks in. Yes, it can reach some people.

Also: I absolutely understand when the limited return for energies expended feels draining and who can do all that on top of a lifetime of laboring to - say- get your colorblind white parents to admit that racism exists and that have been participants & beneficiaries.

I also understand just getting pissed when you’ve been hurt and negated in the same way over and over again.

Almost everyone I know who has “called someone out” exhausted themselves trying to call people in.

None of this is simple.

I’m mostly responding to white media getting super excited at the idea of “calling in” as if it is a brand new magic solution to unpleasant confrontations

When, it my experience it has literally been a consistent part of praxis for over 20 years.

I watch the transracially adopted leaders, professors, educators and clinicians I know do this work with white family members every single day of their working lives and I also know what they have been met with and how fucking TIRED they are.

I’m not in anyway critiquing the calling in literature and research or its comparative efficacy.

I’m just saying I’ve been watching this at work for 20 years, and the adoptee/adoption community has been laboring with this for at least twice that long.

And it is an entrenched complicated dynamic for real reasons.