Learning to rightsize our responsibility
i’m so honored to be able to join you
when i was thinking about what it would
be good to talk about today
i thought it might be helpful to talk
about what gets in the way
of us actualizing this goal of unity and
diversity
and i thought the west best way to talk
about that would be to share a little
bit about my story
and how i learned to think about these
issues a little bit differently
and how that change and perspective
equipped me to feel comfortable and
responsive
in working in the area of diversity so
to start with my story we’ll start with
the beginning
when i was a little kid i went to martin
luther king jr elementary school
and all of my heroes were these
international figures right i
idolized mother teresa and gandhi and
medela
mandela i was a kid right so where do
you go
if you want to be a peacemaker you go to
war
and for me that meant attending
university in washington dc
and studying conflict resolution and
international service
and when i graduated i landed my dream
job and i worked for an organization
called seeds of peace and what seeds of
peace does
is it brings youth from opposite sides
of a conflict
together to a summer camp in maine
so americans and afghans
indians and pakistanis new immigrants
and traditional white communities
youth from these prospective places come
together
and they get to have a traditional
american summer camp experience
go on the ropes course swim in the lake
but in addition they meet for two hours
every day in facilitated dialogue to
talk about the roots
of their conflict so the theory of
change with this
organization is that if you bring young
people together
and they learn to humanize the other
side
their enemy that when they go back to
their home countries
and they access positions of power
they’ll use that power
to change and in the conflicts between
them
so the organization started doing this
work around 1993
and i started in 2007
so by the time i joined it had about 15
years of experience doing this type of
program and i do want to say
that the personal transformation that
took place in that summer camp
was real i saw young people
who were afraid to go to sleep at night
because they were sleeping in the same
cabin as an israeli or a palestinian or
an american completely distraught
on departure day because the
relationships that they had formed were
so powerful and deep
we actually kept a running list of how
many cross-conflict marriages
were a result of this program so the
personal transformation was real
but what happened to that transformation
of the conflicts from which they came
does anyone know much about the
israeli-palestinian conflict in the last
20 to 30 years
not many people would say it got better
right so what happened how can we have
this strong personal transformation
and not that societal transformation
the the experience that i think answers
this question most for me
is with an israeli participant named gil
so gil came to the program in the early
90s he was one of the first
who joined and part of my job was to
actually do our alumni relations so to
keep track of participants and see where
are they now
and gil was one of the participants that
we were really watching because slowly
but surely
he was making his way up through the
political
establishment in israel and by 19 or
excuse me by 2008
he had became the chief of staff to the
israeli foreign minister tiffany livni
so all of our staff and all of the
organization and
all of the other youth who went to
summer camp with gil
were ready to see what he was going to
do
with this position of power and it was
with that hope
that we all watched as gil stood behind
to tisny libny as she announced
the war on gaza in 2008.
and so a little bit about the gaza
script it’s a palestinian territory
where almost 2 million people live
70 of the people who live there are
refugees from the israeli war of
independence
and the territory is so small that you
can’t actually run
a marathon in it you’d have to turn back
there’s not enough space
and gill stood there as
they were announcing an aerial
bombardment and invasion
so how could this be how could he stand
there knowing what he knew about
palestinians and their humanity having
gone
to summer camp with them as they were
condemned to die
eventually a thousand unarmed
palestinian civilians were
killed so what happened here
i learned a couple things through this
experience the first thing i learned is
that proximity
does not equal equity or equality
as i was thinking through this problem i
came across the fact that
africans fought with the colonists in
the american revolution
that didn’t change our country from
expanding and institutionalizing slavery
men and women can be in deep and loving
relationships with each other
but that man can still go to work and
pay a female employee
less than he would play a male employee
to do the same job
so it’d be wonderful to think that we
could solve
issues of diversity and exclusion by
just getting together and understanding
and knowing each other a little bit
better
but unfortunately that’s not the whole
picture
we have to do more we have to be more
intentional
in our work the other thing that i
learned
is what a disservice we were doing to
those young people
by bringing them when they’re 16 telling
them their leaders
and telling them they were responsible
for changing the societies in which they
came
while we did nothing about the ways in
which
their societies would change them upon
their return
because what actually happened in the
end is the influence of their societies
was more powerful than the knowledge
they gained
of their enemies humanity
so again what does that have to do with
us and this conversation here
well for me once i saw this power of
socialization
happen to gil and the thousands of other
participants in our program
i had to ask the question what is the
influence of our society
on me and
the answer to that question is why i can
stand here and say that i
know i can exhibit racism
i also know that i’ve internalized
limitations on myself
because of what our society says about
gender
and i’m not saying that because i’m
proud of these things but
because i’m no longer naive to think
that i’m immune to
all of the messages and all of the
experiences
that we’re surrounded by i say it
so that i can face it
here’s the thing if we can’t face our
socialization
if we don’t believe it exists or we
can’t see it or name it
if we can’t see our socialization
then we only have ourselves to blame
when we’re faced with inequality
or injustice around us and if we only
have ourselves to blame
then more often than not will react with
shame
and shame is a really powerful emotion
for us as humans
and it can exhibit itself in a lot of
different ways
sometimes shame can look like silence we
shut down about an issue we don’t engage
we can’t talk about it sometimes shame
can look like a justification
for the way things are or defensiveness
so we have to start becoming more aware
of these reactions as we have them
and again i’m not trying to overwhelm
you but i’m bringing this up because
maybe you’re having some of these
reactions tonight
maybe something that you’ve heard or
will hear tonight
makes you a little bit uncomfortable or
maybe even offended
so i wanted to share with you what i’ve
learned to do when those feelings arise
in me
so the first thing i do is i have to ask
myself
am i responding to something that i
personally
said or didn’t say or did or didn’t do
that’s within my frame of influence
right so part of being able to answer
this question is we have to understand
what we have control and capacity to
influence
and that’s going to be different for
each one of us a politician has a lot
more influence and control than a
student
so part of answering that question is
figuring out where i have an impact
and if your answer to this question is
yes
this is within my spirit of influence
then that is amazing
because that means that you can do
something about it
you can repair the harm you can
apologize you can
learn you can grow you can be held
accountable
those are all amazing things we can do
if the answer to that question is yes
and if the answer to the question is is
this within my spirit of influence is no
then we have to learn to let it go we
can’t allow ourselves
to get stuck in shame we can’t
allow ourselves in taking responsibility
for the whole of a system
to be immobilized from changing the part
that we can mend and if your answer to
that question
is yes this is within my spirit of
influence
but i have no idea what to do about it
then i
hope that you’ll reach out to me and
that we’ll do this work together
thank you