Decompiling Oppression #69
Sam McVeety
At a recent talk, Kripa Krishnan (with support from a number of allies) introduced me and others to the framework of professional inclusion. The basic thrust of professional inclusion is that different roles within an organization should be valued and included equally (rather than valuing, say, engineering over other roles). Since I like to think in parallels, this got me thinking about connections to disability justice, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's Care Work:
A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.
Before continuing, I want to make it clear that none of this is meant to minimize the unique challenges faced by the disability justice movement; my intention is rather to honor the work that has gone on before and seek inspiration and guidance from it. Like professional inclusion, disability justice contends with the tension between minimizing harm in the here and now vs. contemplating the root causes of those harms. For example, we can work hard to create more accessible spaces (everything from fragrance free spaces to ramps to flexible work hours), and, I think it's important to acknowledge that we're living in a capitalist system that attaches value to bodies and roles; one that over and over again tells all of us that some bodies and minds are more valuable than others. Those values can have severe consequences, too, particularly in the pervasive notion of disposability, from losing your job to your life.
Another parallel between disability justice and professional inclusion is that both movements have to contend with everyday differences that have practical manifestations, big and small. As a software engineer, I do different work than someone who designs VR headsets, cooks meals, or coordinates real estate (even if some of the markers are artificial, like badges). In the disability justice world, some people are able to walk unassisted, and others are not. In both movements, it's crucial that these attributes not be equated to value (again, it is subjective, contingent frameworks, like capitalism, that attach value to them). By contrast, other areas of equity work (particularly racial equity) contend with differences where the social construction of difference is more demonstrably artificial (though this doesn't prevent value from being assigned differently). Both frameworks ask us to be curious about just how deep our social constructions of value might go.
Something that I think we can learn, and that has stuck with me from disability justice is the richness and complexity of how to effectively build movements across a huge number of sub-identities. While this is present in any movement, I think it's particularly pronounced in one that can have membership with such differing qualities, where a common theme is that everyone is the expert in their own disability, and necessarily inexpert in many others that they may encounter. While this might seem fraught at first, it also provides the foundation for beautiful communication patterns of consent and curiosity, where people know that they will constantly be learning from each other and seeking out those subtle and large variations, rather than taking shortcuts to a universalizing theme. From Care Work:
We realized that even though we were all queer and trans disabled people of color, we didn’t automatically know each other’s access needs cross-disability ... Often, instead, we experienced the places where interdependence didn’t just magically work out as betrayal, letting each other down ... Sometimes, because we were used to being the only revolutionary crip fighting ableism in a sea of able-bodied obliviousness, it was hard for us to hear that we weren’t always right, to understand differences of opinion or approach or experience as other than wrong, or attack, or threat.
With professional inclusion, there are similar negotiations: we are constantly evolving roles and responsibilities and iterating on how and where they fit into organizations.
Listening to the talk on professional inclusion, I was also, for a moment, concerned that this might overwhelm the audience, triggering some variant of compassion fatigue. One more category to worry about. I realized, though, that here again, equity is a yes-and space. Yes to everything that came before, and yes to this as well. It may add to the complexity of the challenges we face, but that complexity is necessary to build communities and teams that are truly inclusive.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Does the comparison of treatments of professions to disabilities trigger any resistance or hesitation from you? What pathologies might be at the root of that?
Communal: Piepzna-Samarasinha asks us: what it would look like to move from “access as service begrudgingly offered to disabled people by non-disabled people who feel grumpy about it” to “access as a collective joy and offering we can give to each other.” What would that look like for your community?
Solidarity: Support People First (Washington) and their work to build a society where we are all equal citizens in our communities.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FAQ
Can I share this newsletter with non-Googlers? Yes! Feel free to forward this note externally; it does not contain confidential information.
Is this an official Google newsletter? Nope. The views expressed in this newsletter are not the official position of Google, and we are not affiliated with any particular ERG.
I am leaving Google or transferring to another bet. Can I still receive this newsletter? Yes! You can join the external list here.