a few weeks ago i was in a conversation about professional development (pd) and i offered this comment up to the group: professional development (individual or organizational) fails unless people actually sit down and take the time to adjust their work load (often via calendar). if it just stay at the level of an idea, the work load stays the same, people donât adjust their schedules, they fill their plates like they usually would (which typically means overwork), and they end up with no time or mental energy to do any pd.
iâm reading salvation: black people and love, the second book in bell hooksâ love trilogy. as always, thereâs lots of good stuff but chapter seven: cherishing single mothers, has a ton of pushback on the westernized notion of the male-headed, two parent nuclear family.
just finished episode #1701 of show about race titled will you be my black friend?. gotta be one of the episodes that has gotten me the most riled up. two thoughts are lingering with me from last night.
we need to change the calculus on oppression for oppressors
one of the key mechanisms oppression is putting the burden of progress on the oppressed group. poc having to teach white people that what they’re doing is supremacist. women having to teach men that their ways of talking, thinking, and being are sexist. trans people having to tell cis-folks that their ways of being are transphobic. and on and on.
as a result, it seems that oppressed folks and writers have avowed to not be the teachers of their oppressors. i am 100% on board with that. but that leaves a very obvious logical hole (one which i have not figured out how to fill, but i’m working on it). if it’s not in the oppressor’s obvious interest to end oppression and it’s not up to oppressed people to teach their oppressors that they’re being oppressive, but it seems that oppression benefits the oppressors greatly, why would oppressors ever do the work it takes to end their own oppression?
i think at least part of the solution is in a statement someone made during the show: “we have to change the calculus on oppression for oppressors.”
it has always bothered me (and i’ve written about it before somewhere) that oppression is most often framed as hurting one group and benefitting another. i think shifting this frame is a key part of ending oppression. some people do this, but i think we have to make it even clearer that oppression hurts oppressors as much as (if not more than?) the oppressed.*
i’ve only ever come up with what i think are weak examples, but we need way more. things i’ve heard of to date in the sexism frame:
toxic masculinity results not only in gun violence, but in an incredibly high rate of suicide for men. case in point: men are dying because they canât talk
conventional western definitions of masculinity prevent men from loving and being loved in ways that they themselves want (bell hooks, all about love)
we need more.
white feelings & reality
another part was this interchange where tanner basically posited that white feelings need to be tended to in order to end oppression. one discussant mentioned quoted someone who believed that most discussions about racism are racist because they center white feelings. i feel that, for sure.
but my friend grant quoted this line in his master’s thesis:
as much as i don’t want to center white feelings, it is obvious to me that white feelings create reality. we are an empire and when the people making the decisions up top have feelings, they reverberate. across the entire fucking planet. the president elect is donald trump and a single tweet from him when he was in his feelings almost triggered a nuclear arms race. in fact, it might have and we just don’t know it yet.
now, i’m not saying that poc are responsible for managing white feelings. i think there are enough accomplice white folks who can do this work at this point, but the question stands. will white supremacy go away as long as white feelings still revert to wanting to be on top?
*i realize this is a problematic thought, but iâm looking at decades of strategies that seem to have not taken us very far so maybe this is another thing to try.
earlier this week i completed my third personal reflection retreat. the roadmap for it is over here so i’m not gonna rehash that in this post. this post is just general thoughts, what went well, and what i think would make it better next year.
general thoughts
i love doing this. why don’t they teach people to do stuff like this in school or religion or other cultural institutions? maybe they do and i missed it. anyway, having three (mostly) offline days to look back and plan for the year just felt really good.
as always, i was surprised at how much happens in a calendar year. the process of building my 52 weekly summaries highlights from my calendar just how much i did and time i spent. i always see stuff that i forgot happened and i’m continually reminded about the first thing on gretchen rubin’s habit manifesto: what you do regularly matters more than what you do once in a while.
this might sound corny, but i feel like a new person with an entirely new set of possibilities after reviewing what happened last year. i think this is because i had no idea what was possible in 2016 when i did my jan 2016 retreat. and then looking back on the year from now itâs like… well if thatâs what happened based on what i thought would happen, who knows what could happen this year?
what went well (+s)
free housing (was house-sitting for friends in central square)
prepping agenda beforehand
had company (spencer) visiting from the uk which both helped keep me focused and also made for good breaks
finalizing a draft of my infinite growth vision statement supported my planning for 2017 so much; itâs so crazy that we walk around the world without compasses
marking a whole day to do project launch prep work was great
what could’ve been better (âs)
i didn’t disconnect from my cell phone; this cost me lots of focus
didn’t get to everything
every year i’ve felt like i want more time and this year was the same; next year (assuming i make it that far) i’ll do four days
would have been nice to have prepped my budget review beforehand (maybe on dec 31st?)
i listened to it and was starstruck. i entered grad school with a huge level of excitement about “the new(/sharing/collaborative/solidarity) economy” and have since beent turned off from it as it is increasingly captured by “the old economy” (see jason spicer’s piece on why the sharing economy isn’t really sharing). this piece reminded me of why i was interested in the alternative economy in the first place.
quick summary in case you don’t listen to the piece: a small group (12-15 i think?) of families created and ran a babysitting co-op that used poker chips as currency. when you needed babysitting, you gave chips and when you babysat you earned chips. there were were 15, 30, and 60 minute chips.
now, first of all, this lines up critically with a scale of a project that makes sense. wendell berry talks a lot about the proper scale of community. communities that are too large simply don’t function the same, largely because people become unknown to each other. it’s much easier to have a functioning economy when you know the people you’re connected to in the system. one of the problems with capitalism is that in its search for profits, it seeks increased scale. this means that it’s impossible to know everyone to whom you’re economically connected. since all of our economic decisions impact each other, it’s important to be able to see those impacts. economic systems that are too large make it easy to miss the human consequences of our decisions.
i could go on, but the point i wanted to land on were the following two insights. these are snippets from the transcribed audio:
Josh (interviewer): What you said just there was pretty interesting about how this […] functioned not only as a system for making sure people had adequate babysitting when they needed it, but maybe also to make sure that couples were getting out and having enough time for themselves that maybe they wouldnât have been forced to do if they werenât part of the co-op.
Claudia (interviewee): Thatâs true. Thatâs right. And I think they forget that they need to do that. You know, youâd find ways to do things without spending money, but just getting away and having some time as a couple together was important. And you forget that sometimes in your busy life. So yeah, it was a way to say, âHey! you guys need to go, weâll take your kids. I need chips, you got chips.â Yeah, that happened"when some people had too many chips we made them go out more so we could babysit their kids and get their chips. it ended up creating a system of checks and balances against hoarding. this probably helped some people’s relationships.
Josh: So when you took care of somebody elseâs kids for an hour they would give you the relevant amount of poker chips for that, and then you could use those poker chips to spend to get babysitting for your own kids?
Claudia: Thatâs right. And the nicest thing about it was you know if you just did it amongst friends with no poker chips or you just, say, had one friend or something, you always felt obligated to that one person, where this way you only felt obligated to the group. So you didnât have to feel like just because you babysat for Joe and Sueâs kid that they had to babysit back for you. That wasnât the way it worked. You could call anybody. And you might have kids that you especially liked to take care of, and then you might have a couple that you preferred to take care of your kids. And it didnât matter, nobodyâs feelings were hurt. All you did was, you know, you were working with the group.
how fucking cool is that? this is the scale of economy i’m interested in. these types of things are what we need more imagination around and examples of. gotta get on that.
