Stop doing insignificant work in the world
Why have we made a silent, unspoken agreement to not do significant work in the world?
I am tired of having long, endless, polite conversations about discrimination and hate. I am tired of executives who keep asking me for the "business case" for diversity as if another notebook of statistics will finally make them pay attention like the other 120 notebooks of data have not. I am tired of going to meetings to hear about the state of our communities relative to race or other diversity issues only to hear talking heads present illegible PowerPoint bar charts about disparities in graduation rates between blacks and whites.
Good lord, don’t we know all this already? Raise your hand if you are white and straight and would volunteer for the rest of your life to be treated as people of color and GLBTQ people are treated in this country. If your hand isn’t raised, then you know we have to do something about the discrimination GLBTQ people and people of color–and others–face DAILY. If your hand isn’t raised, then you know this is going on and you cannot pretend not to know any longer.
Are we delaying action by insisting on more data because we don’t know what to do, or because we like the status quo because it is by and large working for us, or because we are just damned lazy or overworked or too busy saving up for that summer house?
I am also damned tired of people being killed just for being who they are. Are other people so threatening to us that we must disavow and hurt and even kill them? That is so much about who we are, and not about who those targets of our hate are. It is our trash, and we need to stop it. What are we afraid of?
Ellen DeGeneres, in talking today about a 15-year-old boy recently shot in the head by a classmate because he was gay, offers this challenge (and resources) on her website:
“I would like you to start paying attention to how often being gay is the punchline of a monologue or how often gay jokes are in a movie,” DeGeneres said to an estimated 2.5 million viewers. “And that kind of message, laughing at someone because they’re gay, is just the beginning. It starts with laughing at someone, and then it’s verbal abuse, then it’s physical abuse, and it’s this kid Brandon killing a kid like Larry.”
The reason these things continue to happen, I firmly believe, is because we allow them by not doing significant work in the world. If you are a parent, a teacher, a community member, a human being living on this planet, it is your work to do. Let’s stop fooling ourselves that we are too insignificant to make a difference, that it is not our work in the world to make this planet hospitable to all humans. Let’s stop fooling ourselves that another slide presentation will make a difference, that we don’t already know what’s happening in Darfur and, for that matter, in classrooms across our country. If we could solve these problems with data, they’d be solved by now. If we could solve these problems by having another conference in a nice warm location with a lot of people dressed up in suits, they’d be solved by now.
Perhaps I can’t change the world. But I can damn sure raise two children who will know what it means to consider every person they meet to be as fully, beautifully human as they are.
Twenty things you can do today:
1. Show this young man’s family you care by signing the guestbook on the site erected to remember Larry.
2. If you are a parent, buy books that demonstrate that diversity is beautiful. Read them to your children. Then read them again.
3. Devote a year to getting to know someone who scares you.
4. Read magazines that reflect interests and realities that are not your own. Go to a newsstand. What’s a magazine you would never read? That’s the one to buy and read, cover to cover. Next week, pick another one.
5. Walk toward people you perceive to be different from you, not away from them.
6. Every week, ask and really listen to someone’s story. Where did they grow up? What are their best memories of their childhood? Find out what you have in common beyond the ways you are different.
7. Mentor a child.
8. When you hear a gay joke, or a black joke, or any other kind of demeaning humor in a film or TV show, write the producers. Let them know it’s not alright.
9. Be an advocate for someone.
10. Pay attention to the subtle ways in which we tell people "you’re not normal."
11. Be an effective ally for GLBTQ people.
12. Be outraged by your own racism.
15. Consider yourself part of the solution.
16. Replace "they" with "we" with "I"
17. Be as outraged about racism as people of color are.
18. Release your attachment to being right if it is keeping you from being effective.
19. Educate yourself on what to say when people tell homophobic, racist, sexist, or other hurtful jokes.
20. Do these things every day for a long, long time. Or just until you’d be willing to be treated every day as are those of us who are GLBTQ or people of color–or women, for that matter.
