I Will Never Be An Ally, and other discomforting revelations — Part 1

A conversation starter on the uncomfortable art of invoking social justice from the comforts of the mainstream.

Land, wealth and power are not fairly distributed in 2016. The practices that change this reality are what I understand to be social justice.

When you inherit the brunt of that injustice—that is to say, the trauma of it — it’s all very painful to experience. If you can find compassion in the pain, there you’ll locate the wisdom within you to lead social justice.

When you inherit the benefits of that injustice—that is to say, the ignorance of it — it’s something quite different. It’s all very… well, uncomfortable. If you can find compassion in the discomfort, there you’ll locate the humility to listen for the wisdom in others.

This is a series for those, like me, who benefit from those underlying unjust conditions of land, wealth and power, but who want to find a role in bringing social justice to life. The practices that invoke social justice in this way — from the comforts of the mainstream, in relationships of accountability with those pushed to the edges— are what I understand to be solidarity.

How do we find compassion in that discomfort — towards our ignorance, towards our benefits — so that we can better hear what makes social justice work? In other words, what is my ‘inner work’ for practicing solidarity? That’s the central question of this series.

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This is the first piece in a several part series that shares my ‘revelations’ about solidarity practices for ‘professional organizers,’ drawing explicitly from my experiences as a self-directed research fellow with the Laidlaw Foundation in 2015. Before and during that time, I have supported the efforts of justice-based organizers to share experiences and strategies for sustaining their work beyond the constraints of the institutional granting system.

In this first Part 1, I frame why it’s essential to do ‘inner work’ through dialogue with others who you share identity and experience with, particularly in the context of problems that have deep history. In Part 2, I will explore what the landscape of personal responsibility looks like in the context of an unjust present. In the following Parts, I will try to recognize the behavioural patterns common to professionals that keep us re-creating rather than addressing the great problems of our unfair world. In the final Part, I will draw together these revelations and touch on the current ‘moment’ we have to interrupt these behavioural patterns to more meaningfully invoke a socially just tomorrow.

The professional organizer, and the awkward, confusing and uncomfortable side of injustice

I’d like to start by putting into context the landscape of social justice work as I see it, including some key terms I’ll use.

Some words of shared context

When I refer to unfair distributions of land, wealth and power, I am talking about the deep and historical patterns of violence and unequal opportunity that persist into the current day and age. These exist across the historically imposed separations between the mainstream and marginalized communities — separations of race, indigenous status, gender, sexuality, class, citizenship, age and the many other aspects of human identity that our mainstream institutions and culture continue to marginalize. Let’s call these unjust separations patterns of injustice.

[Sidenote: I have a friend named TJ—someone who, as a queer black historian of colonialism and race, knows a thing or two about what it feels like to survive against patterns of injustice—who has taken to using the term systemic fuckery. It’s a directness I rather like. If I preferred to be proper about it (regrettably, I often do), then I would let you mentally fill in that phrase at your own discretion. So let’s do that.]

This is a series for those, like me, who benefit from those underlying unjust conditions of land, wealth and power, but who want to find a role in bringing social justice to life.

The good news is that there are many, many groups of people leading the deep, re-distributive changes that up-end the patterns of injustice. They are working hard to bring to life a fairer distribution of resources while simultaneously resisting the violence that we in the mainstream continue to tolerate and sanction. More fundamentally, these groups are supporting each other throughout the process to claim their individual and collective identities from a mainstream culture that often doesn’t (accurately) represent them. Let’s call these groupings of groups social movements, or just movements.

Within movements, there are some people whose work is an extension of their collective identity. The fundamental safety, livelihood and freedom of their community depends on the success of their work. Let’s call them frontline organizers, frontline communities or simply the frontline — as distinct from mainstream communities or the mainstream.

There are also people in movements whose work is an extension of their professional identity. Their wages and careers depend on effecting certain kinds of change — with a preference for short-term, quantifiable changes — sometimes through partnerships with frontline communities. The reality is that they also depend on many other mandates, prerogatives and inclinations, besides authentic partnership. (Hence the obsession with these particular kinds of change.) Let’s call them professional organizers or just professionals.

In any movement, someone could be a professional in one room, a frontline organizer in another, and both at the same time in a third. Navigating between these three rooms… it’s all very confusing.

In the midst of all this, there are powerful dynamics at play that function to keep the patterns of injustice exactly as they are. Let’s call these forces the status quo. Changing an unjust status quo when you benefit from it… it’s all very awkward.

Okay, you’re probably thinking that this is all really heady and abstract. So let’s get concrete.

Let’s say that I’m working in a paid professional capacity for a mental health organization, but participating on a deeper level based on my own and others’ negative experiences trying to seek care in our under-resourced mental health system. It may feel very much like the well-being of me or people like me is at stake with this issue, even as I am making a wage from the organization. If my organization is working with frontline organizers who have an interest in mental health — say, a survivors group made up of people who were previously institutionalized against their will — they may feel their well-being is similarly at stake, though there are real differences around what is at stake.

The diversity within that scenario — the often unseen fact of it — means that our interests won’t necessarily be the same between or among us. My boss, meanwhile, will have their own mandates to advance their perceived well-being, or to advance their boss’ perceived well-being. None of these interests, including my own, will necessarily be directly linked to system changes that promote healing among frontline communities over the long term.

Within the traditional organizational context in this example, the power of an individual to enact their well-being increases as we go up the chain. If my goal is truly to shake up the status quo to benefit frontline communities, but I feel that I have something to lose as an individual, the dilemma arises: whose interests will I prioritize at any one time?

Navigating the different rooms

This dilemma can play out at a community meeting and within our own families as much as it can in a board room. It can happen anywhere, really, where people gather to make decisions. But the dilemma is not what we professionals might think it is; there is actually more choice available to us.

In any movement, someone could be a professional in one room, a frontline organizer in another, and both at the same time in a third. Navigating between these three rooms… it’s all very confusing. And changing an unjust status quo when you benefit from it… it’s all very awkward.

The real dilemma starts when I consider that the cold outer edges of the status quo are often invisible to the people wrapped up in it, as professionals and other mainstream communities often are. Meanwhile, the inner lining of these benefits that my communities receive — it is really quite comfortable, thank you very much.

And who enjoys being uncomfortable? Like I’ve been saying, it’s all very awkward and confusing.

This series is a conversation starter on the necessary art of being awkward, confused and uncomfortable, from one professional organizer to another.

Though that may sound like just about the worst thing ever, it’s actually the most important conversation we — those who benefit from the status quo as professionals — can have to make 2016 a lot more just than 2015. And 2017 a lot more so than 2016. And maybe, if we get super good at it, 2017 might be the end of all that injustice, and we can have a big party. The title on Facebook could be “Goodbye Injustice.”

Okay, probably not. But we should still try and get the party started with a good conversation about how to keep trying anyway.

Let the conversation begin…

Why a “conservation starter”?

You won’t be able to learn from awkward, confusing and uncomfortable experiences all by yourself. I know I haven’t, and I won’t yet.

Reading this will be a dialogue of sorts, but on its own will be pretty one-sided. That’s why just reading isn’t enough. What you’ll need is a good conversation — many, actually — of which this is just a starting point. And like any good conversation…

• the content will be something you care about. It’s about serious issues and our own passionately imperfect reactions to them.
• the structure will be flowing and multi-polar. You’ll need to let tension and harmony work together. You might lose yourself in tangents.
• the start will involve choice as well as surrender. You’ll begin when the time is right, and then you’ll just need to kind of go with it.
• the pace will be intermittent, over many visits. You might need to end it abruptly. And after that, it might start again when you least expect it.
• the tone will hold both laughter and weight. You might find pain and joy in the same breath. At that point you may have no choice but to laugh.

I’m trying to start that kind of conversation. In your reading, I encourage you to engage in this spirit of getting started.

‘Revelations’?, and some conversations worth having

In each part, I’ll use stories from my own experiences to illustrate some ‘revelations’ of mine that I believe any professional organizer will find worth having a conversation about. I use the term ‘revelation’ reluctantly, but with an intention. It’s not about me having unique access to some greater Truth, but to draw attention to the way truths strike us — when we learn how to see them, that is. And I’m still learning.

An uncomfortable story about genocide

In the area now known as Saint John, New Brunswick, where I grew up, there was until recently a curious historical artifact in a very public place. Market Square is a vaulted indoor town square where tourists and locals alike gather. Its two-story atrium, bathed in natural light, is a gateway to many local landmarks: the waterfront boardwalk, the historic library, the uptown City Market, the provincial history museum and the convention centre, alongside some of our best locally-owned restaurants and shops.

It was over Christmas 2013 that my then-partner, Amara, and I came across the artifact in question. We were on vacation to visit my family, wandering across Market Square’s indoor promenade. Suddenly, she stopped dead in her tracks. I believe her words were something along the lines of, “What… the fuck?!” I followed her frozen gaze to a two-storey mural inset against the brick wall.

[As you might expect, what follows may be triggering to some who have experienced/ are experiencing colonization and genocide.]

I’ve never forgotten the jarring experience of seeing it then. It was like meeting an old favourite teacher as an adult, only to find an uneasy self-centredness beneath their friendly affectations, and signs of prejudice you never noticed before. I knew this mural well, of course. It was an old teacher, in a sense. To my mind at the time, I would have described it as a cutesy little storyboard of Saint John’s local history. I had walked by it literally thousands of times — first as a kid, probably while my parents were running errands, or during a school field trip; in my later teen years, I would have taken it in absentmindedly while killing time on lunch breaks or heading out to the bar.

Until that moment, though, I had never actually seen it for what it was: a classic colonial whitewashing of history — hidden in plain sight between the looping lines of its storybook manner. The first panel of the mural sets the scene of a “Green Mound” at the head of the Saint John Harbour, where the heroic “first adventurers” would make their dramatic entrance. Incidentally, we learn, our adventurers found the burial sites of “prehistoric Red Paint Indians,” who “left for us flints, tools of stone and bone dust to mark their little time.”

This, I now know, is an unvarnished artifact of the genocide and theft that marked the colonization of the land now called Canada. The fading vignettes skip over everything from the Doctrine of Discovery to the the later brutal acts of domination —often called ‘Dominion’ — imposed by European monarchies over long-established indigenous governments (about which we learn nothing). The warped history it tells had been preserved for decades, not as an artifact of another time, not encased at the museum for study, but in a bustling, active place where that harmful past lives on into today without the inconvenience of self-investigation. The mural scoffs at the so-called tools, flint and bones beneath this ‘prehistoric Mound,’ but here we found a burial of another kind entirely — of history itself.

Amara was, at that time, an experienced activist doing solidarity work with indigenous communities in struggles for health and self-determination against extractive industries poisoning their lands and bodies. They were and are working against still-active colonial policies that robbed them of control over their community’s treaty-bound rights to land and self-determination. It’s the kind of work where the past is not so easily hidden behind the divisions of the present. She had some choice words.

For my part, I didn’t know what to say. I grew up in a supportive, work-hard-and-save kind of family. I’ve since learned that Saint John is one of the most sharply unequal cities in Canada, something that never quite made it into my schooling. (Nor did the words ‘genocide’ or ‘colonization’ in relation to my own home country.) My parents’ had worked hard — not unlike many other hard-working families around me — though for us, that work led us to a balanced, comfortable life. Through the many benefits and supports available to me and others like me, I went to McGill University, where I learned about ‘systems’ and ‘issues’ and other strange and fanciful abstractions. (There was still nothing about colonization or genocide in relation to Canada.) In any case, my schooling had kept me at arm’s length from the grittiness Amara was seeing about how history plays out in the present. I was really only just starting to see it myself.

At that time, I was working ‘on the inside’ in government, an environment whose mannerly common sense clashed badly with the artistic wanderings of my true self. Of course, I was accepted at face value and supported to climb the career ladder. But I felt so foreign and groundless in those halls of bureaucratic power that I was woken to see things through the eyes of that true self within me. As my lens on the world changed — along with my job — I still couldn’t see any overlap between my emerging visions of social justice and the landscape of my upbringing.

Social justice was easier, I found, when I didn’t have any skin in the game, or a community and history that I had to stay accountable to.

“This is what I’m up against here,” I might have said to Amara that day in Saint John, with a scattered sense of foreboding for the history and pain that remained so stubbornly invisible. I might have added: “Now I remember why I left.”

In the days that followed, I remember drafting a letter to the editor for the local paper. I wanted to uncover what this mural represents, and what work might need to be done to recognize the ongoing silence around our history on unceded Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) land. I wanted to invite an exploration of what it might take to heal the fractured, deeply unequal relationship that persists between and among the original inhabitants of Turtle Island in New Brunswick and the successive communities of settlers and immigrants who now call it home.

I never finished the letter, for all sorts of reasons. Some are obvious and others I am still figuring out. All of them are personal. And each one is directly relevant to the big-picture questions I was trying to formulate in my letter. I just wasn’t ready to put them into words yet.

Why couldn’t I finish the letter? For one, I went back to Toronto — back to my ‘real life’ in the big, anonymous city, where I could get back to my ‘real work’ that I identified with in the city’s ‘youth sector.’ Beyond that, I felt immobilized by my ignorance about the true history of Canada. I knew it was somewhere beneath the mural that was painted in my mind — a mural that papered over my own family’s migration and settlement stories over the 5 or so generations we had been in the place now called New Brunswick.

I was disoriented by the swirling of fact and fiction, and how personally threatening it all felt. In that mindset, home became a place both loving and unsettling at the same time. It was a tension I had run from more than once. Social justice was easier, I found, when I didn’t have any skin in the game, or a community and history that I had to stay accountable to. I still had no idea who I was as a person in relation to this place that made me, and I didn’t know how to not know something so vital. Toronto and my ‘real work’ were fresh starts — a way to depersonalize the ‘good’ I wanted to do in the world. I could keep busy with projects that would make me into the person I aimed to be, without the responsibility to think about what people and forces made me the person I already am.

I now see that the letter was left unfinished because I had written it in the wrong voice. I was used to speaking editorially, with the detached authority of my intellect. But I found I couldn’t do so with the knot of history, family, and self-in-the-world caught in a lump at the back of my throat. This ‘Lump’ of my own unprocessed experiences prevented me from unearthing the ‘Mound’ that was blocking my view — beneath which was a pile of artifacts and assumptions like this mural that I didn’t have the courage to unearth.

My discomforting revelation: I will never be an ‘ally’

I now see that social justice starts where I’m standing — in relation to where I come from. In relation to these particular experiences and identities I have, on those particular shoulders of those who raised me, and from this particular unceded land that underwrote what I have been given. All of this remains my foundation even when I pretend I stand alone.

From ‘who I am’ to ‘what I practice’: Social justice starts with inner work

The kind of role for myself that I’m talking about is much less a fixed identity like ‘ally’ that I can claim so neatly. It is a relationship to myself and the world.

The thing about relationships is that you need to work on them. That takes commitment and practice. It’s this type of relationship that I consider solidarity and this type of practice I consider inner work.

What I create ‘out there’ is based on the reality ‘in here.’ To act differently, I need to see differently.

This is a notion very foreign to the mannerly, common sense professional voice inside my head. Aren’t the urgent changes we need actually very practical, involving material steps we need to take? All this talk of inner work and relationships sounds like navel-gazing to me. (My inner professional voice is full of rhetorical questions and grumpy pronouncements.)

Well, yes. And what I create out there is based on the reality in here. To act differently, I need to see differently. In the words of Mohawk elder Rarihokwats, writing in response to a brilliant lecture by Taiaiake Alfred called “The psychic landscape of contemporary colonialism”:

While colonialism’s effects can be seen externally, the landscape of colonialism lies within us. Colonialism is spirit-sucking parasite which lives within our heart, mind, and soul. Unless we confront and dominate the colonialism inside, confronting it outside will be a futile exercise. That is the struggle in which to be engaged.

This engagement requires self-knowledge. Knowledge of who we are, and what it is within us that must be transcended if one is to dominate colonialism and its debilitating effects. Who am I? What is my problem with colonialism? What am I going to do about it? Questions for the daily agenda.

We must recognize ourselves as victim-beneficiaries of colonialism.

Other thinkers from a less explicitly political tradition make a similar point in their own ways. Take author, consultant and academic Margaret Wheatley, who writes: “Seeing with new eyes gives us the capacity to solve problems instead of creating more of them.”

Until we learn to see our work with new eyes, from the bowels of our inner struggle, we are at best confronting a futile exercise, and at worst creating more problems.

When we benefit from the status quo, that inner struggle is one of coming to terms with our ignorance and discomfort around the patterns of injustice (re: systemic fuckery) and their debilitating effects. It is answering those most basic questions: Who am I? What’s my problem? What am I going to do about it?

Until we learn to see our work with new eyes, from the bowels of our inner struggle, we are at best confronting a futile exercise, and at worst creating more problems.

This ‘daily agenda’ Rarihokwats talks about is another way of thinking about the question I set out with at the beginning: What is my ‘inner work’ for practicing solidarity?

It’s one that I believe is vital to professional organizers who are trying to bring deep, re-distributive social justice to life.

What we know: Some assumptions I’m making

Since we’re setting out together in this capacity, I’ll start by identifying some assumptions about what ‘we’ know. By this I mean, here is my way of seeing the world with others, that I now mostly take on faith. Maybe you won’t in fact feel a part of this ‘we’ I’m creating, but my hope is that you’ll at least be more aware of those differences we bring.

• We know we can’t solve our most gut-wrenching problems alone, or even as organizations and networks. We know it’s going to take authentic, long-term partnerships with frontline organizers.
• We know movements change the patterns of our world by engaging as gardeners or naturalists rather than technicians or engineers: by nurturing people’s re-birth rather than repairing their ‘damage’; by cultivating mutual inter-connection rather than optimizing rigid structures; and by stewarding the well-being of the whole rather than maximizing some narrow definition of output.
• We know that it is frontline organizers who are in the place of most potential for change. That is to say, it is the experience and expertise of those most affected that has the deepest capacity to create conditions for a system to change itself. And yet, we know that their voices tend to have the least formal power to bring forward that capacity for change within our organizations, institutions and systems. We know that, as professionals, we benefit from this reality in ways we are not always aware of — certainly in material or status terms, and in many other ways besides.
• We know that our identity as professionals must remain vitally engaged with the voice of the frontline organizer, including the frontline voice within us. We know that social justice is personal and political.

We know that it is often hard to act on these many things we already know. To do those hard things, we need to learn to see things with new, older eyes.

Seeing with new, older eyes

Reading this, you may be feeling awkward, confused and uncomfortable. Your inner professional voice may be stammering its rhetorical questions and grumpy pronouncements.

Well, okay. If we can accept those feelings and hear that voice, and still see new again, it’s all very beautiful.

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This series has come together with the help of a self-directed research stipend from the Laidlaw Foundation in 2015, during which time I supported the efforts of justice-based organizers to share experiences and strategies for sustaining their work beyond the boundaries of the institutional granting system. It has grown out of several years of work as an action researcher and co-organizing friend with various networks of youth organizers, which you can learn about in my previous article here.