When They Show You Who They Are

This post has been percolating in my head all week and I still don't know if I will be able to get what I am trying to say right, but I will try. So this has been a hard week for many. A very hard week. I know I tend to say this a lot on this blog, but the last 5 years in higher education have been weeks of hard weeks, or at least weeks where the difficulty escalates. This week was hard for many reasons, but for me one the reasons it was difficult was watching people show all of us who they really are.

I have talked a lot in presentations and on here about moral injury, about what happens when our morals and values do not align with the spaces we find ourselves in.  This can be work spaces, but it can also be community spaces, or places where you volunteer time. One thing I noticed happening quick and early this week were people doing a mass exodus off of different social media sites. The reason given was because there was too much sadness and information and rage on the platforms and for their health and wellness they needed to get off of the sites, or that they felt being on a particular social media site meant an implicit support of whomever happens to own the site.

There is so much to unpack there and I want to do this in a way that connects to the work we do in eduspace. First, I want to say that I am always in support of folk doing the things they need to do to support their bodymind needs. If that means being off a certain social media site then sure yes do that (I am sure you can feel the but coming already). Second, I am writing this of course as someone who is deeply invested in accessibility work, where many parts of my identity are being impacted by policies and choices being made at global and local scales. Third, some of this may be written cryptically because I am not going to use many of the words they are currently doing searches for, and if you need a more plain text version of this or want to have a conversation offline or online I am here.

From a community organizing point of view we always note that there needs to be different ways to share information. That when you have only one way to share information that it makes it a lot easier for that information to be manipulated and blocked. One only has to look at what happened when that one social media platform went down for not even 24 hours. But also those alternative ways of communicating and sharing information need to be clear to the people in the space that need that information. Otherwise, you are literally abandoning the people who will need your support the most. When I am not doing my pays the rent work, the rest of my time is actually holding space for different groups of folk to share information. This is done in various ways which I of course am not going to outline here for the reasons above, but this blog and the podcast are also other ways I try to hold space for folk and the information sharing and conversations that are needed.

So it was really interesting to me to see folk cancel accounts, leave spaces, because they could, and not realize how this may impact that sharing of information because for the most part these people are the people that I would categorize as nodes. Nodes are the people who connect other people or groups. Think about that one student you have in class who is a real community builder, who engages with what other groups say in class and not just the people who happen to be sitting near them. Those are the nodes. And well this week we lost a lot of nodes.

Being able to just say bye to a platform is also a kind of privilege. Because it demonstrates that the information shared there or the community found there is not something that is foundationally necessary to their bodymind or life needs. They have their own communities elsewhere, they have other means of information sharing. But this is where I would love to remind you that not everyone has that. Not everyone has those alternate means, and before closing shop on your social media account that was a node for information sharing, you kinda need to make sure those alternate means of sharing are expressed to the people you are leaving behind.

This is very far from being a 0s and 1s situation. I am not saying blast next steps for the universe to see (for obvious reasons), I am saying hey flag the possibilities for the folk who will now lose you as the node of information sharing. And maybe some of you are saying well that is not my responsibility, and I guess to that I say, if you reflect on how you were the node for so many you may see how somehow that kinda is your responsibility. I know everything is a lot, but leaving folk behind is also a lot, and also brings up moral injury feelings. 

I will give you an educational analogy. Say you are the instructor and have a group assignment where you have given very clear instructions. Some group members are responsible for sharing those instructions with their other group members to make sure the assignment gets done and everyone feels supported. Say you decide half way through the term to stop sharing information to the groups and that now the information the groups would need would be found in some secret geocache on campus only accessible to people who don't use mobility devices or assistive technology. Think about the outcome of that group assignment. We started off with maybe all the groups doing well, now we are faced with the fact that may only a very small handful of groups will succeed with the assignment because they can find the geocache and share the information.

There is already so much being taken away in terms of information, supports, jobs, people, that having nodes who are important part of that information relay just disappear without telegraphing some backup plan feels a lot like complicity and a lot like quick compliance. I am watching the quick compliance happen. I am taking notes, as are others. And I am also aware that there are strategic compliance or even silent compliances happening. I am talking about the vocal compliance, the vocal compliance that puts the people we thought you were in allyship with at risk. The vocal compliance that is just following the money and reinforcing extraction. 

This week was a week where people showed you who they are. I know a lot of you have been sharing that "first they came for..." quotation on socials this week. Thing is some of us actually have lived our whole lives with the reality of that quotation embodied. It is in everything we do or say; it is foundational to how we run our lives and the micro-communities we try to build and support. Because we always know that soon no one will be left to speak.

Yes we knew this would happen, I guess I'm just disappointed at the people who are moving to show that side of themselves so quickly.  So if you are going to change the instructions for the group project halfway through the semester, please make sure you have a backup plan communicated so that all the groups can finish the assignment. Because so many of the groups won't, so many of the groups will disappear. And if you have the capacity to pick up that node information sharing work for the groups please do - we need those folk right now, before more groups disappear. And if you need a space held for you right now, reach out, I will see what I can do to connect you to what you need.