LOU ANN BLAKE: We're also going to have a quick announcement from President Riccobono.
MARK RICCOBONO: I hope everyone is enjoying the symposium. So much great conversation and content. I'm really thankful to everybody who's here. I just wanted to jump in really quickly because sometimes during tenBroek, interesting and exciting things happen. And you may know that for really since the beginning of this symposium, Lou Ann Blake has been our chief coordinator, pusher, puller, making everything happen! And you may or may not have known that today, the daily record announced its top 100 Maryland women including Lou Ann Blake for 2021! So I wanted to jump in so congratulate Lou Ann in front of the entire symposium and thank Lou Ann for her leadership and mentorship work and especially around the symposium. Since that came out publicly today, I thought it was fitting to make sure that this group knew it! Thank you very much! And enjoy the rest of the symposium.
LOU ANN BLAKE: Thank you, President Riccobono. I really appreciate that. It is an honor. A lot of great women including Betsy who used to be executive director of what was then called the Jernigan Institute. I appreciate that.
Nicole, do we have Cathy yet?
I don't know.
MILTON REYNOLDS: I'll call her really quickly.
LOU ANN BLAKE: Thank you, Milton.
To get this lunch film started, we have Jasmine Harris who is a professor of law and Martin Luther King Jr. research scholar at the University of California Davis School of Law. Jasmine is also a member of the tenBroek symposium steering committee. So thank you, Jasmine, for joining us and the stage is yours. (No audio).
LOU ANN BLAKE: Jasmine, you may be muted.
JASMINE HARRIS: Can you hear me now?
LOU ANN BLAKE: We can hear you now.
JASMINE HARRIS: So sorry, guys. I forgot the brilliant thing I was going to say during the pause. Thank you so much for the introduction. And I'm delighted to also congratulate you on that honor of being named one of the top women in Maryland! What an honor to actually be so named. I wanted to thank you and to everybody in the symposium, it is phenomenal. We wanted to say thank you. As Lou Ann said, my name is Jasmine Harris, a professor of law at the school of law. On behalf of the steering committee, I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our next session and perhaps the most popular session. Lunch and a movie! I also have the pleasure of introducing today's brilliant facilitator, Dr. Catherine who is a professor of history at the University of San Francisco and the director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability.
I'll simply offer a few comments about Mr. Kudlick.
(Audio difficulties).
JASMINE HARRIS: She spent more than two decades at my university now, the University of California Davis. Catherine Kudlick will head this conversation on the importance of intersectional accessibility in activism. As we engage with this film, consider that intersectionality means in all of the work we do each day.
Intersectionality is not a thing but a practice, not a way of just seeing the world but a way of interacting with each other.
With those brief remarks, I'll past the mic over to Dr. Kudlick. Catherine, can you hear me?
LOU ANN BLAKE: Cathy, are you there? We can't hear you.
It looks like we lost her.
LOU ANN BLAKE: Hopefully she'll be rejoining us.
I know she was having computer challenges yesterday.
LOU ANN BLAKE: Stacie, I don't know if she could call in.
I sent all of the information.
It says she is waiting for host.
Is she in the wrong room?
She's not showing up on our list at all.
LOU ANN BLAKE: While we're waiting for Cathy to rejoin us, we can thank our sponsors of the 2021 tenBroek symposium. At the gold level, we had Brown, Goldstein & Levy. We had Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld. At the silver level, we have The Digital Accessibility Legal Summit 2021.
MILTON REYNOLDS: She says she's waiting for host. I did just send her the link.
LOU ANN BLAKE: She must be in the wrong room.
MILTON REYNOLDS: One of the things that I think Cathy was hoping we might do to start this out as a way of gaining some connection to the conversation that started yesterday around indigenous communities and thinking about which land that we're on. I just popped in the chat a link that if you enter your ZIP code, you can identify which land you're on. She was using that as a way of sort of thinking about what we're not seeing and how the process of not seeing is linked to these challenges we are all facing as a community around disposability and dehumanization. Let's see if she's back in again. Let me communicate with her.
LOU ANN BLAKE: Also at the silver level, we had, in addition to The Digital Accessibility Legal Summit 2021 organized by Chris Law, we also had Derby, McGuinness & Goldsmith LLP and Pearson. At the bronze level, we had AARP Foundation. American Bar Association Diversity and Inclusion Center. Burton Blatt Institute. Law School Admission Council. Rosenberg Martin Greenberg LLP. Whiteford Taylor Preston. At the White Cane level, we have Disability Rights Advocates, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. Goldstein Borgen Dardarian & Ho. And the law office of John F. Waldo. Thank you so much to all of our sponsors. You all make it possible for us to put this symposium on. Do we have Cathy?
MILTON REYNOLDS: I think it makes sense to show the film now.
LOU ANN BLAKE: I agree. Will, can you please play the video for us?
[ Hayden Kristal Video ]
I'm kidding.
Okay, I'm going to voice my presentation today. They let me know beforehand that most of you have a pretty significant sign language impairment, and I just want to tell you I think you are so brave for coming here today, and it's so good to see you out despite your impairment. You are inspirations to me.
So I start every workshop that I do that way with that sign language fade in, and I do that for two primary reasons.
The first reason is that if I get up here on stage or if I'm speaking in front of a big group and I get really nervous, nothing calms me down, nothing centers me, like looking out into a sea of faces just doe eyed with terror. I've established dominance so I know today is gonna go great for me.
And the second reason I do it is because hearing people, particularly hearing people for whom English is a native language, most of you will never have the privilege or have never had the privilege until today to walk into a space, particularly a space like this one that is predicated on progressiveness and equality and a free and open exchange of ideas, and because of the circumstances of your birth and your genetic makeup, and because of the circumstances of your education, you've been completely unable to participate.
And so even though I just made you sit through that for a couple of seconds, every single one of which I enjoyed immensely, I want you to take that feeling and I want you to hold on to it for the duration of this talk. Deal? Fair? All right, then we can begin.
My name is Hayden Kristal, and I am a deaf, bisexual, transgender Jew, but I'm lots of other things too. Right? I am not just those four descriptors. You cannot just give those four descriptors and get a whole idea of who I am. I am white, I believe Sherwin Williams calls this neon white, if this is a shade that you're interested in. I'm an American, I'm 22 so I'm young, I'm a former Miss Teen Utah. That's not really true. I had to get you back on my side after I pulled that sign language trick at the beginning.
But so, I'm so many things, but not—what's so amazing about humanity is that we are all so many things. None of us are just one thing, right? We are these amazing, rich, multifaceted, three dimensional compilations of our experiences and our identities and our environments. And that's amazing.
But each of us finds an identity, one of those labels, that we connect most strongly to, and I think for most of us that's the identity or the identities that we navigate every day, the ones that we have to think about the most. And so for me, those are the identities that I listed before: I'm deaf, I'm bisexual, I'm Jewish, and I'm transgender. I don't have to think about my whiteness every day. When I enter a space I don't have to think "am I going to be put in an uncomfortable position, am I going to experience pain because of my whiteness? How am I gonna have to negotiate that? I don't have to think about that every day but I do have to think about how am I gonna navigate the access barriers because of my deafness? How am I going to navigate prejudice and bigotry? "Can I use this bathroom" is a topic that's been coming up a lot lately. Will I be arrested if I go into this bathroom?
And so we spend a lot of time thinking about these identities and for some of us this creates activism, it creates a desire to change that, so that people the future don't have to think so hard about it. And that's great but the problem with activism I think in a lot of capacities is that we tend to get blinders on and we tend to focus singularly on that identity that we are navigating, and we can forget some of those identities that we don't think about much. And that can create problems.
So when I started college, as you do, I got very interested in activism, both LGBTQ and disability rights activism, because those were things I was thinking a lot about and those were experiences that I was having, and I want to change those and create a better environment for the people who would come after me.
And so I thought, you know this is great! Both of these groups, LGBTQ rights activists, disability rights activists, both of these people are organized groups and they're moving towards legal protections and societal changes and changes in systems of power and prejudice to empower people and they'll connect and it'll be great and it'll be like when all the Transformers get together and they make like the big Transformer and will be like a mega liberal and it'll be great! Not exactly what happened.
In hindsight it's like looking back and saying all these Christians believe in Jesus, they'll get along. Historically very much not been the case.
A common goal or a common value does not necessarily an ally make, and in fact, kind of counter intuitively, the place I experienced the most bigotry and maybe not even bigotry but the most—the place I have to think about the most, think about navigating particularly my deafness the most, is within other spheres of activism, and for me particularly LGBTQ activism. And I've had a lot of time to think why that might be because it's a very, very counterintuitive that I would go into this place and be met with so much resistance when I ask for providing a change or an interpreter or captioning or wheelchair access.
So I've had a lot of time sitting quietly through uninterpreted keynotes and through uncaptioned movies to think about why that might happen. And my theory is that it's really, really difficult to admit that you might be causing the same kind of pain that somebody else has caused you. I know that because when somebody tells me that I did something racist, my first reaction is no, right? I don't want to think that I've caused somebody that kind of pain, especially because I know what it feels like to be discriminated against. And that's a huge problem in and of itself because it creates these walls, it creates this isolation, and it makes it way easier to just say "no" and to push the problem aside than it does to change it.
So, people who live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, but for the sake of today I'll just speak from my own experience, we're going to talk about LGBTQ and disabled identities, face a different kind of oppression—they face suppression from identity A, B, and then the intersection of both of those identities. I'll give you an example. Let's say, imagine for a second that I am a deaf transgender person just take a minute, visualize.
So according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 41% of transgender people will attempt suicide. So to give you an idea the national average is about 4.6%, and just for the sake of a visual, I'm not gonna count but let's just say everybody from the you, onwards. And I'm gonna go ahead and step to this side of the line, because I think it's important that I be real and honest so you know that these things happen and that they matter, it's not just a hypothetical.
Let's say that I'm a deaf transgender person, and I've been victimized for my transgender identity, and I go out and I find a best therapist I can possibly find, and she's only done a gender identity issue so it's the only thing that she works with and she's an expert and she's a pro and I show up to that meeting and I get an interpreter because I want to express myself in my language and that interpreter either consciously or unconsciously has a bias against transgender people. All of the information in the room is flowing through the interpreter—all of my thoughts, all of the therapist's thoughts are going through the interpreter. Do you think that the interpreter's bias consciously or unconsciously would color the information that's flowing through that room? Probably.
I have a really good friend who has cerebral palsy, he uses a power chair, and he's a gay man. So my friend uses attendants and he uses, you know, people who come in and help him do things like everyday tasks that are difficult for him, something like changing clothes or bathing or going to the bathroom and those things aren't necessarily sexual but they're intimate and my friend is an out and proud gay man so do you think if one of his attendants come and is a homophobic man again either consciously outright or even just in quiet ways, do you think that's going to color the kind of care and the quality of care that my friend receives? Absolutely.
So we've established that not only are LGBTQ people with disabilities vulnerable at identity A and vulnerable at identity B but they also face a specific kind of vulnerability here at place C. So we have all these extra issues and all these problems coming in and then that's compounded by the fact that the resources we have available are often not accessible. So over the past five years that I've been really involved in activism, I have seen amazing mind blowing changes in the resources available to LGBTQ people. It blows my mind and it makes me so grateful that people aren't going to have to struggle to find the help that they need, but the problem is if the resources are not accessible to the people who live at the intersection of those identities, they may as well not exist.
So I have a blind friend who is bisexual and she wants to go in and she wants to read a book or a pamphlet about coming out to her parents, which she knows is going to be hard, painful emotional experience for her. If you were that person are you going to want to go in there pick up a pamphlet and ask a stranger "will you read this to me?" Probably not.
So that person has two options, they can either just go and they can fight and they can, you know, ask for changes and if they're met with the resistance because again it's easier to just say no I'm not doing that, I'm not making that mistake, I don't need to change my behavior because it's hard to admit you're causing pain, so they can fight that battle or they can do nothing, and I can tell you as somebody who's been on this side of the line at that point in my life when I needed help the most I didn't have the emotional fortitude, I didn't have the mental energy to go and to fight a battle that's already been won. And so those people will just not get help, and so these resources that we have, these tremendous resources may as well not even exist.
And I know I'm being kind of a Debbie Downer right now, and I apologize for that. I'm not like this at parties. So I'm gonna, we're gonna move into something a little more positive because I think there is hope for this situation because I think the solution is actually really easy.
I am someone who has faced a lot of discrimination, a lot of bigotry, a lot of prejudice, and I firmly believe to the core of my being that 99% of people don't go out, they don't set out to go be bigoted. They don't set out to go hurt someone's feelings. They don't set out to go, you know, I'm gonna ruin someone's day, and the 1% is me most of the time. I'm not a very nice person, and the person on the end of that is usually my little sister, so I think that the vast majority of people go out and they try to do good.
I think that bigotry is applied ignorance, and I see proof of that everywhere. How many Republican congressmen and senators have we had who are staunchly against gay marriage, and then their kid comes out and all of a sudden, it's not a partisan issue, it's just the right thing to do. They learn that gay people weren't terrifying monsters, most of us, weren't terrifying monsters who were setting out to you know steal their children away to dance half naked in a pride parade, right?
Once you learn something once, you can change the behavior. So most of you don't have to think about your ability every day, right? We talked about that the beginning, right? You're still with me, great! So most of you don't have to think about your ability, most of you don't have to think about navigating places through the [experience] of somebody who's working around a flawed system.
And so, why would it come up to you if you were planning an event like this if we've never had to think about it, why would you think, is this wheelchair accessible? Should we have interpreters? Is the material large print, is it Braille? Why would you think about that, right?
So I think that most bigotry is just this little bubble of ignorance and if we can just pop that bubble then I think things will really start to change because you can't change what you don't acknowledge, and I love that line because it's a line I stole from Dr. Phil, and every time I say it everybody looks like "yes, yes!" and in my head I'm like that's Dr. Phil, so everybody can stop making fun of me for my after school hobby all right? But you can't change what you don't acknowledge.
So now because we've talked about it today, you all no longer have an excuse. You know now the bubble of ignorance for this room have been popped, and in big ways and in small you are the leaders of the community. Maybe you are the boss at your job, maybe you have children, I'm sorry if you do. I'm kidding. You know, maybe you're just the loudest voice in your friend group, but in big ways and small you have the ability now that your bubble has been popped, you can go pop that bubble of ignorance in other places and create access to spaces that weren't accessible before.
And that's the important thing, and that's the message I want you to take away from this today. I want you to be able to go out and use the empowerment that you feel in those spaces and then use your voice of privilege, the identity that you don't have to think about, to pay forward that gift of empowerment to other people.
Thank you guys so much for your time.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Cathy is with us. The third dial in number, the 510 919 9106 is Cathy. Looks like she's currently muted.
She will need to do star 6 to unmute your phone, Cathy. I just shared that. Hopefully she'll be in shortly.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Can you hear me? Can people hear me?
MILTON REYNOLDS: Yes, we can.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Excellent. Thank you. Thanks for your forbearance and patience. I heard a lot about what happened with the film. I'm sorry about the technology. I guess we can't live with it and can't live without it. Thanks for bearing with me.
Milton, I'm going to launch into some of the introduction we talked about and then get people to talk about the film. How's that? We switched our order a little bit.
To introduce me a little bit. I'm Cathy Kudlick. I'm visually impaired/blindish person. And I'm really excited to be part of this symposium. I think it's great that we're moving forward. I'm a professor of history at San Francisco State University so I think a lot about history and the role and impact of history which is one reason I really appreciate Milton's intervention about eugenics and that important history that's part of what we know. Or what we need to know, I should say. That historians know but that everybody needs to know.
I'm director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State and we're advancing conversations about disability to highlight ingenuity, creativity and cultural richness that comes from putting disability and conversations with other forms of identity and being LGBTQ, race, identity, things like that. So it's really — really important to show the cultural side because that's what gets the wheels going and gets people in a soft spot which is really important because people are open to culture and cultural representations.
So we ran the disability film festival. Check us out. LongmoreInstitutessu.edu. One of the great joys I have is running a lot of these programs that are at the intersections. They're conversations. We have student fellows, things like that. We also have a fabulous advisor council and Milton here is one of our members. In fact, he's vice president of the advisory council. I'll let Milton introduce himself and say a little bit more about the film and then we can launch into a discussion of the film as we planned.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Thank you, Cathy. Just for everybody, I did just drop a link in thinking about the film we just watched, please consider how understanding intersectionality will make us better at what we do. I'll make it brief so we can move to conversations. One of the things that I offered up yesterday — let me put my camera on. Sorry about that. One of the things I'm hopeful is that what we offered up yesterday in terms of eugenics might offer another way of viewing the world in the same way that intersectionality opens up a possible new world view. That we see things in relationship to each other, not abstracted from each other.
Eugenics, for me, has been the frame work of ideas that I've been able to stitch together which were disconnected ideas but stitched them back together in order to understand the ways in which patterns of inequity are rooted in these ideological commitments that are deeply seated in our national identity.
For me, it is a way of re claiming the ability to see the world for what it is and I'm hoping that I've piqued a little bit of curiosity because it is consistent with understanding how intersectionality works and is recognizing that there is a history that imposes these notions of disposability on different groups by asserting that this hierarchy that we see in society or the hierarchies that we see are rooted in natural biological or cultural norms rather than political and policy positions.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: The one thing I want to build on what you said, Milton, was that disability just such intersectionality are works in progress, we're trying to work through understanding these relationships. As a lot of you have known if you've been coming to all of the sessions this year at the tenBroek symposium, you know there is a lot of learning to do. There is a lot of passion. We might not always know what we're learning and we might be a little uncomfortable with it. But when I'm teaching, I think that a little bit of discomfort is where the learning happens.
If you acknowledge there is a little bit — I've still got stuff to learn, that's opening a development you're not always going to feel comfortable with things. I feel like if we're just coasting along and being comfortable, there's something not right there. The trick is to find a trick to deal with it. You're not alone in the discomfort even with people around you or just in terms of time. We've all gone through these evolutions.
I'm still learning a lot. I feel humbled by it. I feel really vulnerable by some of the conversations that I've been forced to have and that I'm still having. I feel I'm getting there, getting it and with my own disability stuff and I want to thank the NFB in some ways for a lot of my own coming to terms with disability stuff. But the racial piece still needs work. The queer piece still needs work. I don't know where all of these threads come together and where they diverge and what it means to be a person in these spaces, having these conversations. But I think it's really important to acknowledge that we're all bringing our humanity to it and we're kind of — we're going to mess up. It's okay! Messing up is part of learning and learning is messy.
With that, I think we wanted to invite people to share some thoughts about the film which deals with a lot of the messiness and probably a good place to start is at what point did you feel a little bit punched in the gut if anybody's willing to share that.
MILTON REYNOLDS: I'm going to turn off my camera but I want to invite people into the conversation. If it is helpful, even to sort of go back to the question I posted in the chat, how does understanding the notion that intersectionality is at play help us be better at the work that we do which I think is probably the larger question that this symposium is provoking. But if it goes back to gut punch, embrace that as well. It looks like Marissa has her hand up. I'll be with you by audio.
Hi. I was very interested in what she said to say about having to ask for an accommodation. I think that I am an insurance attorney and everybody has to ask for something from your insurance company or your provider.
I think — I've always thought that you shouldn't have to ask. But she made it really clear why you shouldn't have to ask. I really appreciated that.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: That's great because the flip side of asking is assuming that you get something. I'm also struck by the situation at airports where I'm on an island and the car rental company sends the vans around and people get on and they get to their cars right away. As somebody who needs alternative forms of transit sometimes or is waiting for the bus or whatever, they come a lot less frequently. And somehow I'm always left to think like oh, I've got to ask that my needs be met whereas these people that have the rental cars at the airport just assume that that little bus is going to come and take them to where they need to go.
If you think about it on the face of it, it is the exact same service that's being provided. A little bus is taking somebody somewhere. But one bus is assumed and the other bus is having to be requested for and there are all sorts of weird drama around it. All of that. So it is an interesting point you bring up.
MILTON REYNOLDS: If I could elaborate on that, Marissa. You mention this idea about insurance. I was thinking yesterday about the relationship between race and space and how spaces are racialized and that that becomes a way of resources flowing in or out of those spaces and it can impact communities categorically. I'm thinking about the nature — let me put my camera back on — I'm think about the nature and the way in which insurance rates, at least in my experience, are default connected to ZIP code rather than driving record. So I know that when I moved from the peninsula which is typically a less diverse space, more white and probably more Asian these days than it has been historically, when I moved to the east bay in Oakland which is a more diverse community with Latin X folks, my insurance rate jumped up. It had nothing to do where my driving patterns but how the space I'm inhabiting now are connected to race. So the default is to not provide resources but to extract them. Whereas if I was in another space, I would be reaping the benefits of it. It is interesting how ideas of race are hidden in plain sight and transacted in ways that the resources are allocated by default or are not. That's an interesting piece.
I see Daniel's hand up and Silvia's as well. Daniel first?
Hi. I'm Daniel Goldstein. I'm a retired lawyer who used to represent the National Federation of the Blind. I had two thoughts listening to the video. One was that I was so impressed yesterday by the written piece on the epistemology of ignorance that I found myself disagreeing with the speaker that all it took was popping the bubble. Because ignorance is not a tabular, it is actually a firmly held set of beliefs. And found myself wanting to think about solutions in the context of yesterday's reading.
But to respond to Mr. Reynold's question about how understanding intersectionality at play can make us better at what we do, I think it is very important, certainly for attorneys because if you have a client who is a member of multiple, marginalized groups helping that person with just one of their identities is not going to end the discrimination that that person faces. You have to go four for four instead of three for four in order to make an impact.
MILTON REYNOLDS: You want to respond to that?
CATHERINE KUDLICK: No. I think it's true. I guess at the root of Dan's statement is we can only address so much but take the one piece we're dealing with and hold it in respect for the rest of the pieces is already something even if we're not working on that concrete thing that maybe another piece of the person, I think you've got that piece that you are understanding more but it is part of this bigger picture. I think that we need to think about the people we serve as part of an interconnected — the only other thing I would add to that is it is possible that having that understanding will give you some other strategies about how to manage the piece that you're more familiar with. And again, I'm not a lawyer so I can't jump in and say what that might look like.
But if you think of identities and intersections as opportunities for new ways of approaching either your own thinking or convincing other people of something or getting the kind of buy in that you need, you know, it is an interesting fact to think about.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Let's pull Silvia into the conversation. I see your hand is up.
Hi, Milton and Cathy, thank you. And for showing the film as well. I was putting together a few things in my head. One of them was something that someone in the small group, the breakout room I was in. They were mentioning how sometimes doing things like putting pronouns beside their name and other things doesn't feel natural. It just feels like motions we go through without having necessarily changed how we think or how we feel. I was thinking again about what Cathy was saying about feeling uncomfortable.
I think that sometimes — there is that saying, "fake it until you make it" and I don't think it applies exactly the same way. But that feeling of discomfort is part of what we experience when we change our habits and how we do things. It may seem like it doesn't feel natural yet or I don't know if I've changed who I am yet or my values yet just by putting up some pronouns beside my name but it can have a very practical purpose of making other people not have to be put in the position of asking. It is always going to take energy to ask for something, to request a change in how we do things. And often as attorneys, we are most comfortable feeling fully professional, fully in control of how we do things.
We don't like being uncomfortable and uncertain. No one does. But I feel that lawyers especially dislike it. I remember an article where — a psychologist I think writing about how they were relating to their teenage son or something and how they were trying to use these techniques that felt completely alien. Certain ways of approaching their teenager that would not put their teen's hackles up and how it felt really fake. But it actually worked.
Then realizing that maybe it was okay to feel uncomfortable for a while to kind of fake it and then to come around to realizing that there is value to both what seems like a pro forma thing and that you'll eventually come to adapt real changes in your behavior — that the changes in behavior sometimes may come first before the internal change in how you think. I took a long way to get to a point. My apologies for that. That's all. Thank you.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Oh, no, it is a great point. The thing I was thinking as you were talking is a lot of us — I don't know why traveling is so much on my mind right now. It is something we all like to do. We go and immerse ourselves in some other culture and for a while, we try on this new identity, unless we're Americans who assume everybody needs to do everything like we do. We're open for that moment to kind of do things that don't feel quite right to us. But again, it is context that's important. And we're guests in another space or in another culture.
The other piece about this is we're dealing with individuals who aren't in our worlds, we go to approach ourselves as maybe being in difficult territory that we each need to navigate and think about. And what kind of situations are people putting themselves in to fit into the culture that we fit in so naturally. So the extension of adding pronouns after your name or something like that is an accommodation welcoming somebody into a culture that may not be familiar to them or they're not sure it is going to be okay with them. Mine's jumbled, too. But hopefully people who are hearing me will find pieces they can pull out and say that makes sense. I'm excited and hyperon coffee. Apologies there, too. Thanks.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Responding briefly to Silvia's points which I felt were well very stated —
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Sorry. Silvia.
MILTON REYNOLDS: It relieves the burden of naming from those who may be marginalized. It also makes me think about this from the perspective as an educator because that's where I do the majority of my work is thinking about how to move these ideas. And I think this idea of dissonance as a sign of learning rather than a marker of not knowing is a really powerful reframing. Certainty is valued in our society but certainty oftentimes comes about as a function of imposing norms and being in a position to impose those norms and reflecting the communities in which those norms are rooted.
So I think, from an educator's perspective, I oftentimes talk about democratizing the dissonance. A teacher has to decenter themselves because they are typically the primary locust of control of what happens or doesn't happen in that classroom. When we have a mismatch between who's in the front of the classroom and who's in the seats, we can see how the dynamics get amplified and communicated through time rather than disrupted.
The idea of doing this work requires embracing dissonance and discomfort and to see that as a sign of growth rather than a sign of being marked as less fit because we do not know which I think is where some of the notions about the importance of certainty and knowing come from is being marked as not knowing, as being seen as lesser than. There is an interesting point of intersection. Thank you for that cogent point, Silvia.
I would like to invite others. I see in the chat — I don't know if you can see the chat, Cathy.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: No, uh huh.
MILTON REYNOLDS: This is from mark and Taylor. I spent some time this morning trying to decide which of the lunch sessions to attend tomorrow because I notice some of my identity ones where I would fit. Intersectionality is a daily life for a lot of people including more lawyers than one might think. These issues affect both our clients and our colleagues. So thank you for that, Lark and I appreciate you lifting that up. Cathy?
CATHERINE KUDLICK: I think it is an excellent point and it stands on its own.
Steve here. Can you hear me?
MILTON REYNOLDS: We can.
Really interesting presentation. I was recalling how, as a young lawyer, representing legal aid clients, I was struck by the fact that none of them had any problem with my blindness as far as I could tell. It was almost a respite from the normal, daily life. How could this be, I ask myself? Especially when I thought about the further fact that I'm white. And they were black. I realized it had to do with the fact that I had or they believed that I had some ability or power to do something to get something they wanted. Whether they had a right to good, legal representation and hopefully wisely, they believed that I would give it to them. And I noticed when I came out to California to live in the '90s, I learned how the rise of tolerance and then respect for and then totally embrace LGBTQ culture in San Francisco with the rise of political power.
It struck me that one of the dimensions of how we experience ourselves as people with various marginalities with respect to specific marginalities and even to a greater degree, the way the world responds to us has to do with these kinds of — I won't call them economic but I know a way to coin them from these transactional factors.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Thank you for that.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Go lady.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Please, go ahead.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: I was going to ask you to say something. Sorry. It's weird being on the phone like this because there is a little bit of a lag so it's because there's real silence and people are thinking or you're thinking or if there is a lag because of the technology a little bit. So I think I was dealing with a tech lag. Continue.
MILTON REYNOLDS: The one thing that I would say sort of about this moment is the recognition that we actually need access to each other's thinking in order to understand the world more fully. I think because of the distinct and different experience of racialization which are obviously tied to multiple identifiers, we develop different understandings of the world and different capacities of navigating and holding dissonance because some people are forced to do that on a more regular basis filtered through more of their identities.
In leveraging yesterday's article about the epistemologies of ignorance, that the imposition of these ideas prevents us from seeing the world in the way that it is or limiting our way to see it through our own positionalities. This is why we need each other. We're in an interesting moment in which people are staking claims in terms of whose responsibility is it to learn around these issues and a variety of things, all to me which seem typical of the moment.
I would like to lift up the fact that we have work to do and our work may be different. When we say it is not our work to help inform others, we may be also asserting inadvertently that we have nothing to offer. I think it is an important tension that we hold. That doesn't mean we need to be exhausted doing everybody's work for them. I want to be clear that's not my intention. I do want to complicate the notion that we do have things to teach each other and in some respects, we may be some of the only folks can enlighten people to these other dynamics. It is an interesting tension that we have to hold but I'm stitching together the last comments in Silvia's and Larry's earlier on. My apologies if I bungled the names. I see Felicia's hand up.
I just wanted to pick up on what you said. I think that's one of the main reasons why diversity is so critical because if you have diverse individuals at a table discussing any topic, you can get a different viewpoint and insight. If you have the same people, whether the race, gender, whatever the group is, then it's hard to understand the perspective of another individual because you're looking at it through your unique lens as opposed to taking into consideration the lenses that other people have to live and work every day and have to travel different parts of the country and how they're seen.
So if you don't know, you don't know and that's the reason why the companies that generally do the best are companies that really promote and hire individuals from diverse backgrounds, individuals with different abilities, different individual disabilities, different races, different religions and that's why those are generally the companies that are most successful because they figured out the benefit of having these perspectives is the only way you can grow and develop as a country. That's just something I wanted to share.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: That's great. Great points. Yeah. And what you're also pointing to is that needs to go deep. It can't be this superficial gloss on things. And this was in the workshop yesterday about diversity and intersectionality. The point came up over and over that you've got to build these relationships. It's not going to happen overnight. It is a reckoning that comes at multiple levels but the reward is so profound when you get there. But you've got to do the work to get there. And I think, personally, I've learned a lot by trying to build my relationships with people that aren't like me. I'm into the completely successful at it. I don't pretend to be all — but I do feel like the more conversations I have that are in these spaces and in these diverse situations, the better it is. But it takes time and people have to learn that you're worth talking to. You're okay. You're going to listen and you're not just a diversity — kick off the box person. I think it is an important insight.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Just layering on what Felicia is suggesting is this is the moment of inversion that we're in. Actually as a society, we're beginning to question this sort of imposed patterns of disposability that shape the way in which our society functions. It is an important time to be doing that because we are moving at a moment in which there's going to be an inversion of the demographic sort of power. As we become a majority/minority population, even that language is ugly. But I think these factors are on going so this idea of — to use the language that you leverage, Cathy that it is not a destination. Doing the work is a commitment to reckoning and being in conversation with each other. And I think a significant piece of this, as Felicia stated and has been an emerging theme is we have to understand that many of the people we've been socialized to see as disposable and having less value may, in fact, hold many of the understandings of the world we need to create a more healthy and inclusive society.
I'm thinking about mutual aid work that happens within the disability community and how do we systemize care and love as opposed to systemizing disposability or hierarchy. That's what this moment is about. And inhabiting this understanding of the world will be a process, not an event. I think we have to move from the — beyond the performative call out culture that may be rooted in past essentialist commitments and striving to present ourselves as virtuous people. Rather what we want to do is develop the ability to hold disposability is not the default but systemize and care are first rather than staying stuck in this ideology. There are some of us that are more important to take care of than others. That's nonsense. I would like to lift up Heather McGee's work in the sum of us. We're cannibalizing ourselves as a society because of our inability to move beyond these malignant ideologies. I see Alexandria Lipincott has her hand up.
Hi. I just wanted to add a thought that I've been ruminating on for a while. More of a question than an answer or a comment, perhaps. But time really seems to be an impediment to embracing this vision of the future that I think many of us want. And I think we need to be willing to take the time to sit with people and learn from them and I know for me that that's a challenge to take the necessary time, especially when you're talking about intersectional issues because you have to learn — take the time to learn about each one and it may still be that you're dealing with just one individual or one issue. In our world, time is money. We're familiar with that saying. There just never is enough time. So I think that's part of something we need to figure out when we're talking about these issues. Thank you.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: I think it might be an issue of framing and it not think of it as time but as cultivation and you know when people are thinking about the way that we create our spaces, our work in our gardens or whatever it is that we do that rejuvenates us, that this is part of that process, too. It is not just putting yourself out there to learn about somebody else. It is a piece of it, of course. But think of it as a form of self work that's part of being human. It is not just giving out time to get to an end but it is actually doing important work that links to your humanity and you, in a broader sense, your humanity and what it means to be you. It is through these encounters and tough conversations, through these oh, shoot, I didn't know that, moments that you learn about yourself and what you need and want and take for granted. And then how you might, in turn, turn around and be useful and helpful and respectful and all of the good things about other people.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Time is interesting around culturally bound. This notion of how quickly something should happen is oftentimes connected to the experiences of having agency and access or the absence thereof. I think about my enslaved ancestors who couldn't impose any sense of time because they didn't have access to power but had to imagine the time in which their lives would be better.
For some, the time is rooted in a spiritual space and in other cases, it was rooted in an activist space. So I think we have to challenge the notion of time. I'm going to pop into the chat a link to an article about the characters of white supremacy culture and a big piece is this imposition of time. That things need to happen now. I think that the notion that some things need to happen now oftentimes dismisses the complexity and the depth of the work that needs to happen. So for me, the way we deal with complexity is to have time on task so we need to reconfigure our understanding of what it means to engage with these issues. So we think about the process of engagement more so than the product or the outcome, recognizing that through time on task, particularly with other folks who have different insights, that what will evolve over time because it has to inherently because these ideas, again, are being repackage and reimposed in a way that presents them as normal.
That's an important thing to learn how to — we all have to learn how to hold that tension of time. Change happens at the speed of trust and trust doesn't happen overnight.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: That's a great — wow, I want a T shirt with that on there. Milton, that's a really good point. The other thing I would add to it is the disability justice piece which is one of the main tenants of disability justice is to challenge capitalism and this notion that we're all like only as good as the fastest worker and it is the idea that no bodies are left behind. So you go as slow as the slowest person to make sure that everybody can be moved forward together.
So it's a challenge of — outright critique of capital notion of time and the standardization of how we do things and the speed at which we do them, all of that. So that's super important, as well. I think that feeds into the white supremacy piece really, really tightly. I haven't read the article you're talking about but I can't wait to read it.
MILTON REYNOLDS: I'll send it to you, Cathy. I did pop it in the chat.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Thanks.
MILTON REYNOLDS: I think we've got about three minutes based on my reading of the time. Do we have another comment from the audience to close us out? One aha, big idea that you're wrestling with? Looking for hands. Anybody want to pop anything into the chat as we're closing out? It looks like folks may have run their course with this or maybe allowing some thoughts to congeal.
I would talk about learning how to hold complexity together. We'll be more effective and powerful as a collective. And that comes from an understanding that we each bring something unique and important to our shared understanding. And if justice is a national imperative which I believe it is or should be, we have to think about the process of building forward to that and that we link our hands together and try to use our new understandings of the world to form coalitions that allow us to move ideas in ways that fundamentally affect policy and fundamentally change people's lives.
CATHERINE KUDLICK: Great. Couldn't say any better other than to add thank you to everybody for coming. Thank you for all of the people that were working behind the scenes with my technology and other technologies and a special heartfelt thank you to my partner in action and what not, Milton Reynolds, who — my mentor, my friend. Thank you so much for being here today. And thank you, everybody. Onward! We've got work to do but great things to hold on to and carry forward. Thank you.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Always a pleasure to be a fellow traveler with you. And the learning is a reciprocal process so thank you for enriching my life as well. We'll hand it back. Thanks, everybody for your time.
This has been a great session. We appreciate everybody's comments and insights. We'll be moving to our workshops shortly! We'll see everybody there!