Heading home from a week in Portland and the #BanfieldIndustrySummit. Good trip and great discussions, but I want share some thoughts/observations with my colleagues...A thread...1/
Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) work is tough because it requires us to make value assessments about our personal beliefs. There is often so much dissonance between what you *thought* you knew about people and evidence to the contrary.
For those of us toiling, we're always wrestling with how to help folks navigate that dissonance to get to a more evidence based, evolved, enlightened way of thinking about the people and environments around them. 3/
When you're doing this work as a person with a marginalized identity, it comes with a cost that is paid with passion. It's hard. It's hard on the body, mind and heart, but the desire for social justice is a life pursuit; so you grind it out.
But please know, being the *lonely only* or being in rooms with hundreds of people (esp invite only rooms) while being one of few is hard sometimes. I've been in these spaces for nearly my whole career. Sure I'm *used* to it,but it always comes at emotional costs.
When D&I content is discussed, our absence in these spaces creates echos, it triggers very academic discourse about what should be done. I was glad that there was a desire at the #BanfieldIndustrySummit to get commitments to do something, but I still left feeling like.....
there were pieces missing. There is a high need for broad D&I education across the profession. For some content to be shocking, means folks haven't been paying attention. We can't afford to be so parochial; we can't afford for folks to be shocked about demographic data in 2019.
Further, we need more dissonance around what this profession thinks it knows about serving marginalized communities. 15 years ago a paper was published encouraging more POCs to own pets bc that would mean POC kids would get exposure to veterinary medicine.
As I tweeted yesterday, we own pets. Pet ownership looks different in different communities & having a pet is not predictive of accessing vet services across communities.
Personal story, my mom grew up poor on a farm, lots of animals. Dad grew up middle class, had dogs. Access to vet med? No. I grew up lower middle class, lots of pets including a sheltie that lived to just shy of 17; minimal vet care. Parents were raising 3 kids.
Everybody got "tussin" and baby asprin. We LOVED our pets. LOVED them deeply, but vet care---wasn't a part of our life style more than a couple of times. We had different survival priorities, but those animals were still a part of our family.
And don't think we didn't understand the importance of vet med, we did, but access was a problem. The type of owners we are now, with a higher SES status is really different. Our resources are different allowing us to re-prioritize & sometimes is still tough.
The presumption that pet ownership in POC communities --> vet services smacks of privilege and is kind of absurd on its face. How many mtgs have we all sat through about how undeserved cats are in terms of vet care????
Miss me with the assumptions about POC owners when you got cats owned by tons of folks out here not getting care. 🙄
We have an opportunity to make vet care better, accessible, culturally responsive, ADA compliant, veteran & active duty supportive & just all around better. But don't blame folks for not getting care---YOUR job is to peel back why there is lack of access...
why your assumptions don't hold water, why you think ownership ->>care, why a better case for prioritizing care in communities isn't a proffered solution, why after 20 years of hanging around I'm still 1 of maybe 9 POC in a room of 200 in this profession.
I love this profession & I recognize the grace I'm granted as a non-vet. I've been around a long while; y'all are my people. But for real, sometimes I gotta be blunt: Do better on D&I, work harder, read more broadly & and let's get this profession ready for the future.
@threadreaderapp please unroll
