Tag: equity

Turn off the Gas

.Reading time 8 minutes.

Ideology, Indoctrinate, Binarism…

Donald Trump has only ever been surrounded by whiteness and wealth.  His education lacked a moral compass and he was emboldened by an era (the 1980s) that celebrated everything big, regardless of its actual quality, logic or sustainability. While I do know the era, I do not know the man.  I cannot speak to what wakes him up in the morning (or in the middle of the night).  However, as he is the primary agent of political policies that are aimed at making my world a hostile and uninhabitable place he will be mentioned in what follows…

I’ve placed the words above and through this article with their definitions because what the individual man, Trump is attempting through his newly minted office of chaos is for Presidential Executive Orders to take on power that he, nor any government actually has: the ability to control, shape and speak on behalf of belief.  In the latest garbage (linked below), the administration is attacking a variety of “ideologies”.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/

But there are two problems.  First, the Trump administration is bundling together what they see as “radical-left” or “woke” into a single package and framing it as “indoctrination”.

The second problem is that those of us who are in the crosshairs of this and other policies are taking the bait.  We have let the true ideologues convince us that we are under attack.  Our response as a result is classic crabs in a bucket which will get us nowhere.  This is a big mistake.

The beauty of true equity work is that it is NOT based on ideology.  It is NOT built on a singular or narrow idea of what is right or wrong.  It is a philosophy of accommodation.  That is, it looks at individual unique needs and seeks unique solutions.  It empowers and fortifies individual agency. Equity is built on uniqueness, adaptability and flexibility, while what the administration is presenting as “making America great again” is doing the opposite.  In fact, looking at the definition of ideology and indoctrination, that is exactly what the Executive Orders are, just as was promised in Project 2025.

In addition to indoctrination, the administration is intentionally trying to confuse people into exhaustion; they are trying to convince people that they aren’t seeing, hearing, feeling what they are feeling.  Gaslighting.  What is being done is that the administration is trying to accuse the “radical left” of doing exactly what they themselves are doing.

Turn off the gas

To fight this insanity, it must be first remembered that while we may all want to play like we are “unified patriots” with “universal goals”, that is actually not helpful framing.  If diversity is what we truly believe in, and if it is really our strength, then that is what we need to muster.  The response to this shouldn’t be as simple as “give me back my rights” or worse some kind of self-hating apology for being “extreme”; the response needs to be “I don’t want your tired, narrow and inadequate rights” and “I will not be limited in my wholeness to make you feel safe.”  The hatred coming from Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty God-awful loud, but robust, authentic diversity can be MUCH louder.  Human diversity is literally endless and infinite and that’s what has the true ideologues shaking in their Cybertrucks. Diversity is the superpower.  What’s more, it is built in, so we just need to figure out how to harness it. The response cannot give in to the impulse to hold tight to single issues as diversity.  What needs to be embraced and pushed by leaders on the left is a better grasp of diversity as a powerfully organic capacity for humans to be different whether or not someone writes a poorly worded (and frankly petty) document.

Last week, I posted to my blog about how Unitarian Universalists are hamstrung by whether they first need to be free or human (Free or Human?).  What I’m trying to do in this new post is address the same challenge to a wider audience.  Being human is only limited by the limitless capacities of the human body.  Our embodied selves are vastly more expansive in body and mind (as any medical professional will tell you) than even in our advanced society is capable of understanding.

There is no “radical left”.  That is an invention of deeply troubled, narrowly educated and scared, ideologues.  What they are scared of is all the people who are able to look in the vast reaches of the human self and recognize infinity.  They don’t want that.  They want the safety of on-off, black-white, boy-girl, good-bad.  They’ve been taught that spaciousness is to be feared.  And yes, true innovation is terrifying, but the human body innovates every time it overcomes disease, or adapts to an environment, or gives birth. Innovation and the capacity for creative problem solving and the generation of ideas is what we do. The limited, uncreative, unenlightened mind builds a rocket and tries to get to a single destination (for example Mars) to create an empire.  The creative mind, builds a rocket to explore space and learn from all of existence.

Do I have an exact strategy for applying what I’ve written above?  Not yet.  But part of me looks to some of the most creative people I’ve known for help getting to the answers.  People who hear music that is first in their heads and then they are able to translate that music for the rest of us to hear; people who see themselves differently in the mirror than the rest of the world sees them and are brave and honest enough to live that truth; people who explore the reaches of human understanding and reveal better ways for us to be with each other; people who save lives, people who accompany those coming to the end of life.

Somewhere in the endlessness of our ability to be human is a way to drown out the annoying and harmful tune of one-note ideology, indoctrination and binarism.

–ALD

 

Tag Along

.Reading time 8 minutes.
Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

I sent a friend a text message last night during Super Tuesday on March 5, 2024 that sums up what I think many black people and people of color voters might feel about the 2024 Presidential Election cycle:

“Watching white people decide the future of the country is not fun.”

Although this was arguably the norm in the pre-Obama era, it was less blatant and less existentially debilitating then.  Ignorance was a twisted bliss.  Particularly for those of us children of the Civil Rights Movement, there was at least the vague and performative indication that one’s vote as a black American (a long fought for right that was severely compromised in 2013) counted for something.  In 2024 however, it is simply a fact that whiteness, or really the various convulsions of whiteness are driving the politics and policies of the country.

White liberals are still congratulating themselves on Obama, whose policies by and large look like every other mid 20th century Democrat politician.  While physically so, politically Obama was not a black president.  Arguably, he shouldn’t have had to be.  Biden is a coda to Obama as well as a throwback to the Johnson/Nixon era touting an underlying message of universality and “gee can’t we all just get along”-ism that struggles against its tendency toward colorblindness and flattened playing fields.  In contrast, Trump actively courts Nazis, racist and homophobic radical Christians, and the KKK while making a place for blacks who really want to see themselves as white (I’m looking at you Sen. Tim Scott) and Latinos who already do when it is convenient (Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio).  They provide Emmy worthy theater, by playing along while not getting in the way…yet staying in camera shot.

But Emmys are given for fiction and our politics actually change people’s lives.  The phalanx of white men currently closing ranks around our national decision making is an odd mix of impotent liberals and rabid conservatives who have never had to consider gestation inside their bodies, or what it means to be the target for gun violence because from a distance you might look like someone, or being shut out of housing or jobs because you talk with sibilance. But they want to convince us that they really do have everyone’s best interest at heart, and we should all just tag along.

But tagging along with, that is “trusting”, someone who has no idea what a life lived outside of the safety of being a white penis holder has never served those of us without that embodied experience well.  Voting is more difficult now if you have brown skin, having a uterus is more difficult whether you identify as female, male or trans and I can already hear the key in the lock on that old closet door, ready to swing open to welcome the gays back in.  While the dominant white men in politics and academics see this as a natural ebb and flow of “society”, for the rest of us it is life and death.

Electing Barack Obama was the best and the worst thing possible for the United States.  It was the best thing because 220 years of white male rule seems like a lot in a country that is only 236 years old.  My goodness, not even Great Britain did that.  It was the worst thing because it exposed the reality of American ignorance about what representative government actually is.  Or maybe it just laid the true bias and bigotry bare?

Back in the day, one of the arguments against women achieving the vote as well as the argument against blacks having the vote after emancipation was that women and non-whites were not capable of holding the responsibility for civic duty.  This seems odd considering the rather central role women have in literally creating life and the fact that illiterate white men who led lynch mobs to wantonly kill blacks could vote.  The legacy of questioning the capabilities of non-white, non-male individuals is built into the system, codified in law and regularly reasserted in policy.

But in 2024, non-white is nearly dominant and non-male has been dominant for decades in this country.  If we look at the representative reality, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden should be president of the United States.  Not intending to be ageist, it is impossible to look at global demographics and international leadership without seeing them both as fossils. Neither of them will be capable of solving the crisis at the border because they have only literally flown in and flown out of that situation.  Neither of them can solve the problems of US involvement in international war because their experience of conflict is at existential arms length (more so for Trump).  Neither of them can understand the conflict in Gaza because their understanding of the region and the people involved will always be academic at best and trope based at worst.  These are not leaders for a modern world.

The United States is at a crossroads.  It is dragging its elderly politicians to places they are ill equipped to go.  It is silencing the voices of its diverse electorate through gerrymandered voting maps and restrictive voting policies, to keep the myth of a status quo happy.  Through what can only be called radical judicial decisions, it is enabling criminals and dismantling the one guardrail that we have.

There is a deep irony in that Trump is noted for regularly making the case to “take our country back.”  I would say he’s right.  But the people who need to act on this mandate aren’t at his rallies.  They aren’t white and they don’t stand to pee.  Women, brown people, immigrants, “minorities” of all kinds…that’s whose labor (both kinds) built this country, that’s who has kept it going, that’s who has always innovated and who has always made a way out of no way.  This is who needs to take it back.

It’s time for the white guys to tag along,…if they can keep up.

–ALD