Equity is a practice. It is a practice of the personal and structural work of truth and transformation. This is what I help leaders and communities understand and embody as they unlearn various forms of inequity like racism, sexism, and queerantagonism. I introduce them to a 12-step process for unlearning addiction to the misuse of power. In order to do so from a place of authenticity, I had to begin my own journey unlearning habits of sexism that I didn’t even know were in me. Here’s a bit of my story, taken from UnLearn InEquity our new experiential course.
I adapted the 12 steps of the Truth & Transformation journey for Black people who I saw overexposed to the hostilities of racism. After that, I recognized that the path to healing and freedom for Black folks happened to be a path upon which white folks could find healing and freedom as well. I then saw how the work of unlearning inequity relates to all forms of on-topness, beyond those two categories.
My own initial recovery work was as someone Black. There was plenty to learn, plenty of ways in which I had internalized supremacist logic and didn’t know it. However, when I paused to contemplate the complexities of my experience, I found that was not the only way the struggle against on-topness had affected me. Yes, I am someone who is historically marginalized by a system designed to disadvantage Black people. At the same time, I am someone who is also structurally privileged in so many ways by a system designed to advantage my particular performance of manhood. The craving for on-topness had infected me too in ways I hadn’t previously conceived!
Heretofore, I’ve talked about hitting my bottom by losing my marriage for a while and almost my kids. I’ve shared my work of critical analysis, which included admitting the inequities at play, finding a counselor and locking arms with close friends in order to position myself for growth from power-over to power-with. I’ve even acknowledged the simultaneous legitimacy of having emotional baggage to carry and the difficult necessity of sorting through it. None of this is easy, but I’ve come to see it as the work of being human. And none of us get a pass from the work of being more human just because folks like us who came before us built escape hatches into our social systems to help us avoid doing our fair share of work.
My truth work (Steps 1 – 6) was a lot in and of itself, enough to, perhaps, qualify me again as “a good one.” However, transformation (Steps 7 – 12) was still wanting. I was too well versed in being on top or striving toward that end to expect it just to abandon me because I had “peeped game,” as my friends and I might say. It literally took two and a half years of listening more deeply, moving more slowly, judging myself instead of my beloved before the desire to be on top loosened its grip enough on me that I was able to hear something different.
In September of 2019, about a month after my spouse and I had mutually decided to split, the kids and I took a trip to Florida for a buddy of mine’s ocean side wedding. While there, he and I had a chance to walk the beach and talk. Of course, he asked why Leslie hadn’t come. When I told him how offended I was to be accused after the fact of some of what she had accused me of, he chuckled and said, “Oh, so you thought you were gonna make it out without catching any charges, huh? Nah, playa, that’s not how it goes. They gon’ always throw the entire book at your ass! Charges on top of charges!”
Between my buddy’s sense of humor and the shifting sand, my legs got weaker and weaker. I was ready to collapse in laughter. He was uproarious and his logic, unimpeachable—or so I thought at the time.
Midway through December, Leslie and I decided on new terms for our relationship and to give marriage another go. That was just in time to learn how not to strangle each other during the lockdown that began the following March. Two calendar years later we were back at it again though, having what felt to me like the same argument, only this time, I called myself doing better by being unwilling to engage in certain parts of the customary back-and-forth.
Even if better externally, my internal commentary was on overdrive. “There’s that list of accusations again…. Oh, I know what that is…. I’ll own what’s mine to own, but some of it is hers to figure out…. I’m tired of all this round and round…. It’s the same old shit…. What do you mean my “tone”? I ain’t got no tone!… I’ve spent two years working on a tone that I couldn’t hear in the first place! I’m such a good guy that I even accepted the explanation that it was me being all judgmental. So here I am judging me, not you, and here you go again!”
Two or three days into it—because that’s how we used to try to wear each other down—I’m completely losing the thread of the argument trying to tell her she’s lost the thread, and I still can’t hear this damn tone she’s talking about. I finally ask if I can record our conversation. Maybe in listening to it after the fact I might hear something different. Low and behold, she consents!
I listen to that thing over and over… and over—with my best headphones. I’m listening for why she’s getting stuck or spent. Why she can’t trust me past a certain point. Of course, I’m expecting to find some fault in her logic or even mine, some place where she or I switch topics and end up talking about two separate things. I’m listening and praying and journaling and praying and listening. And then I hear it.
People are always telling us what is true for them. I talk about this in Module 10 as it pertains to those who maintain white supremacy culture. Well, it’s also true of people who suffer at the hands of supremacy culture—in this instance, male supremacy culture, a.k.a. patriarchy, a.k.a. sexism. Leslie had been doing her best to name something that was true for her for 20-some-odd years, and I finally heard it—That Tone.
It was That Tone that says I don’t believe a word you’re saying. It was That Tone that says, even if I did, you ain’t really trying to do anything different. It was That Tone that ultimately says, of course, you’re the one who needs to change and, at the same time, you are incapable of change. It was condescension and frustration and resentment and hurt and fear all wrapped up into one. That Tone was the reason she didn’t trust a thing I had to say or any risk I was asking her to take. Honestly, with That Tone lording over her, she would have been a fool to.
Hearing it was like my ears finally popping. As hot air and wax flushed from my ear canals, I was able to hear other variations in tone that had eluded me for years, including the fact that the list my beloved kept handing me when we fought was not a list of accusations. It was a list of wounds she had experienced—some from me, some with me, some before me that had opened up again because of me. She had been trying to tell me where it hurt, and here I was poking and prodding, pushing and shoving every time she let her guard down.
The reason it matters that I began to hear what she was saying for the woundedness it expressed and not for the accusations I thought them to be is simple. Accusations, you seek to defend against. Wounds, you seek to heal. READ ABOUT THE FOURTH LEG OF MY JOURNEY>>>
If you or your organization could use design, advisory, facilitation, or strategy support continuing your own equity journey—including subscriptions to our new UnLearn InEquity self-paced course—contact us.
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