112. KILLING THE AUTHENTIC SELF - Why Is It So Hard To Be Yourself At Work?
As a member of my workplace’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committee I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to bring one’s “authentic self” to work. A recent survey was published asking for thoughts from across an educational organisation about equality, diversity and inclusion and the key findings summarised a telling dichotomy. One the one hand, the negative, staff had reported an overall lack of diversity where they worked. On the other, the positive, they said that they felt comfortable in the workplace, welcome, and well represented. The results made me laugh. The sense of inclusiveness the non-diverse staff were experiencing seemed, to me, to perhaps explain the lack of diversity. If you didn’t fit in to that environment, if you were different, would you want to work there? Probably not. The positive was the cause of the negative, a negative in itself, but it was unclear whether the organisation was aware.
Although not a classic minority group, my own experiences with exclusion started young. A child of an immigrant I was lost frequently at school as my peers drew from shared cultural assumptions that I did not have. Even within my own family, Jewish traditions clashed with Methodist ones, with neither side of the family ever interacting with each other because of an ocean between them, and it felt wrong to pick a side. As a teenager, finding punk rock, I eventually learnt to embrace being an outsider. Fitting in had never been an option anyway, but now I could see that it wasn’t even desirable. Conformity was a trap. But I also learnt early that being brave enough to be yourself, in all its confusion and opposition to norms, came at a cost. Even though I loved feeling free enough to be myself, I didn’t make life easy for myself as I found more of me - anarchist, punk rock, atheist, straightedge, vegetarian - and lost the ease of just fitting in with a crowd. Life sure would be easier if I just shut up and learnt to blend in. But to do so would to no longer be me.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t blend in. I blended in whenever it was necessary to do so. Different clothes, a different way of speaking, holding my tongue, laughing off insulting jokes without firing back, going with the flow even as I wanted to swim against the grain. It was just that whenever I did that, I felt phoney. And I always wondered why it was even needed. Why we couldn’t just be different from each other - be ourselves - and fit in through our diversity instead of arbitrarily conforming to a standard of “acceptability” usually imposed from above? An exercise of power rather than an expression of our shared and diverse humanity. I have never understood why people are so afraid to see disagreement or clash. It is my belief that such a fear stems not from the inherent awfulness of disagreement, but from its infrequency in our lives and our not being taught how to live with difference. It is, in fact, one of the greatest gifts philosophy brings to its students, I believe, that we learn how to argue about clashing ideas without feeling personally attacked by the objections and with an openness to change our minds if challenged.
These ideas become all the more important when we think about the things that mark us out as “different” which are beyond our control and, in a conformist world, based largely on learning how to fit in, create barriers to success. In a racist and patriarchal, heteronormative world, for example, skin colour, cultural background, gender presentation, and even the person you are in a relationship with can all be things you feel forced to mask in the workplace in order not to rock the boat of institutional acceptability. When we talk about the need for representation in certain roles where such attributes have historically excluded particular groups or individuals, what we are talking about really is breaking down the arbitrary mental criteria we have built in our heads about what is and isn’t “acceptable”. We are expanding our definition of what it means to “fit in” by recognising that round shapes shouldn’t be forced to distort themselves to fit into square holes and that, instead, we should stop setting boundaries that exclude all shapes from entering in the first place. The expectation that a shape should be square and not round is the whole problem and such expectations need to be disrupted and destroyed.
Within my own institution - a school - there are so many cues given to students, big and small, about what they “ought” to do, what is “proper”, “appropriate”, “acceptable”, etc. And these cues are given by staff who, themselves, have internalised so many arbitrary expectations and received wisdoms about what one should and shouldn’t do to succeed from their own schooling that have just been accepted and repeated without scrutiny. How can we teach our students to be their authentic selves, be proud of who they are in all their diverse glory, when we also tell them they all have to wear the same uniform, when we monitor the sort of language they use, when we restrict and monitor their behaviour based on standards we can seldom justify independently from an appeal to “the rules”? And more importantly, when we ourselves, as teachers, so rarely get to bring our own authentic selves to work under similar arguments of “appropriateness” or “professionalism” how can our students take us seriously if we tell them to celebrate their uniqueness? We too are expected to dress a certain way, speak a certain way, hold our tongues on certain issues, promote certain values we may not actually hold. Can we really speak of equality, diversity and inclusion if teachers themselves don’t equally represent the rich diversity of the people we share our world with?
It seems obvious, for example, that if an applicant for a teaching job in a school turned up wearing jeans and a hoodie, or with a face tattoo that reads “REBEL”, that they would be unlikely to be hired as a teacher. But should it? What has that external appearance actually got to do with the efficacy of their education? Why should we fear rebels teaching our children? A job interview is a stressful time for all involved. Yet how often do we hear about the candidate who gets the job “seeming relaxed” or “feeling like they already belonged”? If we still make our decisions using such biased gut reasoning we will be forever excluding the anxious, the socially awkward or the neurodiverse. We can take the names and ages off the application data when selecting our shortlists, but as long as we ask for covering letters we will continue to be wowed by all the same things we seek to be wowed by while perhaps more relevant, but unfamiliar, experiences, or articulation of those experiences, get lost.
Even seemingly obvious professional norms can be questioned. Why should it be obvious, for example, that buying into a certain view of teaching and learning is a reasonable part of the interview process for being a teacher? Isn’t it possible that schools thrive best when they have a rich environment of many different approaches to education going on in each classroom? Like a three-ring circus, something to appeal to everyone but not necessarily everything for everyone, can’t schools be an intricate tapestry of diverse and interconnecting heterodoxy? Let the maverick teach their way, the traditionalist theirs. Let some teachers run their classrooms with an iron fist and other classrooms be given over to student self-rule. Let experimentation be the guiding principle and let teachers inside the classroom be the human beings that they are outside of it. For if they can’t be, then how can they tell the children that they teach that they should embrace who they are and that, whoever they are, they will be included in our rich and diverse world as their true, authentic selves?
I guess what I am saying is there is a vicious circle that needs to be broken. We teach children in schools not only our subjects, but about how success is defined in the world and what is expected of them in order to fit in and do well. And we base that advice on our own experiences, which are riddled with biases and repressions of our true authentic selves, passing down onto those children those same biases and repressions that have been passed down to us and ensuring their perpetual assent. The glass ceilings which need to be broken are fitted first in these schools, by teachers themselves pressed up against the same sharp glass. Until we acknowledge that as a profession and start breaking down those barriers by radically reassessing our expectations of what a teacher should and shouldn’t be, efforts at equality, diversity and inclusion in schools will continue to fall short, and the damaging lessons taught instead will continue to replicate and reproduce far beyond the school gates as our students make their way in the world with the same old biases and repressions internalised once again.
It’s time that schools became more diverse, and their staff, at least in the short-term, a little less comfortable.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com