 photo source: mic.com Before digging into this piece, read part one: Confronting Conflict Within Movement Work. binaries got us fucked up At the core of relational and communal conflict is a fundamentally flawed belief that power is innately evil (unless it is the power we personally hold), causing us to forgo critical analyses of power and disavow its uses and imaginative possibilities. We yield collective power to the binary of oppressor and oppressed, stopping short of accounting for the ways we cause and endure harm on all sides of oppression. Evil latitude of power is not the sole territory of people holding ideologically opposed positions. Systemic oppression we are trying to dismantle is not simply the other side. It is also inside of us and our communities. It is all parts rather than either/or, because sometimes, there is no other side. When we fail to understand power structures and the power we hold as individuals, the power we are granted by virtue of identity and perceived position, the power reclaimed through solidarity, we will continue to abuse our selves and others. What is considered evil and wrong, good and right, politically “progressive,” are social constructions that leave no room for honesty and humility, expansive nuance, analysis of power, self-reflection, individual and collective values, or mutual goals for accountability when harm breaches relationship and community. Assigning conflicting parties to polarized ends of this false binary forces a limited and limiting spectrum where a full picture with many possibilities and options and methods exist. Our commitment to binaries is fruit of systemic oppression. We are conditioned to adhere to a certain school of thought: only two of a thing exists, positioned in direct contrast, to superiorize one over the other. Our approach to engaging one another when we disagree, when personalities clash, when harm has caused a rift tends to err toward replicating the same false binaries. What may be most unhealthy is our manner of applying this practice to conflicts across the board, from petty arguments of personal difference to disagreements about the direction of a political action to rooting out sexual violence committed by an organizer against another community member. conflict is not abuse except when it is Abuse and sexual violence is not conflict, but violation. However, the aftermath of abusive behavior devolves into what we widely consider conflict. Our response to conflict can and frequently does become abusive. Our reactions to abuse and conflict and their overlap parallel one another in many ways. We disbelieve and attack victims, justify wrongdoing and harmful behavior, devalue mutual respect for boundaries, building a culture that yields compounded harm. Ashley Yates is a queer black woman and activist formerly affiliated with the Black Lives Matter national network. She cut ties with the organization before publicly sharing the abuse she endured at the hands of a BLM staff member, another queer black woman, and subsequent harm caused by top leaders’ unwillingness to hold their colleague accountable. Her deeply personal analysis via open letter to BLM leadership highlights the misuse of identity politics as a fatal flaw in binary thought specific to conflict and abuse. “Identity doesn’t give you free reign to abuse or continue to abuse in private through whisper campaigns and discrediting of your survivors. Identity doesn’t grant free escape from accountability,” Yates writes. She continues, “Identity does not equal infallibility. Abusers don’t just occupy the identities you don’t like. They are often people that look just like YOU.” Othering abuse and harmful behavior by sole virtue of identity is dangerous praxis that prevents us from seeing and uprooting our own harmful actions. When organizers abuse other organizers, the identities we share, our common struggles as organizers, and adulation of individual leaders causes us to question whether abuse is even possible in organizing spaces or between organizers. Addressing abuse and conflict head-on falls by the wayside. be humble At best, constructive criticism from fellow community organizers and other folks who know us best is communal love incarnate. Criticism is necessary to and for our work. It builds us up, calls out what needs improvement, and holds us accountable to our selves, communities, and movements. The moral high ground is an incredibly dangerous position to self-determine. Thankfully, we do not exist or operate in isolation. The thoughts inside our heads, the ideas that pour out of us when we are most creative, are collaborative and generative. We are products of environments made up of small, in/consequential collisions with other people and their thoughts, feelings, ideas, and creations. We work alongside brilliant minds, busy hands, blazing hearts, people carrying wholly different lived experiences to broaden and sharpen our critical thought, emotional intelligence, analysis and action, and most important — our connection to each other and our worlds. Our relationships and communities help us determine what values we must shed, those we must take up, and how to practice our shared values with one another. Unfortunately, conflict often favors ego over mutuality and radical humility. Humility grants us necessary space to sit with our shortcomings and open our hearts and minds to feedback gifted to us by our peers. Progress cannot afford to avoid, mishandle, or fail to gain forward movement from conflict. Conflicts are unique in magnitude and impact and relationship between parties involved and affected, but we tend to fall back on various means of avoidance and proven unhelpful methods that treat conflicts as indistinguishable. This habit overlooks our ability to hold multiple truths at once, to ask hard questions of our selves and others, to discover paths forward without reflexively resorting to harmful binaries, disposability, and punitive practices. bad blood When conflict between two or more parties occurs, we engage in some age-old patterns of behavior. We tend to:
adrienne maree brown shares in her interactive text Emergent Strategy, “So many of our organizations working for social change are structured in ways that reflect the status quo.” She highlights small problems that can infect organizational culture. Two elements of note are “destructive methods of engaging conflict” and “personal drama disrupting movements.” Our general inability and unwillingness to navigate interpersonal conflict balloons into toxic community spaces, detracts from and hinders urgency, focus, and collaborative effectiveness. A hypervisible means of addressing conflict in organizing spaces are callouts, publicly naming and shaming harm done, usually after other interpersonal methods have been exhausted or are unhelpful. Callouts are one tool of many and play out differently depending on moving factors. We size up others’ character, work, and our personal feelings about them arbitrarily. Arbitrary, because we don’t spend significant time learning our selves and the values we hold that direct our living, loving, and labor. We largely disregard the importance of the continual process of self-recovery. The baseline we can hold ourselves and others to must be centered on firm foundation. Further, we fail to effectively communicate and share in our values with our peers, then consequently hold them to a standard they may or may not be aware of and cannot meet even if they wanted to. This cycle is an unsustainable way to address conflict, politically grow, and resolve to work together inside of difference. When fellow organizers don’t meet the bar we have set, what do we gain from draggings or cancelations? How do we measure their shortcomings against that of their contributions to community and the weight of the harmed party’s voice and desires? How do we remain in community with someone who has caused us personal harm? In what ways do we submit ourselves to punitive methods of engaging conflict? How can we imagine healing and restoration into being? Our experiences on all sides of varied conflicts, of giving ourselves over to debilitating fear, sadness, ignorance, anger, is fertile ground for radically different ways of being, relating, and connecting.
loyalty loyalty loyalty We are a loyal people, creators and community builders and organizers alike. We are loyal to our work, our co-conspirators, our friends, our chosen families as we connect over our labors of love. Regardless of how we each define our loyalty, it demonstrates a willingness to defend specific people and groups, and by extension, their ideas and actions, due to our respect for them even if we don’t personally know them. Black Lives Matter promotes the campaign to “protect black women” and “say her name,” but according to Ashley Yates’ account, leadership silenced and disparaged her for speaking truth to her abuse. We have increasing difficulty supporting ideas apart from personality. Our attachments to specific people doesn’t always translate to loyalty to worthwhile work. It is, in part, why a significant majority of our political initiatives and community groups are led by and produce what adrienne maree brown names “singular charismatic leaders” and “top-down structures.” We habitually attempt to build whole movements around such leaders and structures, leaving our work open to ego-driven conflict and disruption. Ella Baker imparted to us, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” People-centered movements cannot sustainably run and grow on person-focused work. Our individual relationships should not act as a shield for people we love when they cause harm to others. Those we care deeply for are capable of committing acts of harm against other people, just as we are capable of committing acts of harm against others. It is our duty to hold our selves and loved ones accountable as an act of freeing love and loyalty. The love we hold for friends and family and fellow organizers in its best form bends toward accountability, restoration, and freedom. Absolution without question or consequence at the direct expense of those harmed is a telltale sign of loyalty without principle. When conflict arises our loyalty to the people of our choosing can hinder our compassion for others, erase the reality of multiple truths, and upend the transformative power of honesty and humility. This is a corrupted kind of tribalism, a dangerously subtle form of perpetuating and recreating harm at the root of systemic oppression. But our work is to free our selves and communities from its chokehold on our imagination, to connect in spite of barriers before us and built by us. Ashon Crawley encourages us, “We do not need to cede care, concern, compassion, love, forgiveness in order to contend against forces that seek our separation.” An unapologetic lack of care is not revolutionary. A politic of disconnection and disposability will not liberate us. Imagining communal accountability pushes us to feel, think, and co-create otherwise means of engaging in conflict and deeply connecting. Let’s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |