In yesterday’s post, I started talking about the minority town I would build as a way to improve DEI. More to the point, it would be to let people in the majority expeience what it’s like to be in the minority. None of the truly cruel stuff like physical attacks or sustained emotional harassment because that’s not ethical or moral. More to the point, I most emphatically want anyone to experience that.
Except. The problem is that for many people, it’s not possible to truly empathize with someone until you actually go through what they did. There’s a mystery book I read several decades ago in which the female protagonist was a cop. Her boyfriend was also a cop. One side plot was that her boyfriand had to go out on a case of a woman being mugged at midnight. He came back and said that she should not have been jogging at midnight, which really got under the woman’s skin.
Putting aside whether anyone should be running at midnight, the boyfriend had been implying that a woman specifically should not be running alone at midnight. This was in the ninties or the early aughts, so it wsa quite a feminist statement that the womna decided not to stand for it.
Her boyfriend had a little garden in the front yard that he was meticulous about. Or lawn. The details are fuzzy, but the main gist is that the woman started messing with the garden–pulling up flowers and things like that. The guy lost his mind and started plotting how to catch who was doing it.
She confessed after a week or so, and he was furious. She explained her thinking, which was that she wanted to give him a taste of what women had to go through all the time (constantly being vigilant about all the things that could happen).
I’m explaining it terribly, but it made sense to me. I appreciated it at a time when women were given a long list of things that they should and shouldn’t do. It becomes second nature. Some of it is reasonable for anyone (giving the name and number of a first date to your bestie, for example), but is overly emphasized for women.
When I think about my mythical town, I immediately run into problems. It’s easy to say that it’s for cishet white men (to have the ‘experience’), but what about, say, cis gay white men? Many of them are almost as privileged as cishet white men, and they have many of the same blind spots. If they are middle/upper middle class, that is.
Sadly, I’ve exeperienced quite a bit of sexism from gay men, though for a different reason. It’s beacuse they don’t actually have to interact with women on a personal/social level at all if they don’t want, which can lead to in-group thinking.
Money is a big factor, too. This is one area in which I’m hugely privileged, and I’m very aware of it. But how aware? Not aware enough.
So would my town have different areas? Like the race area, the gender/gender orientation area/s, the sexual orientation area, the disability area, the class area, etc.? That would probably be more practical, but it would defeat part of my intent with my town.
I want a holistic approach t o the issue, but I don’t know if it’s possible or if most people are up to understanding that the issues are multifaceted. While I would love to have faith in people that they can think of different levels, I don’t. Have that faith, I mean.
One thing my last therapist said to me that I have ruminated on ever since is that I thought on a level five whereas most people thought on a level two or at best, three. Many times, they literally could not understand what I was saying–they weren’t just being difficult or deliberately misunderstanding.
That really helped me me look at things differently. It didn’t make me feel any less lonely, but at least I was able to take it less personally. Or to not try as hard to explain something. It used to be I would try over and over again in as many different ways as I could explain something. When it truly clicked that the other person was not capable of understanding what I was saying, well I still probably tried another time, but then I was able to let it go.
How the hell did I–oh right. Trying to build a town that is multidimensional when it comes to several isms is probably a pipe dream. It’s hard enough to get people to consider one ism, let alone four or five.
It’s been interesting to me to see the heated debates on gender identity that have been cropping up. I remember when this happened with race and gender as far as sexism.Then a big one over marriage equality.
I will fully admit that I did not think marriage equality would happen when ith did. About five years prior, I was talking about it with K. I said that I thought it would happen within our lifetime, but not for twenty years.
I was very pleasantly surprised when it passed in 2015 with very little fanfare. I mean, there was a heated and sometimes nasty discussion before it, but there was nothing the antis could do, ultimately.
Not to say they haven’t tried and won’t keep on trying. I don’t even want to think about if that orange asshole gets elected again. Ugh.
Back to my town. I want it to be as close to areal town as possible. Police, firefighters, a hospital, two libraries, plenty of eateries, and, of course, schools.
I think there would have to be offices, too, to simulate office life. Office culture can be so varying when it comes to DEI. And the isms can be systemic, entrenched, and perpetrated from up high. I don’t necessarily mean that in a malicious way, either. A lot of discrimination is not purposeful; it doesn’t make it any better, necessarily.
I’m done for today. More later.