A Mic Drop for the Ages
Michelle Obama was talking with poet, Elizabeth Alexander about the cultural myth that says working women can “have it all” if they just manage their lives right, when she momentarily forgot where she was and stated,
“It’s not always enough to ‘lean in’ because that shit doesn’t work all the time,”
at those words, the crowd inside Brooklyn’s 19,000-seat Barclay Center auditorium and all across the internet erupted. Women cheered, fist-pumped and retweeted Michelle’s reality check. And they weren’t the only ones. I’m a middle-aged white guy, and when I read those words two days later, I felt grateful because Michelle had spoken a truth that wasn’t just for people with her exact life experience. It also spoke to mine (because I’m human) and what I heard it say was this:
You can’t fix broken systems with self-improvement.
I didn’t come from the same background as Michelle Obama or Elizabeth Alexander. The aspirations of my ancestors weren’t perimeter fenced by system of discrimination that kept most good things for people with a different kind of skin tone and family name. For my part, my previous career as a cartoonist and social commentator, and more recent gigs as a User Experience designer for business clients, haven’t exactly placed me among the ranks of the world’s downtrodden, but personal experience and a lot of reading in history have made me skeptical of Lean-In-type positive thinkers who tell us that having a decent time of things at work or in life is just a matter of “building a better you,” (as if that were easy, or even desirable.)
Adding skills vs changing YOU
I am a dedicated self-improver, who loves to learn new skills and apply different methodologies. (Hell, I’m going to finish some more e-learning segments right this very afternoon) But I’ve also been around long enough to know that if an organizational culture doesn’t value who you are, what you can or can’t do doesn’t matter. And I’m not the first human to get this particular memo.
Marlon Green, the first black man hired as a commercial airline pilot in the United States, wasn’t the first person of color to be really good at flying airplanes. He was just the first black pilot willing to push his employment discrimination suit all the way up to the Supreme Court with a reasonable expectation of winning, which he did. His problem wasn’t lack of skills or experience — he had 2000 more flight hours than the white guy who got the job — it was being black in a white world, which no amount of professional development could change.
Katherine Switzer wasn’t the first woman with the endurance and speed to finish the Boston Marathon, and when Jock Semple, its longtime grand marshal, tried to physically shove her out of the 1967 race, it wasn’t because he felt she needed more training. And the only reason Jock didn’t succeed was that Katherine’s boyfriend stepped in block him. (Challenging entrenched power systems requires backup.)
These pioneers and countless others realized that if you don’t fit other people’s rigid notions, all the solitary self-improvement in the world won’t grant you entry into the world they have made for people like them. You need to force your way in, and for that you’ll need allies to support you. Just ask the 2018 freshmen in the U.S. House of Representatives.
How’s that self improvement thing workin’ for ya?
On the other hand, all the personal individual career-empowerment weekends, motivational books, continuing education courses and professional development seminars that sprang up like toadstools since the yuppie era of the early ’80s, haven’t boosted the salaries or benefits packages of regular employees enough to match the rate of inflation. They haven’t halted the spread of contract and ‘permalance’ work or given workers any leverage at all in changing working conditions.
Learning new skills is awesome and necessary, but it’s not a magic spell that turns inequality into fairness and exploitation into dignity. #Metoo and other people power movements have taught us that collective action creates change. They’ve also taught us something deep and personal: the shame that pushes people to try and remake themselves into something they hope those in power might accept, isn’t self-improvement, it’s self-betrayal.
