The Rare Fighter Against Bigotry Who Actually Fights It Instead Of Spreading It
I encountered Chloe Valdary on Twitter maybe four years ago. Can't recall how long I've been following her, but I have always been relieved and enlightened by her tweets.
At a time when so many are pushing a new kind of racism -- damning white people -- as a religion, she's a lone voice of reason and balance in the story.
Conor Friedersdorf profiles her in The Atlantic. An excerpt:
Chloé Valdary is the founder of ... a diversity and resilience training company that the 27-year-old African American entrepreneur runs from Downtown Brooklyn. Its website lists clients including TikTok, WeWork, the Federal Aviation Administration, and Greenwich High School, and asks potential customers a loaded question: "Looking for an antiracism program that actually fights bigotry instead of spreading it?""We teach love and compassion," her website insists. "Let us train your team." What's more, Valdary pledges, "We do not dehumanize, stereotype, or caricature anyone who seeks our services."
...Having interviewed her by phone and email, and having delved into her course material and the thinking behind it, I can confirm that her approach to anti-racism and inclusion really is substantively different from that of her better-known competitors.
...In 2011 she enrolled at the University of New Orleans, where she majored in International Relations and studied diplomacy. After graduating in 2015, she reflected that although her academic field offered many frameworks for combatting conflict, it seldom addressed a related but conceptually distinct task: teaching people how to love. Wasn't that a glaring deficiency? One of her heroes, Martin Luther King Jr., repeatedly stated in the last decade of his life that the end goal of his activism, even beyond equal rights for all people, was the creation of a "beloved community" rooted in redemptive agape, love. "It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends," King said. "It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age."
Valdary, nothing if not ambitious, decided she wanted to teach people to love like that. But how? She would study what people already love in hopes of reverse engineering the process--work she completed during a paid fellowship at The Wall Street Journal. She sought data in popular culture, identifying people and products that inspire quasi-religious devotion. Companies like Nike and Disney and artists like Beyoncé counted tens of millions of loyal fans. Did any common denominator explain their appeal? "All were creating content where we as the audience see ourselves and our potential reflected back to us," she told me, arguing that with "Just Do It," Nike was tapping into the human need for self-actualization; that almost every Disney movie incorporated Jungian archetypes and variations on the hero's journey as metaphors for the human condition; and that Beyoncé's iconography and lyrics like "Who run the world? Girls!" made her fans feel their potential reflected in her artistry.
Valdary wanted a name for this process of affecting others by helping them see their own potential. In 2016, as she completed what would become an 82-page paper on her findings, she read the 2011 book Enchantment by the Silicon Valley marketing specialist Guy Kawasaki, best known for his stint at Apple. He believes that traditional marketing and even outright manipulation are less effective than what he calls "the process of enchantment." If you can enchant someone, you can bring about "a voluntary, enduring, and delightful change," he argued. "By enlisting their own goals and desires, by being likable and trustworthy, and by framing a cause that others can embrace, you can change hearts, minds, and actions.
...Now Valdary had a name for her theory: the Theory of Enchantment. In her estimation, people in the process of enchantment can be taught, as they come to more fully appreciate their own potential, to love themselves--and people who have learned to love themselves can be taught to love their neighbors.
In 2018, after two years of delivering lectures on her framework in the U.S. and abroad, she saw that her Theory of Enchantment could be applied to efforts to manage diversity and fight racism within institutions, so she launched a business, targeting educational institutions and corporations. Three principles guide all of the coursework her company offers:
1. Treat people like human beings, not political abstractions.
2. Criticize to uplift and empower, never to tear down, never to destroy.
3. Root everything you do in love and compassion....Whether or not love is in fact the key to transcending injustice, Theory of Enchantment strikes me as more likely to cause people to treat one another better than other diversity training for the simple reason that it rejects race essentialism, which alienates many, and centers love, which does not. Robin DiAngelo's popular "white fragility" framework breaks the first rule of the Theory of Enchantment, Valdary points out, by treating white people as a monolith and racially essentializing everyone. "All individuals are complex and multifaceted. If we treat any human being, any group of people, as a conglomerate, we run the risk of stereotyping them, reducing them, in our words and in our actions, and turning them into an abstraction," she said. "That's not going to be helpful or sustainable for anyone. We have to treat each other like family."
My calendar app reminded me today is the first day of black history month. I think part of our problem is that we don't integrate Black history into courses about US history, but leave it to stand alone, as if Black Americans are ancillary to US history and not integral to it.
I don't know how you can tell the story of America and leave Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, both Benjamin Davises, Jesse L. Brown, James Baldwin, Charles Drew, Martin Luther King, and the rest to be told as side stories.
Conan the Grammarian at February 1, 2021 4:55 AM
It is difficult to love people you don't know who are different from you. Instead of reaching for the sky it would be easier to take a baby step and just try tolerating different people.
I don't need strangers to love me; just don't try to make me think or act like you. As Kojak said years ago, "I've spent my whole life learning to be just like me. I can't suddenly be just like you."
Jay at February 1, 2021 6:13 AM
Only exposure heretofore is here.
Crid at February 1, 2021 6:23 AM
I fucked it up. DuckDuckGo let me down.
Here is the correct link, and it's not the worst thing to listen to on a long drive.
Crid at February 1, 2021 6:25 AM
Um, Jay, it's pretty interesting how many results you get when you search on "who wants to be tolerated."
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22who+wants+to+be+tolerated%22&rlz=1CAJMBU_enUS937&oq=%22who+wants+to+be+tolerated%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.8017j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Or, as I said in this blog, though I can't seem to find it right now, typically, the verb "to tolerate" means to put up with something awful.
On the other hand, someone said that real "tolerance" is not when you think "wow, they're just like us, sometimes" but when you think "wow, sometimes I'm just like them - and I never realized it before!"
True, no one "loves" strangers, unless you're the type who always enjoys harmonious chatting with people on airplanes. (I knew an old man with many friends who said "I like my friends, but I ADORE strangers!")
However, it's only common courtesy to assume (within reason, such as not putting yourself in danger) that all strangers have at least some good in them - and to try to find it, when you have to interact with them.
lenona at February 1, 2021 7:01 AM
And here's something worth reading again:
https://electricliterature.com/shopping-for-a-boy-give-him-a-book-about-a-girl/
By Shoshana Akabas, lecturer at Columbia University.
First paragraphs:
My senior year of high school, I audited a contemporary literature class with one of my favorite teachers—the kind of teacher students hang around to talk to after class, the kind who has the deepest respect for his students and also the highest expectations.
One day, after I’d been unusually quiet in class, he asked what I thought about the book we were reading; it was his first time teaching it. Truthfully, the book featured a lot of characters I had very little interest in reading about: extremely troubled anarchists. I told my teacher I wasn’t enjoying it, and I think I even went so far as to say that I didn’t think it should be on our syllabus.
When he asked why, I said, “Because I can’t really relate to any of the characters.”
My teacher leaned back against his desk and smiled like he knew something I didn’t. “So, what?” he asked after a pause. “You only read books about yourself?”
We laughed about it, and then probably had a meaningful discussion about different avenues for connecting to literature until the starting bell for the next period rang and I hurried off to math class. Internally, though, I was horrified. In part, it was cutting to take critique from a teacher whose respect I so badly wanted. But mostly, I feared he was right. At home that night, I sat in front of my bookshelves, privately confirming to myself that I did, in fact, read all kinds of books about people I’d never encounter in real life. But the question buzzed in the back of my mind for weeks, because, deep down, I knew I judged not just my enjoyment but the quality of books based on how much I could relate to the characters.
My teacher’s question, perhaps more than anything else I learned in high school, has stayed with me. After that discussion, I started to value books based on how much they challenged and expanded my “theory of mind”—essentially, the ability to understand people’s desires and perspectives different from my own.
This probably won’t come as a surprise, but reading has been demonstrated to make people kinder, more empathetic, and more socially intuitive, among a host of other benefits...
(snip)
lenona at February 1, 2021 7:08 AM
Pinker talks about that in Better Angels.
Crid at February 1, 2021 7:35 AM
Conan; I am old enough to remember the origins of black history month.
The original reason for black history month is because blacks were "left out" of the picture of American History. I mean, who wants to talk about the negative (e.g., slavery) when they could/want to talk about the positive (e.g., all men are created equal . . ) So, black history month was to bring to light parts of American history that were ignored.
Black history month was, theoretically anyway, suppose to go away when blacks were fully mentioned in American history.
Whether that has happened or not, I guess, depends upon one's viewpoint.
Personally, I think black history is now fully mentioned in American history; but, it seems not every one agrees with me on that.
And, I totally agree it would be better to eliminate black history month (or any other X history month)
charles at February 1, 2021 8:02 PM
February is also a month that demands we celebrate Baked Alaska (today), Tater Tots, Carrot Cake, Nutella, Pizza, Plum Pudding, Wine, Chocolate Mint, Sticky Buns, Margaritas, Banana Bread, Tortilla Chips, and some other foods that probably aren't too bad for you.
Absolutely a plot to increase diabetes during Black History Month. I'm sure of it.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at February 1, 2021 8:24 PM
Er, explain, Gog?
Lenona at February 2, 2021 5:56 AM
Several years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle featured an inset on each day's front page touting an accomplished Black person. All of the people touted in that inset were entertainers and athletes. No Benjamin O. Davis, no Jesse L. Martin, no Charles Drew, no George Washington Carver. Nothing but rappers, actors, singers, and professional athletes.
To be honest, charles, I don't think teachers and publishers know enough Black history to teach it -- whether as an integral part of American history or as a separate subject one month a year. This is why I think the slavery narrative is front and center. It's all they know; it's all they've been taught.
Teach Black children about the people who accomplished great things in spite of racism and you teach them to aspire to greatness. Teach them they were only ever slaves and you crush any aspiration. So, teach them about Jessye Norman, Leontyne Price, Marian Anderson, and others who defied prejudice and achieved greatness.
Conan the Grammarian at February 2, 2021 6:20 AM
"Er, explain, Gog?"
Trying to trick me into revealing my sources, eh?
Well, I've got an entire wall covered with articles and photographs all linked by red twine and pushpins to back me up. It's a conspiracy and you can't convince me otherwise.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at February 2, 2021 10:01 AM
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