I’ve been fortunate to facilitate and participate in diversity workshops and anti-racism trainings in which people have been brutally honest. There have been tears, strong words have been exchanged and people have asked for forgiveness and help to overcome their racism. This kind of openness does not happen easily at these kind of workshops and gatherings. It is painful, it takes guts to become vulnerable, to claim our complicity in the web of oppression. Many of us at these events lack the language and/or the nerve to do the hard work that take to uproot racism (or other destructive patterns and oppressive behaviors - heterosexism, patriarchy, colonization, male privilege and so on). Some rather deal with placebos and easy tasks that only mask the real problem. In spite of our self-congratulatory assumptions that we are beyond issues of race, the scars and the evil of racism still run deep through the veins of the Americas.
One common sugar-coated pill I constantly hear comes in the form of a seemingly inclusive metaphor: the “invitation to the table.”
“People of color are invited to the table.”
“If we want diversity, we need to invite some Latinos the table.”
“We’ve invited some African American to our table, but they did not want be part of it.”
“We want more women at our table.”
As open and inclusive as the table metaphor might sound, all it does is reiterate who is the owner of the table and who still have the power to decide whom to invite or dismiss. While we all might know what a table is, the concept on many of these conversations is based on the rectangular-power table, in which the head of the table is the one who control the conversation, who set the tone and agenda for the gathering.
We need new metaphors that convey a non-threatening, non-oppressive language for healing and transformative conversations and relationships. Some new concepts might be the one of coming around the fire for story sharing, the Natives People's Pow-wow, the Hawaiian Luau, the potluck…
We are in dire need of new alternative images in which everyone can come together to a place of respect.
What other metaphors would you suggest?
Eliacin
Your early posting asked "who owns the table." I continue to sit with that. Rather than invite others in, why don't we go out and BE with others for a long enough time that perhaps, just perhaps, other will invite us in. IF that happens, may we have the grace to step lightly over that threshold, to listen well, and receive gratefully. Who indeed owns the Table?
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