After a decade of working in the diversity, equity and inclusion field and being part of many social justice movements I am more aware than ever of the co-opting of these movements by people who are not deeply living and breathing decolonial practices. Back in 2020, after George Floyd's murder, I was concerned this was me and I tried to step away from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work, because I didn’t want to be another white person making money off of the struggle. But my friend Janice, a black woman who has been doing this work for far longer than me, said to me “There’s no way we are letting you step away now - we’ve gotta use you and your identity to speak to the people that won’t listen to people like me”. She worked with me to explore why I’d rather be surrounded by people of colour and my deep discomfort in white spaces. She made me see that I had a responsibility to hold space for white people with compassion, even when I wanted to run away from our shameful colonial history and the white supremacy culture still present. She taught me that oppression is the water we swim in, the complexities of our conditioning and the slow and consistent chipping away that requires. She helped me unpack all the ways the system was suffocating and harming me and let me be vulnerable in my pain, while still holding me to account over the things that give me ease or entitlement.
As I’ve deepened my roots and my practice, I’ve learnt how to move through this work authentically, even when both myself and the wider field is feeling deeply conflicted. I want to share a few questions that consistently keep me grounded in this work and why I struggle to trust anyone that says they stand for equity and justice but isn’t asking themselves these questions. As Cole Arthur Riley describes in This Here Flesh, “Liberation is not a finality or an end point; it is an unending awakening”.
How does the oppressor show up in me?
When a person or an organisation tells me they are good at DEI it’s an immediate red flag for me. Even though I’ve spent the last 10 years doing some form of DEI work every single day as well as the lived experience I have as a queer autistic person from a working class background, I still have a mountain of things to dismantle and redesign within myself. The oppressor lives inside all of us, and as described in this article, “Coloniality is a shape we are born into and entrained to continue perpetuating through all the educational, administrative, cultural and structural systems that we navigate”
If you truly believe in change, particularly if you espouse social justice rhetoric within your work, you should be engaging in a constant cycle of self-consciousness. Paying attention to the ways you police people, the decisions you make about financial income and what you spend money on, the way you respond to pressure, what intentions sit behind your relationship building, what space you take up or give to others.
Do the people around me call me out?
Self-criticism isn’t enough. We need to be engaging with the people around us to understand what we need to change in order to embody our values. If you and your friends or colleagues aren’t regularly calling out and questioning each other, you are likely perpetuating the problem. The teams that are the best at DEI are those where everyone can challenge each other to do and be better, regardless of where the organisation is on the ‘progressive’ scale. We are likely to make even more mistakes and unearth deeper wounds the more we push into unchartered territory, which means that those working within the social justice space should expect to be called out even more.
If you have a particular positionality within a space you are both less likely to receive criticism and more likely to need it. As a white person within DEI I expect to be held to a higher standard, it’s valid that I should have to prove myself. But sadly all too often people who consider themselves ‘good people’ avoid being called out through defensiveness, martyrdom, or centring of their own pain.
Is this charity or solidarity?
Which brings me to the question of ‘doing good’ versus deeply understanding that this work is necessary for our collective liberation. No matter how much people share the ‘First they came’ poem or quote Lilla Watson about how ‘your liberation is bound up with mine’, so many people operating in social justice spaces still act as if they deserve some kind of medal for doing what is fundamental for us all to resist the continued threat of fascism.
In spite of being deeply connected with how our struggles are interwoven, I still find myself thinking I need to engage in certain spaces or do certain acts from a place of sympathy or guilt. When I feel these within me I interrogate how I might move to feeling the implications of this social issue in connection to my own humanity, whether the act I wish to pursue will actually help the situation, and whether my desires come from a place of deep care or just through wanting to be perceived a certain way?
Am I distancing myself for the sake of my reputation?
On the flip side of aligning ourselves to causes out of wanting to improve people’s perceptions of us, many of us also make the mistake of distancing ourselves from the things, acts or people we feel are unfavourable. We rush to jump on movement bandwagons before we have formulated our own authentic beliefs about it, and we rush to disassociate from people with harmful or ignorant views. It is valid for a trans person to distance themselves quickly from a transphobe to avoid being exposed to harm, but all too often a trans ally will distance themselves from a transphobe before they’ve done any work to connect with, understand and educate that person. What’s more is a lot of phobic behaviour stems from disconnection and lack of exposure - so our choices to protect our reputation within the social justice space actually leads to making space for people’s harmful views and behaviours to continue perpetuating.
I have not yet had the joy of reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s book “Loving Corrections” but when I heard her speak to it on this podcast it reminded me that it is imperative I continue to make space to be with people that make me feel uncomfortable and to provide experiences to people that are rooted in compassion rather than confrontation.
Is this new pain, or is someone just giving it back to me?
When I think about the various discomforts we feel when we do this work, I am reminded of all the times that people have responded to it with intense reactions that seem unreasonable. What I realised when I used to deliver DEI training is that quite often it is the first time (or one of the few times) that people with certain privileges have had to experience discomfort or pain around that aspect of their identity. And in those moments it offers an embodied opportunity for them to reconnect with the pain that they have been avoiding for so long. When a white person experiences intense shame, pain, anger or grief in response to being asked to engage with racist aggressions I tend to conceptualise it as either a moment where their body has invited them to access just some of the pain that the victim has been carrying, or that in order to enact ignorant and harmful behaviours towards other humans they have been previously existing in numbed state. Perhaps also the experience of acknowledging other people's pain has re-awoken them from the disembodied place they’ve been having to exist within due to other forms of oppression they experience within the system they are perpetuating.
So when I feel pain course through my body when I’m faced with something someone thinks I’ve done wrong or been complicit with, before reacting I ask myself what is the universe giving back to me right now? Is there something I’ve been avoiding and how can I see this pain as a gift to allow me to move closer to who I am? How am I being called to rebalance the scales and how can I carry and process what’s moving through my body? And is it just reminding me to come back down to earth to be in this work, rather than floating around above it? We desperately need to be in it and present, rather than performing, because as Andrea J Ritchie describes in Practicing New Worlds “The strongest solutions happen through the process, not in a moment at the end of the process” and we need to be ready to shape those new worlds together.