Making meaning
A meditation on culture, inclusion, and change
When I started my consulting practice, I had the opportunity to give myself a title. I work in a variety of contexts and had a hard time identifying a title that would make sense for all these directions, so I stepped back to reflect on what is in common across these different strands. I considered “consultant,” but that felt awfully corporate. And I am, well, not (corporate). I thought about “principal,” you know, like principal partner of the firm. That sounded fancy, but I’d already served as a middle school principal, so that was, on the one hand, confusing, and on the other, deeply triggering. I needed to identify what was at the core — not just the core of the work I do but also at my core — and I recognized that, across it all, I’m most interested in and feel best equipped in making meaning. So I went with the next logical choice: Meaning-maker.
It’s been a rough summer. #understatement And if there’s ever a time to ask the deeper questions, to consider what is at our core and how we will navigate the road ahead, it’s now. I’ve been returning to old texts and reading new ones, in search of inspiration, consolation, insights, and a way forward. I keep coming back to a handful of texts and, while I don’t have an answer yet, they give me a chance to make some meaning out of my experience of the last year. Pausing to make meaning helps us to intentionally move forward, inoculated, at least for a time, from the divisiveness and tribalism that dominate right now.
Meaning-making refers to the process of interpreting and understanding our experiences. It enables us to respond to our experiences, and with each moment of meaning-making, we build a worldview, a set of operating assumptions about how the universe works and what we can or should expect in our lives. This sounds abstract and philosophical, but our worldview shapes every aspect of our lives and our relationships, even passing interactions, and it’s in the context of our worldview that we understand our impact on the world. We don’t have to agree on the nature of the universe or about personal ethics or anything in between. In fact we probably shouldn’t construct the same meaning, because we all look through different lenses, we’re formed in different places and by different relationships and experiences. We also don’t have to assume that the meaning we make will stick. It’s not forever — the meaning we make here and now responds to the here and now. It might guide us for a while, but as our experiences change, so will the meaning we make of them. Christian Wiman puts it a different way in My Bright Abyss: “if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived — or have denied the reality of your life.”
One approach to making meaning that I use frequently is called “finding a poem.” I identify phrases or sentences from different sources and juxtapose them in a way that opens the door to new insights, interesting contrasts, or conflicts that may not have been apparent in the text on its own. When I “find a poem,” I like to think of it as facilitating a dialogue between different voices and perspectives. Will that dialogue or the “found poem” hold the key to the future? Probably not. But it’s a starting point for something.
What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus…
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. from Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”
In early April, barely a few weeks into the global spread, author Arundhati Roy saw the devastation that lay ahead, but she also saw the potential. She looked around the world and saw once-unquestionable realities, like the evils that plague societies and oppress people all over the world, suddenly vulnerable. She looked to history to understand the experience of cultures rocked by pandemics, and these, the final paragraphs of her essay, capture her insight.
In the midst of this terrible despair,
it offers us a chance to rethink,
to break with the past and imagine the world anew.
I’m grateful that I came across this essay in April — it gave me language to understand what was happening in the world — but these phrases in particular have stayed with me because they remind me to hope. These words constitute a kind of mantra to remind myself that, whatever we’re going through, we can find an opening to reshape our culture.
I think about schools as laboratories for developing culture, and so Roy’s words brought me back to thinking about the role that schools can play in the coming years. The work isn’t just for schools to do — we all have a chance to rethink…but what do we need to rethink? How could we start to imagine our relationships, our culture, our world anew?
Inclusion that reinforces marginalization is not inclusive. Inclusion that is not complemented by efforts to have individual relationships is not personalization. from Glen Llopis, Leadership in the Age of Personalization
Glen Llopis sees the opportunity for change in the corporate world. In Leadership in the Age of Personalization, he describes a potentially seismic shift from what he calls the Age of Standardization to the Age of Personalization — from separating as tribes to connecting through empathy, from outdated metrics to a more nuanced understanding of success and significance. A key piece of this shift is moving away from a focus on “diversity,” which can be too easily reduced to quotas and tokenism, and toward “inclusion,” which is more of a disposition and a continual process than it is a box to be checked. The impact that he anticipates isn’t just social — it’s economic. Commitment to personalization will change the way people work, and its impact will be felt by individuals and reflected in the outcome of their work.
Inclusion that reinforces marginalization is not inclusive.
If we’re being inclusive, isn’t that, by definition, not marginalization? Not exactly.
My favorite metaphors are associated with food, and sitting with this sentence, one came to mind. One metaphor for inclusion is “a seat at the table.” So, metaphorically, when we make room for someone who hasn’t had a seat at the table, we think we’re being inclusive. However — and here’s where the food starts to come in — what about the menu? I might invite someone to my table, but what if she doesn’t like what I’m serving? What if it’s not her custom to eat my kind of food? What if she’s allergic, if what I’m serving will make her sick? Of course, I have the option to make something different for that particular guest, but have you ever been the person with the “special meal”? Sure, it accommodates a diner’s needs. It also puts her seat under the spotlight and really ruins the night because everyone has a different reason for explaining why they don’t understand that particular food restriction.
This is what Llopis is telling me — giving someone a seat isn’t enough. Inclusion, to return to the metaphor, isn’t just making room at the table. It’s reconsidering your menu. It’s thinking carefully about the ingredients and tools that you want to use in your kitchen. It’s intentionally adapting to the needs of your guests before you even invite them over. It means welcoming each other, fully and as we are.
We should not have a society where the value of marginalized people is determined by how well that can scale often impossible obstacles that others will never know. I have been exceptional, and I shouldn’t have to be exceptional to be just barely getting by. But we live in a society where if you are a person of color, a disabled person, a single mother, or an LGBT person, you have to be exceptional. And if you are exceptional by the standards put forth by white supremacist patriarchy, and you are lucky, you will most likely just get by. There’s nothing inspirational about that. from Ijeoma Oluo, So you want to talk about race
One of the most difficult things I’ve read this summer is Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race. Each chapter feels like a difficult but necessary and important conversation with someone who loves you so much she will tell you the hard truth. This excerpt, from Oluo’s discussion of affirmative action through the lens of her own professional experience, is as profound as it is cutting. In addition to providing critical insight into the myths and the lived experiences impacted by affirmative action, Oluo gives me words to start to clearly and directly describe the characteristics of a world I don’t want to live in.
We should not have a society where the value of marginalized people is determined by how well they can scale obstacles that others will never know.
As a teacher, campus minister, administrator, and principal, I had a first-row seat to the lives of a lot of students. The most painful experiences I’ve had as an educator included hearing students describe and process the ways that they had been marginalized just for being themselves — kids who were judged because of other’s perceptions and prejudices about the color of their skin, or because of their sexual orientation, or because of their physical ability, or because their brains were wired differently than their peers. It’s an experience I knew well, an experience that leaves you feeling totally isolated and vulnerable.
On the other had, the most beautiful experiences I’ve had as an educator included witnessing students recognizing the ways they hurt or exclude others and taking the steps to change their behaviors, seeing kids who once felt alone surrounded by people who took the time to know them, to hear them, to help them be their best selves. Those experiences reinforce my optimism — I’ve seen people change, I’ve seen authentic communities grow — and it always begins with establishing relationships where people start by seeing each other as people.
White body supremacy offers the white body a sense of belonging. It provides a false sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, of being part of something intrinsically valuable…there are other ways to belong and many other things to belong to. We can belong as family, as friends, as intimate partners, as neighbors, as countrymen, as fellow human beings. We will not end white body supremacy or any other form of evil by trying to tear it to pieces. Instead, we can offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to. Instead of belonging to a race, we can belong to a culture. Each of us can also build our genuine capacity for belonging. from Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem writes powerfully about understanding and finding ways to heal racialized trauma. In this passage, Menakem confronts something that is so abstract and so massive — what could I possibly do to understand, nevermind address, the problem of systemic injustice? — but he doesn’t just lob the message “change the system” and let you figure it out. He points to belonging. The solution isn’t just to tell people they’re racist or to abandon what they’re doing. The solution is to offer them a better alternative that fulfills our very basic desire to belong and enables us to create the world we want to live in.
…we can offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to.
When organizations promote their mission and vision statements, I take them very seriously. That’s how they tell us: here’s the world we want to live in, and here’s how we’re going to bring that world about. It’s typically a lot of buzzwords that are vague enough to mean anything, like a daily horoscope, but sometimes I stumble across an organization whose mission is compelling and points to a world I do want to live in. This line stands out as a kind of mission statement that I can adopt for myself but also as a standard to hold up for other missions. Underneath all the branding and good intentions, do you intend to — and do you really — offer people better ways to belong, and better things to belong to? Schools strive to do this, but schools, especially independent schools, are vulnerable to cultural trends and social pressure, often reinforcing unjust structures and assumptions, at best accommodating and at worst actively perpetuating worldviews that are characterized by exclusion, elitism, and all the other social “-isms” attached to them. For schools — really, for anyone really interested in whether an organization is ready to effect positive change, whether it is truly inclusive, whether it is really enabling the establishment of just relationships — Menakem’s phrase provides language for discernment: are we really offering a better way to belong? Are we really offering something better to belong to?
So out of this reflection, here’s the poem I’ve “found.”
In the midst of this terrible despair,
we have a chance to rethink,
to break with the past and imagine the world anewInclusion that reinforces marginalization is not inclusive
We should not have a society where the value of people
is determined by impossible obstacles
that others will never know.We can offer people better ways to belong,
and better things to belong to.
While this juxtaposition doesn’t give me a clear path ahead, it does give me a starting point: a starting point to assess my actions and my inactions and to communicate my priorities; a starting point to describe the world I want to live in and to understand how to build it; a starting point for listening to and understanding the people around me who may have found a different starting point or who imagine a different kind of ideal world, and a starting point for dialogue.
This brings me back to thinking about schools, which function as spaces where people learn how to belong to each other, where teachers and students collaborate to shape a world that reflects their needs and their values. Schools are successful when students know that they belong, when faculty strive to know them and let students know that, with the tools and ideas offered to them, they are powerful. This was the most important insight I gleaned from my early years teaching: when a child knows that she is loved, she becomes powerful, powerful enough to change the world.
It’s not just students, though, right? This is true for all of us. When we know we’re loved, we become powerful. What’s the old maxim? With great power comes great responsibility. I don’t presume to know what that responsibility is for each of us right now, but, if I’m really committed to imagining the world anew, to inclusion, to valuing people as people, and to offering new ways to belong, I need to give life to my belief that each of us has the power to make someone else feel like they belong. And that is a power to use very, very wisely.
*****
This is adapted from a keynote for West Sound Academy’s Fall Festival on 3 October 2020. Thanks to Barrie Hillman and her colleagues at West Sound for the opportunity to offer this reflection.
Works cited:
- Llopis, Glen. Leadership in the Age of Personalization: Why Standardization Fails in the Age of Me. GLLG Press, 2019.
- Oluo, Ijeoma. So You Want to Talk About Race. Seal Press, 2019.
- Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press, 2017.
- Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic is a Portal.” Financial Times, 3 Apr. 2020, www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.
- Wiman, Christian. My Bright Abyss. FSG Adult, 2014
