2019-06-13
Working in a high-churn culture like a civic hacknight, where 40% of people might be new each week, there are some interesting opportunities to work on non-exclusive and unloaded language for being critical of dominant systems. Here are some turns of phrase I’ve discovered to be useful:
- Instead of speaking against capitalism, speak of capitalism’s lack of curiosity toward certain important things. I often say “I try to work on things that capitalism isn’t curious about.” People embedded in capitalist systems find it hard to be critical of it, likely because it’s hard to imagine or hope for anything else. But it’s easy to agree that capitalism does not display an interest in certain things that humans are interested in. And a very human frame for that is curiosity. Being anti-capitalist is a heavy title to wear, but being skeptical of incurious systems is easy. We can talk about it just as we might speak of skepticism toward intellectually or emotionally incurious people who don’t ask questions of peers.
- Instead of speaking only about “diversity & inclusion”, speak sometimes about generosity of leadership. I like to think of this as creating a positive pressure for leadership, so that it will flow outward. It doesn’t prescribe where that leadership should flow, but if the general environment encourages thoughtfulness around representation, then the folks sharing leadership will inevitable end up on their own personal journey of who they should offer that leadership to. This allows the work to happen more in the headspace of the person doing the work. They will have more ownership of the conclusions drawn. Combined with short rotations of leadership, there’s many surfaces and transition points to learn from. Community projects aren’t companies — you can only once appoint founders, so that decision bears great importance, but if the person stewarding an initiative changes often, then each change is an opportunity for each group to recalibrate on who that culture values seeing in a leadership position.