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Category: Troubleshoot Tuesday

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: The Place of Rage Pt 3

    Image Description: The background is hot pink. There is a gradient pink and yellow circle with a giant yellow “angry” emoji/emoticon in it. The title text is yellow and reads “The Place of Rage Part 3”. The links in black are “lukayo.com” and “patreon.com/lukayo“. The other title pages are yellow circles or gradient yellow-pink circles on a hot pink background with a yellow border. 

    Content warning: trauma, police, prisons.

    Transcript:

    Mabuhay! If you haven’t already checked out part one and two, I suggest you listen to them first. The links are in the video transcript, along with links to writers that informed this series.

    This week we’re focusing on the question of “what happens when expressions of anger have harmed someone in a space?” Especially if it’s a space that you’re facilitating or leading for skill-sharing and educational purposes? My approach tries to take into consideration two core concepts: trauma and ethics.

    Before we get into it, I just want to put a content warning up, since we’ll be talking about trauma, prison, and police systems.

    So why are we talking about trauma? First of all, my understanding of trauma was covered in a previous Troubleshoot Tuesday article, which I’ve also linked in the transcript. To sum it up in a really basic way, trauma is a reaction to being or witnessing wounding and harm, and it messes up your threat response. The idea is that we have the capacity to choose our threat response when we are threatened or harmed (like fight, flight, freeze, appease/fawn, etc.) but when we are traumatized, a threat response gets “stuck” and starts automatically before we can even think about it. This is what being “triggered” means in trauma theory. So for me it’s important to introduce concepts like triggers and trauma into my workshop early on, like in the Community Agreements, and discuss how to hold space for those stuck threat responses. That way when anyone does get triggered, whether they know if they have trauma or not, other people in the workshop are prepared and there’s some guidelines in place on how to support everyone.

    But how about when folks can choose their behaviour when they feel threatened or when they witness or experience harm? That’s ethics. There’s so many concepts out there about what folks think are moral, i.e. “good and bad”, so I’m just gonna cover some of my own ethics and how that’s informed my responses in my workshops. I’m hoping that this sharing will help you figure out or rethink your own courses of action in your teaching spaces.

    In my previous video on The Place of Rage, I talked about considering power dynamics in the space, which I think is foundational to intersectional anti-oppressive ethics. My ethics is also relationship-based, and is part of a decolonial and disability justice framework. Lastly, I believe in transformative justice (TJ), and I think that TJ makes sense as a form of ethics that also comes out of, if not the same as, intersectional anti-oppression, decolonization, and disability justice.

    My understanding of TJ is informed by workshops run by the Just Practice Collaborative in Chicago, writings by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective in Oakland, California, and the zine and book The Revolution Starts At Home (all of these linked in the video transcript below). As well, transformative and restorative practices are deeply embedded in the practices of many Indigenous peoples to Turtle Island, and their teachings in informal and formal gatherings, in social media and over messenger, and the hard and necessary work that is done alongside the settler colonial Canadian prison industrial complex with Gladue sentencing, also has informed my understanding, and I owe a debt to them as do many settlers and non-Indigenous to Turtle Island folks when trying to practice transformative justice. Though I will not cover it in this series, my understanding of transformative justice is deeply informed by ceremony with my own people and indigenous peoples in Turtle Island and in the Philippines.

    The first thing I try to do when responding to harm in a workshop space I am facilitating, a harm traced directly from someone’s expression of anger, is that I try to slow down or redirect any responses I have that come from my own trauma, and focus on consequences and the impact of the harm on everyone involved, and perhaps communities that aren’t even in the space right now but are connected in some way.

    Thinking and feeling about consequences is important, and I try to go there instead of immediately wanting to punish, exile, and control. My understanding of the settler colonial and racist prison and police systems that I’ve grown up in is that they operate on systems to control that are enforced through punishment and exile– “I’m going to make this person hurt, I’m going to make this person lose, I’m going to make this person feel worthless and take away as much of their humanity as possible because they are bad and wrong”. These systems got into my head, mixed up with my trauma, when I was growing up, and it takes a lot of practice and conscious effort every day not to fall back on them. I don’t want to make people disposable because this is against my values of intersectional and decolonial anti-oppression and disability justice. I don’t want the prison and police in my head to win, because I believe there is another way to go about things.

    Want to listen to/read the rest of the video? Please subscribe for $10 per month to gain access to weekly interactive posts where you can ask questions about the creative process and troubleshoot your anti-oppressive workshops. Supporters will also receive a mailed package with print-outs of anti-oppression activities and posters. All funds raised go to healing work among my communities. 

    Links:

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: The Place of Rage Pt 2

    Image Description: A cellphone with a giant angry emoji/emoticon on the screen, lying on top of a wooden surface.

    Transcript:

    Mabuhay! If you haven’t already checked out part one, I suggest you give that a listen first, before jumping in. I’m going to build on what I talked about last week, which was in favour of emotions and anger, by discussing this idea of “too much”, which leads into concepts of conflict, abuse, bullying, and oppression (so content warning for all those things).

    Here’s the core question for me: When is the expression of emotions and anger considered “too much” in a given context, especially a workshop setting, without perpetuating oppression by policing, silencing, and invalidating people’s trauma and pain? How do we figure that line out? And, if we have that line figured out, what do we do when it’s crossed?

    I wonder if this is more a question of ethics than it is anti-oppression– but to me anti-oppression and decolonial thinking is a form of ethics. I just find the ways that this ethics is interpreted or practiced on the daily is so different from one person to the next, from one social group to the next. This gets into complicated territory of “are we gaslighting survivors?” and “are we believing survivors?”, as well as “are we apologizing for abusers?” and “are we scapegoating other survivors as abusers when we don’t ask for evidence or their side of the story?”

    Now, before I get deeper into how I would attempt to figure this line out, let me state briefly that, speaking for myself –while encouraging other people, groups, and collectives too– the attempt must be made, because the consequences are dire. I have witnessed harm occur when anger is expressed violently and abusively, and I have witnessed harm occur when anger is expressed and it was arguably not violent or abusive but the backlash towards the expression was violent and abusive. I have witnessed harm occur when people have done nothing and when people have intervened. The stakes are high, and I want to grow and move forward– I want our movements and our campaigns to grow and move forward too.

    Want to listen to/read the rest of the video? Please subscribe to my Patreon for $10 per month to gain access to weekly interactive posts where you can ask questions about the creative process and troubleshoot your anti-oppressive workshops. Supporters will also receive a mailed package with print-outs of anti-oppression activities and posters. All funds raised go to healing work among my communities. Original article here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/26851147

    Links:

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: The Place of Rage

    Image Description: A cellphone with a giant angry emoji/emoticon on the screen, lying on top of a wooden surface.

    Transcript: 

    Mabuhay! This Troubleshoot Tuesday, I’m going to briefly talk about what Katherine Cross writes as “call-out culture, purity politics, and the veneration of rage in activist circles” (the link to her article in Feministing is in the transcript to this video). This is a multi-part series because of how huge this topic is.

    I am not going to talk about social media scapegoating because these tutorial videos are about supporting folks facilitating workshops and running programming in their schools, communities, and workplaces. I think that the dynamic and nuanced discussion on social media scapegoating and shunning culture is super important, and I’ve offered links below to folks who have a lot to say about it.

    In the next few videos I’m going to talk about different strategies to handle rage in participants (and yourself) during a workshop. In this particular video I want to argue in favour of emotions, and in favour of anger, and how to make space for it.

    I’ve noticed historically and currently how “being emotional” is equated with “being less than” in regards to feminized people and racialized people, and that anger is only permitted for the masculinized– and white. It’s a tactic of silencing, where a person or people’s pain is minimized or erased by the underlying message that they have no right to be angry at all. Giving space for emotions and anger in our workshops for folks who have been told they are “too angry” and “too emotional” is about validating the pain and trauma that folks have endured under oppressive circumstances.

    So how do we make space for these feelings? You can say it openly, right at the beginning of the workshop or discussion. That it’s okay to cry, to get angry, to need to walk out, to ask for space, or a hug, or to shake with fear and anxiety. Talk about your own feelings, how they affect you, how they may express themselves during the workshop. I talk about how sometimes I sing when I’m nervous, and I cry suddenly, and that’s okay to let me cry. That when I get angry, I clench my fists, and I scream into pillows but my voice doesn’t rise.

    I think it’s also important to bring this up during the Community Agreements part of your workshop (a video on that coming up soon). I don’t think it’s responsible to hold space for emotions without checking in with everyone about any trauma they’re willing to disclose regarding triggers, as well as agreements made on how to manage conflict and feedback between participants, and if there are support people to check in on folks who step out in the midst of great distress.

    Anyway, that’s it for today! Don’t forget to comment on this post with your own concerns and questions, and I’ll be happy to answer and troubleshoot with you any situations that have come up for you in your own work and discussions. Tune in next week for more on The Place of Rage!

    Links:

    If you liked this video, please become a patron, where all funds raised goes directly to healing work in my communities. Link to original article here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/26681270

     

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: 3 Signs That You Need to Disengage From Work

    Image Description: A close-up of a road sign that means “no entry”. It is a red circle with a white horizontal stripe on it. Inside the stripe is the title “3 Signs That You Need to Disengage from Work”. Below the title is the URLs “patreon.com/lukayo” and “lukayo.com” in white.

    One reason I decided to write on this topic is as a reminder to myself because I don’t know when to rest. I know when to collapse, when to push myself to exhaustion, when to succumb to sickness, when to grudgingly acknowledge that I need help– but rest? I can go into a lot of reasons why this is so, whether it’s a trauma response, internalized ableism, a learned response to the crushing pressure of competitive capitalism, or my own frenetic brain energy that dominates my body’s gentle signals. But this article isn’t about that. It’s addressed to other workshop facilitators, presenters, and community organizers who also have the same kinds of trouble like me, the types that can notice when a friend is silently grieving or when a community asks for accomplices, but does not notice when they themselves have simply Done. Too. Much.

    Here’s to the rest of us.

    Sign #1: You’ve forgotten the last time you’ve eaten balanced, regular meals, and had rejuvenating sleep, for seven days in a row. 

    This is kind of the basic groundwork needed for most human beings on this planet to function– or so I’m repeatedly told over and over again by relatives, medical professionals, mom-friends, dad-friends, Ancestors, and my cat. Okay, Lukayo, (you ask) but what if you’re a disabled, chronically ill person? Well (I would answer), I too am in a similar situation, and meals and sleep are hard due to my conditions. I would also ask you to think real hard about the fact that if you have a hard time sleeping or eating, should your priority be workshop facilitation, or going to your medical appointments and working on recovery/treatment? Might be time to disengage. Which brings me to…

    Sign #2: You keep setting aside what’s important and not urgent for what’s urgent but not important.

    This is one of the things I read in the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that was helpful because it really put into perspective this crisis mentality that I’m in, that there’s a difference between important and urgent. Important is what’s true to your value system, your larger goal and purpose in the world, and how you align your actions with that. Urgent is something that is time-sensitive. Some things are both important and urgent, and definitely should be worked on right away, like a grant application for community-run program that is sorely needed and that you’re emotionally invested in. Some things are neither important nor urgent, like watching Youtube videos that mildly irritate you but you do it because you’re bored.

    The tricky thing is the important-not-urgent and the urgent-not-important. The first is something like doing martial arts every day to support your body’s strength and stamina and self-protection, while the second is an angry feedback Tweet on a presentation you did. Do you stop doing this important thing that’s part of how you feel healthy and safe because you’re stuck in a crisis mentality that jumps from one urgent thing to another, regardless of importance? Are you answering every angry or dismissive review of your work personally and spending tons of time and emotional labour crafting perfect paragraphs on people’s Facebook walls? Might be time to disengage.

    Sign #3: You keep making more mistakes than you have time to repair them.

    Also related to the previous example and Signs #1 and Signs #2, because if you’re not getting a lot of sleep or eating what you need, then, like me, you tend to not check-in with community members when you need to, or forget important slides in your Powerpoint, or double-check that you printed out your notes. Then you’re perpetuating a crisis mentality as you’re trying to put out fires that start and end with you. It starts to get into a cycle, too, where folks become more disappointed with your work, and you try harder by de-prioritizing sleep, food, and the important-not-urgent stuff, which can cause more mistakes, which creates more pressure to repair them and work harder… you get the picture. Time to disengage.

    So what should you do? Is the answer to always disengage?

    Disengaging from your workshop facilitator life or community organizer role is easier said than done. We’ve got families to feed, medications to pay for, surgeries to fund, and dreams to fulfill. If you can’t fully move back from your work, consider disengaging for a little bit to re-think your priorities and schedule them back into your life, while finding ways to delegate what isn’t important to you or what doesn’t absolutely need your supervision to do. Maybe someone else can aggregate all the social media feedback for you and can come up with a strategic response? Maybe someone else can make that poster for the event or print out your materials? If delegating tasks doesn’t seem feasible, then consider disengaging to weigh outcomes and risk. Is what I’m doing sustainable? Will I burn out and land myself in the hospital, which would take more away from my life than if I just scaled down my work to a workshop per month, one steering committee, and going on social assistance?

    This stuff isn’t easy and I don’t have all the answers, mostly because if you’re running workshops and doing community organizing, chances are you’re part of communities that are in constant crisis, and that crisis mentality is catching, even if you’re aware of it, even if you don’t want to be a part of it. I find it easier when I have other folks who are also trying to disengage, regroup, re-prioritize. We can work collectively to remember that rest is a form of resistance (check out restforresistance.com for more inspiration along those lines).

    What signs do you notice that help you to disengage before you hit burn-out? What are your troubleshooting strategies around doing too much?

    If you like what you’ve read and want to support healing work among my Elders, teachers, and communities, please subscribe to my Patreon. Link to the original article here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/26493515

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: Side Punch

    Image Description: The picture is divided into two parts. On the left side is a black and white photo of a person in a grey hoodie, with their back towards the viewer, as they stare out at the water. On the right side is a semi-transparent graphic of a stylized grey fist on a dark grey background, aimed towards the person in the hoodie. In red are the words: “SIDE PUNCH: SURVIVING LATERAL VIOLENCE”. In light grey is written “LUKAYO.COM”. There is a red rectangle at the bottom of the right side of the picture, with the words “PATREON.COM/LUKAYO” in black.

    Every time it happens, the sense of betrayal is so vast, it feels more than just a psychological punch to the gut. I remember one of the first times, as a kid in the schoolyard, where I was being pushed around and laughed at by other Filipinos. My clothing wasn’t right, and I talked weird, and I wasn’t into the right things. I was too “white-washed”, I didn’t belong, but neither did they want me “too Filipino” either, like when I had first immigrated to Turtle Island/Canada. Other times I witnessed it among the Filipino adults who gossiped about each other and tried to shun each other at church or at parties. As I grew older, I noticed this phenomenon happened in queer communities, trans communities, and among other racialized groups.

    When it occurs in a workshop, it’s probably because you’re doing a teaching targeted towards your own community, and they immediately want to fight it out while you’re explaining concepts or during discussion. Maybe it occurs before the workshop– folks contact you about a conflict that’s happening and certain folks can’t come or if they come then another set of folks won’t come, and so it goes.

    We could just brush it off and call it “community drama”, but most likely what’s going on here is “lateral violence”, and it sucks. A lot. So how should you handle it, as a facilitator and as a community member? The short summary is that you should  remind yourself (and others) of the root cause, ensure the safety of yourself and your participants as much as possible, and try to reach out to folks from the same community who already support you and hopefully understand what lateral violence is.

    Remind yourself and others of the root cause.

    When I was a child, internalized racism ran deep, and I assumed that the nonsense that happened in my communities was because Filipinos innately are inferior in some way– I was ashamed of myself and ashamed of my community. I tried to run away from them and myself for a long time. It’s tempting to buy into all of that nonsense again, especially when you’re in the heat of the moment and it’s disrupting your educational environment and plans.

    But lateral violence isn’t innate. It isn’t the essence of a person or a community. It’s a habit, a trauma response, and/or a soul wound inherited throughout the generations where the pain of a people explodes on each other because they feel powerless against or seduced by the institutions that devastated their communities in the first place.

    Personally, when lateral violence happens in front of me, I look at the situation as if folks are being possessed by vengeful ghosts, so filled with anguish at the injustices done to them that they take the bodies of their descendants to release their rage. I am filled with compassion, even as I take safety precautions for myself and those around me, to figure out how to appease these ghosts and encourage the personality of the descendant to come through with their gifts and be more than their pain.

    This isn’t to say that you can’t hold people responsible for their actions– it just means that it helps to combat the shame placed inside you by oppression, and the ignorant perspectives of those outside of your community that comment on inter-community violence. It also means that, if there’s a way to call folks in on what they’re doing, that you could ask them to direct their anger at the source of their pain and channel it into activism.

    Are you a diversity coordinator, anti-oppression facilitator, or equity officer interested in reading the rest of this article? Click on the link and subscribe for $10/month to get anti-oppression tutorials, videos, posters, hand-outs, and trouble-shooting guides like this one twice a week. By becoming a patron, you support healing work among my communities, and the indigenous Elders that mentor me. 

    https://www.patreon.com/posts/21216326

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: When Participants Get Triggered

    [Image made using Canva. The background is teal, with a cartoon brown hand holding an anatomically correct bright red heart that has lines radiating from it. In a black box in the foreground is teal text that reads: “WHEN PARTICIPANTS GET TRIGGERED”. At the top of the graphic are the websites “www.lukayo.com” and “www.patreon.com/lukayo”.]

    I am super passionate about how to support participants that get triggered in workshops, and also I have a bunch of rants on it (like how the word “trigger” is being mocked and thus craps on people with trauma, as well as other people misusing the word “triggered” when they’re just feeling uncomfortable). Most of the rants, however, can be traced to what seems like folks who have never experienced trauma have no idea what trauma is (which is fair) and then proceed to say they do have it or just make fun of it (not cool, people).

    So before we get into the check-list of tips that I’ve now gotten into the habit of making (because lists are FUN!), what is trauma? Well, there’s a Western medical model of trauma, and a decolonial model of trauma (check out Renee Linklater’s Decolonizing Trauma Work for more info).

    The Western medical model that I learned about in grad school, in training at the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute, in Pete Walker’s book on Complex PTSD, and when I went to trauma recovery programs for my own C-PTSD, talks about an event that a person experiences (directly or indirectly) and it messes them up because their understanding of the world is shaken and their threat response (fight, flight, freeze, appease/fawn) doesn’t get to complete, becoming a trauma response that gets trapped in their body and triggered when they’re not actually under threat. That’s how we get the word trigger there– it’s something that reminds you, consciously or not, about a threat that is not happening in the present.

    The decolonial model is based on Eduardo Duran’s work in Healing the Soul Wound, but is built on Linklater’s discussions with Anishinaabe practitioners in Oniatario/Ontario. I’ve also experienced this in my own healing journey and in the spiritual counselling I do for others. Instead of just focusing on the symptoms, like the medical model, this model focuses on how trauma is a wound to your soul/spirit, that separates you from yourself and from your community. Healing consists of programs and ceremonies/rituals to bring you or your soul piece back to yourself in the container of a loving community, or in a group ritual where everyone is healing together. Community isn’t just the two-leggeds related to you or around you, but consists of all the relations– the stars, the sun, the moon, the wind, the earth, the trees, the plants, the rocks, the water, the four-legged, the winged, the finned, the crawlers, sacred fire, sacred tools and technology, the Ancestors, and the Creator. I believe we were not born with the ability to truly see ourselves, and so our community is the mirror that reflects our gifts, our purpose, and our love.

    All right, so now that that’s covered, what happens when we’re doing a presentation or running a workshop, and folks with trauma begin to respond as if threatened or if their soul wound begins to bleed out in front of us all? Which model should we use or should we use both?

    For the latter question, it’s difficult to make a snap judgement on which model the person would prefer we approach them with– that really has to be determined in a safe and trusting environment of support and/or therapy and/or ritual. Your workshop on anti-oppression or whatever topic that can be potentially triggering doesn’t have the capacity for that, and is more of a learning environment than a healing one. The tips I’m going to lay out here is adaptable for both models of trauma that honours the learning environment you’ve set up while still honouring the need for healing of those who may attend.

    1. Check-in with organizers if you can get support people and a quiet room at your workshop
    2. Mention support people, trauma, and triggers in the promo of the workshop
    3. Ask if there are other mental health access needs for participants in the registration process
    4. Have a list of mental health phone lines, spiritual practitioners, and centres to go to at the back of the workshop
    5. Talk about trauma and triggers at the beginning of your presentation, referencing all the supports that are available at the workshop and apologizing for the ones that aren’t
    6. Discuss with participants what would be the best way to check in with people if they suddenly leave the room, or if they’re having a mental health crisis in the workshop and can’t leave the room
    7.  Have signage on large flip chart paper in the room listing what was already planned, as well as what was decided upon as a group

    Are you a diversity coordinator, anti-oppression facilitator, or equity officer interested in reading the rest of this article? Click on the link and subscribe for $10/month to get anti-oppression tutorials, videos, posters, hand-outs, and trouble-shooting guides like this one twice a week. By becoming a patron, you support healing work among my communities, and the indigenous Elders that mentor me. 

    https://www.patreon.com/posts/21042512

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: 3 Tips on Dealing with “The Other Place” Derailment in a North American Context

    There you are, a facilitator in Canada or the United States, sitting in a circle or at the front of a classroom, explaining the history of oppression and colonialism, or why racism and white supremacy is basically synonymous, when someone raises their hand– or often times straight up interrupts you:

    “But what about China’s history of colonialism?”

    “But what about how different African and Filipino tribes took slaves?”

    “But what about how Japan is racist to other peoples?”

    “But what about how Arab countries are sexist?”

    Here we go again.

    The problem with these questions is that, if the person who asked them isn’t from there, they seem to come from an emotional place that is

    • terrified of blame and guilt, so they need to subconsciously or actively deflect and derail what they perceive is blame being put on them,
    • determined to undermine the credibility of the facilitator because they don’t like you or don’t like seeing you as some kind of “authority” due to their own oppressive or biased views, or
    • a combination of the two.

    The sad part is most folks who ask these questions don’t actually see themselves as trolling you or being micro-aggressive, they may actually see themselves as being genuinely curious or playing “devil’s advocate”. As an exorcist, I have more respect for people who think they’re being curious than for folks that declare themselves an advocate for the devil, to be honest. But, anyway…

    So what do you do? Here’s some tips that come from a place where you assume the best, i.e. that the person actually believes they’re being curious: 1) start the workshop already framing the focus and purpose of the learning for a North American activist context, 2) remind folks what local activism and anti-oppression means, and 3) ask the querent how they intend to work in solidarity with the activists in the areas that they’ve mentioned.

    Are you a diversity coordinator, anti-oppression facilitator, or equity officer interested in reading the rest of this article? Click on the link and subscribe for $10/month to get anti-oppression tutorials, videos, posters, hand-outs, and trouble-shooting guides like this one twice a week. By becoming a patron, you support healing work among my communities, and the indigenous Elders that mentor me.

    https://www.patreon.com/posts/troubleshoot-3-20894786

    [Image created using Canva. Image description: The background is black. On the left side of the image is a photograph with muted colours of baby blue, fuchsia, red, yellow, and rose pink. In the foreground of the photograph are two pale hands holding out a small colourful globe of the planet Earth. The words in white beside the photograph, in between two line separators, are the following: “”BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER PLACE?!” 3 Tips on Dealing with “The Other Place” Derailment in a North American Context.”]

  • Troubleshoot Tuesday: 3 Ways to Learn The P-Word

    Whether you’re running a presentation for your job, doing a workshop for your community, or trying to have a conversation with that “friend” (you know which one I’m talking about), you may have to struggle with explaining the word that gets 25% of people’s back’s up: privilege.

    (Note: I am not a statistician, so when I write “25%”, I mean, roughly, the amount of eye-rolling, pursed lips, frozen facial expressions, deep-diaphragm-groaning, and spirit-leaving-body experiences I feel with my spidey senses every time I drop the P-word in a crowd.)

    In this first Troubleshoot Tuesday edition, I’m going to take you through three general kinds of ways to explain privilege while comparing the pros and the cons: checklists/flowers/etc., games and gaming analogies, and storytelling and group work activities. Some of these are better for discussions you’re quickly having at a party, while others make more sense if you’re training your collective that’s committed to social justice and solidarity work.

    Regardless, always remember the objective: the point of explaining privilege is not to make people feel bad– it’s to realize the secret powers they never knew they had that can be used for the consensual benefit of their friends, loved ones, and communities.

    That’s why I have a bit of a pet peeve with the term “check your privilege”– I always feel like what people mean to say is “hey bud, you’re not understanding the full context of how oppressive this situation might be and how you benefit from it unintentionally”. Maybe it would make more sense to say “Use your privilege to help me, not hurt me!” Not as catchy though, I know, but keep that in mind as you choose which method of explanation or teaching is right for you and your audience.

    Are you a diversity coordinator, anti-oppression facilitator, or equity officer interested in reading the rest of this article? Click on the link and subscribe for $10/month to get anti-oppression tutorials, videos, posters, hand-outs, and trouble-shooting guides like this one twice a week. By becoming a patron, you support healing work among my communities, and the indigenous Elders that mentor me.

    https://www.patreon.com/posts/20769892

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