Race, hierarchy, yada, yada
Two views on DEI and just not being an asshole
Greetings,
You have heard me going on about the book I am writing, but it’s really happening. To that end, I have been reviewing some of my previous work as supplementary to the text of “The Earth is My Bitch” (the book), and came across a podcast interview with DEI trainer, Dax-Devlon Ross, that is just perfect. The conversation completely sums up the predicate of my book, minus my ultimate conclusion. I will come back to that.
This podcast was aired four years ago, but is so relevant now that we are in the second Trump administration and the pressure to be a winner has been ratcheted up to the point where the sound you hear is the groan of the valve wound so tightly, it is on the verge of explosion and all of us losers will finally know it wasn’t us that screwed the pooch.
It’s so relevant now because it is a conversation that I think has the power to inspire us to stop moaning and start acting as if we actually do have power and agency in our lives, because we do, even when we are put in situations where it feels like we don’t. As long as we can see beyond our separations, we have the power to create bonds of love and affection, and that might just be the foundation we need.
Ross’s and my conversation features a blundering start to a rich and deeply impactful conversation about race, racial Capitalism, hierarchy, and relationships between human beings, and humans and the earth, and humans and what is unseen, the notion that many, excluding me, think of as God. None of this exchange would have been as satisfying as it all was had I not referred to the ghetto when our conversation began. We were more interested in relating than being right, and that was the thing.
I hope you will listen to this podcast, and even more, I hope you will tell me what you think of it. It was such a revelation to me to hear myself so lucidly delineate what I have now come to just accept is true. But at first, as I was listening, I said to myself, “I thought those things?” LOL.
After the pain I endured between then and the end of 2023, when things started to even out, so much of what my mind was wrapped around when I had the luxury of time to think about things, either had slipped my consciousness entirely, or became so absorbed by my evolving view of life outside the set of the status quo, that it’s become imperceptible.
In any case, as I told Ross, I do not tend to like DEI programming, both because I do not like being told what to think, and because of having been subjected to some really bad, shaming bullshit in the past. But that was because the woman conducting the reprograming was ironically speaking from the same hierarchical position that has hurt people of all skin colors for eons.
I understood her anger, and even her hypocrisy, but not her lack of introspection and wisdom, which had she engaged, would have helped her understand how little she actually desired to make the privileged understand and relate to her, and how much she actually wanted to punish people.
DEI gets tricky when the people in question haven’t ever done anything personally, but are a part of the oppression generally. I think this is why so many have celebrated Trump’s whack of DEI.
Ross seems to me to have great insight into himself and his motivations. These do not include punishing people, but embracing them with maturity and compassion.
In his method of DEI training, which I have noticed he has now cleverly and wisely started marketing as “equity ventures”, he is simply asking that you be willing to have a relationship with people you’ve been entrained to either look down upon or be suspicious of, or both.
If we’re willing to have new friends, and to be a friend in return, we will overcome any hierarchy, is one salient takeaway. That’s my conclusion anyway. As I put it in the podcast: you are not special. Get over yourself.
The problem is that, as I have learned first hand, to truly do this, one must face an existential crisis. If white people, for example, have been acculturated to believe they deserve more access to resources because they are better based on their skin color, it’s mighty hard to accept a different version of yourself. I mean, as Ross says, what is the alternative? Why would you want that?
There is more to it all than just not being an immature jerk, however. It’s that, as Ross and I discuss, we are all harmed by the constructs of hierarchy and racism. It’s part of a paradigm that keeps us separated, unfulfilled, distracted, angry, and in pain. It teaches us no option but to cannibalize the earth and ourselves.
And my ultimate conclusion is that this is not simply evil. It is not earthly. And it serves no one’s purpose who is actually human. Chew on that.
I do tip my hand to this in the podcast when I suggest that psychedelics, UFOs, and AI are three challenges to the idea that we have time to be so self-absorbed by our specialness and better-thans.
Meanwhile, if you are despairing because Trump has killed DEI, I think in listening to what Ross has to say, you will see that you can do DEI without the administration’s permission. Why do you have to wait to be kind? You can do anything without an authority’s permission, especially you can mature beyond it and live life without waiting for it. Easy, right?
Peace,
Whitney
