The toxic past time of everyday domination
Domination cannot be our primary tool for fighting for and with the people we love. Multiracial and multicultural institution (MRC) building needs a much bigger toolbox than the one we currently have.
No matter what happens in our elections this fall, the toxic repercussions of the MAGA movement will be with us for a long time. The white stochastic terrorism won’t stop. The push for authoritarianism won’t stop. The true difference will be whether we are fighting this fight with some formal power or no formal power.
IF we have formal power, we will have a woman of color running the country. Black women are scrutinized MUCH more than the average white man. That scrutiny will create a series of fraught internal battles and struggles in our democracy JUST as authoritarianism fights to take power away from democratically elected representatives.
For as much as the left — which I’m defining loosely for the purposes of this writing as a coalition of people fighting for MRC Democracy — would deny we were culturally impacted by that movement, we have taken up a few of its toxic cultural tendencies. A very human thing to do when you are surrounded by toxicity. I am most concerned with the use of domination as a primary tool to get what we want and even as a form of entertainment. This toxicity has infected our friends, families, communities, and institutions. It is a poison that will silo us and have us reject coalition at every turn.
Here are four ways I’m seeing domination pop up in our movements, communities, and lives that I think we need to get a handle on if we truly want to build multiracial/multicultural communities.
One, in an internet connected and globalized world — there will always be evidence that we shouldn’t trust each other across community. I have watched when battles pop up inside community, workplaces, family, and social media — folks will justify a lack of coalition with examples for how one community wrongs another community, one community takes “advantage”, one community cannot be trusted, etc. While these feelings and statements can be edifying and have some truths, we constantly lift up examples of the worst people in a community to justify messy behavior toward another individual within that community. We are so connected in our information ecosystems now — we will always find a reason to be separate. We can use those examples as reasons to wall off our hearts and not engage in the hope of potential MRC communities.
We rarely use these examples to uplift good community behaviors. We make those people the exception and the worst people, the norm. In reality, most people live in the middle making tradeoffs that protect themselves and loved ones over anything and anyone else and we are all in a project to remind ourselves of the safety we do have when we are connected, so we can extend the lasso of community further. The strategy of the segregationist right is to divide and conquer, to keep us from relationship with each other so that we spend our time factioning ourselves instead of fighting them and their authoritarian vision. Bad behavior is bad behavior, it should be called out and boundaries should be created. There is however a difference between creating a boundary and uplifting bad behavior as a reason to give up on broader relationships. MRC community will not be utopic. Demographics are not destiny. However, for us to understand our fates are tied together — we will need to exert more emotional discipline.
Two, the use of good person/bad person binaries to justify being pissed about someone else’s tradeoffs. There will be so much complexity around tradeoffs in the coming years. Real pain will be felt as we clean up the absence of good leadership/governance/decision making at the national level for decades. Pushing problems this far out will innately mean that the tradeoffs we must make now will often be fraught, have huge temporary losses where groups of people will be impacted negatively, and pain will be felt. Even something as agreeable to many as electrifying our grid will require pulling money from some place to massively invest in another. There will be questions of where and who you start with. We may have to change permitting rules meant to regulate a variety of things. This is the cost of not dealing with climate change robustly in the last 50+ years. Now take that example and extend it to every part of American life. There will be many places where getting things done will hurt — even when we win. I’ve watched that delay end institutions who are unwilling to go through that pain in order to fix the dysfunction — it is definitely coming for us country-wide.
That being said, when those tradeoffs are made, we tend to villainize each other. We also tend to elevate someone who is either a grifter or seeking attention who says we can have everything we want without pain or sacrifice.
A singular human is never the reason big sweeping glorious change happens. Equally, a singular human is not how big, life-destroying pain happens — unless you have THAT much power and your blast radius is just that wide. This means that making those tradeoffs cannot be how we come to write each other off. I don’t mean a sustained pattern where the same people are paying the cost of tradeoffs over and over isn’t immoral and shouldn’t be called out. We should. I mean boiling every situation down to — they made that tradeoff that impacted me and that means they must be evil. I am not saying this tool shouldn’t be used either — I find it quite useful for known bad actors like white supremacists trying to change Overton windows. But not everything is that, some things require depth of conversation and negotiation in a diverse society — or as sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom calls them — thick conversations.
Three, the use of identity to shut down conversation. Identity does not absolve us from wielding power responsibly. It commands us to. Many of us have experienced the trauma of leaders who center themselves over the whole and consistently make tradeoffs on the most marginalized people. We have seen what happens when a leader has a skills gap and that gap is blamed on people working under their leadership. WE need an appetite to be even more intentional with power.
I want to be very clear here that there are pernicious power dynamics that constantly marginalize Black, Indigenous, Asian, and/or Latiné people on all sides of the gender spectrum, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled people, white women, and others. It has given many of us the ability to spot when friction is a product of internalized bias. I want to hold this alongside a trend of people, often in positions of power — or capeing for people in positions of power — using identity to: escape accountability, shut down conversation, or create good/bad binaries.
It is so hard to talk about this because I do not want to give a single leg for people to find yet another way to escape their accountability for racism, sexism, etc.-ism. AND, I fear if we don’t start talking about this out loud, we will create deep moats where folks have zero friction that demands they hold their power with the responsibility having power requires, learn from the people they are in service to about the ways they need to grow, and/or stop powerful institutions harming vulnerable people with necessary protest.
I don’t think it happens because of nefariousness. I believe it is often a product of our trauma triggers bumping against each other. It is a product of tremendous fear. And when we shut down conversations with identity based accusations like say misogyny — we have to be specific. Using the label does not get us to the change we seek, it calcifies the conversation — freezing it in place because even talking about it somehow makes us immoral. Naming the behavior that is upsetting us and how it is influenced by our social biases gives us more room to learn in community. It is not the strategy for the far enemy that I’m talking about, it is the needs of coalitions I’m concerned about. I understand many of us have not had language for this kind of specificity but the shortcuts we used to take are not going to work in a world where leaders of color have consequential power.
Four, the ultimatum for participation. I have watched countless times as people, especially younger folks, have an idea and want to see that idea come to fruition. The response to a presentation of tradeoffs or limitations or mitigating circumstances is seen as an idea not being respected. Then the strategy to get what we want becomes “If you don’t do this — you must not be for liberation/you must not care about the team/you must hate these people” We then threaten our participation by saying we will walk away because we are obviously not being “real”. It does us such a disservice. What is more, they learn that disservice from the people that lead them and expect deference as a condition of participation. There is an important conversation to be had about our choices and who owns a variety of decision making rights. Ultimatums do not get us there and they have become incredibly frequent. I get what I want or I take all my marbles with me is not a way to create democratic governance. It creates smaller and smaller groups run through authoritarian norms. That accustom’s people to authoritarianism in the small ways, not prepares them for shared power in the big ways we will need to build necessary muscles around.
I share these habits because I have participated in all of them. Having spent the last decade working in and with multiracial and multicultural institutions, I’ve gotten very worried that these habits make us unable to do this work with each other. They are not allowing us to find the deeper truths. Sharing power is complex and it needs all the tools we can get. These habits are stymying our evolution to the world we want to build.
