The violence of unity
What a week, huh?
Like many, my family found out the election had been called for Biden when we started to hear cheering erupt in our neighborhood here in Brooklyn.
I was slow on the uptake. At first I thought, are we cheering for essential workers again? Then I wondered if NYC had decided to have a secret marathon after all...
My husband was the one who said, "they must have called it."
And sure enough, they had.
I wasn't expecting to at all, but I started crying. It wasn't from joy or happiness, it was more from the release of stress, which I now know is one of the ways we can complete the stress cycle (see my recent blog post on burnout).
It did feel good to cry.
But here's the thing - this election was actually America exceeding my expectations. I can still hardly believe we managed to elect Biden. I fully expected Trump. I've been bracing myself for him to be re-elected for, oh, about three and a half years at this point.
Why?
Because when you come to learn the truth about this country, even just a little bit more than what we are typically taught or lead to believe, when you come to understand how systemic racism and white supremacy were a founding principle of this country, built into every aspect of its systems and institutions in ways that are still very much alive, present, yet invisible to so many of us today, Trump no longer is an aberration. It's the system working exactly as designed in ways that we all can't help but be complicit with, whether with our intention or consent or not.
The nightmare didn't start in 2016, and it's not over when Trump leaves office. Trump is a nightmare, make no mistake, but he is not THE nightmare.
Those of you with privilege who are saying you can breathe for the first time in four years, remember those who have never been able to. For centuries. By specific and intentional design. And still won't be able to.
White supremacy is not partisan. Black, Indigenous and other people of color get murdered and oppressed no matter who is in power in the US - as do women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, poor people, disabled people... and the list goes on.
Trump is the symptom and not the cause. I hope at least now it's clear that he wasn't elected by accident, and was only NOT elected again after a lot of hard work, and mostly thanks to non-white voters and especially, as always, to Black women.
It's not half the country, it's the whole damn thing, through and through, by design, from the start.
What does this mean for DEI advocates and leaders?
Well, Biden called for unity in his acceptance speech last night - he kind of had to. I know easy it is to bemoan how "divisive" things have become in this country and across the world.
However, within organizations and communities, I would caution about calling for unity without also bringing what we at Co-Creating Inclusion call a "power analysis." A call for unity from a position of relative power and privilege needs to be specific with regards to who is expected to unite with who.
Asking the most impacted to unite with those who benefit from the systems that oppress and marginalize them furthers the harm. It's gaslighting because it implies that the oppressed were the ones who were divisive and violent to being with, when the original violence was with the oppressors.
There are two quotes that describe this dynamic perfectly that came up for me in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd (see my blog post on screaming into the wind) that bear repeating:
"Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others and persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized."
Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
"ESQUIRE: How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?
BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, and no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene."
James Baldwin in "How to Cool It" interview in Esquire, 1968
Yes, fingerpointing and blame leads to self-righteousness which leads to victimhood and giving up agency, which is exactly what systems of oppression want us to do.
But we do not have to be complicit in our own oppression by reaching out to those who benefit from it, or asking others to do so. We do not have to create space for our own dehumanization, all for the sake of "unity."
The idea of unity itself can land as violence, even if that is not what you intend.
It's up to us to reach out, create what we call "brave safe space" and start to bridge the divide when we are in relative positions of power and privilege - not ask those who are most impacted to do so, or even to imply that they should.
And we should do so, not from that position of power, as we seek to "help others" only in an effort to reassert our power, but as a way of shifting power so that we all have it, because we know that we are not free until we are all free.
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
Lilla Watson
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