“Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man.”
— Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
There’s been a lot of coverage (well, that I’ve seen) about Ted Yoho calling his colleague “a fucking bitch,” his subsequent non-apology and Ocasio-Cortez’s putting all of it in the House’s Congressional Record.
And I keep watching and reading, largely because I’ve woken up to my internalization of socially acceptable misogyny. Again.
As someone who’s been called a “fucking bitch,” who’s had a finger wagged in my face while a man towered over me to inform me how I was wrong, I’m ashamed to say I didn’t blink when I read the original headlines about Yolo’s comments. That’s how low my estimation of leadership has sunk. And that’s how low my own standards for what’s acceptable have apparently sunk: that I would roll my eyes, sigh and think no one would care or do anything about.
Thank you, Representative Ocasio-Cortez. For your actions, for your words, for your reminder to me that what’s acceptable only remains so when enough of us let it be so. Like you, I don’t feel devastated by misogynist or racist attempts to degrade coming from other people. And what they day or do still matters. We all need to be held accountable.
And thanks to all the people who have not let this incident fade away as just one situation. Thank you for keeping this in the news to recognize that this is a feature, not bug, of our social programming. For keeping this on the record.
In a study called “The First-Daughter Effect,” Elizabeth Sharrow, an associate professor of public policy and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues, determined that fathering daughters — and firstborn daughters, in particular — indeed played a role in making men’s attitudes toward gender equality more progressive, particularly when it came to policies like equal pay or sexual harassment protocols.
That’s deep. For clarity, “first daughter” doesn’t refer to the first daughter born among all children. It refers to the daughter being the first-born child. So the impetus for feminism for dads (yay) is rooted in patriarchy still (sigh).
I’ll take the win, however we achieve it, but this underscores that we cannot wait for people to “get it” or “care,” especially if that requires a personal relationship or experience (that they can’t order on-demand). While the individual lightbulbs go on (or don’t) at their own speeds in people’s minds, hearts and lives, each of us also needs to keep showing up and shining some light, while (yes, there’s more) we keep architecting change in our structures and systems.
And yes, “we” is me. I’m ashamed that I anchored my personal sense of what’s socially acceptable to misogyny’s low bar. Ashamed in a good, motivated way not to keep living down to that bar myself.
I just read “How to actually talk to anti-maskers,” an opinion in The NY Times. (I love the “actually” in the headline. As in, not just yell in their faces.)
Charlie Warzel, the author, notes “You cannot force public trust; you have to earn it.” And while the article is about leadership communicating with communities about public health practices, I want to address the interpersonal truth that I cannot force you to trust me in a conversation (about politics, race, gender, religion, class…) that we can reasonably anticipate will be fraught, if not outright hostile. I have to earn your trust, and the only way is through experience. Experience that may unfairly need to defy your previous unpleasant and even unsafe experiences with other people. While those might not be “my fault,” the conversation I’m having with you right now is our mutual responsibility, and all of who each of us is gets to be part of this interaction. I don’t get to curate which part of you has the right to speak, and vice versa. That is, if I’m really committed to not just this conversation but you, too.
The first thing that struck me is from the headline: if I ever anticipate having a conversation with someone I disagree with, it will help if I start now by not, even in my own mind, labeling people as “a Trump supporter,” “climate change denier,” “anti-vaxxer,” or “anti-masker” (all labels that liberals and progressives use for our perceived opposition). These labels allow me to reduce you to a fixed mindset and, presumably, a fixed set of actions. So, not surprisingly, I engage you with gritted teeth and girded loins, much like I might when trying to shove something heavy and unwanted out of my way.
And then, from the article:
As the Ebola epidemic raged in 2014, some West Africans resisted public health guidance. Some hid their symptoms or continued practicing burial rituals — like washing the bodies of their dead loved ones — despite the risk of infection. Others spread conspiracies claiming the virus was sent by Westerners or suggested it was all a hoax. In Conakry, Guinea’s capital city, an imam was arrested for violating his quarantine, and residents protested by not letting health officials check for fevers.
So the World Health Organization sent Cheikh Niang, a Senegalese medical anthropologist, and his team to figure out what was going on.
For six hours, Dr. Niang visited people in Conakry inside their homes. He wasn’t there to lecture. Residents asked him to write down their stories. When they finished, Dr. Niang finally spoke.
“I said, ‘I hear you,’” he told me recently over the phone from Senegal. “‘I want to and will help. But we still have an epidemic spreading and we need your help, too. We need to take your temperatures and we need to trace this virus.’ And they agreed. They trusted us.”
Turns out, the people Dr. Niang encountered weren’t selfish or anti-science. They were scared and felt stripped of dignity by officials who didn’t respect them or understand their traditions. What they needed was for someone to listen to them and to feel like they had some agency.
Wow. What if I didn’t start with the issue and what you need to know (guilty as charged, over here), but by hearing your story, as told by you – and accepting that whatever you tell me now is not “all of it.” You get to decide whether and what to share, based on how safe you feel, what you think is important to share, how important you think it is to share it, and whether you think I’ll get it. Is it worth it to you to tell me?
Then, Dr. Niang models “yes, and…” Not, yeah, whatever, OK so anyway…
“Yes, I hear you. And I want to and will help.”
Notably, the “help” isn’t helping you to see why you’re wrong. It’s to help you and all of us to be as safe as possible. In a conversation about an issue I care about that I can’t solve myself, the “yes, and…” is hearing your story and trying to find out how to help or partner to address the issue in front of us that’s currently stuck in stalemate, because just disagreeing with each other isn’t effective.
I keep thinking about that saying “hard on issues, soft on people.” I think it’s misleading to say “soft.” I think: hard on issues that matter and require commitment and stamina to solve, and humane with people so that we can prototype imperfect but better solutions, empower more voices to speak up and be heard, and continue to iterate toward justice.
My colleague Prasant Nukalapati posted that this was one of the best things he read this morning. Me, too. Thanks, Prasant!
“[My family] didn’t care if I was autistic as long as I didn’t act autistic. But masking exacts a toll… ‘High functioning autism’ isn’t an empty label just because it includes the words ‘high functioning.’ It means I might have the ability to function under ‘neurotypical’ demands — but only for a while.”
Novelist Helen Hoang (who wrote The Kiss Quotient, a fun romantic novel–and I’m not a romance reader typically)
“Are you horny? I’m horny all the time. All the time. Some people find that shocking. Why do you think that is? Could it be that society desexualizes people with disabilities? That’s right, I’m disabled. And I have a higher sex drive than you… But it never even occurred to me that my disability might make being gay more complicated. Which is why I was really confused the day after I came out, when my mother hugged me, crying, and she said: ‘I’m scared. Now you’re different in two ways.'”
“The very urgency itself says you don’t have a very deep understanding of how hard this work is, and how long it takes and how ongoing it needs to be. Racism is not going to go away by August, so how about we do it in August?”
– Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, addressing the frenzy of organizations, communities and individuals right now to “be antiracist.”
rethinking diversity 