Two Actions. This Week. Because Our Silence Isn't Neutral.

I want to speak to you like I would a friend. A fellow white person who is trying to stay engaged in a world that feels like it keeps asking more of us. Because it does.

I’m writing to you as a friend who recognizes that being committed to equity isn’t always exciting. Today, we’re talking about actions to support mail-in voting and TPS status for Haitians in the U.S.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

Every week, it can feel like something new. Another policy shift. Another threat to our rights. Another group of people pushed closer to harm. And it would be easy to step back. To say, “I can’t keep up.”

I get that.

And I also keep coming back to this: whiteness—and systems of power and oppression like it—thrives in these kinds of moments. In the pause. In the exhaustion. In the decision to not act because it all feels like too much. Today, we’re talking about how being committed to equity isn’t always exciting and a couple of actions we can take to support mail-in voting and TPS status for Haitians in the U.S.

Because, as I understand it, whiteness is not only something personal. It is structural. It shows up in systems that quietly decide who gets access to power, whose participation is made harder, and whose safety is treated as optional.

And when we don’t act—when we don’t resist—we’re not outside of that system. We’re part of how it keeps going.

So today, I want to offer two actions. Not because they solve everything. But because they are real. And because they matter.

Before I get to the actions, I want to say something about how I'm understanding the through-line — because I feel some of you might be thinking: what does mail-in voting have to do with whiteness? What does Haiti have to do with whiteness?

As I understand it, so very much.

Big, expansive, societal things like whiteness — invented ways of controlling access and human worth — they impact all of us. Whiteness in the U.S. is a system that organizes whose voices are easiest to hear and whose lives are easiest to ignore. It shapes whose participation in democracy is made simple, and whose is made difficult. It shapes which communities are protected by policy and which are exposed to harm, then asked to endure it quietly.

It often doesn’t show up as something explicitly named. More often, it shows up as “rules,” “efficiency,” or “security.” It shows up in systems that appear neutral on the surface, while producing unequal outcomes underneath.

And when we don’t challenge those systems, we don’t stand outside them. We help stabilize them.

Action #1: Protect Mail-In Voting — Submit a Public Comment to USPSDeadline: July 2, 2026 at 5 p.m. ET

Here's what's happening — if this feels familiar, I wrote about it last week too. The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a new rule—linked to an executive order from President Trump—that would change how mail-in ballots are handled in federal elections. Under this proposal, states would need to submit voter lists to USPS before ballots are sent, and ballots would only be delivered to voters on those lists.

On the surface, it can sound like “organization.” Like “security.”

But voting rights advocates are warning that this could introduce new barriers and errors into a system millions of people rely on—especially older adults, people with disabilities, rural voters, and military members stationed abroad.

And this is where I think it’s important to name the pattern.

This is what suppression often looks like now. Not always loud. Not always obvious. Sometimes it arrives as process. As paperwork. As bureaucracy that quietly narrows access while sounding reasonable.

That is one of the ways whiteness operates in our country. It doesn’t always announce itself as exclusion. It often reshapes systems in ways that make participation harder for some people, then calls the result “neutral.”

As of June 25, 2026, a federal judge has blocked key parts of this rule while legal challenges continue. But the public comment process is still open—and agencies are required to read and consider what we submit. This is one place where our voices matter.

I’ve written more about this — and the SAVE Act that set all of this in motion — here, and here, and here.

How to Submit Your Comment to USPS:

1. Email: PCFederalRegister@usps.gov

2. Subject line: Ballot Mail

3. What to write: a couple of sentences about why this proposed rule concerns you and how it could affect you, your family, or your community. Or copy and paste a template from here.

4. End your email with: Your full name, mailing address, and email address. That’s it. Even two sentences count. Even one person sharing why fair elections matter to them becomes part of the official record.

📨 Click here for a full comment template and step-by-step instructions

Action #2: Contact Our Senators to Protect TPS for Haitians

The second action is about Haitian families living in the United States.

Right now, over 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. hold Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a designation that allows them to live and work here legally because their home country has been deemed unsafe for return. (TPS is under threat for other communities too — including Syrians — but today we’re focusing on Haiti.)

That protection is now under threat.

The House has moved legislation aimed at extending TPS protections, but the Senate has not yet acted. And recent legal decisions have increased uncertainty about whether TPS for Haiti will continue.

So the window for action is open—but not for long.

And before we contact senators, I think we need to talk about history. Because it might be difficult to understand this moment without it.

The U.S. Has a Debt to Haiti That Keeps Going Unpaid

Haiti became the world’s first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere in 1804, born from a successful slave revolt—the largest in history.

And the response from the United States was not celebration. It was fear.

White U.S. leaders—many of them enslavers themselves—understood what Haiti represented. A successful slave revolution disrupted the entire logic of slavery. It raised a question that white power could not ignore: what if this spreads?

Under President Jefferson, the U.S. cut off aid and worked to isolate Haiti diplomatically. Haiti’s independence was not recognized by the U.S. until 1862, nearly 60 years after it was declared. This is not just diplomatic delay. It reflects something deeper: a refusal to fully accept Black sovereignty when it emerged through liberation.

Then, in 1915, the United States invaded Haiti. During the nineteen-year occupation that followed, U.S. officials took control of Haiti’s finances and security forces, reinstated the corvée—a forced labor system that compelled Haitians to build roads—and dissolved Haiti’s legislature after it rejected a U.S.-backed constitution. Historians have also documented how the occupation brought Jim Crow racial practices and attitudes into Haiti. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 Haitians were killed resisting U.S. rule. Many historians argue that the centralized military created during the occupation—the Garde d’Haïti—helped lay the foundation for the Duvalier dictatorships that followed.

From 1957 to 1986, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier ruled Haiti through terror, torture, and political violence. Throughout much of that time, the United States continued to support or work with their governments because they were viewed as anti-communist allies during the Cold War. Historians estimate that the Duvalier regime killed approximately 30,000 people.

This is not distant history. It is part of the conditions shaping the present.

Today, Haiti is facing a humanitarian crisis. The U.S. State Department advises Americans not to travel there due to widespread violence, kidnappings, and instability.

And yet, Haitian families living in the U.S. are now facing the possibility of losing legal protection and being forced to return.

This is where the pattern becomes hard to ignore.

Whiteness is not only about individual prejudice. It is a system that determines which nations receive protection, which communities are allowed stability, and which people are left to absorb the consequences of political decisions made far beyond their control.

This is whiteness at work. The same logic that refused to recognize a nation of free Black people, that occupied their land, that propped up their dictators — that logic is what now looks at Haitian families and says: not our problem.

It is our problem. It has been our problem. And right now, we have the opportunity to say so.

How to Contact Our Senators:

The Senate companion bill is S. 4814. We need senators to co-sponsor it and help move it forward.

1. Find your senators on this document or here.

2. Call their offices. Calls can be more impactful than emails. When someone answers, here are instructions and suggestions for what you can say. Or you can say something like: "I'm calling to urge Senator [Name] to co-sponsor and support S. 4814, the bill to extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Haiti remains extremely dangerous, and deporting 300,000 people there would be a humanitarian catastrophe."

3. You can also write through their contact forms on their websites.

You Don't Have to Do Everything — But Please Do Something

I feel the weight of this moment. I know there's always something else demanding our attention, our energy, our grief. And this moment is asking something of us—to act in ways that disrupt oppression and injustice.

Submit a comment. Make a call.

Because this is how systems like whiteness win: by wearing us down until we stop showing up. It counts on our exhaustion. It banks on our silence. Don't let it.

We deserve free and fair elections. Our Haitian neighbors deserve safety and to have their dignity honored. And the only way we get closer to those things is if we keep showing up — for each other, for our neighbors, for the world we actually want to live in.

Quick Links:

📨 Submit your USPS comment (deadline July 2) — for more info click here

📖 Read my earlier blog post on the SAVE Act & mail-in voting

📞 Call script and guidance for contacting senators about Haitian TPS