When we say every voice, do we mean every voice?

“Get every voice in the room.”

If you’re someone who facilitates workshops, leads meetings, runs teams, etc. you’ve probably made this commitment at some point in your career. It’s a goal that we can all probably get behind.

As someone who’s never really had a problem speaking up in front of groups, it took me a while to come to the idea. “Oh,” I realized at some point along the way, “not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in front of 20–30 (or more) people.” (Yeah, yeah, it’s a big ‘duh.’ But let’s be real, we all have our big ‘duh’s’ to come to terms with)

So, like so many have, I learned processes and exercises to ensure that every person had an opportunity to speak.

I learned about ways of making sure that small group discussions, or personal reflections, could be included in the larger whole. I learned to make it possible for all voices to be heard. To make sure that everyone had their opportunity.

Or did I?

For the longest time I didn’t see that there were dynamics playing out in every meeting that I ran, every workshop I designed. I didn’t see it because I didn’t have to see it. 

Not completely dissimilar to my not noticing that some folks weren’t comfortable speaking to a group (though obviously very different), these dynamics were far removed from my experience.

Because my experience was the point. Rather, the experience of people like me. The experience of white-bodied people, and white-bodied men even more so.

The thing is that even though I’d technically learned techniques and tricks to “get every voice in the room,” what I didn’t realize was that there were often voices in the room that weren’t truly safe to speak what was true for them. For their experience. 

There were things that couldn’t be heard—by me as a facilitator, or by others who were in positions of power.

The tools I had were great, but they weren’t enough. I needed to understand more.

I needed to understand what was going on around me.

Not ‘over there’ – everywhere

All too often, when we talk about DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), and/or anti-racism/anti-oppression, we end up talking about initiatives or programs that seem to live “over there.” But that’s not enough—because that’s not what it is. It’s not about the stuff from the DEI workshop or the anti-racism training. It’s about everything.

It’s about what’s happening in the rooms we are in. And it’s about why it’s happening.

As a white-bodied cis gender man, I sit at an intersection that has benefitted from systems of oppression for centuries. I’m at just about the top of the pyramid, the hierarchy of control and privilege. Is it any wonder I didn’t see what was going on around me?

Now, I’m a progressive guy. I’ve been trying to put my values and belief in justice in the center of things for a long time. (I was a union organizer, for goodness sake. Trust me, you don’t do that work if you don’t believe in the values of social justice.)

So I had it figured out, right? I knew what was going on.

Turns out, not so much.

The more I understood, the more I realized I didn’t understand. I didn’t get it because I was trying to get something that I wasn’t supposed to get.

I didn’t see how the people of color who I worked with were expected to conform to an idea of what it means to be “professional.” I didn’t see the ways that, as a white-bodied facilitator, I had a conditioned idea that we were all working on a level playing field. And I didn’t see the ways that I assumed that the experience I was having must be the experience we are all having.

In fact, according to our white-supremacist culture, I’m really not allowed to get it.

What gets centered matters

The tendency to center myself, or, at the very least, center the concerns of my white-bodied counterparts, in situations is, in retrospect, astounding.

Hell, I still do it from time to time. Why? Because the conditioning is that strong.

When a Black man brought a grievance—very vocally— into a group I was a part of, I let him know that “I understood. You see, I’m Jewish, and so (I believed) I get what it feels like to be on the outside.”

Yet, how, exactly, was the situation about me? How could I assume that while, yes, as a Jewish person living in a highly Christian culture, I’ve experienced feeling “on the outside,” that I understood anything about what it’s like to have skin that was deemed a threat by so many? How could I believe I knew anything about what it means to move through the world as a Black man?

At the beginning of the 2019 Othering and Belonging Conference held by the (now) Othering and Belonging Institute in Oakland, CA, I attended a session that centered on a discussion around authenticity.

Who can argue with authenticity? With being as open and authentic as possible?

I felt pretty proud of myself as I was sharing my view on the need for more authenticity in the world. When time came to share around the room, we used a process in which delegates were sent from table to table to gather info. I was elected to be a delegate for my table.

Going around the room, getting five or so minutes at about 8 tables, I heard story after story about how authenticity had harmed the People of Color seated at those tables.

I heard about the need for code switching for survival. I heard about how the uniform of a “professional office” stifled experience—people feeling they could be anything but authentic. I heard how folks speaking how they speak at home got them iced out of meetings and jobs.

The stories kept coming. The session at the conference was about 90 minutes. By the end of it, I realized that I had no idea what was going on around me.

I had no idea just how limited my thinking was with regards to the experience of people who were different from me.

And if that’s true around authenticity, where else is it true?

We need spaces to grapple

All of these experiences lie at the heart of why I created the Disrupting Our Practice: Understanding Whiteness program with Shannon Patterson.

The program is, to me, about stepping into these questions and more. It’s about stepping beyond our comfort, beyond our ideas of what is and isn’t, what’s possible and what’s not, and about the way the world is. Rather, the way we think it is.

The program isn’t about providing answers, but about providing questions. Questions that will get under our skin and turn our understanding upside down.

Not for the sake of turning life upside down, but for the sake of getting into the work of dismantling systems of oppression.

That’s not work that can be done from within the frameworks we operate in by default.

Albert Einstein is credited with saying, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” This is the same.

In fact, it goes further: we need to disrupt not just our thinking, but our very way of being.

For those of us in the “business” of holding (or, let’s be real, controlling) space—be it facilitating meetings, running workshops and retreats, leading teams and organizations, etc.—paying attention to how we show up, as well as what we do is critical. In fact, our presence (and its qualities) lies at the heart of our practice. 

We show up in ways that reflect the beliefs and habits that move in us.

The Disrupting Our Practice: Understanding Whiteness program is about beginning to disrupt the many belief structures that have been conditioned into us so we can engage in conversations around dismantling harmful and oppressive systems in a very meaningful way, and to do this work from a more resourced place.

Perhaps this program can be a place where you do some of your grappling. We’d love to have you join us.