Vigilance and speaking up are essential. If we want to see real change we need to draw attention to harmful actions and the damage they cause. Calling for respect and acknowledgement is rarely an easy path, especially when it involves confronting long standing societal norms. Change is difficult, even change we truly want, and being a catalytic thorn is all too often a draining and thankless job. So it’s important for our own psychological, physical, and emotional health to make sure we are putting ourselves through it for the right reasons. Are we truly battling for change or are we lashing out because we’ve been hurt? Are we genuinely trying to usher in lasting change or are we trying to settle old scores?
My first, and admittedly optimistic, impulse is to credit everyone over the age of two and half with the understanding that our actions have impact on the people around us. As our societal consciousness and awareness expands we have no choice but to realize and acknowledge some of our most seemingly innocuous habits of language and attitude can have shockingly harmful effects, intentional or not, on those outside the general norms. It is an important realization, a confusing and painful adjustment, and an incredibly difficult process to curate. While I would argue zealously wrapping one’s self in willful ignorance is more an act of fear than inherent evil sadly there are those who choose to deliberately harm those they don’t understand, who take their reactions and attitudes to extremes. The vast majority of people, however, don’t want to harm those around them. Especially not in ways they might not even be fully unaware of.
Drawing people’s attention to these impacts is a crucial, uphill, and frustratingly fragile process. If we want a behavior or habit to change we have to point it out, develop and cultivate awareness of it, nurture the commitment to do the work it takes to change, and be both ceaselessly pushing forward and also patient in allowing the change to take the time it always takes. Think of it like bad posture, something as a full time dance teacher I spend a lot of time dealing with. Your bad posture doesn’t just suddenly disappear because someone points it out to you. The first step is having the misalignment illustrated and realized, then comes the demonstrating and experiencing of correct posture, followed by a period of being consistently reminded and guided towards realignment. Finally, the stage which requires all the work and patience, is the gradual reprograming of the body in order to reset the natural standard. You don’t just suddenly have perfect posture you start catching yourself slouching and correct it. The more you work at it the less slouching there is to catch until eventually your body’s default settings have been changed. It doesn’t take forever but it does take time.
The difficult part when looking at this in terms of societal changes is that instead of just dealing with a physical habit which only affects the individual we are dealing with social behaviors which can potentially be deeply harmful , even if unintentionally, to those around us until they are corrected. And in some cases we are talking about literal life and death potential consequences. Even with things such as racially bigoted or sexually inappropriate language which are so glaringly harmful and out of line, and which are easy to spot given that they have to be deliberately pushed into the ebb and flow of generic day to day interactions, we are still struggling as the decades tick by because of imbalanced social structures which have actively resisted and silenced the ‘call attention and illustrate’ stage.
So then what do we do about much more widely spread, and seemingly innocuous, concepts such as references to gender or relationship status or spiritual beliefs? Racial animosity is deliberate and targeted and thus a relatively less complicated thing to call out and confront, or at least it should be, but when we are looking at something as deeply rooted and universally interwoven as references to ‘him’ and ‘her’ or assumed motivations around romantic relationships confronting those habits can seem to feel like we are asking people to completely re-write their understanding of the world they know. We can’t simply wave a wand and disappear such universal concepts and language but we cannot ignore the impact their casual use can have on those outside of the generally assumed norms.
Genuine inclusiveness is the approach and attitude which can help us navigate around and through these challenges. If we approach these hurdles and difficulties with the intention of welcoming, inviting, and including then the goals are all focused on commonalities and compatibilities rather than differences and disqualifications. That’s the ideal, and one worth striving for, but getting everyone involved or affected into that mindset can take a lot of painstaking and delicate work. Change is always difficult and uncomfortable so getting people to feel welcoming of it is never easy. It requires that all important and fragile balance of raising awareness, asserting accountability, but avoiding the temptation to become fixated on being punitive. Fairly or not the lion’s share of this kind of work will always ride on the shoulders of those pushing for change, the ones carrying the wounds and the pain, rather than on those who are being challenged to change.
Speaking up and ‘calling out’ are important parts of the process but they are not the sum total. Promoting inclusion and preventing exclusion may branch from the same initial source, the desire for change to prevent harm, and they may seem like opposite edges of the same blade but their core aim is fundamentally different. Preventing exclusion is outwardly active, on the attack, and very much a blade. Promoting inclusion is internally focused, much more of a shield intended for defense and protection. Preventing exclusion can be a necessary and crucial part of initiating change and there are times when it is absolutely necessary to attack. But it is, at its base, a punitive focus and therefore an ineffective source for generating genuine lasting change. Punishment is not rehabilitation, no matter what the action movie paradigm tries to tell us. Taking the offensive isn’t automatically or inherently ‘bad’, at times it is necessary, but it is an approach which needs to be used judiciously and eventually set aside to allow the slow genuine growth to occur.
Purely focusing on promoting inclusion isn’t the perfect and only solution. Simply saying ‘let’s all just love and hug one another’ does not guarantee change or erase harm, though more loving and hugging is certainly needed in the world. Even spaces aiming to be intentionally inclusive can get it wrong, as in the case of a non-binary friend who was invited to speak to their experience as a performer and creator as part of a panel about gender diversity and representation in theater only to be misgendered by the panel’s moderator the entire time. Even the best and purest of intentions do not guarantee effective execution and it can be incredibly difficult and unfair to have to be the level headed and patient party when you are the one being hurt but we have to keep asking ourselves what is our core goal? Are we trying to invite and guide change or to punish misbehavior? Both have their place and purpose but the more we fixate on the punitive the less it becomes about change and instead becomes more about racking up victories as if we’re trying to make some kind of ‘call out’ quota. That might make us feel better temporarily but it focuses on eliminating concepts and expressions rather than including them and doesn’t leave any lasting change in its wake.
And that is the key metric for determining if what we are doing, pushing for, rallying behind is promotive or punitive. Are we making space for more people and ideas or are we seeking only to punish and evict? Are we expanding concepts, definitions, and attitudes or are we simply seeking to supplant and replace existing paradigms? Behaviors which are intentionally and intrinsically harmful, such as those which are racially bigoted and sexually assaultive, need to be directly confronted and fought. Some things unquestionably need to be evicted from our societal lives in the name of simple common decency. But true lasting change, the kind of change which can potentially eradicate those kinds of harmful attitudes and behaviors, requires the engine of inclusion. The more we are able to help people realize that the presence of ‘other’ does not banish or destroy ‘same’, the more we can move people away from seeing ‘different’ as a disqualification, then the more we lessen the impulse to villainize and dehumanize that which we don’t recognize or understand.
The goal of inclusion is to make ‘everyone’ truly mean and encapsulate everyone. To deal with the very real and large scale threats and challenges facing us on a planetary scale we are going to need everyone and we’re not going to have the time to sound us all off by name and sit us at separate tables before trying to move forward.