Categories
Resources to tackle privilege Social change Transforming Conflict Understanding power Understanding whiteness

Support Space: Black Joy – White envy

The monthly Support space for white people unlearning racism continues Thursday May 25th 5.30-7pm

Theme:  Black Joy: White Envy

This space is for NVC practitioners, whether you are beginning your journey with NVC or you have been practicing it for decades.

This month we will explore what comes up in our bodies reading this article on ‘Black Joy’ in the pursuit of racial justice and notice disconnection, defensiveness, reaction, envy … and particularly invite enquiry into how behavioural patterns based on envy can show up in our white-bodied ways.  

Empathy and constructive challenge is encouraged. 

Here is zoom link,  or contact ceribuckmaster@gmail.com for more info. 

About Unlearning Racism for white NVC practitioners

Unlearning Racism is a support space for white people interested in NVC and we meet monthly. Info here

It is co-held under the umbrella of pre-emptive work by the Conflict Transformation Weave.

For those of you who are interested in conflict facilitation, understanding systemic issues such as explicit and internalised racism, class, gender inequality, neurodivergence and physical mobility and how different aspects of these identities ‘intersect’ (or ‘crossroad’ each other) is essential.

It’s also essential as a facilitator to have a sense of how your own social identities impact and inform your experience (who can you easily empathise with and who not, as just one example) and a sense of how other people experience you as you show up in all the glory of the intersecting features of your identity.

Categories
Resources to tackle privilege Social change Transforming Conflict Understanding power Understanding whiteness

When parts of your identity fall through the cracks

Falling through the cracks

In our April 2023 Unlearning Racism support space for white people, we looked at Intersectionality and why an intersectional lens is important, particularly when considering the complex marginalisations that happen around race.

Ijeoma Oluo in Chapter 5 of her book So, you want to talk about Race explores personally how

  • Their queer identity may be overlooked by anti racist movements
  • Their black identity may be overlooked by feminist or queer movements
  • Their middle class identity may cause them to overlook poor people in all movements

This is the essence of Intersectionality: it is an invitation to explore our identities in order that parts of us don’t fall through the cracks of connection, and that we might be better equipped to understand other people’s experiences of marginalisation.

What we did in the session

If you missed the session, we watched 3 min section starting at 56 mins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByiEt0hpmkk  (total video length 1hr 18 mins and we will discuss parts of this video in the future)

We then explored these questions:

What would be the areas of identity you might overlook or not notice because they are not part of your identify?

Whose experience would be inaccessible to you because of that?

And What action might you take to counter this or do this differently?

  • For example, I’m a cis-woman, I put my pronouns on my screen as an act of solidarity with non binary people
  • Im an able boded person, I try to name accessibility in venues I use, so disabled people don’t have to always ask for the information they need to come along.
  • I’m a white man. I tend to read books by other white men. I can create change by finding my knowledge and learning in works by black women, or people from the Global South.

We then went on to ask this question

What other examples can you think of, that if you didn’t hold awareness of different identities people occupy, that part of their experience would go unacknowledged, and could create huge conflict and imbalance in life?

Further exploration …. How Intersectionality evolved as a concept

You can watch Kimberley Crenshaw talk about the original case involving Emma Degraffenreid that led to coining the term Intersectionality. https://youtu.be/JRci2V8PxW4 (5.50 mins)

Emma Degraffenreid was an African American who didn’t get a job in a car plant that employed African American men on the factory floor and white women as secretarial support in the office. Her lawsuit for discrimination was thrown out because black men were being employed and white women were being employed. But Emma Degraffenreid faced double discrimination as an African American woman and the law refused to understand her experience and tossed the case out of court. Kimberly Crenshaw advocated that there was no name for the problem, and when you can’t name or frame a problem, you can’t solve it, hence the need for a lens, such as Intersectionality to see Emma’s dilemma.

An ‘Intersection‘ is more commonly used in the US than the the UK. It’s simply where two roads meet, so if the word crossroads or junction provides a visual image that might support understanding, go for it!

About Unlearning Racism

Unlearning Racism is a support space for white people interested in NVC and we meet monthly. Info here

It is co-held under the umbrella of pre-emptive work by the Conflict Transformation Weave.

For those of you who are interested in conflict facilitation, understanding systemic issues such as explicit and internalised racism, class, gender inequality, neurodivergence and physical mobility and how different aspects of these identities ‘intersect’ (or ‘crossroad’ each other) is essential.

It’s also essential as a facilitator to have a sense of how your own social identities impact and inform your experience (who can you easily empathise with and who not, as just one example) and a sense of how other people experience you as you show up in all the glory of the intersecting features of your identity.

Categories
Community conversation Resources for neurodiversity Resources to tackle privilege

Do we tend to the consequences of our ‘othering’, or rush on with our plans? by Sue Johnston

On September 17th 2021, the Community Conversations team in CTW hosted a Conversation about Social Change asking the following questions.

  • What is the world needing that you as an NVC practitioner, or us collectively, as NVC practitioners, could contribute to?
  • What is it important to be doing right now?
  • What will deepen our lives and our connections to one another and the web of life?
  • What are our options for integrity in a time of increasing marginalisation of some, of collapsing systems and civilisations and the threat of extinction?  
  • How do we choose where to put our energies? 
  • What if we have low capacity or ill health? 
  • How can our practice of NVC support all of this?

This is Sue Johnston’s response to these questions. Sue poses some helpful questions you might want to ask in your groups and communities to nourish the sense of ‘we’ in our interactions amidst difference.

*********

“My interest is around the disadvantaged, disabled, sensitive, outsiders, misfits and frankly rejects; those with conditions that suffer more than enough ignorance and intolerance – for example neurodivergence, CFS, fibromyalgia; illnesses that additionally lend themselves to imposter syndrome in my culture. People with conditions often undiagnosed or ordinary looking enough to still be measured against norms and found wanting. Repeatedly.

Who in NVC circles may, for example, experience significant difficulties in “the basics” such as remembering “an occasion when”; in identifying feelings and/or needs; or in making clear requests. Perhaps because their executive function isn’t orientated that way. Perhaps for other, maybe unknown, reasons.

Here are some questions that come:

  • What does it cost our humanity when we protect our own comfort/perceived safety above another’s basic well being, when our fears blind us to wider consequences?
  • What gets in the way of our curiosity about their story?
  • What hampers our curiosity about the negative consequences for them and ourselves when we other them?
  • What stops us seeing when we are othering?
  • Could it be that taking time to grieve might  address something of our failings at such a time?
  • Do we tend to the consequences of our othering, or rush on, away, with our own plans and preoccupations? And what is it that orientates us when we choose between these?
  • When we focus on removing people who interrupt our plans for harmony and growth, is it possible that we undermine the very qualities we seek?
  • Are our time frames askew; when we “protect ourselves from inconvenients”; what happens when we one day become the inconvenient ones?
  • What is this process doing to our culture?
  • What are the children learning from seeing this happening around them?
  • Could it be the self same approach that is eliminating inconvenient life everywhere? Weeds, trees, bees?
  • When particular individuals with difficulties consistently run into the personal boundaries of others and therefore become isolated, to what degree is it “their problem”? Could it also mean anything for those personal boundaries? Are they really as personal as we may believe?
  • Could we be reinforcing the very prejudices we long to address?
  • Is there any value in having “difficult” people in our midst?

In such troubled times, when there is so much we are each struggling with, could it be that gathering such folk in might better serve the whole? Might listening to them be a worthy endeavour? Not to “help them” or “support them”, but to learn and live and model interdependence, and much more besides?

Obviously I am orientated in a particular direction, given my experiences of loss of self and others; of isolation. And at the same time I’ve been on both sides; I’ve found people very daunting indeed, and blocked many out. I’m longing to listen for what I am missing when I am convinced of my position; longing to find patience and humility to put the health of interdependence and relationship before my needs or yours. Whenever, that is, I have sufficient capacity to do so without jeopardising my basic health and ability to contribute (interesting, “perfectly reasonable” boundary, right there;  what does it cost, I wonder?). 

And even if I withdraw from you into self, for I am a limited being, I want to be in the “us” as I do so. To pause with my wake as it ripples into your life and beyond. I’m guessing that at the end of days especially, I’ll  regard my wake with less regret, for every inclusive, less ‘Suecentric’ choice I make now.  I find personal comfort such a burden to drag through this time and place, both of whom are calling out for love with woefully inadequate response. Comfort has a way of drawing me away and devouring my humanity.

Written in gratitude to the ones I have othered in any degree, who have endured my clumsy attempts to reach out in curiosity, who have indeed humbled me with their stories. And written in grief for my negligence in witnessing the wake of most of my othering, more times than I cared to know.”

Further reading

An instruction manual for and about dissenters by Miki Kashtan

Categories
Resources for neurodiversity Resources to tackle privilege

Beginning to undo internalised ableism by Sue Johnston

We put a call out for resources around neurodiversity to support neurodiverse people in the NVC feel valued and a sense of belonging and to support neurotypical people learn and grow in understanding. Here is one response.

Beginning to undo internalised ableism

Sue Johnston

“So much arising in me. Deep gratitude. And deep sorrow that I would feel so grateful.That this could look to me like a big step, simply because it actually makes neurodivergence a hint more visible in one small place, when ableism is so powerfully alive and well, barely challenged, at such enormous cost to us all. And our community is no exception.

I’ll name one of my wonderings.

Marshall’s 40 word rule. Utterly beautiful. And structure and limit is GREAT for an ADHD brain. And what about when that brain has flipped into a supersonic hyperfocus monologue? What does it cost that person to be kindly interrupted because you are bored? How long after your interjection will they have finally recovered from the shock of smashing into a brick wall?  The kind of shock that has already happened a few times that day perhaps? A shock likely invisible to you, or were it visible, incomprehensible, maybe to the point of incredulity. Alien.  So the voices in the workshop continue, like feint fuzzy echoes in the distance, as they try to find their way back into the room, into the subject, way behind now so maybe confused. Maybe ashamed. Again.

If you ever interrupt in this way, do check how they are afterwards? 

Do you think they could answer honestly, when they’ve always been told they are exaggerating, that the experience they have just had doesn’t exist? And so now, that’s still what they believe, even as the experience shakes them again to the core? They unconsciously know that their task is to keep quiet and not disturb the nice normal folks anymore than they already have done. 

I’m used to being the nuisance, causing a scene, holding people up, taking more than “my share” of space, being told as much, often kindly. Used to being the frightened silent one who dares not speak for fear of getting it wrong again. We’re talking terrified here. (Which I now realise  is why most of my empathy guesses for a good long while centred around fear!). I’m familiar with being too much. 

I’m not claiming to have any answers. I only got to understand the gulf between cultures by remarkably good fortune and by dogged determination to survive in a world that doesn’t meet my kind where we are, but instead consistently expects us to meet it, in it’s manner. I know how lucky I am to have survived long enough to be identified (not diagnosed; I’m not ill). Many don’t. I know too how lucky I am to get the chance to begin to undo the I internalised ableism in this one human here. To see now so much more clearly the extent of the diversity of human minds.

And my heart breaks for all those attending NVC  workshops who come away with their difficulties compounded by ignorance. It’s real. It matters. 

Please remember, there are quite possibly neurodivergents in your workshops who have no idea  that they don’t experience the world in the same way as everyone else, don’t know that they think differently, that in some ways their brains cannot do the same things as neurotypicals. 

Or if they’ve managed it, it takes masses more effort to achieve the same outcome. They don’t know that their suffering and that of those in relationship to them may well be created less by their disconnection from their needs; and more by daily misinformation about what needs their behaviours and emotions actually point to.

One small example. I used to cry a lot on empathy circles when I first came to camps. Many people liked it. They said it helped them access their emotions. So I would deliberately go first to help people. It felt like a responsibility. Many neurodivergents work that way; wired to put others first. But it could be invisible. Maybe it looked like lack of consideration to some. Sometimes it probably was.  I imagined that this was some kind of skill.  But what was invisible to me, and those around me, despite the tears, was just how distressing it was. How surprised I often was to find all this pain in me over something I hadn’t thought was a big deal. But I’d heard the psychologised explanation that I was in denial; and I’d heard the NVC explanation that  I’d been disconnected from my emotions/needs til that moment. And, being autistic, I’m wired to trust, accept, take literally. It makes me vulnerable. I would unconsciously disregard the extreme angst in my body afterwards, believing it was just a sign that I had “processed deeply”, and it was all good. After all, I’ve been systematically trained to deny my symptoms. The empathy did give relief in some ways, of course. But I do wonder now, whether far from offering relief, it often reinforced my inability to know myself.  

And another thing I’m aware of. Exposure anxiety. 

It’s an autism thing. I will often cry intensely when I speak, even if I want to say something brief and trivial. It really isn’t necessarily to do with the content of what I’m saying at all. When  I hear my voice it can freak me out, I’m overcome with such pain throughout my body. I didn’t know that those sensations weren’t something everybody had to contend with, that I wasn’t just  less self disciplined. So when empathisers linked my tears to my observations of my life…assumed remembering was generating emotion… It was supporting me to prolong the agony created by the current situation. And I’d crack on on my quest to be normal ( some hope! Laughing a lot!).

Tragically, people can’t ask for the accommodations they need, because often they don’t even know that society disables them. 

What accommodations could you make? Well, I wonder myself. We’re all so different. Think in terms of someone who keeps trying to walk up the steps and falling down them, unaware that their legs don’t work like other people’s, and that ramps and wheelchairs exist. And when they eventually think to tell  an able bodied person about their problem, the response is, ” I know what you mean, I have that problem, I just do x”, so start trying and failing all over again.

If you made it thus far, I’m super grateful.  May it be that it serves your continued open heartedness and curiosity. So much in life is mystery, and it seems proper that we respect that.

In warm gratitude for this amazing life,  neurodivergence, and this community.”

June 2021