Dear Steve and Shirley,

I’m a 39-year-old married man; my wife is 37, and she volunteers throughout our community, and it’s become her life passion. She got fired right after the pandemic because it was too hard for her to keep her composure with her co-workers after all of the Black Lives Matter movement stuff. Every day she comes home ranting; she came home ranting over something a co-worker said, and I’m sure she usually took it the wrong way.

Currently, she’s the director of a nonprofit organization that does gardens in underserved areas of town. She is often featured on the news, and she’s so passionate that it’s funny; she’s talking about growing greens and tomatoes, but she sounds like Malcolm X. Everyone teases her about it, and we always get that speech about how Black women are expected to be behind the scenes, not authoritative positions. I tell her all the time that it’s not 1960 and she’s got a voice in today’s society, but she doesn’t have to scowl when she talks.

I work for a major food distributor, and our small division gave back the food for Easter so that 1,000 families could have a meal. My wife volunteered, and I knew she was going to ruin it somehow. As we were handing out bags to pre-selected families, my wife went to my CEO, who was visiting from Florida, and asked him if they could only find needy Black people to help out. This woman was mad because we didn’t have but a few white families. My boss turned bright red, and I had to go get my wife, Steve and Shirley, my wife is an activist at the wrong time. How do I talk some sense into her? What can I do?