The American South antebellum had very few organised slave rebellions. What was common, though, was sudden flashes of violence: enslaved people who (to the best knowledge of the slave masters) were content with their lot would sometimes take an axe and murder someone, or poison the family that owned them, or some other drastic act of violence.
While poisoning one's superiors isn't quite so common in corporate settings, this kind of sudden flash of anger often comes up in the workplace: the hard-working woman on your engineering team who suddenly quits, citing a whole bunch of problems that you never noticed, the black guy who suddenly starts quarrelling with people about every piece of work that you do and the trans sysadmin who disappears without warning one day, leaving all your web infrastructure to go down... these all happen quite often in workplaces.
The most striking thing about situations of this kind is that the people whom this happens to are always surprised. They never register than anything's wrong until it's way too late, and when something does happen, they experience it as sudden, insane, irrational rage that came out of a clear blue sky. And then, they're so upset. These awful, terrible, no-good people destroyed their lives for no reason!
Corporate epistemology
So, why does this happen? It's my contention that the cause is mostly epistemic: people in power know things and think of knowledge in ways that leave minorities unable to know things, and the explosions are a natural consequence of what lurks in their blind spots. Moreover, in complex social structures such as corporations, this way of thinking about knowledge can be remarkably resilient to objective reality.
Now, obviously this doesn't mean that us minority groups don't have experience of the world that we can learn from, nor that we can't organise and articulate that experience systematically. In fact, we're often quite a lot better at it than the majority group or people who've assimilated to that group's way of thinking. Knowledge, however, is quite a bit downstream of what I've described above: for a social group to think of something as knowledge, there needs to be a broad agreement as to what it is to know something and what isn't knowledge, even if it looks like it. Figuring out what counts as knowledge in a given context is thus an empirical question as much as one of causal reasoning.
So, what do we find when we look at the average corporate environment? It certainly isn't that knowledge is built from evidence and reasoned discussion. By contrast, for the most part, what counts as knowledge in a corporation is what people with power say it is. These people are often completely detached from reality, call themselves "thought leaders" and suchlike, and are deeply, deeply privileged people. In a corporate environment, however, these people are insulated enough from the consequences of their actions that they can force an organisation to treat whatever verbal diarrhoea they spew as knowledge.
Moreover, the way your average corporation is structured creates a situation where managers, by virtue of their position, are more able to know things than people lower on the hierarchy. To give an example of how this plays out in practice, I was once asked by a manager to create an exhaustive map of electrical connection data for New Zealand by address. The way I was to do this was to get a "comprehensive" list of street addresses in New Zealand, and make 4.5 million API calls against an API that would return connection data for that address. Now, given that I've lived in a lot of rented homes in my life, often in shoddy and rapidly-built high-density housing, I obviously have the experience that this is a non-starter. Address data is simply not consistent enough, nor is it updated frequently enough or even the same across different organisations. This was never going to work.
Unfortunately, this experience and information that I have, thanks to my position in the hierarchy, didn't count as knowledge. Meanwhile, my manager, being the CDO of the company, had the clout and authority to make his vague beliefs count as him knowing something, which then allowed him to assert that view as institutional knowledge in a way that I simply couldn't. So, of course, I had to go and write the code.
The interesting thing comes when I attempted to implement the code: as I expected, we only managed to get a million or so sets of connection data, much of which was transparently garbage. This was documented and, from a technical perspective, it was obvious to me that we needed to try a different approach. However, when I presented this, it became clear that it still didn't count as knowledge as such, and that the CDO's vague idea still held more weight than actual, demonstrable evidence. It was made clear to me, in no uncertain terms, that my inability to make the CDO's approach work was a defect in me, and I was instructed to continue attempting to make the method work without changing anything. In this particular case, presenting evidence that went against what the institution decided was knowledge led to me being beaten down until my voiced experience conformed to the organisation's knowledge structure.
This is bad enough in and of itself. But it gets worse. The consequence of this is that people who a) look the most like the people in power and b) that say things that hew the most closely to what people in power say are held to know the most. This is a fairly standard human heuristic: people who meet expectations the most tend to be trusted the most, but that doesn't make it any less bad. First off, it means that minorities (almost never being in power) are always held to know less than people in the dominant group, meaning that their insights and experience are structurally devalued and leading to situations where we find ourselves trying to communicate important information over and over again, only to be disregarded. Secondly, it means that gaining power in organisations as a minority means that we have to toe the party line much harder than someone of the dominant group might have to: we have to hew closer to whatever idiotic party line's being peddled to make it seem like we're knowledgeable. Taken together, we have a situation where very specific forms of "knowledge" are the only types of knowledge to be widely accepted, and anything else will lead to you being sidelined. How could this possibly go wrong?
The violence of being denied the right to know things
So, what kind of effect might this have on a minority in a workplace (and a society) where the consensus decision seems to be that no matter what our experiences are, we are clearly incapable of knowing anything? We're denied economic and professional opportunities on this basis, and when we attempt to communicate our experiences in order to do our work well, we are all too often shoved down and pushed forcibly back into conformity. If we refuse to go along with this, we're pushed out of our workplace. Moreover, thanks to our established inability to know things, anything that goes wrong will be seen as your fault, right down to your inability to make everything work on whatever tiny income you scrape together to survive.
This is structural violence.
Quite simply, if we demand the right to be able to know things, we will be harassed, denied opportunities and eventually starved, made homeless and arrested. This is violence by any measure, and the only way to avoid it is, it seems, to deliberately avoid communicating what we know or claiming to know things at all. This is a fucking inhuman expectation to have.
But shouldn't these people just be more professional?
On some abstract level, perhaps we should. It'd be better for our careers and our professional relationships, certainly. Unfortunately, this isn't hugely relevant. If you create systems that consistently sideline people and do this to them, there will be consequences.
People have a finite tolerance for being disrespected and disregarded. It can sometimes be a very high tolerance, but it's always finite, and when exceeded, it always leads to negative consequences. Sometimes it means that people just check out and do bad work, but a few of us will tend to explode: usually the ones that are the most invested in doing good work, the ones of us that happen to the cleverest and the ones with the most self-respect. It's not nice by any stretch, and yeah... from a personal perspective, I would probably do better by not blowing up, but we can't always get what we want, can we?
The kind of rage that develops from spending years of your life systemically silenced, ignored and then blamed for failing to communicate the very things you actually did communicate is something that's very difficult to understand if you've not been through it. If not dealt with in some way, it will eventually consume you. And you fuckers are creating systems that do this to people on an industrial scale. Shame on you all.
But our DEI course said we have to listen to people's lived experiences! And we do!
"Lived experience" isn't the same as knowledge. What's at issue here is that even when you pretend to listen to our lived experiences and perhaps even introduce some token changes to "centre our experiences" or "respect our knowledge systems" or whatever fresh bullshit you manage to drag up, you still deny us the ability to know things in the same way that you do. You'll listen to our experiences, pat us on the back, patronise us a little, and then keep going as though nothing we said mattered. Even when it's a clear warning that if something doesn't change, really bad things will happen, we still end up ignored and then usually blamed for the resulting outcome.
Often enough this even extends to things that you'd expect to be a matter of technical expertise. The earlier question of whether you can use addresses to index electrical connections doesn't really have a huge amount to do with me being trans or whatever my other experiences are. It's something that I partially learned thanks to those experiences, sure, but it's also a very real, solid fact about the world that anyone with a brain should be able to understand. The fact that that knowledge was ignored clearly shows that you don't think of lived experience as knowledge. Quite simply, you don't listen to or learn from lived experience as presented in DEI courses: you just masturbate furiously to it while crying about how much we've suffered. Fuck you.
What does this mean for me?
This section was written a few months after the rest of this article: that probably explains the slight shift in tone
I've been thinking a lot more about these kinds of flashes of rage as I've been building out my own businesses. As those of you who follow me know, those flashes are things that I deal with on an infrequent but consistent basis. It's not a fun or productive thing to deal with: you do your best to be calm, collected and appropriate for the corporate world, but the bullshit simply builds up, and eventually I wind up snapping and saying something devastating, or, for that matter, publicly shaming a person on LinkedIn. It's usually a polite kind of devastating and aimed at people who at least somewhat deserve it, but completely destroying someone in that measured, inexorable way is probably more unpleasant than the alternative is. And then afterwards, when I have to confront what happened, I consistently feel like shit.
Now, hurting people is very much not in accordance with my values, so the fact that this keeps happening makes me something of a hypocrite. Now, it's true that in the immortal words of Dalinar Kholin, sometimes a hypocrite is just a person in the process of changing. But then, being the uncle of the king of Alethkar does help a lot with your truth being taken seriously. I don't necessarily have these options. Looking at the options I have to change how I behave in these circumstances, the first is to somehow stop experiencing those flashes of anger. I'm not sure that's actually possible: certainly, I can try and delude myself into believing the truth of the people above me, or at least into thinking that it must be valid, but knowing myself, this is highly unlikely to succeed. The other option is to simply mindfulness meditation myself into not experiencing anger in any meaningful way. This also has its issues: a large part of my identity and sense of self is bound up in working for justice and a fairer, kinder world, and well... if you eliminate anger entirely, it's very easy to stop caring. Anger, in so many ways, is tied up with care and the need to protect the things you love. Even in the case of some of the angry people that express bigoted ideas that I go off at, they've gotten it into their heads that my existence threatens something that they value deeply. Worst of all, ceasing to be angry entirely would mean not caring about the fact that people I care about are being badly hurt. I don't want to give that up, even if it would stop those flashes of rage.
So, changing the way I think to stop myself from losing my shit probably isn't workable. The second option might be to try and channel that anger more productively. I try and do that in my writing and my work, and perhaps with sufficient effort it will work: I might write more, build my readership and start consistently landing contracts, and as a result I'll have enough spoons and willpower to deal with all my anger productively. Right now, however, what I'm doing helps, but isn't sufficient: the flashes are less frequent, but they still happen. There's also the fact that I still don't feel as though I'm able to make much of a difference in how the world treats trans people (which is the marginalised group that I'm currently the most preoccupied with helping). I can make people aware of just how bad things are, and perhaps persuade some people to make their processes kinder to trans people, but that's a slow process.
So, stopping the flashes from happening internally is probably not possible, and channelling them more effectively is good but inadequate. The only option left is to change the environment: I've spelled out above how consistent repression and ignorance of very real injustice creates a situation where this kind of anger is more or less inevitable. Unfortunately, creating an environment for myself where I do less of this is difficult, and requires me to have money: the very thing which is made harder to achieve by virtue of me consistently blowing up at people. What a messed-up situation. Having more friends, doing more things and creating an environment where there's more of a community for us all to lean on can really help, and I am lucky, through this blog and other communities, to have a strong community that I can really lean on. My issue there is that very little of that community is in Hamilton, where I live. So, as much as the online community is absolutely brilliant, day-to-day I can still find myself feeling pretty lonely: not a situation conducive to isolation. I should probably move cities, but of course, that also takes resources. What's a girl to do?
I have no real answers to anything I've posted: just the fact that all of these things that need to change are tangled up in each other, and changing any one of them seems like a real challenge.
What does this mean for the corporate world?
One conclusion that I'm running into here is that the corporate world could really do with putting work into doing less epistemic damage to people. I'm not entirely sure how that's going to happen, given exactly how rotten the whole enterprise is, but it does need to happen. Obviously taking minoritised people seriously would be an excellent start, but I genuinely can't think of any interventions that might actually work.
One possibility might be encouraging minority groups to band together and share their experiences: this works to an extent, but the issue is that these groups all too often include managers from minority groups, and managers tend to be very good at adopting corporate truth. I guess that from my view, all I can do is keep saying things, keep writing and hope against hope that something changes.