Decompiling Oppression #1
Sam McVeety
One thing I've spent the last year wrestling with is how best to share and discuss knowledge around the various equity projects that I'm pursuing. A common theme from 2019 was giving myself permission to create more space around these topics, but lacking an ideal venue, I found myself still prone to second-guessing, and relying on one-off opportunities. While this approach had a few notable highlights, I want to try something more sustainable and ongoing in 2020.
I'm actively resisting the desire to have a complete plan for this at the outset, so I'll start with some broad contours of what I'm trying to do:
Share knowledge, particularly intended for folks with privileged/majoritarian identities.
Calls to action, both in building solidarity through self-examination and community building, as well as through concrete financial support. I'll talk about why I think this is so critical in an upcoming post.
Connect to personal experiences, both my own and others, to ground abstract and general notions in the personal and immediate.
I'd like to thank Melissa and the #FeministFridays crew for inspiration, along with Professor Angelica Chazaro and her amazing Fall 2019 Critical Race Theory class. Before going further, I do want to name the fact that this post specifically centers a white perspective. As a white male, it's not my intention to exclude others from my audience, but rather to speak most urgently to enlist other folks with similar identities to increase their part in allyship and abolitionist work.
So, let's get started! Where to begin? There are so many topics that I'd like to explore in the weeks and months ahead, but it seemed only appropriate to start with joan olsson's DETOUR‐SPOTTING for white anti‐racists. The "detours" listed in this article are different ways in which well-intentioned work around racial equity can get sidetracked (or even become counter-productive), often because actually engaging in the work of equity is so challenging.
18 detours might seem like a lot, but in my own experience, I've seen them all manifest in real situations, whether in myself or others. I think there's a certain communal strength to be drawn from a catalog like this, for folks who are engaged in challenging oppression -- this work is hard, and you're not alone in struggling with it. Heather Hackman, a professor that I've taken a number of workshops from, characterizes these detours as operating similar to gravity -- it's incredibly easy to let go of the struggle, and sink back downward. Whether you call them detours or gravity (or privilege), I think it's helpful to be able to name these dynamics so we can address them.
I've personally felt the pull of #2 (Rugged Individual/Bootstrap Theory -- "everyone has a chance to succeed in this country, just look at Obama") throughout my life, which is particularly prevalent in high-achievement spaces that I pass through. In order to make this detour visible in my own life, I've found it helpful to have pursuits in my life that I'm both predisposed to (math and computers) and those that are a constant struggle (anything athletic). From there, I can dig down into the different ways that my personal path through life has made things easier in some ways (father as a math teacher, uncle as a computer programmer, disposable income for a personal computer growing up, lots of folks in CS who looked like me, etc.). Conversely, for things I struggle with, my personal experience indicates that success (or at least mediocrity) isn't impossible, but I have to work harder than some of my peers to get the same result.
This effort differential is a core part of how I understand the concept of equity. Equity doesn't just mean an end to formal discrimination (e.g. "you can't have this job"), but is a more expansive view, which says that "just because something is available, doesn't mean it is equally easy to access". Equity seeks to interrogate and dismantle the idea that, if circumstances related to my race, gender, or other identities make it 10x harder to achieve the same result, then that's a fundamentally unjust system. Crucially, the difference in effort is affected by a difference in circumstances, as well -- if I have to take two bus lines to access a computer lab, that's a very different experience than having a personal computer for use at home.
In the interest of keeping things relatively succinct, I'll wrap up there. If you found something in the material challenging, or if I said something out of my lane, please feel free to reach out. Sign up for future updates here! Before you go:
Each week, I'll provide a series of invitations to you. I'm going to start with trying out having these invitations correspond to the categories of personal, communal, and solidarity. The reason I've chosen these is that I believe that this work requires engagement along all three axes to be successful -- personal work to expand and grow one's own perspective, communal work to engage with those around us, and work in solidarity to transform our thoughts into concrete actions for change.
My invitations to you for this week:
Personal: Read DETOUR‐SPOTTING for white anti‐racists and think about what detours have shown up in your life or that you've observed in others. Try to focus on one or two of the detours and take a deep dive, rather than going shallow across a lot of them.
Communal: Share this reading with someone, and make time to discuss it together after they've had a chance to read it. Share the thoughts you have on your own personal detours or those you've observed in others.
Solidarity: Following the example from SURJ, donate to a black-led organization like Washington Building Leaders of Change. Start with an amount that you're comfortable with -- maybe $25 or $50, if you're just beginning.