I came to the White Privilege Conference in Tulsa ready to be challenged as a middle-aged white man. I’ve always strived to be an ally — growing up in the Black Power 1970s, donating to Black Lives Matter Toronto, volunteering for various causes — but I’d also grown to understand my own unconscious biases, privileges and where I align in intersectionality. I came to this gathering fully prepared to face my own discomfort around race and unpack more so it was a shock to find myself schooled on gender.
It happened at the white caucus session I mentioned in part one as I tried to help our distraught nonbinary friend deal with feelings of guilt for not speaking out more in that workshop.
"You can’t put it all on yourself!" I said, "You said your piece and only they can choose what to do with it." The facilitators of the caucus were Shelly Tolchuk and Christine Saxman, authors of Being White Today: A Roadmap for a Positive Antiracist Life. Shelly nodded at my words and, eager to help, I went on but she soon stopped me, saying, “We need to let someone else talk now.” Oh of course! I stopped and the room was silent. Two men were looking down at their shoes, the other men and women sat quietly and the enby* youth still looked miserable. No one made a sound. "Well, I just wanted to say—" I started again but Shelly stopped me again. “Okay," I said, "but…no one is speaking.” "That’s fine," she said, "We don’t always have to. You have a very male energy right now." "A what?" I said, baffled. "This need to speak on behalf of everyone," Shelley continued, "It takes over the room, it’s a very male style."
Everyone in the circle was now looking directly at me, one woman frowning, and my social anxiety started to spike. How am I dominating for attention when I hate speaking to groups! I reflexively went for a joke.
"I’m gay," I said, "No one has ever said my male energy is too powerful.”
"What are you feeling right now?" Shelly asked. Feeling? Was I now being psychoanalyzed??
"I’m feeling very misjudged!" I squeaked, "I’m not trying to 'take over the room,' I just want to help." Something had gone wrong and I felt disoriented.
We moved on and afterwards Shelly came over and said, "You handled that well. Thank you for not freaking out.”
“Really?" I laughed, "I thought I did freak out."
"Oh I’ve seen worse," she said but that night in the hotel, I remained troubled by the whole thing. How was I so misunderstood? Or was I actually being a dick? Somewhere in between, I supposed. I didn’t like it.
But I got some answers the next morning, thanks to Esther Armah, a powerful speaker and author of the book Emotional Justice. The mistake I was making, she offered, was trying to fix the other person’s problem. I’d started with empathy but turned them into a puzzle to be solved. You have to stay with the feeling. As Esther says in a similar speech below, "You cannot PhD your way out of trauma." Echoing what Shelly wanted to teach me, Esther says, "The silence is where the truth is."
Our work at Breakfast Culture is a friendly but business-centred approach. We deal in data and numbers and the lives of real people but now, with a stronger understanding of my need to listen and rest in discomfort, I rejoined Shelly and Christine at their workshop on creating a “roadmap" for anti-racism (watch their video below!). They laid out a path that relies just as much on emotion as it does ideas and that, I realized, was both my missing link and a big reason why inclusion work can be so difficult and while the backlash against DEI has been so furious. For perhaps the first time in history, white people have been asked to dig deep and truly examine our impact upon the rest of the world. This work is emotional and complex and messy. It's not easy! There’s a knee-jerk resistance to this responsibility to others, a huge desire to stay in our various comfort zones.
I haven’t written this diary to say "Look how evolved I am!" because mere weeks later, I misgendered a trans friend (heavy sigh) and will no doubt screw something else up soon. No, I write this to say that learning to see how others see, to try and feel as others feel, has forever been a huge but rewarding challenge, one we all can do and all need to do.
*enby, by the way, is a word some non-binary youth are using to describe themselves. NB, get it? You learn something new about people every day. I thank my teachers Shelly and Esther and Ryan and everyone who made the White Privilege Conference happen this year. Let’s keep on this road to growth.
Breakfast Culture's “Ally is a Verb” group and individual anti-oppression coaching workshops show how to use privilege to speak up and support, how racism manifests in ways big and small, and how to be effectively anti-racist. Schedule a talk with Jefferson Darrell today to learn more: https://calendly.com/jefferson7/30min
#TheSecretSauce #diversity #equity #inclusion #DEI #allyship #advocacy #activism #values #representation #CultureShift #WhitePrivilege #Tulsa
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