Not all stories speak courage and color; some are silent self-protecting stories, and these stories also define “I belong!”
The year is 1984. In a small northern town in India, a little girl with her sister is sprinting down the street in the evening. She is late for her responsibility of bringing the milk, and she is eager to reach home as quickly as possible. About a hundred meters from her neighborhood, she is stopped by the two men on their bicycles. She is asked: What’s your name? Can you help us with this address while pointing to a scribbled word on their hands?
Being a girl and being out after sunset, this young girl knows why she shall not stop to answer their questions, and she shall locate the nearest safe house to get into.
Some more questions: Where are you going? Why are you running? Some more running.
That young girl was me with my sister. But this story is far from unique. I daresay that every girl in small or big town has her own version. Change the date. Change the town. Change the names. This story has been played out and continues to play every day in its ways. And not every time is the person “lucky” enough to have been in a safe neighborhood.
Today, we honor PRIDE when we desire an equitable, just, and inclusive world for ourselves and our children. We celebrate and embrace diverse facets like culture, color, race, country, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, and many more differences.
Of course! We need to stress differences because the failure to focus on different stories results in a failure to see our own discrimination and own biases. And one cannot fight what one does not see.
But we are missing something – the unconscious of the fact that when we come into spaces, we change those spaces, and very often, because of folks who are uncomfortable or fearful of what our presence means to them.
This is “the talk” that we need to include. The talk of sameness. The talk of self-protecting stories.
We all are more the same than different. The more we look within and know ourselves, the more we create space for others.
Home’s where you go when you run out of homes. ― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy.
For those who may say, How I see life is my story. How I got to my station in life is my story. But, the kind of space I take up and, before uttering a single word, how the consciousness of the fact about how folks in this space are going to react to me, my spoken words, and my embodied space takes over me is not only my story.
You may be thinking, “women aren’t the only ones who have been stopped for an unsportsmanlike intention.” That may be true. But what may also be true is that if you are a man, you have never experienced being interrupted in the board room because of your gender. Or It didn’t matter to you this much if interrupted because you embody a different story; you got a different version of “the talk.”
Had I not followed my parents’ advice on that evening in 1984, I would probably have had dangerous consequences. I take tremendous care not to break my girls’ spirit, but I want them to come home safely at the end of the day.
The way we all live and share our stories, we choose to be on a progressive or a conservative side of the system.
Finally, after much reflection, the question remains: what are “the talks” that we shall celebrate? Which talk is an urgent and necessary part of life in creating an inclusive world where everyone belongs?
Create space for every story – both the self-protecting silence and courageous call-out. If a courageous call-out is a beautiful tapestry of different colors, the self-protecting silence is the base thread underneath the unique tapestry.
We need to create spaces for both distinctions and similarities without generalizing them. We need to seek the balance of courage and contentment; celebrate the individual capacity to embrace and respect their connection with grace. We need to dispel the fear that feeds the discrimination.
Live “your story” with pride, and seek within; as Dr. Tiffani Jana says, “Awaken your inner Inclusionaist.”