I See You

Being seen is a lesson our kids teach us long before we have the words for it. They tug our sleeves while we scroll, they stack block towers right in our path, they sing too loud in the back seat. We call it acting out, but most days it is a simple request: look at me. In those tiny protests there is a truth we seem to forget as we grow up and strap on our titles and calendars. We want to be noticed for who we are, not only for what we produce. We want someone to hold eye contact a second longer and say, without flowery language or a Slack reaction, I see you. At work, that hunger hides behind roadmaps and metrics, but it does not go away. It shows up in the way you write a doc that no one reads, in the way you pour into a team while carrying private grief, in the way you show grace to a customer on a day when you have none to spare for yourself. It shows up in the meetings where the folks who know the ground best sit quiet because the room has already decided. It shows up when you cannot bring your full self across the threshold because you learned that certain parts of you need to wait in the car if you want to be taken seriously. I know that feeling. I know the tightness in your chest when your identity and your job crash into each other and the professional mask asks you to swallow what is human. I also know the power in hearing someone say, with intention, I see you, and then backing it up with action.

That is why this is for the people who choose, every single day, to help others be seen. I will think about two of them in particular, because they have stood in the tension and decided to build rooms where people can breathe. But I mean it for anyone who has taken on the work of culture when culture stopped being a poster and became a practice. The work is harder now. In a country that seems determined to sort people by label first and story last, the simple idea of seeing each other is being dragged into a fight that should not exist. The new administration has spent this year turning diversity, equity, and inclusion into a villain, writing executive orders that frame DEI as radical waste and pushing agencies to erase programs, offices, and training from public view, as if eliminating the language will unmake the people it was trying to protect. The instructions have been blunt, from directing agencies to terminate diversity roles to scrubbing resources from federal sites, and when courts have stepped in to slow parts of that purge, the message has still been loud enough to chill the room. The intent feels clear. If you change the words, maybe you can pretend the needs are gone.

Look at Chicago to understand what this climate does on the ground. The city just went to court with a coalition of municipalities to challenge new federal strings on emergency and anti-terror grants, conditions that would require them to certify they do not run programs that “advance or promote DEI.” It is hard to describe how backwards it feels to tell cities that public safety dollars are contingent on ignoring efforts that make communities safer for the people who actually live there. This is not theory. It is funding and policy, with human consequences in neighborhoods that have already been asked to carry more than their share.

Now layer that on top of the immigration crackdown that has unfolded in Chicago as well, and the picture sharpens. In recent weeks federal raids have swept through neighborhoods like Pilsen, Little Village, and parts of the South and Southwest Sides, and downtown has seen arrests near landmarks that used to feel untouchable. Local outlets and public broadcasters have reported more than five hundred arrests in a matter of weeks, small businesses in Latino corridors watching sales collapse as families stay home, festival organizers rewriting safety plans, and community groups training rapid response teams and Know Your Rights volunteers to keep children with parents and neighbors with neighbors. The raids have not only taken people, they have taken breath, disrupting routines, emptying storefronts, and turning ordinary commutes into a calculation of risk. This is what it means to be seen for the wrong reasons. It is visibility without dignity, attention without care.

Some will say the politics are beside the point at work. Keep it neutral. Ship the thing. But the politics show up anyway, in who gets to be in the room, in whose stories are deemed off topic, in who is allowed to have a bad day and who has to smile through one. If you are a woman, if you are LGBTQIA+, if you are a person of color, you have probably felt the calculation of which version of yourself will be safest on a given morning. You have probably done performance math in a space that claims meritocracy while quietly recruiting culture fit. And when you look up at the people who write the rules, the demographics tell their own story. The new Congress is more diverse than in the past, but the overwhelming majority of members from racial and ethnic minority groups sit on one side of the aisle, while the party currently moving to curtail DEI remains led and staffed in ways that do not reflect the country they serve. Representation cannot be the only metric, but when the gap is this wide, it changes which experiences are understood without an explanation and which need footnotes just to be considered.

I think about all of this in the quiet moments, the ones that do not look like leadership at all. The ride home after a hard day where you wonder if the work is moving or if the work is moving you. The moment at your kitchen counter when your little one asks to play and you hear yourself ask for ten more minutes, again, and again, and you hate that the ask is always pointed at the people who give you the most grace. The meetings where you cannot say what you really feel, so you thank someone for their candor and try to keep your voice steady. I replay the first time someone told me they saw me, not because I had delivered a number, but because I had tried to carry people well. It was at HashiCorp where I began to learn what DEI actually is when the jargon falls away. It is not a quota or a slogan. It is practice. It is the discipline of building spaces where belonging is not a monthly theme but a daily habit. It is the choice to sit in discomfort long enough to change something, even if the change is only a door held open that used to be closed. I have watched people do that work while the temperature in the outside world keeps rising. It would be easier to give up. It would be easier to decide that being seen is a luxury and get back to the business of pretending.

But I keep returning to a harder truth. We are being seen right now, but too often it is through a lens designed to flatten us. Rhetoric that calls DEI immoral teaches people to look for enemies instead of neighbors. Policies that punish cities for inclusion teach people to fear collaboration. Even the legal wins that pause some of these orders cannot undo the way language spreads once it is unleashed. Words matter. They become permission. They become policy. And policy becomes the shape of a classroom or a clinic or a paycheck.

So here is what I want to say, from the position I actually occupy. To the people holding the line in companies, in schools, in city departments, in places where budgets are tight and patience is tighter, I see you. To the leaders who do the invisible work of calling people after the meeting, of advocating quietly for the person who is always interrupted, of making sure the pay conversation matches the performance conversation, I see you. To the two at my company who have taught me that culture is built in dozens of small choices long before it shows up on a slide, thank you. To everyone doing that work anywhere, thank you. You are not just administering programs. You are teaching the rest of us how to look at each other without flinching.

And to the people who feel weary from asking to be seen, I know it is tempting to stop asking. I know that every time a headline tells you your story is a threat, it gets harder to bring your full self to a room that does not feel built for you. But the most radical thing some of us will do this year is refuse to disappear. Keep telling your story even if your voice shakes. Keep asking better questions than the ones designed to trap you. Keep building the kinds of teams that outlast slogans. We are not perfect. We will get parts of this wrong. Still, we can decide to practice a different kind of seeing, one that starts with names and ends with accountability.

Because at the end of the day, this is not about winning an argument. It is about how it feels to go to work while the country makes a sport of your existence. It is about the kid who will learn from the way you walk back into the house after a day that tried to swallow you. It is about the teams that will move faster the moment they stop pretending and start belonging. It is about the cities that will be safer when their most marginalized residents are allowed to be visible without being punished for it. And it is about honoring the people who make that possible in every environment they touch. If being seen is a human need, then the work of seeing is a human duty. Choose it, fiercely and without apology. Then back it up with policy, with budget, with hiring, with promotions, with the thousands of small decisions that turn a value into a culture. If we do that, the rooms we build will not need to ask anyone to shrink to fit. They will expand to match who we are.

Colleen Fukui-Sketchley and Arielle Watkins— I see you, and I will always be grateful for the way you have seen me.