Beyond Inclusion: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone
On September 27, Dr. Leticia Nieto led a racial healing workshop for the RCC community that carried participants through experiential learning across art-forms. By exploring stories, songs, poems, and metaphors we gain a better understanding in our bodies of the developmental strategy required to build inclusive environments - as individuals and communities. This workshop facilitated the movement of the group, as one participant named it, “out of left brain analyzing to right brain creating.”
Dr. Leticia Nieto is a coach, psychotherapist, and educator specializing in liberation and equity, motivational patterning, and evolutionary creativity. She is the author of Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Developmental Strategy to Liberate Everyone, an accessible analysis of the dynamics of oppression and supremacy that offers readers ways to develop skills to promote social justice.
View the video by clicking the image above
Or scroll down for takeaways from the conversation
Group singing, even on Zoom, is a great practice in remembering we are part of a much larger organism. We are more interdependent than we are distinct.
We sang these lines from Rebekka Goldsmith: “What if we all believed we belong, to each other we belong. I will stand with you. Will you stand with me too?”
“You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet ... I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is — we were made for these times. Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised since childhood for this time precisely.”
Community responses to this reading:
“Don’t spend your spirit dry by bewailing these times” - it’s easy to despair - pausing that
Wailing is valuable. Bewailing is not helpful - it’s getting stuck in wailing
Our task is to not lose hope
Tremendous potency in the pattern of how we come together - echoes and patterns
“Without the coincidence there is no story”
“There is potency in the pattern”
We are never in the community by accident
There’s got to be somebody in your community that you can’t stand - that’s when you know you’re in community
A group of people moving together with the same ideas is a cult
A group of people moving together with different ideas is a movement
Recognize the pattern and honor it, even as we recognize the gorgeous entanglement of our different ideas
Across generations there is a call and response - we don’t have to do all of this in our own body, but can do this collaboratively and collectively
Sacred convergence
What do you need to be present here?
This question is an intersectionality-informed orientation to disability justice, addressing the root of dehumanization
Any time you name what you need, you are liberating the space, because you make space for others to say, “I need that too”
Choice is the smallest unit of liberation
Don’t wait to be chosen. Choose.
Play with this in small ways - your choice of breakout rooms - simple exercise - invite someone to join you in a breakout room
Metaphor of the apple
core - power - seed - core of ourselves and our collective selves - universe
peel - status play - thin, always visible - high status moves and low status moves - posturing
meat - social rank - social assignments and “isms” live here
Metaphoric realms are more generative - they bring up multiple associations and connections, including Adam and Eve, Snow White, apple pie
How are you connected to the core and to your power?
Core includes all directions:
Down - groundedness
Up - cosmos and divinity
Out - accompaniment and community
Past and Future - ancestral and intergenerational
We all have people and practices who support this core power in us - role models, elders, colleagues, and ancestors - who have imprinted their wisdom upon us - given us templates, portraits, patterns
Through theatrical play, we can “interview” these role models inside ourselves - call upon and draw from this imprinted wisdom
Important skill when working with power and social justice - bring this skill with us into the work
In the case of an incident of racial aggression or harm there are several layers happening at once
Status-play confuses the issues - and status-play is happening all of the time
Layer 1: Who said or did what? Who failed to do what?
Layer 2: What are the social locations of the people in the incident? How do they differ in lived experience and privilege related to their age, disability, religious membership, ethnicity, racialization, social class, sexual orientation (do you know their sexual orientation? why not?), Indigeneity, immigrant or refugee status, gender identity, etc.?
The same action contains different meanings depending on who is carrying it out and to whom
It’s not about the size of the aggression, the absence of actions, or even the omission of certain groups or participants
It’s about the connection to rank
Human development and socialization
We all have parts that are completely embedded in the socialization that we received from birth
There are other parts that have begun to stir
And there are some that have experienced a de-centering from our socialization
Finally, there’s the possibility of relationship to society - we can start to see ‘supremacy’ and unevenness in every area of social membership. These are systemic, operate constantly
This concept comes from object relations theory
What is the journey that I am taking in relationship to rather than embeddedness in rank?
Creating inclusive environments requires looking at the core layer and the presence of supremacy in every aspect of our work
We must overcome the pervasive wish to solve the problem of oppression - and rather attend to the set of oppressive conditions, to counter them actively
Identify the source of power in communities and relationships
Brave spaces require going in with resources
Can more of us spend more of our time noticing how we can undo privilege? Yes!
Can supremacy itself become humanized? No, it remains mechanical and industrial. It’s a memetic structure that strives to survive by repeating and replicating like a virus. It only responds to being witnessed and countered
We CAN change our relationships to supremacy and privilege
We’re working to be counterers rather than carriers
“We must become the mentors that we are seeking. Is also dreaming us what it is that we are dreaming”