Month: March 2015

SB101: Let’s make it awkward.

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My fellow Hoosiers.

By now, you have probably heard that SB101 has been signed by Governor Mike Pence.

I’m not going to talk about whether or not this law forms a legal basis for discrimination.  Lawyers with more knowledge than I on these matters have already made that case and I am convinced.  If you want to read some of their arguments, you can do so here and here.

I’m not going to talk about whether or not Jesus of Nazareth would have condoned such a law.  More learned Christians than I have already made that case, if you would like to read some of  their arguments, here they are.

I am going to talk about what Hoosiers who oppose this law, who think that this law is bad governing, bad theology, and a breach of human compassion and decency, can do.

I grew up in Indiana.  I was born in Lafayette, I went to high school in Bloomington, I attended college in Richmond.  My extended family and friends live in Indianapolis, Elkhart, and South Bend.  I know my home state and I know the misplaced fear, the mistaken righteousness, and the dangerous passivity that allows a law like this to be lobbied for and to be passed.  I know it because I grew up with that fear and righteousness and passivity, and sometimes I was the perpetrator and sometimes I was the survivor and I know a lot of people who will be the perpetrators and who will be the victims of this law.

And I also know that as Hoosiers, one of the things we fear the most is…awkwardness.  Discomfort.  Making a scene.

We are taught to be nice, by which I mean to make sure that conversations aren’t too distressing, that no one is publicly embarrassed, that everything seems, at least on the surface, to be agreeable and pleasant.

This isn’t always a bad thing.  Sometimes it is a kind and useful thing.

But sometimes, we need to make a scene to effect change.  We need to point a finger at the status quo and say that the status quo is wrong.   It’s taken me a long time to learn this and it is still something with which I am deeply uneasy.  I don’t like confrontation, I don’t like making people visibly uncomfortable, I don’t like sticking out and calling attention to myself.  But I have learned that oppression thrives in many environments, and a silent community is one of them.

What can Hoosiers do to fight this law?  We can make it viscerally, horribly, deeply uncomfortable to have it on the books.

We can bring it up at our workplace, at our churches, at our schools, and among our families.  Among strangers.  Yes, strangers.

We can ask the stores we patronize if they serve everyone.  We can walk out if their answer is anything but, “yes.”

If we work at an Indiana business that serves people in the state, we can ask our bosses and co-workers to make it clear that we serve everyone and if they say no, we can ask why they don’t want to serve particular people.  We can have that awkward conversation and we can refuse to shut up about the issue, no matter how uncomfortable it makes others.

If we live in Indiana and choose to boycott businesses that refuse to serve particular people, we can write them and clearly explain why they have lost our business.  We can send copies of that letter to our local paper.  And our state representative.  And our city council.

If we choose to patronize businesses that are serve all people, we publicly declare that support.  We can compile lists of those businesses and distribute those lists.

If we are living outside of Indiana and choose to boycott the state, we can publicly declare why exactly why we are boycotting Indiana.  Maybe we can send the money we would have spent in Indiana to organizations and businesses fighting this law and we can declare that publicly as well.

If we choose to come to the state for an event, we can make a point to ask each and every business we patronize if they serve all people and only work with those who do.

If we live in Indiana and lose paychecks and jobs and contracts because people are boycotting our state and we are mad about that, we can write angry letters about how mad we are and how this law is making it hard for us to get by.   We can point our anger to the politicians that signed this law, to the groups that lobbied for this law, and we can tell them loudly that they are to blame for our suffering.

Whatever it is we choose to do, we need to make it loud.  Don’t let the passing of this law be business as usual—make it a public relations nightmare.

Don’t let the conversation die, because if we do that, our silence will be a shield for this law.   And if anyone points out that we are being loud and awkward and making the whole situation so very, very uncomfortable, we can point out that being discriminated against is deeply awkward. 

Now, I want to be clear, I am not calling on vulnerable folks targeted by this legislation to put their safety at risk—I am calling on folks like me, who are not (yet) the target of this legislation.  We need to take care of our community and right now that means making a big, ugly scene.  Throw a fit over this.

Don’t be nice, be brave and fearless for the people we love. 

#MakeItAwkward

Call Outs, Call Ins, and Some History Geekery

Sometimes, several areas of my life intersect, Venn diagram style, and similar conversations happen across multiple communities of which I’m part.  During the past six months, I’ve been watching a conversation unfold across the nonprofit, activist, and writing communities regarding how to hold ourselves and others accountable for ideals that we theoretically share, especially in regarding to calling out people and organizations who are acting inappropriately.

A while back, I read Ngọc Loan Trần’s essay, “Calling IN, a Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable” and this week I read Asam Ahmad’s essay “A Note on Call-Out Culture” which continues a similar conversation as Trần.  Both essays reminded me of the keynote speech by Ejeris Dixon at the Watching the Watcher Conference in Chicago this February, which you can listen to here. 

Trần, Ahmad, and Dixon are all concerned that public calling out of racist, sexist and otherwise wrong behavior can become away to categorize people as “good” and “bad” and to dismiss the “bad people” without engaging with them to try to change their behavior.  They are also concerned that by doing this, people are using the same philosophy that our broken justice system uses, in which we try to parse out “good” and “bad” people and to lock away all of the bad people.  And numerous activists, writers, and social scientists have pointed out, when black people and poor people are characterized as essentially “bad” the implicit bias held against them makes it far more likely that juries, judges, police, and other agents in our justice system will condemn them at great rates and for harsher sentences.

I also read a lot of critiques of Ahmad’s essay, including one by the co-founder of Save Wiyabi, Lauren Chief Elk, who expressed outrage that anyone could compare calling out racism, sexism, etc. to the racism of our justice system and asserts that policing call-outs is another way to silence oppressed people.

In the end, I empathize with both views.  Mia Mackenzie, the editor and founder of the site Trần published their essay, sums it up in her disclaimer at the end of the piece.

  (Disclaimer: WHITE FOLKS: Please don’t take any of this as your okay to act a fool and expect POC to not get angry. We have EVERY RIGHT to get angry when you fuck up. And we have no obligation whatsoever to put your hurt feelings above the impact your behavior causes. This post is specifically about us calling in people who we want to be in community with, people who we have reason to trust or with whom we have common ground. It’s not a fuckery free-for-all. Thank you. )

When it comes to calling out, I like to use the “ring theory of venting” that my friend, a nurse, explained to me.  In the center of the ring is the person who is experiencing the trauma most severely, the next ring are people close to the person experiencing the trauma, the third ring are people a little further away and so forth.  The person at the center of the trauma, say, Martina who has breast cancer, gets to vent to everyone.  Her partner, Inés, in the second circle, can vent to the third circle which includes Inés’s brother and mom, but not to Martina.  At the time, care should flow inward, from the people with more distance and resources towards the people who have less.  And so forth.

When it comes to social traumas, I’m rarely at the center.  It’s neither productive nor kind for me to police the calling out done by people who are experiencing the trauma.  Sometimes Lauren Chief Elk is exactly right, calling out publicly is the only way to make someone in power pay attention.  And sometimes, people experiencing the trauma simply don’t have the emotional energy, time, relationship, and other resources to engage with the person in question.  And yes, emotional discomfort is not the same as systemic racism in our justice system and no, being in a community and working in solidarity with each other does not mean we all have to get along all the time and we should avoid conflict.

I take Trần and Ahmad’s essays not as a reason to monitor other people’s call outs, but a reason to monitor my own.  I’ve caught myself saying and doing things in order to publicly proclaim and perform my own moral purity.  It’s not something I’m proud of and it usually comes from a place of insecurity because I know that I do hold implicit bias, that there’s a lot of information I don’t know, a lot of experiences I don’t have.  The truth is, what I fear most is not the stereotypical extremist, what I fear is me.  I can see an extremist coming from a mile off, I usually don’t see myself as clearly.

This is what I assume will happen if I disagree with someone. Especially the trident part.

This is what I assume will happen if I disagree with someone. Especially the trident part.

Furthermore, after reading Trần and Ahmad’s essays, I realized that sometimes I don’t engage with people beyond calling out, not because I don’t have the emotional distance, time, or resources, but because I just don’t know how to have that conversation and I expect it is going to be hard and uncomfortable.  I was socialized to be a nice Midwestern girl, quiet and non-confrontational, and part of me believes that any conflicts will RUIN EVERYTHING FOREVER AND NOTHING WILL EVER BE GOOD AGAIN.  But that’s not true.

Two historical examples that illustrate this:  Ida B. Well’s call out of Frances Willard in 1894* and John Woolman’s conversations with Quaker slaveholders in the 1740s.**

 

 

In the 1890s, Ida B. Wells was crusading against lynching.  Meanwhile, Frances Willard, a white feminist, suffragette, and temperance activist, was courting Southern women for her cause.  In her attempt to garner support from Southern whites, Willard refused to publicly denounce lynching and even gave an interview in which she accused black men of drinking and menacing white women and children, a damning statement, given that the supposed rape of white women was one of the primary justification for lynching.   Ida B. Wells asked Willard and her supporters to walk back their statements and denounce the murder of black men by lynching, but Willard did not respond.

Oh Ida B. Wells, just when I think you can't get any cooler, you do.

Oh Ida B. Wells, just when I think you can’t get any cooler, you do.

Finally, in 1894, when Wells and Willard were both touring Great Britain as speakers, Wells called her out publicly.  Ida B. Wells attended a lecture by Frances Willard and when Wells was asked of her opinion of Willard by a local newspaper, she chose to read Willard’s statements regarding the “menace” of black men.  The British abolition and temperance crowd was shocked by the reveal, Willard was furious and embarrassed and responded by attacking Wells (And her friend Lady Somerset even whined to Frederick Douglass to make Ida B. Wells stop being so mean to Frances Willard….sound familiar?  It’s depressing how much doesn’t change.)   It was scandalous, uncomfortable, and drama-filled.  But in the end, the whole affair pushed the British public to form the London Anti-Lynching Committee…and Frances Willard signed on as a member.  White feminists and activists were forced to reckon with the racism in the temperance and suffrage movement  and some progress was made.

In the mid-1700s, the Quakers in the United States were debating slavery.  For abolitionist Quakers, one of the most divisive questions was how to handle fellow Quakers who owned slaves.  Should they shun them?  Should they allow them at Meeting, but refuse to let them hold office?  Start meetings for abolitionists-only?  Say nothing and hope they changed eventually?  John Woolman, a Quaker abolitionist, chose to visit slave-holding Quakers directly and try to convince them to free their slaves.  He appealed to their shared religious beliefs and tried to get them see that slave-holding was against the teachings of Jesus.  During his travels, Woolman refused to participate in the slave economy.  Rather than ride a horse, he walked over 200 miles, because slaves would have had to care for his horse.  Rather than wear dyed clothing, which was produced by slave labor, he wore undyed homespun.  When he stayed at the house of slaveholders, he made a point to pay the enslaved people who cooked for him and cleaned the house the same wage he would have paid a tavern keeper.

"Dude, we need to talk. What you're doing is super messed up." ***

“Dude, we need to talk. What you’re doing is super messed up.” ***

There were Quakers who were angry that John Woolman would even talk to sinful slave-holders and I’m sure the conversations themselves were uncomfortable and hard because there’s no easy way to tell someone that what they are doing is racist and wrong—but Woolman’s goal wasn’t just his sense of righteousness and personal comfort, his goal was to free people.  And through these conversations and demonstrating that slave-holding was a choice, not an inevitable way of life, he was able to convince dozens of slave-holders to free their slaves over a hundred and twenty years before the Emancipation Proclamation.  Furthermore, his writings on the subject was one of the prime documents that convinced the Pennsylvania Society of Friends to successfully lobby the State of Pennsylvania to abolish slavery.

Both Wells’ call out of Frances Willard and Woolman’s call in of Quaker slave-holders were effective and demonstrate that there is no One True Tactic to Rule Them All.  All we can do is guess at what will work best in the situation at hand, push ourselves to do whatever it takes, and take care of ourselves and each other in the process as best we can.

*Thank you to to Monée Fields-White for her fabulous article on this incident in The Root.

**Thank you to Professor Michael Birkel for his scholarship on John Woolman.

***Paraphrased from The Journal of John Woolman.

In which your local nonprofiteer gets very excited about Latin America and ruminates on ethics

I recently gave a webinar on prospect research in Latin America for APRA Education Week (which was really APRA Education Fortnight).  Check out the blog post here.  If you are a member of APRA, you can access the webinar here.

In February, Helen Brown of the Helen Brown Group  linked to an article written by Matt Goldsmith and published in the Harvard Business Review called, “You May Not Be In Charge, But You Can Influence the People Who Are.”  The article is geared more for a business audience than a nonprofit audience, but it spoke to me nonetheless.  In the past few months, I’ve been struggling with some of the actions of my employer–I work for a large university and it’s inevitable that there will be times when the university makes decisions with which I disagree.  Unfortunately, almost all conventional advice regarding how to influence the actions of higher education institutions assumes that you are either a student, faculty, an administrator, or unionized staff. As a prospect researcher, I don’t fit any of those categories.

However, Goldsmith’s article lists broad principles that can enacted by a diversity of positions, no faculty senate or board membership required.  Here is how I am trying to use three of Goldsmith’s principles to influence my organization as a researcher:

1) Accept the Facts:  Goldsmith encourages employees to accept the fact that the person making decision will be made by the person who has the power to make that decision, not the “right” person or the “smartest” person or the “best” person.   I accept the current structure of governance at the university and acknowledge that I will need to appeal to the appropriate decision makers (board of trustees, student government, alderman etc.).  As a researcher, I spend a lot of time learning about corporate and nonprofit hierarchies so that gift officers can appeal to the correct person. When I’m figuring out who to talk to about an issue at the university (or any organization I’m part of), I need to do the same research to make sure I’m not wasting my time appealing to someone who isn’t a decision maker.

2) Realize You Must Sell Your Ideas:  As a prospect researcher, a great deal of my work is devoted to investigating the philanthropic priorities of individuals so that I can pinpoint matches between the university’s projects and a philanthropist’s passion.  Likewise, when advocating for an issue at my workplace, it’s important to find a match between an institutional value and the issue.  For example, my undergraduate alma mater is a Quaker school that values non-violence; when advocating for divestment from weapons manufacturers, students and alumni appealed to the tradition of non-violence.  In another example, the University of Chicago is a secular institution and prides itself on academic integrity and access to information, when advocating for more data transparency for the university’s private police force, students and staff appealed to the university’s sense of integrity regarding data and information.  It will always be a struggle to figure out how to live our mission, but one of the reasons I choose to work at a mission driven organization is because I want to engage in that conversation.

3) “Challenge up” on issues involving ethics or integrity—never remain silent on ethics violations: There is a lot of information about ethics in prospect research regarding personal data, but there is less information regarding how a prospect researcher can be a partner in maintaining an organization’s ethics and values.  Many organizations have guidelines, implicit or explicit, for the types of donations they will accept and prospect researchers are in a prime position to find out whether or not a donor matches those standards.  Unfortunately, fundraising staff and administrators may not always communicate those standards clearly, or may have very different ideas regarding this issue.  Prospect researchers can push for clarity and dialogue regarding donations and an organization’s values.

For me, one of the most difficult issues is to grapple with is my impartiality as a researcher vs. my engagement as a member of the university community.  I work very hard to present information regarding fundraising as accurately and objectively as I can, but I also try hard to not let my habit of impartiality translate into inaction when it comes to organizational decisions and direction.  Being an objective researcher does not mean that we cannot be active members of our respective nonprofits, in fact, our positions as researchers gives us a unique perspective and skills to bring to the table.