This morning I’m listening to a lecture from Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, who recently gave the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture on “Doing the Right Thing.” Nenshi shares his thoughts and stories on citizenship and on how that is changing in Canada. And he doesn’t pull punches.
The lecture is divided into two parts. The second part talks about citizen action, but the first part talks about our history of racism.
There is a deep thread of racism that runs through Canadian society. As a white skinned man, I grew up hearing racist chatter. “Privilege” in Canada – being an “Old Stock Canadian” to use Stephen Harper’s egregious phrase, accords you a special window on people’s real views about things. It’s as if you can be confided in to keep the dirty little secret that racism is rampant in this country. And I’m not merely talking about the obvious and official outbreaks of racism like the Komagata Maru or Japanese internment or the Chinese Exclusion Act or None is Too Many or Africville or residential schools or carding or any other of the historical and official policies of racism. No, I am talking about the mindset that simmers beneath it all, the permission given to an attitude of micro-aggression and othering that is constantly stoked by “wink wink nudge nudge” conversations between light skinned people when they think no one else is around. I am talking about a widespread practice of refusing to be reflective on one’s own racism and privilege, leading to misplaced outbursts of outrage that have the odd effect of white people claiming victimhood while at the same time disparaging others for their adoption of an “entitled victim mentality.”
The way Canadian society works is that this simmer mindset among the privileged stays out of sight and below the radar. Anyone who dares to state it out loud and publicly is usually disowned right away as a crazy crackpot. If much of what is said on newspaper comments sections comes out of the mouth of an ordinary citizen in a public setting, you’re supposed to call them out even as you nod along and your inner voice says “damn rights!” The mindset is always there, but you’re supposed to refer to it in code: “those people,” “offshore owners,” “I’m not racist, but…” “one law for all,” “honest, hardworking Canadians,” “Old Stock…”
But what is happening now – and this is something that Naheed Nenshi points out in the first part of his lecture – is that kind of talk is becoming normalized. Over the past ten years, what is supposed to be a secret set of conversations between privileged people is becoming shamelessly public. We are seeing candidates running in this election that have no qualms stating outright racist stuff. We are seeing public debates in which refugees as a class are slandered as potential Islamist terrorists, the 21st century version of the yellow peril scare. Call them racist and they declare you out of order for making an ad hominem attack. In the most openly racist era of my life, one is left wondering when and where we get to have this conversation about how racism informs public policy. Anyone? During the election? Calling another candidate racist is now a gift to the racist candidate. They can rally their base supporters behind the slanderous accusation that they are racist.
And while I’m all in favour of having racism out in the open where we can deal with it, it’s also clear to me that this normalization has the effect of legitimizing racism as an acceptable rationale for policy making. People seriously use terms like “cultural suicide” to discuss the effect of admitting Muslim refugees to Canada and no one seems to blink an eye. We have seen our federal government openly use racism to drive a wedge between citizens in Canada and raise the suspicions between Canadians. We have witnessed the government create two classes of citizens with two different standards of justice for Canadians who were born here or whose grandparents were born here – “the Old Stock” – and others (like my wife, or my children), who can be deported to another country and stripped of their citizenship for committing certain crimes. We have seen the passage of a Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act which outlaws things that are already outlawed, but has the effect of also making “barbaric” an official standard by which we can cast suspicion on people. Have any of you reading this pictured in your mind a white man beating his children and justifying it by saying “a man’s home is his castle and no one can tell me how to parent?” Because that is a pretty barbaric cultural practice, but I will bet not a single white man will be brought to court under this act for that offense.
Racism has become normalized. We are making actual laws again in this country on that basis. Our history tells us that what comes next will be inhumane and unjust and that we will eventually look back on it with regret and dismay. Future generations will ask us how this could be allowed to happen. And no one will say “I let it happen.” We will all declare powerlessness in the face of politicians or elites or whomever we can separate ourselves from. Especially those of us granted the privilege of being “Old Stock” Canadians. If history is any teacher, something powerful and tragic will happen, a denouement will occur, and the conversation will go back underground to simmer along as it always has. Disrupting this cycle is important. It is the critical work of citizenship.
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Over the past four years, Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Caitlin Frost, Tim Merry and I have been sitting down and thinking about our learning about the way participatory leadership intersects with power, systems change, large scale and sustainable engagement and deep personal practice. We have combed through years of our stories and experiences, and developed a learning offering that shares some of our theory, deep practices and stories of systems change.
Over the past two years Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics has travelled across Canada, the United States and once to Europe and we have been lucky to welcome nearly 300 people to our three day program. They have come from all over the world and every conceivable sector in which leadership, engagement and people and the tools that create new worlds.
From October 21-23 we offer our final instalment of the current round of Art of Hosting Beyond the Basics, in Kingston Ontario, Canada, Over three days we will gather on the Lake Ontario shoreline to engage in conversations about applied complexity, participatory leadership, and the challenges of scaling up the results from large group methods like World Cafe and Open Space Technology. We will talk about power and friendship in change work, and broadening and deepening our impact when it comes to community engagement, employee engagement, strategy and systemic change.
We already have a fascinating group of people coming, including academics, health care systems workers, community activists, people who work in First Nations and managers from companies. That diversity leads to terrific learning, and we’d be excited for you to join us.
If you have been working with facilitation, complexity and engagement for a while, this is for you. It’s not a beginners course, but neither is it inaccessible for people just starting in this field who want to accelerate their learning. It’s applied and grounded theory, learning based in stories and a full day of design and coaching for new and existing projects.
We still have seats left. Join us! You can learn more and register here: http://www.aohbtb.com/ontario.html
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Caitlin and I are hosting a learning process for the Vancouver Foundation which has brought together 11 people from community foundations around BC. We are trying to discover what kinds of new practices community foundations can adopt to roll with the changing nature of philanthropy and community.
It’s a classic complexity problem. The future is unknowable and unpredictable. Data is plentiful but not helpful because context trumps all. There are competing experts with different hypotheses of what should happen. These twelve people are brave. They’re willing to be the innovators in a sector that is by nature fairly conservative when it comes to change.
We are using an architecture combining Theory U and complexity work coming from Cynefin practices. I can maybe write more about our design later, but today I’m struck by a comment one of our participants made when she was reflecting on the past three months of engaging in deep dialogue interviews with people in her community. She talked to a number of people as a way of beginning to understand the context for making change, and noticed that the conversations she was having were taking her away from the rigid roles and responsibilities (and the associated posturing) that comes with trying to do interesting work in a hierarchical, top down and controlling way. Today in our check in she shared this:
“When we are given permission to talk to anyone about anything it’s freeing. We let our roles drop as well our limiting beliefs about what we can and can’t do. We are able to more closely align our actions and our way of being with our intentions.”
A pithy but powerful statement in how changing the way we converse changes the way we are able to act. It’s lovely witnessing the birth of a complexity worker.
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When you make your living in the world as a facilitator, you can’t help but notice the quality of conversation that surrounds you. People come up to me all the time asking advice about how to have this or that chat with colleagues or loved ones. Folks download on me their grief that our civic conversations have been polluted by rudeness and the inability to listen. We feel an overall malaise that somehow our organizations or communities could be doing better.
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One of my favourite concepts from the complexity world is the fallacy of thinking that comes from the truth of retrospective coherence. The mistake is that, because we can look back in time to understand causes of our current condition, we can therefore see forward in time and affect the causes of a future condition. Complex systems are emergent, so we can never be sure what the future holds, regardless of how well we can trace how we got here.
Despite the fact that it is illegal to sell an investment instrument without the warning that “past performance does not guarantee future results” falling for the trap that retrospective coherence gives you a reliable path forward is basically a feature of doing any strategic work at all. It leads to planning that puts out a future preferred state and then backcasts a set of steps that, if we follow them, will take us there or nearly there.
So there are all kinds of issues with this, and the Cynefin framework’s greatest gift is that it helps us create strategy to avoid to pitfall of retrospective coherence.
Today though, a surprise in my morning reading. A lovely article on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” We all think we know what that poem is about: about the adventure that will ensue if we just take the less beaten path. But you might be surprised to learn that the poem is actually about retrospective coherence and not adventures strategic planning (emphasis mine):
Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Brilliant.
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