By Rashid Owoyele
February 17, 2025
The processes of colonization and “civilization” have created many deep running scars and traumas which support the ordering of the worlds in which we walk, making them uninhabitable for marginalized people. The only resolution to these phenomena is conflict. Confrontation. Does it have to lead to death and material destruction?
Linguistic Discord
How to behave in society is a cultural artifact that incorporates sociological concepts and anthropologies of knowledge and material which often take the name of civic, civility, or civilized behavior. Yet, I implore you to tell me how these words reign positive when they inherently imply that one agent must remain dominant over another? Why must we politely accept inequality, inequity, and inferiority?
Frankly, my relatively recent diagnosis of neurodivergence has been a blessing in disguise. In the last several years, I have been on a journey of truly reevaluating my inner world. I attempted this by taking account of all of the instances in which I was viewed as problematic, aggressive, too outspoken, or confrontational; a pattern emerged in which my genuine emotions and expressions of hurt or frustration have been met with authoritarian responses. Responses ranging in severity and harshness to include dismissals from jobs, condescending descriptions of my behavior with racialized or homophobic inferences, ostracism, and even bullying — these responses indicate that my tendency to be impacted by the harms of normativity further incentivized my marginalization when I was treated as the problem. The mere audacity to be the reflective surface across which insights into uncomfortable unspoken qualities and systemic influences appear; those structural imperfections which ultimately incentivized my (often swift) removal from those groups, organizations, and communities. Now, I know that those hardships were gifts, but the hurt they caused was at times so damaging to my spiritual, physical, and mental wellbeing that it felt I wouldn’t endure.
We have to accept some destruction in remaking the world
Creativity in the modern industrial sense is almost entirely viewed as an act of production in the West. The component of creation that acknowledges the destruction, deconstruction, damage of one “material” in the pursuit of a preferred material reality goes under-noticed and often ignored in pursuit of comfortable simplicity. These silent externalizations of harm are in fact highly intentional dissociations from our accountability and where blame is fated. The recent book by Nathan Schneider, a colleague and role model, called Governable Spaces approaches the re-envisioning of the “inherent” or implied constructs of order which create rigidity in our socio-technical systems. Particularly in the realm of digital spaces and infrastructures, he proposes an alternative world in which our technology facilitates effective degrees of complexity, and even though he is an absolute genius he doesn’t touch much open what will be destroyed as a result of these developments.
This is absolutely not intended to be leveraged as an attack upon his analysis, in fact I hope that this will be received as a complimentary perspective. A “yes, and,” upon what he quite eloquently and systematically constructs therein. You see, when the systems of order start to shift towards fascism, we have to find creative ways of destroying the parts of that system which have become harmful. Many of our brightest minds and loudest voices get distracted with the task of pointing out all of these structural failings; while that energy could more effectively be spent using those insights and strong voices towards calling into existence the systems of alternative which could render those harmful structures useless and archaic. If we allow ourselves to engage in a structural analysis of a Just War, as put forth by St. Augustine, we are compelled to action only in instances where there is unjust force and harm being committed by a power of relative advantage. This has before been so rarely tangled up in our socio-technical reality as it has since October of 2023. This has resulted in hidden changes to algorithms in the US, attempts to force the sale of private enterprise through nationalistic force, and ultimately ushered in an era of censorship which has been seen before, and does not tend to indicate a positive short- to mid-term future.
As I currently reside under a regime which has created legal constraints around the language and thought experiment I would like to engage in here, I will have to censor some of my thinking for “civilized” norms to be adhered to, and ultimately to not face retribution for my dissent. This effect of government is harmful when it enables the infringement on international law, human rights, and just plain decency. Going through the collapse of the empire building and exploitative world system which has driven colonization and the “civilization” (meaning the forced reeducation and disciplinary influence of authoritative institutions over other persons — even if they call themselves democracies) will require a creative culture that is intentional about what it is destroying to make the space for improvements towards social-, environmental-, and economic-justice. Will we do it with great ineptitude or with style?
Positionality and Situatedness: a brief love note to Donna Harraway and Kimberle Crenshaw
When conflicts arise, immediately the power dynamics of intersectionality are triggered. Like a spider’s web, the jostling of the network of relationships, experiences, agreements, and fight/flight/faint/fawn/flood/flop responses prompt a psycho-social domino sequence, often towards violent or repressive inevitabilities. Our polyvagal systems activate and we become inundated with hormones and neuro-chemicals which have been programed through our epigenetic histories of biological response, and to personal histories of previous exposures to similar environmental cues of threat. Those with relatively more privilege vs those with relatively less privilege — spiders and flies. If the actors involved have no self-reflectedness of their unique positionality and the uniqueness of their experience in comparison to their “perceived combatant,” abuses are quick to unfurl allowing for power and social imbalances to be further exacerbated, leaving parties unsettled and with little cultural training on ‘how to navigate a return to a space of repair.’
If we do not popularize and institutionalize more reflective practices, practitioners, and norms in which we respond to conflicts with game logics of infinite play, we are more likely to be willing to burn everything down. We experience moral injury, and the linearity of the relational constructs in which we suffer emerge. In order to drive the regeneration of relationships we must run the risk of failing. Otherwise, the continual replication of institutions and organizational cultures which are incapable of learning, evolving, and increasing wellbeing for all will continue beyond crisis and end only upon calamity. Growing the cultural capacities that will enable more humanist interactions which will be needed to shape the environments capable of spawning less harmful structures of production, connectivity, and distribution should be the calling of the future of design practice and pedagogy. As a Transdisciplinary Designer, my unique positionality provides me a unique value of contribution and capability which AI can only pretend to mimic. So, how can we be better in conflict in our relational systems of production? (prioritizing “ethical production” over the propaganda-promoted centering of “ethical consumption”)
Conflicts generally arise due to power imbalances — in essence that is how racism, sexism, and the various processes of social marginalization work; they convince a group of people that they are more powerful, more normal, more appropriate than another group and ignore the validity of the claims of the group (almost always a smaller group in numbers in a given population). When more members of a community have a complex understanding of how the world currently is, where harm tends to pool, and whom to protect from normative marginalization — a more equitable and just means of transforming our working worlds in ever more inclusive iterations can emerge. The willingness and readiness for vulnerability is a prerequisite for developing a deeper understanding of which triggers, boundaries, and narratives drive those current harms and incubates a capacity to birth more inclusivity — if the calling for that higher value even still exists. If it does, then it is time to resist the socializations which promote behaviors that are discordant with our hearts. If you call this degree of embracing my human nature ill-fitting for the operation of a system that places me at the periphery, then I will gladly accept the moniker of ‘uncivilized.’ Will you?
