I quit my bonkers nonprofit-sector job two years ago this week. You can read this piece I wrote last summer about what went wrong and why:
A strange sort of arms race kicked off, where whoever could brainstorm the most byzantine ways someone could feel marginalized or excluded by anything we wrote or said—or (decreasingly) did—won by demonstrating a superior sensitivity. The belief that making something more complicated meant you’d contributed predated the identity panic. But doing so took on a new moral urgency. Action alerts that deployed phrases like “stand up for ___” sparked outcry from junior staffers on the harms of ableism. (“It’s a metaphor. Did you stand up when you read the email?” didn’t go over well.) The cause got lost.
And let’s talk about those junior staffers, my fellow Millennials. One young woman with two sets of pronouns in her email signature exhorted us in all-staff emails to vary the pronouns we used for her to reflect the full spectrum of her ever-fluctuating gender identity. She bombarded us with ‘helpful suggestions’ that read like rejected submissions to Everyday Feminism: Don’t say ‘tone-deaf. Don’t assume anyone’s gender identity but do notice it’s a ‘they’ day when she stomps into work in Doc Martens. Do say ‘women and femmes.’ Do consider slipping in a few words about how actually ‘sex work’ is empowering into a statement about a shooting spree. She couldn’t understand disagreement as anything but the product of regrettable but correctable ignorance. She couldn’t accept the possibility that someone could understand her perfectly and yet go another way. And she wasn’t alone in that.
Directors—newly insecure in the authority they wielded—liked to talk about ‘sharing power’ with younger staff. But in practice, ‘sharing power’ usually meant ‘handing off independent judgment.’ If the demands younger staffers issued didn’t make any sense, directors took it as a sign of just how out of touch they were, how little they understood: they hoped no one would ever uncover this perilous ignorance.
My sense is that these women at the top of the organization wanted to stay relevant in this world that had meant so much to them, to which they had given so much of their lives, a world in which the ground had become strangely unsteady. When I tried to push back on nonsensical demands, I got nowhere. What I said couldn't pass to knowledge or questions or even thought. Every conversation we had about gender felt like the first time the subject had ever been broached, even when it was the tenth such conversation. Every conversation had a slipperiness to it, like trying to have a serious conversation with someone who is playing a video game. I watched colleagues who surely knew better avoid inconvenient knowledge. How convenient it is to only know convenient things!
Meanwhile, our commitment to building bipartisan support for our policy priorities collapsed: purity, not efficacy, was the order of the day. When we alienated former allies by insisting they subscribe to radical new beliefs about power and identity, 'we' took it as a sign that we were Doing the Right Thing®. (It’s remarkable when you think about it: we're alienating people we once worked with to achieve real-world gains so we must be on the right track!) As we shed experienced staff, 'we' talked about upping our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not everyone was fit for such a mission.
Ultimately, I wasn't fit for such a mission either.
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