Page 19 - APAP - Inside Arts - Summer 2020

TOXIC SELF-MARGINALIZATION
How our unconscious addiction to being underdogs harms our work
have been experiencing prolonged internal struggles with their teams, being constantly criticized by staff, continually having their motives questioned, on top of
all the other challenges they and their organizations face. Many are leaving or thinking of leaving their position, continuing a severe crisis of leaders of color exiting their post, or even the sector, in droves.
It’s not that the critical feedback is unwarranted; much is valid. And I know there are crappy, abusive, even unethical nonprofit leaders. Like other professions, we have
our fair share of both good and bad folks. Taking down the bad ones, the ones who perpetuate injustice through their actions, before they can further harm the people we serve, is something we have a moral obligation to do. But it seems like some in our sector can no longer tell who is good or bad anymore, and they associate any sort of positional power as inherently
bad, and any sort of mistake as
a sign of corruption to be rooted out and destroyed at all cost, including sometimes imploding the organization.
This affects leaders of all colors and genders. It is warranted for leaders to be criticized, but when women of color leaders, when black women leaders, who experience
the most injustice and oppression, are seen as “the Man” to be brought down, something is seriously wrong.
Discussions with leaders of
color who are going through
similar challenges revealed a phenomenon that may explain these dynamics and possibly help us overcome them. I call it Toxic Self-
BY VU LE
This post is long and will deal with a serious topic that may rile you up.
Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more of us who are supposed to be on the same “side” attack
one another. “We progressives are eating our own” is a refrain I hear often. I wrote about this earlier,
in a post called “Hey progressives, can we stop using the tools of social justice to tear one another down?” This was followed up with a post
to balance things out, called “Hey people with privilege, you need to be OK with making mistakes and being called out.”
The last four years have been rough on many of us. There is generalized anxiety caused by
the relentless cruelty, racism, and inhumanity of this administration. My mental health professional friends have been getting more business than they can handle.
All of us to a degree feel helpless against the overwhelming forces
of hatred that we read about on
a daily basis. Our dedication to
the fight, though, means that we often channel this energy toward targets that are easier and closer in proximity. And thus, we sometimes turn on one another. As one colleague said to me, “People need closer targets, and ones they can successfully take down.”
In our sector, these “closer targets” are often EDs/CEOs
and others in positional power within nonprofits. These leaders automatically become proxies of institutional power, and mobilizing against them in some ways helps to restore a sense of control that many of us have felt like we’ve lost in the face of ongoing horrors. I speak
to a lot of nonprofit leaders. They tell stories that, unfortunately, are extremely similar. The ED or senior leader did something the staff didn’t like, often HR-related like the firing of a team member or the retention of a team member who should have been fired earlier. This then becomes a significant issue that rallies the team, who often may not have the full picture, who then start organizing, using accusations of bias and injustice. Often it evolves into what I call the Wheel of Disillusionment. When the Wheel is set in motion, the damage it unleashes takes significant energy and time, sometimes years, to recover from.
What has been really alarming of late is the number of nonprofit leaders of color who are going through this. Including women leaders of color. Including Black women leaders. Just in the last two months I have had conversations with several POC leaders who
SUMMER 2020 INSIDE ARTS 17
APAP MEMBERS' CREATIVE RESPONSES TO COVID-19 ON YOUTUBE: THE HUMANITY IN US SHORT VIDEO 2020 BY DBR LAB