I’m blogging, along with several other writers, as I read the book by Debby Irving “Waking Up White.” We’ve committed to sharing our thoughts as we read. This is another post in the series of my own journey. For the complete list of posts, see https://stephenmatlock.com/category/writing/wakingupwhite/
Quotes from the book appear using a different style from my reactions.
“Tolerance” and “celebrating diversity” set the bar too low.
Intriguing statement. In this chapter Ms. Irving explores the idea that merely putting people of color (or BBIPOC) into an organization does not, by itself, do anything beyond show that corporations are capable of expanding their hiring pool. (This is not a bad thing; it is just not an enough thing.) This situation means that those who are hired are asked (well, forced) to assimilate into the existing culture of white male supremacy. And the actual diversity of the new hires is not acknowledged beyond a colorful moment of culture during a Diversity Day celebration—the people who are now within the corporation are to be treated like everyone else is in the majority culture.
Nothing wrong with tolerance and celebrating diversity. But. It’s more than this. We are not simply attempting to enable justice. We are seeking to enact it.
“Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” (Vernā Myers)
I loved this analogy. There’s a lot here to meditate on. Dancing is not only something that usually requires interactions with others in some way; dancing is a way to express your very self. And depending upon your skill level, you might express yourself very well. (I am, ahem, not a dancer. If there’s a beat and a groove, then I might recognize it after a few hours, long after the party is over.) And when you partner, you must learn your partner’s methods and moves. You cannot dance with someone and not face or see them.
I’m thinking about this a lot, how I can not only recognize those in my communities who are present in their diversity, but also how to let them dance. My communities are my friends, my religious meetings, my social connections, my meetups, my workmates. I think of the people who are in my life, right now, and thinking how I am an assimilationist with them, not listening and not understanding.
Everyone has their own identities, of course, they are in the majoritarian community or not. This isn’t talking only about individuality—which is important: no one as a member of a group can be forced to be or act in the ways required by the rest of us. This is about the deliberate inclusion of the expressions of people with their own strengths in ways that are important and self-identifying to them.
Hiring an employee or admitting a student of color and then “tolerating” them and/or “celebrating” their food and holidays without understanding their cultural norms in the context of the dominant culture is a setup for underachievement.
I don’t know that this is “hearable.” What I mean is, this is a good point, but what does it mean for us in the majority? How much are we able to hear our friends in the BBIPOC community as they express themselves and their values? For me, I know that I listen, and then I categorize their expressions in ways that slot them into the same categories that I automatically fit people like me into. I don’t think I really listen and see. I nod my head in agreement—but am I doing anything different?
The article [written by Harvard Business School professors David Thomas and Robin Ely] made me think about all the times I’ve heard educators say, “We need to have more teachers of color so our kids of color have adults they can relate to.” Never have I heard someone say, “You know, we really need to get some educators and administrators from different cultures in here to help us think about our processes and curriculum in fresh ways.” Nor have I ever heard anyone suggest it might be good for white students to build relationships with authority figures of color.
Bang! This is a good statement about how the majority thinks of including members of the BBIPOC community by adding them as a flavor or as an exotic extra. I think it’s important to get outside that box, and not just have diversity in how we hire or employ, but even in how we lead and change. It’s great to have people from the BBIPOC community hired as diversity directors, for example—but what about hiring these same people to lead technology or operations or even the board? There’s a lot to be gained by expanding our ideas of leadership and role-modeling besides “this will be helpful to those people, but certainly not us.”
When I brought people of color to the board or staff, my thinking was that their best role was to speak for and be a bridge to their race.
I appreciate the honesty here, even though I cringe at the situation behind this. I can’t imagine anyone feeling great about being hired for this kind of work: “You’ll be great, Frank, when we need to talk down to certain groups that you represent.” That’s how this comes across to me—in my opinion, this is a dismissal of the literal presence of those in the groups, as well as the employee hired to be the Speaker to Those People.
I think it’s great to want to have those connections, sure, but then what? Do we ever consider in these connections that maybe we have something to learn, and that maybe we are the ones who need the bridge and the communications? And for God’s sake, where is the idea here that we value the people in our lives as people and not as symbols or tropes?
What if American linguists had been willing to add or drop letters in the name of creating a more user-friendly version of the English language?
There was a long discussion here about the contributions of Sequoya to his own people the Cherokees. Sequoya developed an alphabet that enabled Cherokees to become literate in their own language, and his work was seen as a threat to the colonizers, in that it would hinder the attempts to erase the identity of Cherokees and block the attempts to assimilate them into the world of English.
But Ms. Irving points out that the larger picture was lost as well: the alphabet created by Sequoya was easy to learn because it was letter-for-sound. In comparison, learning English requires learning all the incredible idiosyncrasies of spelling and pronunciation because we do not have a letter-for-sound alphabet. We have spelling bees, for example, and I can’t imagine other countries with alphabets have them. (Well, maybe France and French. I don’t know.) While I think switching to an exact letter-for-sound alphabet might beyond the abilities of the current set of letters and additions, it does seem odd that we keep spellings for words that are almost entirely disconnected in their pronunciation compared to their spelling. Wednesday or two or night, anyone?
Note that there’s a long history of why our current system of spelling “makes sense,” and how throwing away the current system to replace it with a more accurate system would break our connection with the past, but really, it’s been done before. Korean as a written language is about 550 years old, because a Korean emperor wanted to make a written language that could be learned easily by the Korean people. And it’s been fairly consistent since then, with only a few additions by North Korea.
Now the point Ms. Irving makes is that not only did we attempt to erase Sequoya’s work; we would not listen to his achievements and think “How can we use his creation to help ourselves?” We refused to listen and to learn back then, and at this point, we’re going to have spelling bees forever, because even with the world of auto-correct we need to still get some of the letters right. Who knows if speech-to-text transcription software will ever do all the work for us?
In the same way, the majoritarian culture dismisses and ignores the work of others, and even continues in ways that are dysfunctional because “we know better.” So we do stupid, harmful things at the same time we try to stop others from doing things that we won’t accept. It’s a foolish habit for us, but being ignorant is our choice.
Being competent in multiple ways serves everyone. Not only does this kind of psychic stretching create better communities; it creates better people.
I like this line of thinking, even though it’s self-centered: think of all the wasted contributions we could have had to our majority culture had we not oppressed the BBIPOC community. It is a capitalistic approach to human worth. I like this line of thinking not because I agree with it or think that it’s healthy, but because inadvertently it creates space for our brothers and sisters in the wider human community to find space to grow. It is, to me, a start for us to enable healthy human interactions.
But what I’d like to see expanded here is not just the material contributions that we’ve dismissed, but the deeper understanding of the value of our fellow humans: by oppressing our brothers and sisters we have made their lives a misery. We have stunted their place to grow as humans. We have denied them their liberty to life and the pursuit of their own happiness. Such an understanding is more appealing to me. It does not cancel out the capitalistic idea—I’ll take that, if that’s all we can get.
The people who claim that the freedom of the mind and of the will are the highest good in humanity are those who should be most energized to see this expressed in everyone. I harm my brother and sister when I deny them their full humanity and freedom, even as I realize that selfishly I am harming my own happiness and contentment by blocking their contributions to my life.
It is not just what our brothers and sisters bring to the table: it is our brothers and sisters themselves. That, to me, is the key value I am seeking to establish.
Questions
Have you ever been to an event that celebrated diversity? What did you learn about the various cultures’ belief systems?
Yes. I recently attended a diversity exposition that, over a weekend, let many diverse communities in Seattle express their values and their accomplishments to the general public. I attended a workshop on book and script development hosted by a collective of Black women writers. My role was to listen to them, and to let what they said filter into me so that I could hear them, not just as creators and makers, but as individually valued people with their very different outcomes and purposes. Some of my takeaways were that we will all do whatever it takes to be heard, and we’ll do it without pay and without recognition because we need to be seen and heard. There were some amazing stories about creation and perseverance, about community efforts and the smallest of achievements, because these creators wanted to express everything about them fully.
Did the event give you insight into how a person from that culture might feel, given their cultural values and habits, if they tried to engage in an organization steeped in values and habits from the dominant white culture?
Well, yeah. These women were creators struggling to find venues and support in a city that is heavily oriented to white spaces and white expressions. There are simply more options for white people to find places for rehearsals and for community development. There isn’t the same robust network of creators and producers that white people have developed, and unless majority-run organizations make the effort to connect and support, there isn’t really much offered. Funding has a lot to do with both creation and production, and the BBIPOC communities tend to have fewer resources and less monetary support.
And frankly, it’s difficult to host an event that focuses on the efforts of BBIPOC creators and get those from the white culture to attend and participate. To my understanding, this means that not only does it take more effort and resources to get something up and running, the reward is less satisfying for the effort expended.
For context on this series, see my kick-off post here:
If I love You, I Have to Make You Conscious of the Things You Don’t See
Here are others also blogging along with this topic:
Di Brown ‘Nixie’ at https://dianabrown.net/blog-challenge-waking-up-white/
This chapter (from 26-45): https://dianabrown.net/waking-up-white-the-final-chapters/
Dawn Claflin at https://dawnclaflin.wordpress.com/