|
Yesterday, I attended a faculty and staff listening session hosted by the campus executive council. What struck me most during this town hall were the many colleagues seeking answers and reassurances (receiving neither) about how to best protect queer and trans (and BICPOC) students, staff, and faculty from not only the Trump administration, but also the North Dakota legislature — both of which are actively targeting, dehumanizing, and attempting to erase LGBTQ+ communities from society. Again and again, colleagues asked the campus executive council how the university plans to handle laws designed to discriminate against queer and trans members of the campus community. And each time this concern was raised, the executive council, which is mostly male and mostly white, responded with we will follow the law.* We. Will. Follow. The. Law. We will follow the law landed darkly and reminded me of the good Germans who reported Jewish and LGBTQ+ people to Nazis (original recipe, not our current Trump-Musk variety). Law-abiding Germans looked the other way as Nazis rounded up Jewish and LGBTQ+ people and sent them to concentration camps. Good, law-abiding Germans enabled genocide. Moreover, in the United States, slavery was the law of the land for hundreds of years, and segregation was legal for at least an additional century. At what point do we stop following unjust laws, laws designed to discriminate, dehumanize, and cleanse people from society? We. Will. Follow. The. Law. This response from the campus executive council was bone-chilling and highlighted the limits of allyship. Allyship is rarely unwavering, nearly always conditional. Allies have the privilege of dropping their allyship as soon as they face any challenge, any test of their mettle.
For me, this campus executive council listening session resurfaced a question I've returned to again and again since the 2024 Election: Are allies worth the effort when allies can and often do sell you out to protect themselves at the slightest inconvenience? I've spent my post-academic life working toward LGBTQ+ equity, inclusion, and belonging — encouraging straight folks to become allies and advocates for queer and trans communities. Over the years, I've received threats and slurs from colleagues on college and corporate campuses. But I continued to coach one-on-one and facilitate workshops on allyship because I believed the work was important and would lead to a better, more inclusive world. But we are experiencing the regrowth of fascism at an alarming rate through Trump's executive orders, general Republican bigotry, and the indifference of good white people — and now I'm no longer sure allyship is worth the time and energy. So in this atmosphere of rapidly rising fascism and waining allyship, I am winding down Creighton Brown Consulting, which offered individual LGBTQ+ professional development and organizational workshops, to focus on Rough-Draft Thinking, which will explore my thoughts on queer and trans inclusion and other curiosities. The next post will be (hopefully?) lighter in tone. Though I will always be me and will to a fault speak up. Here are a few things that have exercised my curiosity, caused me to reflect, and delighted me lately:
I look forward to you joining me on this journey — and would love your recommendations! Thank you very much for your time. If you have recommendations or curiosities, please fill out this nifty contact form. Sending y’all supportive, well-caffeinated vibes, Creighton Today’s Pen(cil): Sharpie [Permanent Marker] * The listening session was recorded and distributed via campus email.
0 Comments
Words Matter. Lately, while applying for open learning and leadership development positions, I’ve noticed a troubling trend in Human Resources in which these vital organizational departments have rebranded themselves as Human Capital. The term human resources is bad enough as it often connotes humans as resources with the goal of protecting the organization from you and not resources for the actual humans who compose, who give life to the organization. And human capital is human resources’ darker ideological sibling. The term human capital draws on a long history of human enslavement and exploitation, and as a former literature and writing educator, reminds me of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (1988). In A Small Place, Kincaid travels back to Antigua, her home before moving to the United States as a child. Kincaid catalogs the harms enacted by the British Empire on this twelve-by-nine mile-wide island as she taxis from the airport to her hotel. In particular, Kincaid focuses on how slavery and capitalism (another set of ideological siblings) shaped the island’s culture and Antiguan’s understanding of both themselves and the dehumanizing machinations of capitalism. Indeed, Kincaid writes: You [white North Americans and Europeans] will forget your part in the whole setup, that bureaucracy is one of your inventions, that Gross National Product is one of your inventions, and all the laws that you know mysteriously favour you. Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it’s because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to embrace his idea that you think so much of. (36-7) Here, Kincaid deftly links our modern concept of (human) capital with the objectification and dehumanization experienced by Africans violently removed from their homelands, barbarically ferried across the Atlantic, and casually sold like commodities to support the endless consumption of capitalism. Kincaid connects human capital with its lived and entwined histories of enslavement with banking and commerce systems (Barclays, for example). Words Matter. And choosing to name your human resources department human capital draws on the dark histories and legacies of enslavement, dehumanization, and exploitation in North America and throughout the Global South. Words Matter. Thank you very much for your time and consideration. If you have questions, curiosities, or are interested in learning more about inclusion and leadership possibilities for yourself or your organization, please fill out this nifty contact form. Sending y’all supportive, well-caffeinated vibes, Creighton Today’s Pen(cil): Musgrave Pencil Company 600 News [Wood Pencil] If you are curious about my approach to teaching A Small Place, check out “My Favorite Essay to Teach: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place.
And for a look into my former life as an academic, check out “Educational Archipelago: Alternative Knowledges and the Production of Docile Bodies in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place and Marjane Satrapi’s The Complete Persepolis.” Both pieces were published by the brilliant Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. |
Categories
All
Archives
January 2026
|