The grey scale between resilience and complacency
Since the contemporary attention drawn to #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) in June, I’ve noticed a cultural shift in my lab & department through the normalization of conversations around #EquityDiversityInclusion (EDI), and our role in supporting EDI in academia. It’s great to see and be a part of, and I’m grateful to be in an academic environment that is now engaging in these topics with less fear of “doing it wrong” (at least, sometimes). Have you noticed that kind of behaviour? Where instead of engaging, messing up, moving on, you find potential allies shy away from doing the hard work of listening, learning and unlearning for fear of not doing it right? Y’all, silence and disengaging is definitely “doing it worse”. But I’m not gonna lie, I couldn’t help but feel a seed of frustration in the flurry of anti-racism Olympics that happened after BLM protests this summer -being inundated with EDI literature doesn’t exactly feel helpful when you’ve been trying to get basic-level engagement from your own community up until then. Not to mention the problem of performative allyship that derails racial injustice progress. As a human on twitter once put it, “once again, absolutely no one wants resources from their bosses about mental health and self care. people want workload reductions, fair compensation, flexibility for caretaking, safe working conditions, etc” (credit to @imposterism).
Past experiences in academia of being gas-lit, or normalizing brushing off micro-aggressions made me feel like I wasn’t being “positive” or “cheerful” enough when confronting truly shitty situations. For example, the EDI office at my University was recently gutted -removing key community members & the valuable institutional knowledge they held; leaving, frankly, a crap, de-centralized “solution” that thrust unprepared, untrained people into new roles -unfair to them and the people they are accountable to. I remember feeling so brushed off when trying to explain to some of my colleagues the horrible implications of this move, and how the university could once again get away with being so blatantly hypocritical. I am doing a lot of unlearning from my socialization around “niceness”, and how optimism doesn’t always mean strength -an internalization women (and especially women of colour) are often indoctrinated into early in life. These reflections have made me realize I’ve been encouraged to “build resilience” from uncomfortable or immoral situations, by just… accepting them.
I don’t know about you, but constantly being told by external forces to do something you’ve been striving to do daily is, well, completely invalidating. It’s like telling someone repeatedly about how resilient they should be makes them question if they even have any left. And while I don’t think this harm is often intentional, it can be a by-product of “silver-lining” fueled toxic positivity, and I’m learning to better recognize these patterns. Telling #WomenOfColour to be more resilient totally ignores the real, lived experiences of their very existence of being BIPOC in STEM (i.e. the constant and unpaid/emotional labor of ignoring, educating, repeatedly asking, tactfully discussing, “being the bigger person”, angrily processing, and/or avoiding). I wonder, what I would spend my valuable time and energy on if I didn’t have to do all that?
But the more pressure I put on myself to discard cynicism and embrace “building resilience” made me question -at what point does resilience turn into complacency? When we encourage folks to build resilience, it could mean a variety of things. It could be celebrating someone doing a really hard thing, or getting through difficult circumstances. Or, maybe it’s encouraging healthy habits to cope with the highs and lows of life. But what if there are times where it’s harder to pinpoint, not so much encouraged as it is silently upheld? For example, the patriarchal white supremacist cultural norm not to disrupt, disagree, speak up -or heaven forbid to challenge “authority”. In these situations, is resilience “built” by putting up with bull-shit, keeping your head down, or not speaking up when it matters? Where is that elusive grey line and why is it so easy to slip by -especially if you’re someone that’s never had to question your own positionality? I’ve come to understand that my cynicism isn’t a weakness, it’s simply a learned behaviour to protect myself, and ultimately it can help me learn. When paired with my internal resilience, they both help me reach beyond the comfort zone of complacency into the growth zone of questioning, collaboration, and authenticity. And to me, that is Resilience.