Racist Dystopia Now

A commentary on “Living in a Diverse Community” by Kat Kinkade
Posted by Eastern Hellbender on 5/25/2022

Recently, I decided to read Kat’s 1994 book Is It Utopia Yet in order to better understand the history of Twin Oaks and the ideological framework the founders of our community were operating under when they decided to launch into the project of world building. While reading, I came upon the chapter Kat wrote about diversity, which I have attached. Hopefully, if you read the chapter, you saw the glaring racism and it also makes you deeply uncomfortable that one of the primary founders of our community could so firmly assert the supremacy of her white culture and her right to white comfort. Bad :( Why am I going out of my way to drag a small book chapter that was written by a dead woman before I was even born? How could this be relevant? I am writing this in the hope that those who read this chapter and don’t fully see why Kat’s view is racist will be able to understand. I also want to use this as an example to start a boarder discussion about how many of our ‘non-violent’ values and emphasis on politeness prioritize white comfort over BIPOC safety. I know that Kat was one member here, and a long time ago. But I fear that we as a community have not gone out of our way enough to distance ourselves from these ideas. I mean, for co’s sake, we are selling this book in the front office. These racist ideas are proudly displayed as one of the first things you see entering Twin Oaks. Moreover, it seems to me that some of our members still agree with her views of diversity to some degree. At the very least, the views are still part of our policies and norms. Before I begin, I want to say that I am not out to attack any one. You may find it disrespectful for me to scrutinize one of our founders, but I will scrutinize her the same way I would a founder of our country. If you agree with what Kat wrote, I am not here to point at you and tell you are a bad, bad racist person. Racism is a problem all people with white privilege have to grapple with because we were all indoctrinated into white supremacy. White people are racist, including me. I am here to highlight a particular racist idea that manifests at Twin Oaks and is still prevalent in our culture and structures so we can start to move away from it. That said, reading this may not be easy. I am not taking it light on this one. I am not going to dance around my frustration and contort my words. And yes, I do drag Kat a bit. Sorry, not sorry on that one Kat.

Let’s just start from the beginning. Actually, let’s start with the chapter its self. It is six pages long, and the beginning is about ideological diversity, not race. So five pages. Well, actually, five paragraphs explicitly about race and then four more pages loosely about “class”. It is mind-boggling to me that anyone would think that you could give any justice to the complicated topic of race and diversity in community in just five pages. There are so many complex factors impacting why Twin Oaks, and the communities movement at large, have historically been so white. There are the economic advantages historically only afford to white people that gives them the privilege to flee society in the first place and try to make their utopias. There is a generally inability on the part of most of those white people to even think about needs of BIPOC people, much less actually take actionable steps towards accommodating those needs. There is the sacrifice of individual freedoms and identity for the sake of community that is often dehumanizing and exploitive when the relationship is between a BIPOC person and a majority white community. There is the fact that moving off to the woods so you can learn to live with other human beings is a need that white people feel much more urgently because white people have lost that ability, whereas BIPOC have had to retain it in order to survive in a white-dominated world. There is asking BIPOC who may have only gained economic stability in the last generation or two to forgo all of that for a white person’s notion of equalitarianism. I could go on and on. And yet Kat felt that she could somehow condense the issue of race, the issue laying at the center of this country’s divided, toxic existence, into five pages. In my utopia, the founder of our community would have written at least five long and deeply introspective chapter about the challenges and hopes of inclusion in community and would have ended by acknowledgeing the insufficiency of any number of chapters to give this topic proper care. I attribute Kat’s brevity to the white privilege that allows her believe that diversity and racism are just small details in the laundry list of community ideas that can be quickly breezed through. I also attribute it to the unearned confidence that accompanies that privilege. BIPOC do not have the privilege to think so little about race.

The next thing - how Kat addresses Ira’s criticisms of Twin Oaks. I kept rereading this section and I am unsettled by it in ways that were, at first, difficult for me to express. I like that Kat put the perspective of a black woman in this book and I also like that she did not try to deeply alter or interrupt Ira’s words for her (i.e., she didn’t assume that she knew what BIPOC want/think/feel or that she knows how to say it best for them). However, I don’t like how she just kind of leaves Ira’s comments floating there, just as Ira’s comments. It is too ambiguous. It could be that Kat thinks Ira’s comments stand for themselves and she wants them to be attributed to Ira. Or it could be that Kat felt it was necessary to include the opinions of a black person in her chapter on diversity but does not actually agree with those opinions and is happy to have the audience interrupt Ira’s comments as just the discontentment of one single black person and nothing to really be taken seriously. As with many things with Kat, it probably some complicated wash of both/and. In my utopia, Kat be would including Ira’s perspective and then have been a better ally by actually backing those comments, affirming her criticisms as legitimate and then described some of the systemic structural issues that have lead us to this point. Instead, if feel like Kat does not want to own that what Ira is saying is a real problem. Which is itself a real problem. Also, there is the line, “Ira fits easily into white society, and I would have forgotten her color years ago if she didn’t keep talking about it.” Well, I’m glad Ira has kept talking about it. Color blindness is still racism From there, we launch into the quote, “The Black candidates this Community is eager to accept are the ones who are just like the rest of us, only with darker faces”. Knife to the heart. This hurts so much, I cannot even express it fully. This sentiment is still largely true and I lay awake at night struggling to even find a way to beginning to address it. I fear that a significant number of us are still just hoping to paying lip-service to diversity and have just enough BIPOC here who don’t rock the boat that we can stop worrying about if we are racist or not. I am not sure how many of us actually want to let BIPOC people live here fully as themselves. There is no Black monolith, one way to be Asian or a certain thing all indigenous people do. We have BIPOC members who currently live in our community and there are many who have in past. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t asking most BIPOC people to mute part of themselves and that we aren’t limiting large numbers of people who would otherwise be very aligned with our values from staying here in the long run. Time and time again, BIPOC members have come and left with the same set of frustrations and criticisms. They came looking for solidarity and safety and instead found alienation and oppression. When I first came here, I was confronted with a message. Conform or leave. Yes, Twin Oaks is accepting of a wide range of different lifestyles and it is true that there isn’t much that we can agree on (even for a few very important things I wish we could all agree on, like being anti-racist). But we also have a pretty restrictive and narrow set of norms and policies around self-governance, communication, interacting, work, presentation and shared space, among other things. Unfortunately, all of these norms happen to also be very, very, very white. And Kat even admits that we are in no rush to make space for other people. She literally writes in the next section “We expect members to conform”. That is from her strange discussion on “class” in which she assumes all poor people are aggressive and crass (a topic for another paper), but this applies to expectations around race as well. She openly admits that we have built a “fence” around ourselves. Her message is simple: there is only one right way to be. We expect assimilation the same way white America as a whole does and it has the same devastating consequences. I think it is okay for a community to have a certain set of ground rules and values they expect people to follow when they come. But only if those values aren’t systematically disadvantaging large swaths of humanity and only if there is room for each individual to remain true to their self. But many of our norms, from our written culture to our cultural expressions, are based in whiteness with little room for negotiation. Which leads me to my final point, which is Kat’s final point. Kat concludes her insanely short discussion on diversity by relating a story in which the community attempted to take in a refugee family and then the community subsequently kicked out a refugee family because there was domestic violence occurring in the family. Kat says it was a “practical demonstration in worrisome cultural diversity”. Kat, this is worrisome. So a few things about this first. Why in the world did Twin Oaks think we could be a safe place for a refugee family? What white saviorism crap is that? Did anyone even speak their language? Did we just think it would be fun to have a family that had survived the trauma of escaping their homeland come to dinner with us? Why did we think that it would just work out somehow and that this would be a good way to assuage our white guilt? I wasn’t there for this and I know everyone involved in that decision was trying to do a nice thing. I can’t really Monday-morning quarter-back this. Honestly, I would have done the same thing if I were alive for it. But I cannot help but see the incident as a tragic paring of white exceptionalism and saviorism. White nonsense at its finest. Kat's conclusion, for some reason (cough cough, racism), of the incident was to jump to a discussion about politeness. She goes on to use the refugee incident to say that she would like diversity too, but not if it comes at the sake of being nice to each other and being polite. In her words, “I think that people who choose to live together need to treat each other well to the best of their ability. We can’t afford the social penalties that come from doing less. If that interferes with our diversity, so be it.” To which I would like to reply with a lot of profanity that Kat would not have liked. Here is how Kat could have concluded that story: She could have not included it and then just said ‘We are trying to figure out how to be more diverse here.’ She could have included it and said, ‘Wow, it sucked that ended that way. It is too bad we didn’t have the skills or resources to help that family better but in the end we aren’t professionals, and we cannot do much to help domestic violence. Our bad for thinking we could handle that. We are still very committed to inclusion and diversity but we have a long way to go.’ Instead she said, ‘We kicked out that family because we don’t like domestic violence and I know maybe that looks racist but I don’t care if it looks racist. I would rather be called a racist than ever change, ever’. (She is apparently very aware of how offensive this whole perspective is, saying she knows that people will call her “ethnocentric”’). This is not the conclusion that needed to be drawn. I think it is fair that the community draws boundaries around not allowing domestic violence, no matter who is perpetuating it. I don’t think we would have been able to help that family and I don’t know if I would have made another decision in that situation. But instead of admitting a mistake, Kat just dug her heals right in and drew a really firm line in the sand that I think shows how she actually feels. She is willing to let BIPOC live here as long as it comes at no discomfort to her. Honestly, my head reels to think why Kat wrote this chapter like this. Instead of actually addressing the real concerns that Ira and other people have been pointing to for years about why we are so white, Kat goes off on a tangent about the value of being ‘nice’ to each other. To me, it just seems like a white women being defensive and trying to protect her privilege. Frankly, the arguments she make are irrelevant to a conversation about diversity. I can’t understand what she meant by “some thoughtful and experienced members believe that the concept of diversity ought not be stretched to include bad manners, regardless of class origin. What they mean by desirable diversity is a colorful collage…all under the general umbrella of clearly understood and accepted norms of social behaviors”. Whose definition of accepted norms of social behavior? What values are you reproducing? BIPOC aren’t asking you to put up with abuse, unless your definition of abuse includes being called out for racism. BIPOC aren’t asking you to live in a hostile world that does not include kindness in interactions or social norms, unless your social expectations are steeped in white-supremacy and leave no room for them to exist comfortably.

Kat’s chapter is racist.
It is racist to assume that BIPOC wouldn’t be polite or be able to communicate in non-violent ways, which Kats seems to be implying in her statements. It is racist and a deeply insidious facet of white-supremacy to prioritize so called ‘politeness’ at the sake of BIPOC safety. White people are worried about having a nice, “quiet” place in the woods and BIPOC want a refugee from a world filled with police brutality and right-wing lunatics. One of those is more important than the other. What Kat is calling politeness is really a common ploy of white fragility. Politeness is so often used as a cover for suppression. It is impolite to bring up politics at the dinner table. It is impolite to call someone racist even when they are committing micro aggression against you on a daily basis. It is impolite to challenge me, a white person, for dehumanizing and belittling you regularly. And of course, Kat was overtly referring to the abuse situation. But to conclude her chapter on diversity by saying “so be it” to diversity, sends an alarming clear message to BIPOC about where they stood in her eyes when it came to Twin Oaks. Shut up and get out of the way or leave. At the end of the day, if you aren’t willing to move an inch from your worldview or have a small amount of discomfort so BIPOC can have a safe place to live, then that is racism.

In my utopia, we would understand that racism is the ultimate form of violence. We would agree that prioritizing “politeness” over the freedom and safety of oppressed groups is the rudest thing one can do. In my utopia, we would be okay with people being a little “rude” to people who are actively harming other people and helping uphold a system of oppression that has caused centuries of the worst human suffering ever experienced on this earth. In my utopia, we would be flexible, accommodating and welcoming to BIPOC instead of greeting everyone with a message of “this is how it is, take it or leave it”. In my utopia, we would look around and be deeply uncomfortable with the fact that we aren’t sharing the hoarded resources that our white privilege has granted us over the years. In my utopia, Twin Oaks won’t have the same exact problems as 30 years ago. In my utopia, all of us would read this and want to throw Kat’s book across the room in anger and disgust. But this isn’t my utopia, it is Kat’s.

Relevant Excerpts
From: Characteristics of White Supremacy in an Organization, Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, Kenneth Jones &Tema Okun, 2001. Several Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture Expressed by Kat:

Right to Comfort

• the belief that those with power have a right to emotional and psychological comfort (another aspect of valuing logic over emotion)
• scapegoating those who cause discomfort
• equating individual acts of unfairness against white people with systemic racism which daily targets people of color

Antidotes: understand that discomfort is at the root of all growth and learning; welcome it as much as you can; deepen your political analysis of racism and oppression so you have a strong understanding of how your personal experience and feelings fit into a larger picture; don't take everything personally

Only One Right Way

• the belief there is one right way to do things and once people are introduced to the right way, they will see the light and adopt it
• when they do not adapt or change, then something is wrong with them (the other, those not changing), not with us (those who know the right way)
• similar to the missionary who does not see value in the culture of other communities, sees only value in their beliefs about what is good

Antidotes: accept that there are many ways to get to the same goal; once the group has made a decision about which way will be taken, honor that decision and see what you and the organization will learn from taking that way, even and especially if it is not the way you would have chosen; work on developing the ability to notice when people do things differently and how those different ways might improve your approach; look for the tendency for a group or a person to keep pushing the same point over and over out of a belief that there is only one right way and then name it; when working with communities from a different culture than yours or your organization's, be clear that you have some learning to do about the communities' ways of doing; never assume that you or your organization know what's best for the community in isolation from meaningful relationships with that community

Defensiveness

• the organizational structure is set up and much energy spent trying to prevent abuse and protect power as it exists rather than to facilitate the best out of each person or to clarify who has power and how they are expected to use it
• because of either/or thinking (see below), criticism of those with power is viewed as threatening and inappropriate (or rude)
• people respond to new or challenging ideas with defensiveness, making it very difficult to raise these ideas
• a lot of energy in the organization is spent trying to make sure that people's feelings aren't getting hurt or working around defensive people
• the defensiveness of people in power creates an oppressive culture

Antidotes: understand that structure cannot in and of itself facilitate or prevent abuse; understand the link between defensiveness and fear (of losing power, losing face, losing comfort, losing privilege); work on your own defensiveness; name defensiveness as a problem when it is one; give people credit for being able to handle more than you think; discuss the ways in which defensiveness or resistance to new ideas gets in the way of the mission

Fear of Open Conflict

• emphasis on being polite
• people in power are scared of conflict and try to ignore it or run from it
• when someone raises an issue that causes discomfort, the response is to blame the person for raising the issue rather than to look at the issue which is actually causing the problem
• equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line

Antidotes: role play ways to handle conflict before conflict happens; distinguish between being polite and raising hard issues; don't require those who raise hard issues to raise them in acceptable ways, especially if you are using the ways in which issues are raised as an excuse not to address the issues being raised; once a conflict is resolved, take the opportunity to revisit it and see how it might have been handled differently

Tone Policing: From Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad

What Is Tone Policing? Tone policing is a tactic used by those who have privilege to silence those who don’t by focusing on the tone of what is being said, rather than the actual content. Tone policing doesn’t only have to be spoken out loud publicly. People holding white privilege often tone police BIPOC in their thoughts or behind closed doors.

How Does Tone Policing Show Up? It shows up when white people ask BIPOC to say what they are saying in a “nicer” way. It’s saying (or thinking) things like: I can’t take in what you’re telling me about your lived experiences because you sound “too angry”. Or your tone is “too aggressive”.Or the language you are using to talk about your lived experiences is making me feel “ashamed”. Or the language you are using to talk about your lived experiences is “hateful” or “divisive”. Or you should address white people in a more “civil” way if you want us to “join your cause”. Or the way you are talking about this issue is not“productive”. Or if you would just “calm down” then maybe I might want to listen to you. Or you’re bringing too much “negativity” into this space and you should focus on the positive. Or, or, or…There are so many direct and subtle ways that tone policing takes over, and it doesn’t just occur during conversations about race. Tone policing also occurs when you judge BIPOC for not conforming to white norms of communication (e.g. being too loud, using African America Vernacular English or speaking in ways that do not conform with Standard English, etc.).Tone policing is both a request that BIPOC share our experiences about racism without sharing any of our (real) emotions about it, and for us to exist in ways that do not make white people feel uncomfortable. It is also a demand that racism be presented to you in a form that is more palatable to you, and doesn’t make your White Fragility flare up.

Why Do You Need To Look At Tone Policing? Tone policing reinforces white supremacist norms of how BIPOC are ‘supposed’ to show up. It is way of keeping BIPOC in line and disempowered. When you insist that you will not believe or give credibility to BIPOC until they speak in a tone that suits you, even if what they are speaking about is true, then you uphold the idea that your standards as a white person are more superior. When you control the tone of how BIPOC are supposed to talk about their lived experiences with racism and existing in the world, you are reinforcing the white supremacist ideology that white knows best. It is also an insidious way of gas lighting BIPOC. When you insist that BIPOC talk about their painful experiences with racism without expressing any pain, rage or grief, you are asking them to dehumanise themselves. You are expecting them to detach themselves from the true feelings of what it feels like to be discriminated against and oppressed. Asking people not to feel what

they feel about their oppression and abuse is cruel and violent. You need to look at the specific ways that you tone police so that you can see the very subtle, often undetectable to you, ways that you reinforce white supremacy. When you can understand how you tone police, you can begin to change your behaviour so that you can allow BIPOC the full expression of their humanity.