No More Playing Ostrich :

30 🏛 Rules & 🛠 Tools to Dig Your Head Out of the Sand & Have Fruitful Conversations On Race

By Vincent Bish

These ‘rules and tools’ are from a scrapped book I was attempting to write in 2015.

The current discources on inter-community conversations have possibly rendered these passé/quaint for today’s standards but I’ve decided to post the bones chapter titles here after a panel in which I mentioned them.

I think Paul Jame’s definition of “community” is the sort of context in which I use these rules and tools.

“ A community is a group of people who are connected by durable relations that extend beyond immediate genealogical ties, and who mutually define that relationship as important to their social identity and practice.” — Paul Jame

Trying to have these difficult conversations with people who do not see your relationship to them as necessary and important will not result in any outcomes of value.

Consider these chapter titles a ready-made set of values and agreements as you journey into your own sensitive conversations about oppression between folx of varying levels of privilege.

Rule #1: Much can be done from the starting point that: No one position is unequivocally good/without defect.

Rule #2: Do not invalidate people’s experiences.

Rule #3: Find out what you can offer in terms of nonjudgmental validation.

Rule #4: State the things you’ve learned, explicitly, as you learn them in the conversation (if possible, write them down).

Rule #5: What are those cooperative, win-win goals we both can seek. State those at the beginning (if possible, write them down).

Rule #6: “Empathy is not endorsement.” -Dylan Marron

Rule #7: Oftentimes we are not so much ‘saying something new’ as we are ‘building up a shrine to what has already been said.’

Rule #8: Tag the best points points that the person you’re speaking to has made, even if they fall short of your standard of being fully persuaded by (if possible, have them write it down).

Tool #9: “Compromise is not a sign of the collapse of one’s moral conscience (for there is nothing more necessary to a moral conscience than the recognition that others people have one too). A moral conscious, therefore, might best be thought of a knot tied temporarily between between competing decencies.” -Adam Gopnik

Tool #10: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rule #11: What would the group be surprised that you are not okay with? (If possible, write it down at the beginning).

Tool #12: Memorize this. “The ego often creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from critique.” -Iyanla Vanzant

Rule #13: “Our privilege is not static but deeply contextual. We, who are silenced, may yet silence others.” -Parul Sehgal

Rule #14: “Your culture is your immune system.” -Dr. Marimba Ani Though it may keep you healthy, and vibrant and is essential — it also protects us from unwanted ideas that it marks as foreign.

Tool #15: ”The more you have put youreself in someonelse’s shoes, the more difficult it becomes to do that person harm [and so, if you find yourself wanting to do them harm, it stands to reason maybe you haven’t sufficiently put yourself in their shoes.” -Michal Chabon

Tool #16: Cultural competency, or consciousness, or understanding is not a destination. But a spectrum in which each interval is equidistant to the gap that came before it.

Rule #17 : Only assholes tell oppressed people how to be oppressed.

Rule #18: Everyone acknowledge that people have had it more difficult than you — acknowledge it freely and often.

Tool #19: Memorize. “We can disagree and still love each other UNLESS your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.” -James Baldwin

Tool #20: “One effective strategy for de-biasing your judgment is to “consider the opposite” of what you think is true” -Ed Hirth

Rule #21: Remember: “Every question you ask anyone impacts them on two levels: an emotional and an intellectual level. Most people only think of the intellectual impact.” — Chris Voss, Hostage Negotiator

Rule #22: Did what I said help to create a community of conscience and compassion?

Rule #23: Remember: “Love [like goodwill] doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” -Ursula K. Le Guin

Rule #24: Not everyone has had a bumpy road as smooth as mine.

Rule #25: “We must get over thinking that in skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.” -Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Rule #26: Things not to do: “I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible….except by getting off his back.” -Leo Tolstoy

Tool #26: “They [white people] are the other half of what we went through. -Ta’Nehisi Coates

Rule #27: You will never get anywhere if you are not using shared definitions. (Write them down when you agree upon them, note where there is disagreement).

Rule #28: Just because you didn’t see there being a problem with something you did before, and nobody said anything, dosen’t mean there was nothing wrong with it.

Tool #29: “In no age do we enjoy a perfect understanding of justice. Every injustice necessarily involves a moral truth that very few people recognize early on. In a democratic society, wrongful practice persists only when most people don’t perceive it to be unjust. At first, only a small minority of abolitionists knew that slavery was evil; that view has rightly become conventional, but it was still a secret [to those whites] in the early 19th century. To say that there are no secrets left today would mean that we live in a society with no hidden injustices.” -Peter Theil

Rule #30: If the other side is having a hard time trusting you, attempt to show rather than say, because words are cheap. As Baldwin reminds us, “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”

My personal rules of engagement.