I have been thinking lately about how work towards equity and justice gets off track and derailed. I know so many good people trying to drive change, and yet progress can often feel slow to non-existent. There are lots of reasons for this, in fact change management is an entire industry (I've got a ProSci certification myself:)). But it is about a lot more than managing change. Systems resist change through inertia and through more overt methods, usually driven (unconsciously if I'm being kind) by those who benefit from the current system. This can also happen in even more subtle ways, and that is what I'd like to examine here. One of the subtle but insidious things people in power do to stay in power is steal language. Let's look at a few examples.
My career has focused on those traditionally left out or marginalized. When you try to build systems focused on those with the least first, there is a very common accusation you hear. It is common to be accused of "enabling." This is a word which has been completely co-opted and lost its meaning in my opinion. Enabling is a clinical term. I grew up around addiction, I understand what enabling is. Unfortunately, it has also become a pop psychology throwaway word people use when often they just don't want to help. I am not a therapist, I'm a language arts teacher by training, but our current use of "enabling" sounds like what I did for my children every day to me. I have rarely, if ever, been accused of "enabling" my middle class children. And now, we use fear of enabling to allow ourselves to step away when we have decided someone has gotten "too much" help. My mentor and friend Donna Beegle has a nice way of explaining it. Helping someone do something they could not do without your assistance is never enabling. Yet, we have weaponized this word, and you need to look who it gets used against. It is rarely the powerful we worry about "enabling", rather it is the student who has asked for help one more time than we are comfortable giving it. The word was stolen and made into a weapon. This is called "elite capture" and its worth looking into.
This misuse use of language isn't always rooted in the clinical. Very often it is rooted in what started as a nice idea. For example, in my world, I have often heard the idea of "meeting people where they are." This is a wonderful phrase and an idea with power. For those of us trying to dismantle unfair structures and support those who have been historically marginalized, it can be important to meet people in the place where they are in many ways. I worked for two decades in open access colleges, and we learned to meet people where they were academically and emotionally. And as we grew our understanding of poverty, we learned we often needed to meet people where they were physically, a lesson that informs my current work as a Community Impact Coordinator. Meeting people where they are is a great way to mitigate the unfairness of a rigged system and benefit those who have been excluded. But that isn't how it's grown to be used. The co-opting of the term started innocently enough, moving beyond just meeting students where they are to wondering if it should be applied to colleagues as well. This is a lovely idea at first glance, but the path it creates is problematic. The problem lies in the power dynamic. Meeting people where they are because where they are comes from systemic flaws helps lift people up. However, when we dilute the intention by saying we need to meet people in positions of power where they are, it really just creates an equity detour (thank you Paul Gorski). Meeting people where they are is no longer a tool for leveling the playing field, instead it becomes a way to protect the feelings of those in power. Essentially the language is captured by the elite. I'm watching this happen as "equity" becomes a ubiquitous term. And before long, we hear things starting with "what about equity for..." and the groups at the end of that sentence start to include those who have historically benefitted from the current lack of equity, if that makes sense. This misuse of language feels parallel to people responding to "Black Lives Matter" with "All Lives Matter." Rather than remedying a problem for those who have been marginalized, it just creates support for the status quo in the guise of "getting along" or "living our culture." What about those excluded by the current culture, how do they get heard?
A last example today of the danger of elite capture of words has to do with the term privilege. I first learned about privilege in the context of white privilege about 15 years ago when I read Peggy McIntosh, and went to Dr. Eddie Moore Jr's conference in my city of La Crosse. It was not a new term of course, but it was new to me and to many people I spent my time with. It was a powerful thing for me to truly process my place in the world had not been earned on merit alone. I carried many identities, and some of them moved me ahead on the "number line of life" as my friend Alisa Smedley says in her book. Fast forward a few years and the term is omnipresent, but not in the way I would have wished. I hear it from people who look like me all the time and they say things like "I have to recognize my privilege..." Ok, so?? They rarely follow up with ways to compensate or dismantle this unearned privilege. They simply acknowledge it and act as if they are absolved. It's the same reason land acknowledgements feel incomplete to me. They never end with "and we are giving it back." When dominant cultures co-opt the language, it loses weight and becomes a throwaway.
If you start to think about it, I'll bet you can come up with many other examples of language being taken, twisted, and eventually rendered near meaningless. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel like we are in a constant vocabulary lesson when it comes to equity and inclusion. Maybe that comes from groups historically marginalized trying to find a new way of saying things which might ignite change until the power of the words are taken from them again. Of course, so many of these vocabulary lessons seem to come from people like me, which might be another unconscious way of maintaining our control of the conversation and everything else. So, I will continue to help without fear of enabling. I will meet people where they are when that is what it takes to move them to where they want to be, but I will not allow people to stay where they are because it benefits them over others. And I won't remark on my privilege without thinking about how to mitigate or dismantle it when I can do so. Systems seek their own form of homeostasis. You will have to work hard to interrupt it and be brave enough to be unpopular on occasion.
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