When you erase people to an abstract, feel-good common denominator like say "the public", you don't have to care for their differences, for the complexities of identity & power & history that have made difference oh so very important how we consider governance, access, and reform
"The public", "communities", "citizens" - these units have the potential for real meaning, but far too often non-profits, foundations, and political machinery benefit by stripping them of all meaning, by exalting the whole, negating the parts
By projecting an image of a whole onto a disparate sea of parts, by imaging people rather than addressing us, seeing us, working with us
When I warn us to push back on scale - our own fantasies of it, as well as the almighty funders - the warning is tied to this.
It is so easy to code and recode the erasure of the white centrist lens, which tells us the problem is only inclusion (assimilation) not exclusion, obfuscation, and other methods of resource hoarding and control that create and perpetuate the inequities we wrestle with today
The white centrist lens that tells us if our intentions are good, our impact will be too.
The white centrist lens that tells us that we can change the poison not by fighting it, but aiming "above" it. By abstracting difference, by chosen blindness, belligerent sameness.
The white centrist lens that tells us that we can change the poison not by fighting it, but aiming "above" it. By abstracting difference, by chosen blindness, belligerent sameness.
Systemic problems operate "at scale", oh yes. That's their nature. But fighting a toxic system "at scale" does not mean erasing its mechanisms, targets, afflictions.
This understanding demands that we reflect on how the very operations of our teams and programs and organizations are structured, and whether, in our desire for systemic change, we are tracing the lines of that system into our everyday work and disrupting them
And this understanding demands that we do not perpetuate the erasure of struggle, violence, harm, and overdue accountability in how we approach our work externally --
-- that we centralize and celebrate and seek to understand *difference* in our work on social problems, that resisting aggregation of people unless we can absolutely maintain their individuality and humanity as we work....
...and that we build with, not for whenever possible, in every and any way possible.
That we seek in our every gesture to shift power at the points most available to us, that we make justice internally, interpersonally, and locally immediately, not trusting or waiting for scale, but cherishing the people around us and acting together, right here right now
Don't fight for a faceless public. Rehumanize.
