It's late. I'm exhausted. Actually, I'm more than exhausted. I feel like I've been assaulted.
Oh, wait, that's because I was assaulted. Mostly verbally, still, it was an assault.
Some highlights of the day before I paste in my debriefing notes to our facilitation working group....
I was very excited to be able to arrange my day such that I could attend the first Women's Caucus meeting at #OccupyBoston.
We had at about 40 women present, so that alone felt like a success. A solid beginning for addressing the gender dynamics being experience at #OccupyBoston. As it was a first meeting, we couldn't really address anything external, yet, other than acknowledging that we were here because of challenging issues coming up within the #OccupyBoston community. We had to focus on establishing ourselves and developing our own ground rules and starting to get to know one another.
Right away we encountered the question of "do we allow males in our caucus and, if we do, can they speak or just listen?" I'm not sure we reached a consensus on whether they could be there. That question may still be unresolved. There did seem to be a fairly unified sense that this was a safe space for women to speak and that, if men were present, this was a time for them to listen and learn.
I had mixed feelings about this. We had created a stack for an open discussion early on and a man went on stack and began to speak. He was interrupted by a woman who, from my perspective, misconstrued what he was saying and implied that he was "here with an agenda". She wasn't open to hearing from him and he was shut down. What was complex for me, was that I felt he was speaking in support and was very much misunderstood because he was not allowed to finish. It seemed to me that the woman actually became the oppressor in that moment. She felt something and that was it.
Perhaps, this early in the process, there really is a need to have a separate space. Not just because men might dominate, but because the women have their own triggers to work through.
Overall, I felt very good about the meeting and I look forward to working with these women to build solidarity and consciousness and find ways to structurally address the gender dynamics we're experiencing.
In great spirits, I went on to the facilitation working group meeting. It was supposed to start at 4. The women's caucus started at 3:30, so I was splitting my time. When I arrived at 5:15, a small group of mostly unfamiliar faces were sitting around talking, but not actually conducting a meeting. Being mostly new, they didn't know how. There was one man - older and white - who has been coming for a few days and he seemed to think he was "old hat", asking me if I had any experience with consensus process. When I explained that I had been facilitating and was the original author of the guiding document we used, it didn't faze him at all. He proceeded to behave as though he was the one with the know-how and he would run things, even after it was agreed that I would facilitate the meeting.
I'm glad that C T Butler was present. C T is the author of the one of the source documents we used to start our guiding document. He surprised us all by being there. I had been feeling very frustrated about the difficulty of conducting a meeting with someone who could not let anyone else lead and could not admit that he didn't have the skill or experience to do it himself. C T affirmed to me at the end of the meeting that even with 30 years experience, he found that person very hard to deal with. I was a bit relieved of my internal feelings of abject failure. I had been sitting there thinking, "I guess I'm just not cut out for this. I don't know how to move this to a collaborative place with this guy. Why the hell did I even think I could do this?" It's powerfully healing to have a witness.
After some grappling with the agenda and the meeting process, we moved on to putting together the evening's facilitation team. I made it very clear that I wanted to stay in the background. However, at this point, there were only 6 people in the meeting who were even going to be there for the GA. It takes a team of 10 to conduct one. Also, other than myself and one other person, there was no one present who had ever done the primary facilitation role. Immediately, every one was turning to me expecting me to do it. I really didn't want to.
I didn't want to because, the community is starting to perceive me as the facilitation team leader. We're supposed to be leaderless. Other people need to step up. More than that, when people perceive a leader, they perceive a receptacle for blame. The past few times I'd been at GA, I have repeatedly faced an onslaught of people both during the GA and immediately after, who blame me for any failures they see in the GA. I have been personally accused of being responsible if the whole movement falls apart because the GAs are a failure. I can't be the target of that energy.
Eventually, I agreed to co-facilitate with someone else in the lead, if no one else became available. Luckily, someone else did show up and I was relieved of that role. However, I was practically forced into another role: process manager. The process manager has to have a good grasp of the processes. There really was no one else present who could do the job. It's a thankless job, though. As the process watchdog, you are often seen as the iceberg ramming the Titanic. "How dare you ruin our party with your rigidity!" There really is very little understanding that structure is the key to creating a safe space for all. I was dreading this.
The GA is almost a blur to me. It was a rough, rough evening. The assembly did pass an important proposal to start having an actual finance team and real accounting system with lots of transparency. That was great. But, we also faced an extremely disruptive force with little support for managing it from the rest of the assembly. An overwhelming burden landed on me and, once again, while attempting to perform a duty in service to the community, I was verbally and nearly physically assaulted by a male who could not abide being contained in a process we have all agreed to. In that assault I was called a "fucking fascist", among other things.
I can't do that anymore. Until some of the structural issues are addressed, I will not take a role in the actual facilitation of the GA. If I can't count on those around me to protect me from that kind of assault, then I can't serve the community in that way.
I am, of course, torn by this because, this is how the bullies win. Witnesses don't stop them, so they take that as tacit approval - he really believed that he represented the feelings of the whole group - and they are then relentless. Those who are not protected from the bullying can only take so much before they step aside. Then the bullies fully run the show.
I know this and I don't want to let them win. I also have to take care of myself. There is only so much I can take. If the bullies win, it won't be because I couldn't take it any more. It will be because the entire community allowed them to eliminate the only people willing to keep them at bay.
Hopefully, #OccupyBoston will figure this out. Sunday evening is a special GA devoted to teaching anti-oppression. The focus is on race, but the practices are applicable to any oppression. Let it be a beginning of moving to a new community dynamic.
I leave you with my post-GA brain dump to our facilitation working group:
I'm not sure when I'll make it to a meeting again. Frankly, I'm tired of being assaulted and I need a break. So, before I go onto to other notes from the evening, I'd like to speak to this:
OccupyBoston is a diverse group of people with a diverse set of ideas about how to go about things. Also, evening GAs tend to be partly tourist attraction and we often have a significant number of people who attending out of curiosity. Without a critical mass of people present who own the ethos of non-violent, consensus decision-making we can't possibly be expected to manage a GA. Moreover, if we do not have a critical mass of people committed to protecting people from violent interactions, we cannot survive as a community. Perhaps some of this will get addressed in the oppression workshop tomorrow night, but I can't be there if there is not a strong enough commitment to protecting individuals and the group from violence.
Tonight, we had a confluence of issues which generated an explosion. Let me state the pieces of that which I saw and ask others to contribute to this list:
- we had two men who put themselves on the "Working Group Announcement" stack, who actually did not yet have a working group. Instead, they stood up to, in their own words, "express a concern about OccupyBoston". This led to some speechifying. We had to make a point of process to redirect the speaker to make a proposal.
- that speechifying generated a reaction in at least one member of the assembly, who claimed he wanted to ask a clarifying question. what he really wanted to do was disagree.
- a floor manager, apparently, told him "no, you can't speak now."
he became explosively angry and started yelling at the entire facilitation team and then the the GA about being "silenced" and how the facilitation team was fascist
no one seemed to know how to handle this. I called on the mic for security.
- a member of security came to me and I told him that we had a screaming person disrupting the meeting and that he needed to be removed.
- the security person did go over and talk to him, but he was not removed.
- minutes later, he was screaming again and directed all his anger at me.
- because no one else was taking care of this, I called him to the side of the GA so that the GA could continue.
- Michael stood with me, as this man and 3 of his cohorts screamed at me at the top of his lungs pointing his finger in my face and making personal attacks
- I spent some time calming him down. I invited him to help with facilitation by coming to the meetings. I explained to him that no one was being silenced, that we were there to help direct where to speak and to protect the process for everyone. He wanted no structure. I explained that structure is the only way to make it safe for oppressed voices to be heard. He calmed a lot. Even hugged me and apologized for directing all of his anger at me and he walked away.
- 20 minutes later, he was in the middle of the assembly screaming again. This time he rushed the microphone and grabbed it and we had to get it away from him.
He insisted on screaming about how the facilitators were silencing people. Michael responded, to yet again explain that we were a small volunteer group and would love to have more people helping with the process.
- Things calmed down and the GA resumed.
I document this here, because it could be a great case study. Many, many things went wrong here and it starts way before the GA of the evening even began, with chronic challenges we face. We're all volunteers, some of us with more experience than others and we're doing the best we can. Each of us, as individuals, are challenged in different ways. The group is challenged by three factors: lack of people power; lack of adequate time to assess, learn and train ourselves; and lack of a community which is disciplined to a process. I'm not sure how much we can do without that last item being addressed.
That said, here are some of my thoughts about the problems which converged to create this explosion:
- strapped for people, we scrambled for floor managers and they weren't all trained or skilled
(beggars can't be choosers, but there are some people who are really not suitable)
- strapped for people, we scrambled for facilitators and one of ours this evening had never even been to a GA
(they did a very good job, given what they contended with, but there were moments where their lack of experience led to some out of control dynamics. Not their fault. It's what we have to accept under the circumstances.)
- strapped for people, I was practically forced into the role of Process Mgr, though I had made it clear that I did not want to be in the foreground again, yet
(I've taken an inordinate amount of flack for being on facilitation. Many people have approached me to accuse me of controlling everything. Tonight, one of the lines from this man was, "they are, too, YOUR floor managers! You've taken over everything!" I need to step back. I don't want to be seen that way and I can't be the repository of everybody's anger)
- lacking a community protocol for handling disruptive people, we had no assistance from anyone outside of the facilitation team in containing this man's energy up front
(in NY there was a clear protocol and enough people on it to immediately contain disruptive people so that the facilitation team could continue)
- fearing the disintegration of the GA and given the previous point about no protocol, I took on the job of diverting this man's energy so that the GA could continue.
(I should not have done that. When the community is not able to step up, the facilitators need to stop the meeting and ask for a group determination of what we're going to do. Everyone is responsible for the environment we work in together. It should never be on one person's shoulders to do that caretaking.)
- Security never really dealt with the issue at hand. Once they've been called to attend to a disruptive person, they ought to stay on guard. No one ever appeared again after the first moments when I called for them on the mic.
I'm sure there are more cracks than these. What we experienced tonight is something that will ensure that marginalized voices don't participate. I hope we can find ways to resolve this. I look forward to a vigorous dialogue.
Here are my vague proposals to address some of these issues:
- just as there is going to be a special GA about oppression tomorrow, I would like to see a special GA about GA. Not necessarily to hash out the details of the process, but to discuss how to be respectful to the facilitators, how to bring up concerns about the process, to explain again and make room for questions and/or discussion about why we use the system we do. (particularly about the need for structure to create safety)
- I feel strongly that without a larger pool of trained people to facilitate, it would be good to propose that we not have 7 GAs per week. I think there are other benefits to this: allowing us more time to process for ourselves and to come up with proposals; creating a more generally accessible time for working group meetings which would allow more people to get in on an earlier part of the process
- let's finalize a proposal to be made to the GA about the proposal process. Many people have come up to me asking if there is any way to know ahead of time what will be voted on. Building a system wherein proposals are submitted in writing and scheduled to be voted on, with a public working group meeting before that GA vote, to allow greater input into the proposal ahead of time, will be very helpful for everyone.
- let's try and meet with the safety working group to discuss our needs during GAs
- the link to the consensus process google doc needs to be more prominent on the web site. it's too buried for anyone to ever find it. The more exposure it has, the more it is able to be stumbled upon casually, the more people will read it and start to internalize it.
Please, offer more solution proposals.
On another note, for those of you who weren't at the working group meeting, we had an honored guest. C T Butler is a co-founder of Food Not Bombs. He has worked with consensus process for 30 years and is an author on the subject. One of the documents we cited early on as a source for our guidelines is his. He has been in Baltimore and is now visiting us. He has offered to be a resource. He has ideas he'd like us to consider. (Apparently, he encountered a lot of resistance early on today, due to a misunderstanding. He was giving an interview, which just happened to be conducted in the space where we have our meetings and someone perceived that as him lecturing our working group. So, he's not sure if we're open to his offerings.) I have his email address. He has said he would join our google group if we invited him and he'd be happy to come back and work with us. (He was very supportive of the proposal about the proposal process, by the way.)
We did have a notetaker tonight. Her name was Anna and she has offered to do quite a bit of notetaking. We need to keep checking in with her and also, to keep looking for more people to take on that job, so she doesn't get burnt out.
That's my brain dump. Thanks all,
My previous diaries on OccupyBoston & OccupyWallSt:
OccupyBoston: Triumph and Tedium
A space of our own: A Women's Perspective on OccupyBoston clicks
#OccupyBoston: the day after
A Proposal to the Greenway Conservancy re: #OccupyBoston
Holding the Line at #OccupyBoston
#occupywallstreet: a primer on consensus and the General Assembly
#OccupyBoston: learning together
from an #occupier to Ed Schultz: Yes, we can change gov't w/UPDATE
from #OccupyWallStreet to #OccupyBoston : lessons
#OccupyTheRecList: a discussion (w/clarification update)
Witnessing #occupywallstreet: the power .... of the people ... 's mic
Witnessing #occupywallstreet: my 2nd day
Witnessing #occupywallstreet #6: my first day
Witnessing #OccupyWallStreet #5
Witnessing #OccupyWallStreet #4: Send blankets, Updated #2
Witnessing #OccupyWallStreet #3: Cheer Them On!