Oh, the places we'll go...

I’ve been meaning to say an official hello for a little while now, and I'll be honest with you: it has been devilishly hard to sit down and write anything that felt worthy of sharing. The world feels heavier by the day, and it's easy to crawl under the comfortable blanket of belief that there's no use working for change when things feel so very far gone. But, it is worth it, and things can and will and must change.

We can make it so.

I'd like to tell you a bit about me, and why I'm engaged in this work—this intersectional, anti-oppressive, social justice in the workplace and community space work.

The crux of the 'why' has been my lived experience in a variety of workplace and institutional spaces, primarily in postsecondary as a student (undergrad and grad) and as part of administrative staff in inclusion and equity (though I've also worked as a yoga teacher, administrative support in a variety of industries from mental health care to shipping, waitstaff, a snowboarding instructor, a research assistant in both sciences and the humanities, etc). I entered these spaces as a Black woman intent on living her best life, utilizing her intellect and education, doing the best work she could to help and educate people, and exited them drained, burdened, and overwhelmed by the weight of the undone work I knew I could have done well, were I given the space and support to do so.

Over the last twenty-odd years, we have been told that diversity, that difference, is desirable, is enough. That in predominantly white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical spaces, the very presence of identities which diverge from these norms (norms we're told everyone must at least aspire to if embodiment is impossible), that this visible diversity is enough. It isn't. Institutional spaces, educational institutions, non-profit and NGO organizations made, and still make, efforts to diversify their employee base. But what happens when folks for whom these spaces were explicitly built to exclude, are welcomed into environments wherein no space has been carved, no sustainable support systems created, no extensive learning and unlearning opportunities created for the folks for whom these spaces are comfortable? Well, the folks who experience marginalization and oppression are forced to exist in rooms with no air reserved for them. It can feel like a slow suffocation. A gradual torture, obscured and rationalized and lived through spurred by the imperative to pay the bills. Then, when we can’t take it anymore, whether it means we’ve become too vocal about our experiences, too underproductive, or too indifferent, we are often spat out. This is the way of it when diversity, difference, is prioritized over and above justice-based methods of institutional change.

Criticism of this superficial ‘diversity’ work isn’t new by any means. It fuelled a shifting of terms to inclusion, then to equity. Both of these terms function, to a degree. Inclusion conjures visions of the typical stock photo image of diversity. People look different, together. Laughing, smiling, everyone feeling as though they belong, yes? It’s a nice thought, and a comfortable goal. But something is missing, something rings false about those images—equity brings them into some relief, by creating productive discomfort through acknowledgment of a history that has made access to resources and power so much more difficult, and in some cases impossible, for some, and asserting that supports must be distributed with this history in mind.

Now: social justice. But how can we incorporate social justice into our work and community spaces and places? Into our community groups, our close circles, our families? Is the term antithetical to doing work within capitalistic workspaces? Can you make a workplace socially just? I believe there’s a way, and we have so much will floating around now, waiting to be harnessed. There’s a way to work well, to work mindfully, and to make the spaces we have to inhabit not just bearable, not palatable, not aesthetically pleasing, but just.

Collectively, we need to embrace thinking from a place of possibility, rather than impossibility. Things feel heavy, fraught, impossible of late, particularly for folks living in parts of the world wherein political and social climates actively re-embrace white supremacy, xenophobia, and a myriad array of ways to demonstrate hatred of the marginalized and oppressed. This does not make change impossible, it makes it crucial, and opens up avenues we may have been closed to in the past. There is a tangible urgency to this work, now, and from that can undoubtedly come a creativity and diligence that will be lasting and sustainable.

Bottom line:

UNLRN PRJCT is here to help you do the work that has been waiting, that never left. These issues that seem new and raw, they have been ever-present for those marginalized and oppressed by white supremacy, racism, cisheteronormativity, ableism, classism, and attendant forms of systemic oppression.

The PRJCT is still taking shape. I have grand visions for the ways in which it can do the work of transforming workplaces while serving those who need support in the communities surrounding these workplaces and community spaces, whether virtual or physical. It will continue to take shape along these intentions...possibly indefinitely, and I think that's the point, really. This work has to be responsive, flexible, innovative in every way. Responsive to changing vocabularies, patterns of speech and tone and movement, to changing climates, in weather and interaction and community, to changing borders, all of them arbitrary though so painfully real, and to changing minds, always in flux. The point is to respond to and name that which is changing, and that which stays resolutely, dangerously the same.

UNLRN PRJCT offers a way to explore the possibilities opening up in these times that often feel too murky and fraught to move at all, let alone in giant leaps rather than small steps. What I propose is the attainability of these leaps—that ‘incremental’ change in a time of mass unveilings, despotic leadership, incredible human rights violations, the questioning of borders and practices held dear by the privileged few, and a sickening repetition of histories we should have learned from, simply is not, cannot be, enough.

This is not a time for increments. It is a time to mindfully step forward with tremendous purpose.

There are so many places we can go with this work. But, we need to leap into these new sites of change and promise, and we can’t do that if the place from which we work, seek healing, hold community, and connect with our planet are rife with replications of the oppressive structures.

So, shall we?

Much love,

Ro.

Ro Averin17 October 2018