Observe the Magnetic Field that Gathers all of our Betrayals
This is part 4 of a series, but it stands alone too. Read an overview of the series so far here.
Section 1: Teri
All of us at Crosshatch were asked to reflect on our favorite moment of 2022 for our annual report. Here’s mine:
One of my favorite moments from 2022 was working with Teri VanHall on her session for the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference. Her presentation, “Starting a Community Farm: Lessons from the Field”, touched on dozens of topics, including design systems, governance structures, and planting calendars — more than we could ever do in the 90-minute slot she was allotted. It was during her live session, though, that the theme underlying these ideas became clear: the structures of power on the farm often cause harm, particularly to women. We’ve since hired Teri to develop that theme into a longer series of presentations and workshops, which we hope to present in 2023.
(BTW: We’re making Teri’s 2022 sessions free to watch for the month of September.)
For every environmental hero or an inspirational farmer blowing up as a celebrity, there are thousands out there quietly doing the work, for the sole reason that it’s the work they are called to do. That’s Teri. She’s a remarkable woman, dedicated to art, regenerative agriculture, community resilience, and other ways of building a world where humans can improve their relationship with each other and the land. As you can guess, work of this kind usually pays poorly—the expected trade off being that you get to work on fulfilling projects with amazing people. So when those experiences instead turn out to be abusive or exploitive, it cuts deeper, often driving people out of the work altogether.
But why? Why would organizations with such gorgeously compelling missions fall prey to these kinds of failures? Is this a bug in the system, or a feature? I’m going to argue that it’s a feature—not of small non-profits or other community projects, but of the larger culture. We can fix it.
I think Teri would agree with me, but first, she’s making me pause and revisit a gap in my thinking. Thanks a lot, Teri.
Teri and I email each other, often reflecting on the bigger-picture questions that we both wrestle with. In my last Whole Field essay, I wrote, “we can choose to allow our give and take with the living world to entangle us in myriad relationships with the other members of our place. These relationships protest being valued by economic means. You can’t buy your way out of a gift economy, you can only trade your way deeper in.”
Teri emailed me and said:
The flip side of this coin is that for those who don’t have the economic means, relationships become the foundation of life, and if/when the human elements of those relationships become leechy, parasitic, grossly unbalanced and/or anything less than some sort of reasonable fair-trade, it can be absolutely long-term devastating for those who were relying on reciprocity to hold the center through whatever challenges might develop.
Expendable income allows for degrees of choice, safety, comfort, freedom, progress, growth; whereas relationships take time and may not provide those benefits no matter how deeply one attempts to trade their way in.
I believe you were speaking to the non-human aspects of reciprocity here, which is of critical importance, but also somewhat empty if we’re not simultaneously working to restore reciprocity in our human relationships as well.
I know you already know this, just pointing out the both/and that always jumps out at me, similarly with BIPOC, LBGTQ+, and women, especially low-income women, as there are very few groups I’m aware of that advocate effectively for the latter and it’s rare to see the latter included in advocacy for the former, at least in my experience, and I’m always looking to see who’s included.
There’s so much here worth discussing, especially everything packed into that first sentence. If we can’t figure out how to build systems that remove abusers, and that make power relationships both transparent and accountable, then all of this is for nothing. Teri gave me an out with her suggestion that I was only “speaking to the non-human aspects of reciprocity,” but, no, I was speaking to both the human and the non-human aspects, maybe sitting a little too comfy in my favorite office chair and losing touch with the on-the-ground reality of others’ lived experiences.
That’s where I’m sitting uncomfortably now, wrestling with Teri’s response, especially her second idea that economic security gets you out of a lot of bad places. I need to chew on that for a while before swallowing, because that right there is the fundamental argument for neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism: market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.
We’re living in the era of late Capitalism, deep into the neoliberal promise of economic security for all, well past the point where you can argue with a straight face that the promise has been kept.
It’s hard to argue that our system just needs a few tweaks to make life easier for low-income women, for example. It’s also hard to justify the neoliberal approach to natural resources—deregulate, privatize and globalize — which extracts and exploits both the living world and the people living in it. If that’s the trade off—what’s the gain? Sometimes, these policies help create some limited wealth for people in extreme poverty, and yes, sometimes that means those people can use that wealth to escape bad situations. Those benefits shouldn’t be discounted, but since that’s the scenario that sells neoliberalism to the rest of us, it should be heavily scrutinized, especially to include the role that neoliberalism might have played to create the bad situation in the first place. Oh, and if you include the possibility of anthropogenic climate change wiping out huge swaths of life on the planet, that might tip the scales away from late Capitalism.
On the macro level, neoliberalism is a planetary disaster. And yet, on the micro level, Teri is spot-on, and has the lived experience to prove it. This conundrum raises two tricky questions, with real consequences for our work in the world, especially as it relates to this question of how we build institutions that take care of people and place.
- Where do you invest your limited capacity? In building communities that facilitate interdependence? Or in earning more so you have more independence?
- As we actually work to “restore reciprocity in our human relationships’’ where does money fit in?
One way to frame these questions: you are a farmer, presented the choice between joining a local farm guild with 20–30 active farmers — the guild has an imperfect but impactful history of practicing mutual support—tool sharing, work bees, mentorship, seed and scion swaps, hot soup when you’re sick, barn dances, farm tours, and dozens of other methods of support of all kinds. Of those 20–30, you have a history with 2 or 3 that gives you pause—some old arguments and failures of integrity that have healed over but still bear a thin white scar.
Or, you can have an envelope full of cash.
How full would that envelope need to be for you to choose it over mutual support?
The answer, writ large in most of the world, is that the envelope wouldn’t have to be very full. When people have the choice, they choose economic prosperity of any kind.
Having money gives you the ability to withdraw from toxic situations, but the workplace is often the originating point for toxic situations. Likewise, the financial parts of our relationships outside of the workplace can often be blamed for how they catalyze, amplify and complicate a bunch of bad behavior. Money screws stuff up.
Teri might say that there’s plenty of bad behavior with non-financial impulses too. Avoiding trying to explain, much less justify, why people hurt others, not to mention the impassable philosophical thicket of “the question of evil,” we still have to decide if we can make the case for pursuing interdependence and mutual support, or if there’s no baby in that bathwater.
Going back to the original context of Teri’s question, this is not really about neoliberalism in the sense of macroeconomic analysis. I’m interested in knowing how to make our small local institutions better. How do we build institutions, or weave informal relational networks, that are exceptionally good at disincentivizing, revealing, and dealing with bad behavior?
Because it’s everywhere, all the time.
Section 2: Ruth
Read this open letter to the Union of Concerned Scientists from Ruth Tyson. There are a lot of interesting things happening in this letter, but what struck me is how so much of what she describes is — just what a lot of us are used to. As she says introducing her story, “There are no villains, no victims, just truths that I don’t want stored away in a confidential exit interview.” Tyson goes on to describe the kinds of things that movies like Office Space satirize: opaque management structures, clueless supervisors, workers exhausted into apathy, toothlessly performative identity politics, constant overwork, micromanaging bosses, and lots of instances where you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going wrong, but everyone keeps pretending like nothing is.
Thankfully, both Ruth and Teri are patient observers who carefully describe the situations they encounter. Each mundane detail is like a slim iron filing; when described together, you can zoom out to see the magnetic field shaping them. This is what white supremacy looks like. Tyson beautifully weaves together the tropes of the crappy office and the signifiers of patriacrchy and white supremacy:
Eventually I learned the culture of the team through observation, which mirrored the world outside the org. There were people I would never get to see or talk to who handed down instructions. The men made the decisions, were affirmed and celebrated for doing their jobs. The women did most of the work. The BIPOC were ignored, tokenized, silenced, exploited and largely in temporary positions. The microagressions felt more like dodging the devil than the mosquito bites described in our racial equity training. I saw how white men scrolled through their phones or laptops as I talked, and got up and left whenever they wanted to be done meeting with me. The only time I got feedback was anonymously during annual reviews. I disliked the team’s inability/unwillingness to just communicate openly, honestly, and compassionately with each other. People ate in front of their computers. People in other offices sent me aggressive emails reminding me to submit expense reports and timesheets before asking me how I was doing, how my heart was, or if I felt alive today.
I wish I could include the whole letter. Here’s one more piece:
I felt the stress, tension, and/or apathy in our meetings and wanted to take collective breaths, but felt like there was no space or time to just be together as humans. I wondered if people needed hugs. I knew so few of the acronyms that were thrown around and barely anything about federal policy or how UCS operated. No one asked my thoughts unless it was in regards to the “racial equity component.” I didn’t feel like I was a part of the team or needed to be in all the meetings that were just thrown on my calendar all the time. I spoke up at first but eventually I stopped asking questions. I tried to research on my own. When I wasn’t succeeding at my impossible workload, I assumed I wasn’t smart enough or disciplined enough. I thought I was lazy and irresponsible like my professors told me in college because I failed to prove myself by using citation formats that truly never mattered by any non-white standard.
It gets worse. What’s so interesting, reading this section, is that I can see this. It feels like lots of institutions I know. It could be Crosshatch, if we got bigger and lost our way. None of this is remotely abnormal. These “lifeless downtown office buildings” exist inside a culture-wide magnetic field, a deep and abiding power that uplifts those who have learned to fear or distrust Black Women, and that pushes back on anyone who might strive to create a humane, caring, well-structured workplace.
Ruth’s Open Letter and Teri’s Starting a Community Farm: Lessons from the Field are drastically different documents, but both allow us to observe, orient, and act in response to these forces at work in our institutions.
You have to read all of Ruth’s letter to see the magnetic field at work. When you watch Teri’s videos, understand that Teri was couching her message behind something else, because she’s long grokked the idea that direct critique is a good way to get your platform taken away. Teri’s motivating factor—that we need to rebuild these structures—is always present, though, and the new version of her presentation will be even bolder and more transparent.
I know from other conversations with Teri that the betrayals of reciprocity that she endured can often be pinned on specific individuals, though she often calls out larger social, political or legal systems as either complicit in the harm, or as failing to provide possibility of recourse. Ruth’s story shifts the burden away from specific individuals and more into the systems—the assumptions, default behaviors, and rote patterns people follow inside of workplace cultures.
Section 3: Caitlin
So let’s add a third — a heartbreaking Facebook post from my dear friend Caitlin Strokosch that involves decisions made by faceless people we’ve never met. I’ll summarize and excerpt, but I’m not censoring the swearing, just so you’re warned.
When my eyesight and hearing got a lot worse last year, I started noticing more what people with disabilities are aware of all the time — how ableist and unwelcoming this fucking world often is.
She shares two brief stories about dining out — which is part of her job as an executive director of an arts non-profit. The first involves a menu with tiny type that was unreadable in the dim light:
I held a candle up to the page (I do that a lot now), and then made a flashlight with my phone, and I still couldn’t read it. I wanted to cry. I looked around me, at everyone else relaxed and having fun, and I literally couldn’t order. There was a kind of aloneness that hit me in that moment and it scared me. And then I was furious, for this stupid menu and the stupid decisions that went into it that made me feel that way.
Then another, of a modern concrete-walled restaurant — someone’s idea of what a successful eatery sounded like.
She says:
I don’t even remember if music was playing, but the acoustics of the place were terrible, no soft surfaces, and everyone was shouting to be heard. One of the people I was eating with, a man near 80, kept trying to join the conversation but he couldn’t hear us well enough to participate and so he shrank into his seat and ate in silence, alone in a crowded room. It broke my heart. And it made me really angry again.
I’m having a hard time with this, y’all, and I’m a little embarrassed to say that until I’ve experienced my own hearing and vision loss, it wasn’t clear to me how pervasive this stuff is.
Then, perfectly, she frames the beautiful problem behind all of this:
As someone who often felt like an outsider in a world of inside jokes, small and separate, especially when I was young, it brought that feeling up again, but this time on the other side of age, like my life will be bookended by feeling outside.
I’ve been thinking a lot about belonging, and how it relates to “accommodation” — I mean, no one wants to be “accommodated” (which is only a step above being “tolerated”). Everyone wants to be included. But what we really want is belonging, yeah? For years as a kid, even with all my privilege and access, I just didn’t *belong*, and that feeling is an aching hurt etched in my memory.
Caitlin is a bad-ass. I met her when she was the fierce and successful director of the Artist Communities Alliance, and she’s still speaking truth and changing norms at the national level. You could argue, I guess, that these hipster-eatery design decisions are first-world problems, different from Teri’s or Ruth’s. I think you’d be missing the point if you did.
That call for belonging hits me deep, for the same reasons. I’m grateful to Caitlin for naming that, and because she has more to say that moves us toward some resolution. First, though, to summarize: we make decisions all the time, countless times a day, about what we value, where to put our attention, what compromises are worth making and which are not, what matters — and all of these are driven by a story inside our head, a story that so often fails us when it comes to taking care of each other, a story that is made up, in part, of that magnetic field all three of these women describe.
Sometimes we fail each other face to face, but often we fail each other as strangers, or in faceless ways. Most importantly for what I’m writing about here, is that the decisions we make as part of institutions get amplified, while at the same time separating us from the consequences of those decisions on people who don’t look or behave like us.
This is systemic racism. This is how the patriarchy works. This is ableism and ageism and heteronormativity and neurotypical bias, and it’s why we decide to trade away the living world to grow the economy, each and every day. As we build the world around us, especially as part of institutions of all kinds, from churches to restaurants to non-profits to web services to farm guilds, our choices make that world harder for others to live in—to belong to—and we do it because of this story in our head. It doesn’t work like we make it out to work. Most of us don’t actively go around with ideas like “women are inferior to men” or “I hate people with darker skin than me” rattling around. Instead, this massive and mundane magnetic field is made up of tropes like “that weird kid” (autistic), “she’s just being lazy” (chronic illness, ADHD or other invisible disabilities), “too much attitude” (young black women”) or, more insidiously, just a big blank spot where someone else’s lived experience is, filled in by a bunch of bad assumptions based on your own life and upbringing. This kind of othering runs the gamut from indifference to hostility, but it carries a cloaking device, and that’s what makes it so hard to see, and so to change.
So let’s name it, and let’s change it. And let’s change it by building new systems, and let’s be really careful — as in, let’s develop a constant practice of care and belonging — while we do that. How? Teri has a lot to say about that. It’ll be the focus of my next essay, too, but for now, I’ll let Caitlin take us out:
One of the things I loved most about working in the artist residency field was its focus on hospitality, not just in the singular sense of providing one artist with a nurturing environment, but what it is to gather a group together. And not just residency spaces, but all the ways we welcome each other into conversation, into our collective work, into community.
Like Christopher K Morgan’s “How We Gather” talk last year about Indigenous practices of gathering together.
In a giddy afternoon this week with my dear friend Jamie, we talked about this — how getting from inviting to belonging takes real rigor and intention, a disciplined practice of learning and adapting and listening. And how these spaces, like Hambidge, that have this rigor and intention, can be a crucible for the deep exploration and connection we need to heal our divides, join forces, move forward together in this world that is falling apart. The way that taking care of someone’s dietary restrictions allows them to be in a meeting, how a comfortable chair keeps us focused on the conversation and not on trying to settle our bodies. So many small things aggregate into belonging or othering.
And I reached out to B, as I often do when I’m feeling tenderhearted for that previous work, and I suddenly remembered how I cried during my last site visit with the Artists Communities Alliance during a conversation about what kind of coffee maker should be in the artists’ house B and A were creating — something nice that signaled to the artists they deserved specialness and care, but not so fancy that it would feel precious or be intimidating. How much beautiful belongingness is embedded in these mundane choices.
I love the last line especially, and that will lead us into the next essay.
