Clare Consultation, LLCZero Tolerance 2.0
I recently heard a story from a student finishing her sophomore year at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. A story set in a quiet college neighborhood, its characters all part of the college’s community.
Here’s how it went – A group of friends were hanging out in a dorm room. All were men, all members of the football team and all, incidentally, considered strong students by respected faculty members. The other thing about this group was its racial balance – Black and White.
These guys, all first-year students, had known each other since before the academic year started when they met in pre-season training. They had become friends. They’d developed the shorthand language of being insiders with each other – light, unforced, easy. They threw around slurs – signs of this familiarity – some associated with racism. They were also loud – boisterous with the energy catalyzed by two or more 18-19 year olds in the same space.
Good friends, hanging out. One of them had pushed the window of the dorm room open, for fresh air? for no particular reason? Doesn’t really matter – the window was open and a few students who don’t know these men passed by. They heard the slurs. They were offended. Instead of speaking to the men directly, they went to an administrator.
You may know where this is going.
Yep. It got big. Real big. The men were severely and publically reprimanded at the decision of the administrative council – a group not as racially balanced, but nearly gender balanced and including Black and Latino members. The reprimand was sweeping and stigmatizing – holding all of the young men up as exemplars of gross racism. This outcome even though each one’s testimony confirmed the context of the comments – their friendship, its jargon.
I won’t belabor this telling. I am, of course, retelling from a retelling – there’s lots of room for factual inaccuracy. But this is not a circumstance foreign to colleges, to workplaces, to the halls of government.
Here’s what strikes me as urgent in this or any such circumstance. The moment this situation came to public awareness was a moment of enormous opportunity. It was an opportunity for real work on the legacy of racism we know in the U.S. – and really across the globe. It was a time for leadership with substantial potential for change.
Instead, everybody involved in this particular story got to remain in fear and opposition. Everybody got to leave unchanged. Except the students who are leaving the school confused and angry. The students directly involved and stigmatized, and others disgusted with the lack of conversation – the lack of wisdom and dignity demonstrated by the school’s administration.
Maybe the leaving is its own leadership, and certainly leadership can develop by negative example. Nonetheless, I want to say this as clearly as I can to those of us who are over 25 and positioned in the work world.
Racism is a symptom of a much deeper problem. The problem is fear and lack of information. One solution is leadership – specifically the leadership that comes from listening and speaking, and then from listening again.
There are many gouges in the spirits of citizens of this country that come from hateful and hideous facts of our past. Original acts of cultural, physical and spiritual degradation leveled on the First People of this continent, perpetrated with the brutal practices of slavery, and more recently evident in the internment of Japanese citizens, the demonization of Mexican and Latino migrant workers, and the denial of dignity to people of varied sexual identity and orientation. Original traumas that are impossible to erase from our public lives unless seen and spoken about as they continue today – addressed for moving forward together from here.
Zero tolerance policies with regard to racism and oppressions of any kind are a sound starting point. But, without taking opportunity to listen, to speak, and to listen again their assertion accomplishes little other than salving the consciences of the policy makers.
As with any practice of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, there must be room for all voices. The room is worth making – it is worth holding as long as it takes for learning to happen. As long as it takes for wisdom to show up to replace the ignorance that is the life blood of fear and its tired but tenacious expressions.
The especially tricky thing with all of this is that the conversation may never occur if wisdom doesn’t show up to hold the space in the first place. Wisdom that knows itself from having risked listening.
This is where it comes back to leadership – to leadership for change. To leadership that takes seriously the responsibility for nurturing the wisdom nascent, but surely present in the young. The ones who are learning how to lead by watching us.
Thank you for articulating this ubiquitous and baffling challenge so clearly. Our ability to grapple with it is proportionate to the clarity of our comprehension.