Week Two - Intimidation

I've tried to write this post four or five times at this point. A recent conversation give me some insight into why I can't seem to put words out into the big scary internet void.

Intimidation

I'm intimidated in two really big ways and they sit on entirely different sides of my "axis of identity."

1) I'm insecure about putting myself out there because I am vulnerable. I am a woman and a mother in graduate school in the sciences. I have no security at all when in comes to my career and as a woman (particularly a woman who has had the audacity to procreate , gasp!) the likelihood that I will rise in the ranks is low. I've been taught my whole life to be small and quiet and, quite frankly, I'm ridiculously tender hearted.

2) I'm insecure because I'm white. More and more I recognize that a large part of my identity sits squarely in a position of privilege, my perspective is entirely framed around this. Do I have any right to occupy space in the general discussion of Diversity and Inclusion?

Essentially I'm feeling a bit caught between points on my axis of identity (an we all know there are more points along that axis that I'm not even getting into here). My goal with this seminar is to facilitate learning and hopefully change so, for now at least, I'm going to keep it simple and just tell you what we did.

What we read/watched this week:

We read this insightful and thought provoking piece. The focus is on explaining how to react when getting "called out," and the author, Erin Tatum, spends considerable time explaining the power of privilege , the myth of passivity as progress (if you'll just be nice, jeez!), reverse oppression and false equivalence, and then wraps things up with how to respond when you get called out. Erin does such an exceptional job that I'm not going to try to summarize. I'm just going to tell you to go read it.

We also watched this video in which @chescaleigh defines an action that needs to be called out as: When you say or do something that upholds the oppression of a marginalized people. She discusses how to react when you are called out and shares a personal story of when she did something that needed to be called out

and this video by Jay Smooth that addresses how to discuss racism.

Take home message "I don't care who you are. I care what you did."

Our reading on how to be an ally touched off some important discussion about minority and/or women's groups who do not want allies involved in their work. It was pointed out that there are individuals or groups of individuals who specifically do not want allies involved in their causes because of a fear of having allyship "thrown back in their faces" as an indication that they are not good enough or not strong enough. However, allies may be heard at a different "volume" than women and minorities. Our discussion on this topic lead to no conclusion other than the importance of respecting such a groups assertions and acknowledging that allies are important to progress.

Finally, we took one of the tests meant to reveal implicit biases from Project Implicit.

Every single thing we did this week sparked discussion in our seminar and, likely, much deeper thinking about privilege, allyship, and getting called out. Personally, I'm getting myself all tied up in knots thinking about it and I think that's good. This isn't easy stuff and doing something about it isn't going to be easy.

I'm about to walk into this week's seminar (maybe it wont take me a week to blog about this one!). Dr. Smith Washington from OSU's business department will be presenting and she's magnilficent. I look forward to filling yall in.

Until next time!