On Leadership and Power
“Leadership is the ability to face adversity.”
Bänoo Zan
I choose to live and speak openly regarding challenges that I have faced so far in life. To some people, this might come across as parading weakness in order to gain sympathy points, as much as this is a pretty severe misunderstanding of my speech on the matter. To be clear, I do not want anyone to go easy on me because I 1) have a uterus, 2) have survived periods of serious illness, or 3) am queer. Setting expectations low out of pity or the desire to protect does not help people become happier, stronger, or more capable. It infantilizes and encourages weakness. Infantilizing people is an insidious way of continuing to deny them personal development, dignity, and access to power. To me, this holds even for people who have characteristics that have been used as justification for targeting them: people of colour, women, LGBTQ+ folks, Indigenous Peoples, people with disabilities, and so on.
These people are sometimes vulnerable mostly because they have been systemically denied resources that other groups have received by default for generations. And sometimes we’re not even that vulnerable at all. For example, I am a queer woman with a long history of mental illness, but if I was ever an underdog in life, I don’t consider myself one now; I am a well-paid and highly educated professional at a prominent space company. I am also a landlord in a prime area of one of the world’s most expensive cities. How did I get here? It’s complicated. But it’s at least because I fought to get a higher degree in mathematics and got a great employment opportunity. How that all happened is a pretty good story, and I’ll tell it one of these days. It’s at least a story of how I found, created, or was shown/given resources and of how I worked hard to secure or make the most of them.
When people from the above groups ask not to be targets of violence or other discrimination, that’s very much not the same thing as asking for handouts or monumental gestures of kindness. I suppose that also happens, but my opinion is that it’s a relatively minor problem that we shouldn’t get hung up on when we’re focusing on helping the people who have reasonable complaints and requests. Those people who are asking merely for the absence of cruelty are asking for a fair shake—for the same basic respect, resources, and opportunities that people from the dominant social group (In North America for the past few centuries, able-bodied straight, cis white males) receive. And often they are asking basically-nice, able-bodied straight cis white men to take a careful look at themselves and their lives to evaluate whether they are actually helping to distribute resources constructively or whether they are just coasting on the status quo because they can.
There are lots of perfectly amiable such men in positions of power who might think or speak of themselves as being fair and progressive—but who then act in ways that contribute to maintaining the larger status quo of unfairness and social stagnation. An example is those who non-reflectively give jobs preferentially to people they know (who are usually also able-bodied straight cis white men), rather than recruiting on the open market. That’s not to say that this always results in a bad outcome or that in a given situation they are hiring an inferior person. I also fully acknowledge that, as individuals, men of that description face challenges in life of various kinds. The issue here is about scale and being mindful of how individual actions contribute to the whole. If deployed at the macro-scale, this hiring strategy reduces the chance that others at least as capable—who might also be Latinx, or female, or a non-native English speaker, etc.—receive access to resources and power.
There are many able-bodied straight cis white men who cannot hear any of this. Because it’s threatening. It’s threatening to deep-seated beliefs, threatening to world view, threatening to self-image, threatening to comfort and ease going about one’s days. For many people, accepting this message would mean a profound loss, even if I would argue that it’s a worthwhile one to undergo. It means accepting the possibility that you might have to answer to someone you’re “supposed” to have power over. That can be emotionally hard, and I get it. At the same time, there really isn’t a way to soften the ethical imperative here, as much as I’m tempted to try. But if I did that, I would be doing what I don’t want others to do to me: setting expectations low out of the desire to protect perceived fragility. In my own case, I don’t specifically dream of answering to, say, a trans woman of colour just for the sake of those attributes. But if a competent and talented person who comes along as my boss who also fits that description, I’ll be happy taking that as evidence that society is improving.
This is also a call for people from groups that have historically been targets of discrimination to lead with understanding and compassion. There is a Puritanical or intolerant bent to a lot of leftist dogma that demands punishment of those with (sometimes unearned) wealth, power, and other resources. There are those on the left who can’t hear competing or simply contrasting viewpoints, either. To me, that approach is also toxic and not a path to improvement. Able-bodied straight cis white men are not my enemies! I have many friends, relatives, and colleagues in this category with whom I have mutually rich and meaningful relationships. Hell, I’m married to such a person and appreciate some of the drawbacks of being in his position in society. Healing and constructive change are only possible through active relationship-building between people of different socioeconomic strata.
Simultaneously, there are strangers in the above category I would never get anywhere with because they’re not in a psychological place where they can listen. But there are many, many others whom I like to think of as people who aren’t my friends yet. I need to show those people where I and others are coming from with patience and kindness. I need to show them how to treat me, because (to focus just on gender, as an example), many men have been admonished in vague terms how not to treat women in the workplace or in the dating sphere, but they have not been taught what to do. By the same token, I rely on people who, say, live with a disability, to tell me what they need as individuals and a group. In return, I promise to listen and work with them to improve outcomes in their lives. And if I mess up, I promise to own that and change so that it doesn’t happen again. That brings us into a real relationship.
I’ll close by talking a little bit about how I think about leadership and power in my own life. For a long time, I had no interest in either of these prospects because my passions were so purely academic and artistic. These days, there’s a tension between those longstanding passions and the realization that I can’t both complain about how things are and rely on others to do all the work to improve allocations of resources and power in the world. I’ve internally excused myself from participating in this in the past by citing how far gays and women have come in North America in recent decades. That’s true, but there’s still a lot of work to do, and not just for the subgroups of humanity to which I “belong”. And isn’t it my responsibility to show others how intellectually strong women can be by focusing on my independent research? Maybe, but that’s not enough. How many other brilliant women are out there who aren’t being given a fair shake? And how many brilliant assholes have fouled up the world in various ways? (Don’t even get me started on Picasso, for example.) I could choose to rest on what might be my own exceptional success. After all, I’ve worked hard. Very hard. For a long time. But so have lots of other people, and so do lots of other people. I am excellent, but that does not excuse me. This is the standard that I want to see everyone held to, and so I need to submit to it. That’s also what leadership means.