Nine or ten years ago, I had a conversation with Mikki Kendall about what was keeping people of color away from Arisia. There was a lot of speculation, and some important thoughts about tracking our progress, but only one concrete suggestion: that our badges were too small.
That sounds kind of absurd on the face of it. On one level the explanation is simple: Black teens -- and by this I mean specific Black teens -- felt unsafe in a hotel whose security staff didn't think they belonged at the convention. Bigger badges would more clearly identify them as part of the community and cut down on the harassment they got for being there. But of course this barrier is just one of thousands. The point isn't to fix it (though that's also important). The point is to turn Arisia into the kind of organization that notices subtle things like this and fixes them, or better yet is capable of predicting micro-impacts before they happen and can, to switch metaphors, build a playing field that's actually level instead of being full of potholes.
I had the idea that having
Jodie as conchair would help with this. We certainly got a lesson in cultural assumptions from having him on board, but of course Jodie was a person and not some kind of magic talisman so there are still plenty of things that need fixing, and also we'll need to come to understand the way in which the changes he made addressed this problem because, well, they're often subtle.
One of those is just becoming clear to me, and I thought I'd share it because I know I would never have thought of it myself. When writing the most recent budget, Jodie aimed high on all of the small admin line items. This put a couple of thousand dollars of expenses in the budget that weren't likely to be used, but our income numbers were uncertain enough that this seemed like a reasonable idea, and it's not like we had the volunteers available to pull off some of the things that fell out of the budget because of it. I didn't really think more of it until the con was over and it was time to close the books.
At which point I realized that we had a whole raft of cultural assumptions about budgeting. The biggest is that Arisia's event isn't a fundraiser with the goal of raising as much money for our charitable purpose as possible. The event *is* our charitable purpose and there are places where we're limited in our purpose by the amount of money available. We have some policies that let us reallocate money between line items as needed, so that money that we don't manage to use for our charitable purpose in one place can be used for it in another. We're bad at communicating which those places are, or encouraging people to ask for more money if they can use it effectively. Most people think we're in a more normal budget regime where spending less money is the goal and going over your budget is bad.
In other words, we have set up an
asshole filter.
And maybe we even kind of knew that we'd done that, and figured that we could sort of make up for it by encouraging people to be, as
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siderea mostly calls it in that post, transgressive. But something I certainly didn't connect, and don't see in
siderea's post, is that POC have a lot less freedom to be transgressive in American society. The good news is that this year we had enough POC volunteers to be able to observe the effect. The bad news, of course, is that it's absolutely there. Not every line was budgeted so high that it wound up actually being extra, and it was POC who wound up not asking for reimbursement for things they decided to spend anyway (since the charitable purpose was quite visible).
So going forward, we'll find ways to build a budget that make it clear where people should spend additional money if they have the opportunity to do so, without having to budget as if everyone will in fact do that.
And along with finally having larger badges, that will be two steps forward, out of thousands. Not for lack of willingness, but for lack of understanding.
I'm always looking for more understanding. But I think the only way I'm really going to get these tools to disassemble injustice is to hand them to someone else.
