Anand Giridharadas – The Thriving World, the Wilting World, and You

August 4, 2015August 3, 2015 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

If you’re ready to ask yourself the real, hard questions – and if you want to arm yourself with the language to speak truth to power – I strongly recommend you watch the keynote speech Anand Giridharadas gave at the The Aspen Institute last week.

If you don’t know Anand, he is a journalist and author, most recently of The True American, the amazing story of a Bangladeshi immigrant, Raisuddin Bhuiyan, who was shot in the face by a white Texan, nearly died, and then fought to keep his shooter from getting the death penalty.

Anand’s talk pushes all of us to move beyond accepting change that comes from the system and, in so doing, preserves the system. He asks us to ask ourselves, and those around us, whether generosity is enough or if what we seek is justice. And, if it is justice we seek, how much are we willing to do and how much are we willing to give up to get it?

Here’s an excerpt that gets to the heart of Anand’s talk, the full transcript of the talk, and the video is below.

…we are at risk of confusing generosity towards those victims with justice for those victims. Generosity is a win-win. Justice, often, is not.

The winners of our age don’t enjoy the idea that some of them might actually have to lose, to sacrifice, for justice to be done. In Aspen you don’t hear a lot of ideas involving the privileged and powerful actually being in the wrong, and needing to surrender their status and position for the sake of justice. We talk a lot here about giving more. We don’t talk about taking less. We talk a lot here about what we should be doing more of. We don’t talk about what we should be doing less of.

Layers

May 12, 2015May 11, 2015 ~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

The pavement on the cross-streets between 9th and 7th avenues between 14^th and 23^rd streets have been stripped for the past month. The first step here is milling, which takes off the top layer of asphalt in preparation for repaving, and, maybe because the city is in the midst of filling nearly 300,000 potholes, these streets have remained exposed and bumpy for weeks.

Here’s what it’s looked like.

In these few weeks, we’ve gotten to see what lies underneath: layers of patching, the old covering of potholes, extra asphalt around manholes. Sometimes even the cobblestone, which must be nearly 100 years old, is exposed, making me wonder if any more paving lies between that and the sewer system.

It’s a hodgepodge that’s been built up, layer by layer, over decades, one that we rarely see.

It is easy to be fooled by the thin veneer, the smooth top layer that is so easy to glide across. This layer fools us into thinking that it came into being fully formed. But of course everything builds on what came before it, on what lies below.

In seeing all this I’m reminded of the grimy past of New York City, of a time of dirt and struggle and disease, a time when this neighborhood was the home to slaughterhouses and slop in the streets, not fashion boutiques and 16 Handles. Today’s glossy world sits adopt that messy history, one we are quick to forget at our peril.

I can’t help wondering how it’s come to pass that today’s reality feels so normal. How, in a world where glamor and wealth and radical inequality has become the norm, we manage see only that top layer while ignoring the deeper moral questions that lie beneath: When did we go from building a system that rewards winners to one where the winners, quite literally, take all? And why does it seem so easy to drown out the quiet sound of people throwing up their hands and turning their backs on a system that doesn’t work for them?

Some of this stems, I think, from being fooled by that thin veneer, one that shields us from the fact that our success is not just the product of our own efforts. We literally stand upon decades, even centuries, of groundwork that came before us – times of toil and trouble and near misses that somehow all added up to this life, here and now. The foundation of our comfort, our accomplishment, and our success is our dumb luck of being born into lives in which deploying effort, brains and resources yields results. That’s a winning lottery ticket held by precious few.

Sure, we deserve credit for our own effort, guts, and ingenuity. But let’s not forget that we are nothing more than the top layer.

Bryan Stevenson – Proximity

January 10, 2015January 12, 2015 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

The other day, I had the honor and privilege to hear Bryan Stevenson speak in a small group setting. Bryan is a lawyer and a fighter for justice and racial equality, the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative who has a list of accolades and awards too long to tackle properly.

Among other things, his TED talk, which has been viewed more than two million times, apparently got the “longest and loudest standing ovation in TED history”; he’s recently written a book that I’ve just bought called Just Mercy (it has a 4.9 out of 5 star rating on Amazon); he will be arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court in March about mandatory sentencing; and he has received the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU’s) highest honor, the National Medal of Liberty.

In addition to being a true fighter for rights and justice, someone who is living on the front lines every day, Bryan is one of the most compelling, articulate, and inspiring speakers I have ever had the pleasure to hear. Bryan is an orator, someone who weaves together structure and narrative, deep intellect and cutting analysis, all shared through poignant and often heart-wrenching stories. The man is a gift to the world.

Bryan talked about four things that need to happen to create social change:

Proximity.
Simple as it sounds, Bryan argues that the first thing we have to do to fight injustice is to get proximate to injustice, to show up and see things with our own eyes. When we see what Bryan sees (or whatever other issue we choose to see), we will, in Bryan’s estimation, have no choice but to act. As important, Bryan reminds us, the only solutions that work are the ones that are developed when one has an up-close view of a problem.
Changing the narrative. This was a specific point that Bryan was making about the narrative of racial injustice in the US – What is really going on, Brain asks us, when, say, a 14 year old black boy lashes out and throws a book at a teacher? Is the solution to incarcerate that child or to ask what happens to a child who has lived for 14 years surrounded by violence? – but I believe this point is universal. For nearly all issues there’s an unspoken but powerful story that fortifies the status quo.
Keep hopeful. We give up on issues that we believe are hopeless, wrongs that we tell ourselves simply cannot be righted. In Bryan’s words, “injustice prevails when hopelessness persists.”
Do uncomfortable things. (Bryan admitted, each of his four steps gets harder and harder.) What I heard here is Bryan saying out loud that we simply cannot make real and lasting change if we stay comfortable. Whether it is the people who led or joined the civil rights movement (or any other movement that created large-scale change), each and every person made a decision at a critical juncture that they were willing to be uncomfortable and put themselves on the line.

All of these points deserve to be printed and pasted up on our walls as daily reminders of the work we have to do.

And when I take a big step back, what strikes me is that one of the most pernicious and unseen problems of our runaway economic inequality is the reduction in proximity. While it is easier than ever to feel that the world is more global than ever, more connected than ever, in reality it is easier than ever to separate: to see only the news we’ve told Google we like to read, to get updates only from Facebook friends, to live in houses and neighborhoods and go to hotels (whether here or 5,000 miles away) that are only for “people like us…,” to tell ourselves a story of connection and globalization and democratization of information when really we walk around surrounded by bubbles that we refuse to pop, insulating ourselves from anything really, truly foreign.

I don’t have a lot of hope that the momentum towards greater economic inequality will lessen any time soon, but one of the things that Bryan’s talk made me wonder is whether we would have more leverage in creating change if we worked directly on this question of proximity, and on creating productive pathways to action that, together with that proximity, help people start doing useful work more quickly.

Reminder

September 2, 2010September 2, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I arrived in India yesterday. There’s nothing like landing in a big, populous, mostly poor country to remind us how much is handed to us – in terms of access and opportunities.

And if we remember that most of what we have has been given to us, it is so much easier to see that the only real choice we have is to keep on giving – so that we in turn can serve others who, for no reason at all, have been given less. It is really the only way to show our gratitude and our humility.

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