Meet Géraud Bablon
On sustaining attention on racial and social injustice and the creation of meaningful spaces
You might recognize Géraud as a member of the Presencing Institute (PI) core team, and if you participated in u.lab 1x 2020 or u.lab 2x 2021, as one of the program coordinators. If you have joined the GAIA Journey, you will, perhaps unknowingly, also already have encountered Géraud, who has been helping to shape and realize the GAIA sessions. Géraud has been with PI since summer 2020, having initially joined to administer online programs, and he has now become central to the operational workflow and community sensing. He reflects that coming to PI “felt serendipitous”, as in discovering the work of the organization, he has found something that he had been looking for in his life. “I found the intersection between forces that have been active in my life for a long time,” he says about design and policy, and about focusing on the small and the large, on the details of lived experience and on deep structural forces. “PI was validating that those things could come together”.
Born in France, Géraud first came to the US at the age of four and spent five years in India, which makes the question of where he calls home a complicated one. Right now, his home is Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the USA, but this can change, because for him, home is a place “where I am and where I can build relationships”. Cambridge is also where Géraud first got introduced to Theory U, when he took a course at MIT CoLab with Katrin Kaeufer and Dayna Cunningham on Participatory Action Research. As soon as he discovered Theory U, he knew that this was what could help tie together aspects of his education. Géraud is a graduate student in Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. At the moment, he is on a leave of absence to work with PI and to explore how transformation processes are facilitated in depth.
Valuing Local Knowledge
Géraud chose to enroll in both programs, Public Policy and Urban Planning, as both look at social fields from a different perspective. While policy education asks how a problem can be solved at a structural level in terms of policies and economics, as well as in terms of who has power and can make decisions, it does not have the tools to look at the deeper cultural patterns underlying social issues. Urban planning complements this approach by raising the “desire to deeply understand the systems, including unjust systems, that manifest in a space.” It seeks to ground solutions in the experience and local knowledge of the people whom they affect. This second approach is what intrigues Géraud:
“I really believe that people know their own lived experience best. They know the social field. Knowledge that is local and grounded in experience is more fine-grained, and can make it possible to see why things are the way they are”.
He reflects that sometimes he is hesitant about policy school, because it doesn’t take deeper cultural questions into consideration, when these can actually help build an understanding of why things are. In weaving the two threads together, he is trying to understand the link between grassroots and top-down or institutional ways of working. In doing so, he is looking for a way to understand the intangible quality of place, the stories and history that bind people in a neighborhood or community together, and what happens when people come together in order to do true work towards creating social and racial justice — listening to and acknowledging each other’s realities, rather than paying lip service to “equality” while refusing a deeper accounting of the social field. An important step in this process is to unlearn “the biases that are such structural parts of how our institutions work and the stories in our dominant culture of who has human dignity”, Géraud reflects. “As a person with privilege and especially as a white person and a man, I ask myself: how can we as a culture slow down and see what we are doing?”
The Importance of Trusting
In this process of slowing down and seeing, trust plays an important role. Géraud reflects on trusting in other people and ultimately trusting in their capacity for goodness, as much as for harm — in other words, trying to see their highest future potential — as essential in creating an emerging future that undoes patterns of harm towards certain groups of people. Here, trusting “doesn’t mean not seeing or ignoring harm that is being committed” he adds. “On the contrary, for me, it often means pulling on that relationship of trust to be honest about what is happening, to name harm, when others would prefer not to see it. From a position of privilege, holding oneself accountable to always coming back to that”.
Géraud believes that there is a very important place for the work of understanding how cultures of harm — racism, patriarchy, xenophobia — manifest as powerful bottom-of-the-iceberg forces in our communities, our organizations, our families — “and for the deeper work of creating a place where people are free of trauma”. Though he acknowledges that it is easy when trying to trace these dynamics to fall into disbelief and skepticism, and to cast people as ‘other’ and as the problem, he believes that for the deeper change to happen
“we need to work with people instead of casting them aside — to see harm committed, but also to find something to build on”.
Believing in a world with social and racial justice, he trusts in the possibility of something widely different than what we have right now. “If you deal with social change in activist spaces”, Géraud adds, “you have to trust that process, even if you don’t really know what the ending will be”.
Acknowledging Injustice and Racism
A transformative moment in Géraud’s life was his first job at the non-profit architecture firm MASS Design Group after graduating from college. The firm was working on the National Memorial for Peace and Justice with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. This memorial, to the previously obscured history of racial terror and lynchings of African Americans in the South of the US, invited counties where lynchings had occurred to recognize this history: a history to be remembered and understood not just in the abstract, but locally, where violence had taken place and shaped relations in a community. It asked counties to choose to be accountable to this history. Géraud remembers that, to him, “this project clarified the idea that it is possible for us to engage on a deep and personal level with our history and with the organizing forces of our culture that many of us don’t see and don’t understand because they are buried so deeply”. “This project”, he continues, “invited us to reckon with these forces in our culture”.
According to Géraud, turning the gaze towards injustice also means to be frank about one’s own relationship with race, power, and how white supremacy operates.
During the Racial Justice Teach-In, a course taught last year to MIT’s incoming urban planning students, Géraud worked with the teaching team as they created an environment for students to learn about themselves and one another. In this course, Theory U practices were used to build a holding space in which participants could reflect on their personal motivation to create a more just urbanism, in order to be able to listen to how that profession has historically served to segregate cities and harm marginalized groups under the banner of progress. Together, the group was visioning and imagining a widely different practice of urban planning. Géraud reflects that this experience of students bringing their whole selves to the classroom “really opened my eyes to the way in which this work is applied in practice, and to the way in which bringing yourself in is fundamental to organizing for social justice and creating a better world”.
Letting Come and Being Accountable
Something that Géraud struggles with in this work is the balance between letting come and being accountable. He describes this as “the balance between learning from the future as it emerges and also understanding that, in the way power operates, there are parts that we do not see, that we have a strong subconscious motivation to choose not to see”. Therefore, he feels there is “a need to name things, to name the systems that are creating harm,” even in the face of strong resistance. “We have to push ourselves and our institutions — our families, our schools, our companies and organizations — and then we see the thousand little ways they push back, or prefer not to listen.” Letting come does not mean being passive, or expecting any social field to change on its own, without that push. “I understand it as trusting in the possibility of change.”
Creating Spaces of Care and Trust
If his journey has been towards showing up in justice work by bringing his full self to the table and by valuing every other person explicitly, Géraud has been inspired by several teachers. One of these teachers has been Dayna Cunningham, and the entire MIT CoLab community which as he reflects, “has given me the tools to learn to understand my place in this work, and the action confidence that I bring value and that I must stay true to it”. CoLab has taught him “to bridge the lucid understanding of power and oppression with the faith in our capacity to do something different and to imagine a different future and to trust in one another to get there”.
A space close-by in which Géraud encountered “extraordinary, powerful leaders”, was the MIT Racial Justice Teach-In, which CoLab was closely involved in. The faculty of mostly women of color modeled a new kind of leadership for him, “an ethic of care, love and trust at the same time as not taking any nonsense and knowing exactly where they needed to go”. “If leadership can look like that, then we really can create a different society”. “Being in that space with them” Géraud reflects, “was an extraordinary learning experience for me and it validated that it is possible for a space in which really meaningful work happens, to be a space of care, of trust, and of love”. He adds: “I want to bring that with me wherever I go”.
Watch excerpts from the video interview below:
Thank you to Géraud for this interview, and the team of Hannah and Emma for interview, video & editing.
