Season 2 Episode 2: Power Imbalance and Progress (9/14/2021)

Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.

Today’s episode: some observations on the way power imbalances are ignored and how true progress is impossible without equity.

As we navigate the world, we interact with a lot of different people in a lot of different positions of power or authority. Students go to school and interact with peers, older students, younger students, and adults. Teachers go to school and interact with students, parents, and administrators. Employees go to work and interact with managers and interns and customers/clients. Sometimes your roles and the power in each role is clearly defined. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes you’re playing multiple roles at once and your actions are informed by the power dynamics between all of them. For example, I’m currently in a sort of student teacher position at a preschool where I’m not really going to receive any formal training, I’m just there to support the teachers. I’m not sure where I stand with parents, the assistant teachers, or even the students. I’m playing multiple roles without those roles being clearly defined. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! It’s both unavoidable and inconsequential, most of the time. Just part of the way our society is structured.

There are situations, of course, in which people would like to avoid thinking about or acknowledging these power dynamics, even when they’re very important. Think about your boss who wants to be casual and fun with all the employees, or your cousin whose partner just got a much higher-paying job while they’re a student working entry-level. Think about that professor who goes by their first name and explains how he’s become disenchanted with the way that we evaluate and grade students, but you both know that he’s going to have to grade you anyway. Think about a really positive, open discussion with a person in power, maybe a politician or a high-level college administrator, about problems you see and ways to fix it, and knowing that when you both walk away, you’ll return to your problem and they’ll return to their bureaucracy, and probably nothing will come of it. Is that too pessimistic? Sorry, that’s unlike me. That’s what the podcast is for. Call it like you see it and maybe we can make some change.

I’ve thought about this before, but I’ve been thinking about it more recently because of a conversation a group of students had recently with the provost and staff at the work office at my college. The broad topic of our discussion was labor, specifically the ways we value and reward different kinds of labor. I wish I could remember what it was that set my mind in motion, but something came up where someone commented, “hey, we’ve got the provost here, make it happen!” and he agreed enthusiastically and we all sort of laughed about it, and in my head I saw visions of students going home excited about working and talking to faculty and making change, and the provost going home to chuckle and think things like, “I wish I could change it, that’s just the way things are.” I spoke up, said something along the lines of, “hey, he’s joking but we should actually do that,” but I think it got lost in the jumble of noise, which is okay. I have a habit of taking really small ideas and running with them, which is probably why I can’t remember what this conversation was about, but what sticks with me now is how quickly I determined that the enthusiasm and approval of the people in charge was false. This isn’t to say that they were lying, because I have no real idea, I just mean that in the moment, I judged their tone and demeanor as joking, not serious.

I’ve seen this happen a lot, or at least that’s what I think I’ve seen. People, especially students and young people, do strong advocacy, call attention to problems, and successfully get people to listen and talk to them, but from there, it stops. Because we can have all the conversations in the world, but when it comes down to it, the people in power tend to listen to and work with other people in power, not anyone else. A student can call attention to a huge problem, have conversations with related authorities, and come up with a plan to fix it, but we’re not included in the follow-through. And maybe there is a follow-through! Maybe things change! Maybe progress happens! But change takes time and the state of being a student is inherently transient, so if there’s change or progress without involvement and communication with the community, how is anybody supposed to know? I’ve seen schools and organizations make announcements of new programs and changes without acknowledging the students and other contributors who made it happen, which makes it incredibly hard to trust that they’re actually taking input, not just inspiration, from students. This goes for organizations with POC and disabled people and LGBTQ+ people as well: when you’re making change, take input, not just inspiration, from the people who called for the change to begin with.

My college in particular talks a big game. It’s a great marketer. But in the words of a peer, “this school ain’t shit,” specifically in regards to racial justice. They keep up appearances. But it is not a pleasant place to be if you are not white. Why would it be? The administration of the school is majority white. Equity is threatening. But diversity is not, or at least “diversity” in air quotes. They can hire one or two people of color. They don’t treat them fairly or equitably. Those people quit or stay quiet. The white administration’s power is preserved. True equity is a threat, so they have no motivation to move towards it. That’s white supremacy’s biggest tool, isn’t it? Make racial justice inconvenient, and it’ll never happen. It’s convenient for my professor to add readings about critical race psychology to my psych homework, but it’s inconvenient to analyze the rest of our content and address the racism within it. It’s convenient to talk about how psychological experiments have mostly only tested wealthy white men and then had their results generalized to everyone, but it’s inconvenient to talk about how Abraham Maslow plagiarized his famous hierarchy of needs from the Blackfoot nation and flipped it upside down to fit European individualism. Because it’s convenient to add new things, and inconvenient to change old things.

The biggest problem I see here is that all the people who want to do the hard work and change old things AND add new things are the people without power to make it happen. That power imbalance isn’t inevitable. I use educational settings as all my examples because it’s the world I live in, so bear with me, but you can generalize these concepts to other organizations or entire societies where some people have less power than others. Students don’t have power in academic institutions, but they could. Student governments could be allowed to send representatives to administrative meetings. Student labor unions could be supported and listened to. After major declaration, students could have input on the event planning, hiring, and academic/field work requirements of their department. Undo the hierarchy, uplift the downtrodden, practice equity.

Hierarchy. I just finished a series of books by Octavia E. Butler, the science fiction/afrofuturism author, in which the hierarchical behavior of humans was one of the central conflicts. She called it the human contradiction. We’re immensely intelligent, and we waste that intelligence fighting over places in artificial hierarchies. We couldn’t work in communities for the benefit of our species if our lives depended on it. Now, I think that’s a fatalistic perspective, but it was a series of novels, it had to be fatalistic to have a compelling plotline. But I think there are elements of truth to it, or elements of honest observation. Societies without leaders are nearly unheard of. Societies with leaders are full of conflict about that hierarchy. Caste systems, new and old. Inequality and class distinctions are nearly everywhere. They weren’t always. Many of the Indigenous societies in North America had leaders but not the same social hierarchies. But they had some, of course. They’re human. But only thinking about modern societies, I can’t actually put my finger on one that truly prioritizes socioeconomic and legal equality. It’s like we don’t trust each other enough to live in communities. We see climbing social hierarchies as self-preserving behavior. We see helping others as an unnecessary kindness, not as an obligation to the health of our community. Which is why, I think, our communities in America are so unhealthy. We’re sick with hatred, and with narcissism, which all too often is the same thing.

The upside to all of this is that, contradictory as humans may be, we’re also optimistic to the end. At various times, I may feel despair about the inequalities and the injustices and the power struggles that make up my society, but despair is not motivating. Despair does not cause action. Anger and hope and ambition and confidence and optimism are motivating, do cause action. There are students stepping up and demanding power and change. The Black Student Union. The Indigenous Student Association. The Latinx Student Collective. Supported by white students in SURJ – Standing Up For Racial Justice – whose goal is to deconstruct their own whiteness, use their privilege to spread the word about events held by the other clubs, and advocate to faculty using voices that aren’t historically silenced. They won’t do any good until the administration decides to step back from the bureaucracy and actually listen, but we’re making progress in that direction. True progress is impossible while there are still so many people who lack power and voice, but if we can get more people more opportunities to speak and act, then we’ll be heading in the right direction.

Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. Be sure to follow this podcast wherever you listen so you never miss a new episode, and you can follow me on Twitter @FastFactsPod for various updates. Transcripts of every episode are available at www.fastfactsforgenz.wordpress.com. This is Callie, signing off.