304 - Community Diversity and Tokenism with Crystal Byrd Farmer
Encouraging diversity
Crystal Byrd Farmer, a polyamorous writer and speaker, joined us this week to speak about tokenism and diversity, which she also covers in her book The Token: Common Sense Ideas for Increasing Diversity in Your Organization.
Throughout this episode, Crystal covers the following topics:
What it means to be a token, as well as tokenism specifically in non-monogamous spaces.
How some common advice for encouraging diversity can also backfire and how to encourage people to put marginalized people in positions of power without tokenizing them and/or encouraging more tokenizing behavior.
How to handle resistance.
How community leaders have balanced a need to help people feel included while not endorsing harmful behavior.
Advice for privileged people in uplifting marginalized people’s experiences and struggles.
Using privilege to educate instead of shame others.
“ Instead of shaming, use your privilege to help others understand harm.”
-Crystal Byrd Farmer
Crystal’s book can be found anywhere books are sold, and visit her website to learn more about her and her writing. Follow her on Facebook at @crystalbyrdfarmer or Instagram and Twitter at @crystalbfarmer.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the multiamory podcast, we're talking about community diversity and tokenism with Crystal Byrd Farmer. Crystal is a polyamorous speaker and writer from North Carolina. She's the website editor for Black & Poly and a board member with the Foundation for Intentional Communities. Crystal is passionate about encouraging people to change their perspectives on diversity, relationships and the world. She recently published the book, The Token: Common Sense Ideas for Increasing Diversity in Your Organization. Crystal, thank you so much for joining us today.
Crystal: Thanks for having me.
Dedeker: I read through your book which came out pretty recently and I was surprised to hear you talk about coming from a background of not only organizing and engaging in online communities, but also you have this background in co-housing and intentional communities. I'm curious to hear about how you got into that particular world.
Crystal: Yes. For me, polyamory and co-housing are connected through the same person, a friend or someone-- One of my partners in Asheville. He lived in a co-housing community and while I was going up there to visit him, he was having community meetings and showing all the buildings and the other ecological sustainable updates they had made. I thought this is really interesting. I came back down to where I am near Charlotte, North Carolina and started working on building my own co-housing community. That's how I got into the world of intentional communities.
Dedeker: Wow, fascinating.
Emily: Wow, that's real cool.
Dedeker: I think it is really interesting because I realized as soon as I read that, I was like, "Oh gosh. Yes." I feel like my image of intentional communities, at least modern day intentional communities, is I just think very yuppie, hippie white as well.
Crystal: Yes. That's just true.
Emily: In San Francisco or Ohio.
Dedeker: No, Asheville also, I think makes sense. I guess I'm wondering, how do you find that your work-- It's interesting that you mentioned that for you it overlaps with one person in your life, but I'm curious from your personal experience, how do you find that your work in intentional community overlaps with your work in polyamorous community dynamics?
Crystal: Well, intentional communities are one of those groups where people are already thinking outside the box, they're trying to do something different. They have to negotiate with people, they have to communicate, they have to make agreements, they have to figure out how to represent themselves to the government or to other organizations. They do a lot of work already that's around relationship building and so that really connects with polyamory and how much work you have to do to keep your relationships going.
Dedeker: Something that I've noticed because I work with a lot of clients and I ask a lot of clients when they're thinking about their relationships to think about what's your ideal, what's your vision for the ideal version of your relationships? A lot of people have the commune dream, is essentially what I like to call it.
A lot of people have the commune dream of like, oh, my partners and I we're going to buy a big parcel of land and build all these tiny homes on it. We're all going to go there and live. I guess I'm also wondering, do you run across also just a lot of polyamorous people in general holding the same dream also coming into the intentional community.
Crystal: Yes. Intentional community building is hard. Just like polyamory, you have a lot of people who think, "Oh, this will be great. It'll be wonderful. I can't wait to get all my friends together and we live in this big house." But in reality you have zoning laws, you have boards, government that are saying, "You have to build such and such and you can't have multifamily here or there." It really takes a lot of persistence. There is a higher number of people who are non-monogamous in the intentional communities movement than I've seen in any other kind of movement.
I think there's some overlap there, but there are not a whole lot of polyamorous intentional communities. There was one in Philadelphia called Composure that was really cool, it has some cool people, but then they all moved out.
Emily: Oh, wow.
Dedeker: I feel like I hear that story a lot sometimes.
Emily: Composure, I like that.
Crystal: Yes.
Jase: It is a good name and we like that.
Emily: Your book is called The Token and just for our listeners or anyone who doesn't know what Tokenism is, could you tell us the definition of that and also can we talk about tokenism specifically in non-monogamous spaces?
Crystal: Yes. A token is somebody that represents one or more identities. If you're talking about a majority white community, the token would be the token black person. If it's the mostly straight community, then you have a few people who are LGBTQ and they're tokens because they're expected to represent everything that their identity means and to explain it and to defend it sometimes. In non-monogamy I found myself being the token a lot of times just being the black person in a community.
A lot of polyamorous communities are majority white, the majority middle class and so there's people who are comfortable in that space and then there's me who just shows up as I am with all my different identities and people are looking at me to say, "Well, why don't you bring in more people who are like you?" That's where the book started to form in my head.
Jase: Yes, absolutely. In the book you start out by identifying as a token, just like you were saying right now and about that role that's put on you to be the representative for everyone else who's not part of this group who shares those labels in common with you or shares those identities in common with you. I feel like the word token is often used in a negative context or in a derogatory way. I was wondering if you could talk about your process or your choice for using that in your book for either claiming that word or trying to, I guess, broaden the usage of it, or what went behind that?
Crystal: I think for me it was taking the word and saying, I'd rather you call me a token than to go out to your community and refer to them because some people use it in a joking way, but it's not a joke and there's a lot of emotional labor that's tied into being a token. I wanted to say, "Hey, this book is going to be very obvious and very clear about what you need to do and who you're reaching out to. So call me a token, I'm going to explain it to you some things are going to be hard to hear, but that's okay."
Dedeker: For you, you mentioned that this came out of community leaders or other people in community coming to you and asking you, "Hey, how come you're just the one person? Why don't you bring more people that are like you?" Which feels like it's a little bit of an emphasis on the wrong mover and shaker, if I'm not mistaken.
Crystal: Yes. I think people naturally want to find ways, they want to find somebody who can help them. I found that a lot being a minority is that they see you and they see me smiling, they see me showing up and being, I call it a palatable black person. I'm very easy going. So they think, okay, well maybe she's the one who can explain this whole thing to me. That's where they say, "She's approachable, let me have her do all of this explaining." The book is me doing all the explaining so I don't have to do it in person every time.
Jase: Now you have the book, you're just like, "Here, read this." Got it.
Emily: It feel like a really easy to read, easy to use manual that you can give to leaders or anyone in these communities, but also, I felt as though you could use it in so many different spaces, even in a work community or various places as well. Was that your intention, or where you're specifically like, "This needs to be only for intentional communities."
Crystal: I wrote it right after I left the co-housing conference. The intentional communities movement was very much in my mind. The polyamory community was in my mind going through the editing process with the publisher, they talked about how it could have a wider reach. That's where I started to broaden it out a little bit. Once I started going through edits with the publisher, I was able to add some more in examples, maybe take away a little bit of the language that was very specifically about the USA and make it more broad.
Emily: Because it did feel very broad to me. We knew this was a book written by a polyamorous person and you did speak about it somewhat at the beginning and the end for sure, but it did feel super accessible to a wide variety of audiences, which was great.
Dedeker: Since the book was published, have you found that it's made any waves in your own particular local polyamory community?
Crystal: I don't know. I'm part of the community in Charlotte and they're very aware of these issues. During the pandemic, before the book came out, I sat down at a meeting with some of the young poly people. They've always been aware of this and I've always been an activist in that side of it for my local community. They were really excited to have the book come out.
Dedeker: Nice. Excellent. Something that you talk about in the book and I think that some pretty common advice that I see floating around out there for encouraging diversity in your organizations or in your workplace is to invite marginalized people or non-majority people into decision-making roles or positions of leadership. However, I think as we've seen, sometimes these efforts can also backfire. Like in the book, you share a story of being invited to apply for a board member position for a particular organization. Can you first share a little bit of that story for our listeners?
Crystal: In the book I talk about being part of an organization and going to their national convention meeting for the first time when I was there to talk about diversity. This is my first time meeting some of the leadership of that organization, first time being in dialogue with people who were attending the conference. When I got back, I got an email from a board member and said, "We want you to apply for the board." I looked at their website, I looked at the other board members. They were older people, they were white, they had a lot of experience with this organization. I thought, "I'm not a super good fit to be a board member. I've never been on a board before."
Now I'm on a board for FIC, but at that point I was like, "They just want me because I'm black." That felt like they were asking a lot of me to show up and be a board member and do all that work. Then I felt like I was also going to be the one educating them about racism, about marginalization and I wasn't ready to do that.
Dedeker: I think it's interesting in that story that it feels like this very real-world example of what seems to some well-meaning people a good idea in practice ends up actually causing, ironically, more tokenizing behavior. I guess I was wondering what practical advice would you offer for encouraging community leaders to be able to put marginalized people in positions of power, without it simultaneously causing this more and more tokenization to happen?
Crystal: I think it's important to be transparent and to know that we know what you're doing. We, the marginalized people, can tell that you want us for a certain thing maybe because of our identity. It's really important for you just to own that if you want to do it, but also don't pull the person who just came in the door five minutes ago, who just joined your organization, who just started coming to meetings. You really have to get more people in the door who are diverse and get them involved and active in the organization and then let them self-select into leadership positions and you're growing them instead of just saying, "Hey, you, I think you're different so why don't you come in and represent all the different people?"
Dedeker: I think in the book you really lay out-- The image that I almost get from it, it's like laying a foundation because you break it down into preparing your community, doing the work, whether that's the anti-racism work or anti-bigotry work, anti-oppression work, things like that and then creating culture-conscious spaces. It feels very much like this image of, it's almost like preparing the soil essentially. That you can prepare the soil, but you can't reach down and tug on the plant's leaves to force it to do a particular thing or be a particular way.
Crystal: It's definitely a process, it's not going to happen overnight. I'm the ultimate cynicist where I don't think any organization that started out majority white is ever going to become minority white. You're never going to have a huge amount of diversity. You're working with very small numbers, so it's really important to make the experience a quality experience for the people who are coming in, instead of just pulling on them just because they represent some diverse identity that you're actually helping them be a part of the organization and listening to their changes or what they want to change, then giving them a reason to stay in the organization.
Because I think a lot of times when you have people who are asked to make change or asked to be the leading edge of something, they get a lot of pushback, they get a lot of negativity and then they don't want to stay in the organization.
Jose: That reminds me of a talk that I went to, I guess a couple of years ago now, that was about writing if you're creating fictional content and how to diversify that. A lot of it talked about getting sensitivity readers or people who-- First of all, hiring people, paying them to bring perspectives that you don't have, but something they brought up that really surprised me, because I'm not a fiction writer myself, but something that came up in the talk that really surprised me was, they said if you hire a sensitivity writer and they give you feedback that you should actually take it.
That a lot of people will do this, they'll hire a sensitivity writer for that kind of input, knowing that they'll say, "Hey, so these are the things I noticed that this is weird, or this feels like you're exoticizing or fetishizing." These different things. Then the author would come back to them like, "Well, no, it's not though, because you see, this, that and the other thing or this is really what I'm doing here." It reminds me of that idea where it's like, "We want your ideas, but only if we want them later."
Emily: The palatable too could be hard to them.
Crystal: That's the big part of the work. Is actually hearing feedback and then internalizing it and making the changes yourself instead of just bringing someone on to look the role and to make your organization look good. You actually have to listen to them and respond to their questions and requests.
Dedeker: This is something that you cover in the book a little bit more in-depth, but I think that you talked about bringing people in and then also having to give them a reason to stay and giving them, essentially, ways of combating the natural resistance that comes up to changing things or adjusting things even in small ways or in very radical ways. I guess I was wondering, from your perspective, what's the most common different types of resistance that you see within small or big organizations trying to make these kinds of changes?
Crystal: Some of the biggest ones are the people who are like, they're really excited about the change, but they want to control what direction the change goes. I think we see that a lot when we talk about the Me Too Movement, when Black Lives Matter was a big thing. They're like, "Oh, oh my god, I know exactly we need and we're going to do this, this, this and this." But then you bring someone on, whether it's a facilitator or an organizer or somebody who is actually making real suggestions, then they're opposed to that because it doesn't fit their vision of where they're going. There are people who are trying to control the trajectory of the change.
The other ones are just the people who are really negative about the whole process. They'll go on social media or they'll be talking to people outside of the meetings and they're just trying to slow the process down and derail it and get people to be against the whole idea of it.
Emily: It sounds like there's two maybe types of resistances, those who are excited about it initially, but then are resistant to it after the fact, then those who come already resistant to begin with. Is that?
Crystal: Yes. I think the biggest is that second group is going to be the biggest one, the people who are like, "We have enough diversity, why is this important. Why are we doing it? I liked that group the way it is. We don't need to change anything." That's going to be the biggest group usually.
Dedeker: Well, something that I thought was interesting when you were talking about these different flavors of resistance or different flavors of people who are resistors, that something that you mentioned is that there can also be the people who their response to these changes, especially actions that are pushing for diversity, that there's the type of person who wants to respond by wallowing in the guilts and wallowing in the apologies and stuff like that. I thought that was really interesting of categorizing that as resistance. Can you speak to that a little bit more?
Crystal: Yes. I see this in almost every talk or presentation I give, whether it's in person or on Zoom. There are going to be people who, when they hear about oppression, they hear about racism, all these things, they just feel so sad, so upset, so guilty. It's important to process those feelings, but it's not good to do that when somebody like me is speaking about the real experiences of marginalized people. That's because you're taking away the emotional energy instead of saying, "Hey, this is a real problem. White supremacy is something we need to defeat."
Now we're turning to, "Hey, this one white person feels really guilty, so let's make her feel better. Let's make sure she's okay. Let's forgive her. Let's remind her about these great things she's done." That just takes away energy from the actual work that you should be doing. I think it's perfectly okay for that white person to go talk to a friend or somebody and go through all that, but I'm not willing to do that in my role.
Jase: I feel like the opposite of the resistance-resistor thing, or at least not totally the opposite, but the other thing that I saw come up, especially during last year with Black Lives Matter and all of that was the opposite thing of like, "Oh god, I just realized that my organization or my peer group is racist or at the very least is not inclusive. I need to fix it yesterday. I'm going to try to rush to do those things." Maybe it leads to those situations like you were talking about where it's like, "Cool, the first black person I see, I'm going to invite them to be a board member of my group or something like that." I noticed that two of the, I'm realizing now that I'm behind on this and I want a quick fix instead of committing to this longer-term gradual fix.
Crystal: I think that's a very common thing is for people to say, "Hey, wow, this is a problem. Let's fix it." But they get bored after a few weeks, after a few months when the work gets really hard and this really is work that takes a lot of time. It has to be every single person in the organization, not just the leadership, not just the key members, but everybody has to go through this change. That means that you're going to be supporting people through the entire process, instead of just saying, "Okay, now we're doing this, everybody get over it."
Dedeker: I appreciated that something that I think readers can really glean from your book is, along with covering a lot of information in a pretty easily digestible way, you also give these very, very specific workshops and talking points and you're very specific about like, "Okay, this is what we're going to be talking about for this discussion group." You lay out, are you going to have your tokens present or not? Which I think is actually really key because I think there's a lot of resources that are given to organizations just assuming you got to bring everybody to this particular discussion, you got to make everybody sit through this. As well as giving the reader very, very clear discussion questions to look at things from all angles and look at all of the different feelings that may come up during this process as well.
Crystal: I wanted it to be really practical and something that people can read a chapter and immediately go and schedule the next group meeting around and talk about. I didn't want to have a long 300-page book just about the theory. I wanted people to be able to take it and start working on it right away.
Emily: The huge glossary of different reading materials at the end of the book was really amazing as well. That I think is hugely beneficial to anyone who wants to do this work.
Crystal: That's the second thing that people ask me for it. Once they asked me, "How do I get my organization to be more diverse?" They say, "Well, what resources do you have?" I just took all my links and everything that I had collected over the years and dumped them on the page.
Emily: That's great.
Dedeker: First of all, also just so our readers know, this book is a very quick read, which is fantastic. I think that this is a great place for starting, especially if you're a community leader and you're just super overwhelmed by this and you know that there's a list of 20 books, but you don't know which one to start from. Starting with Crystal's book I think is a fantastic place to get the juices flowing as it were and point you in directions to go from there.
Emily: I want to talk a little bit more about community leaders because in the book you point out tokens are people, which means they can be assholes too. Direct quote, yes, and community leaders really need to help people feel included without endorsing harmful behavior, even if that harmful behavior comes from someone who is marginalized. Have you found that there are people out there who have employed effective and not effective ways that community leaders have pulled off that balance?
Crystal: There are some ways. It's a really hard balance because most organizations or most leaders are already acting from behind where they're already causing harm to marginalized people. They have the tendency to really invest in what the marginalized people are saying, but as marginalized people, we also have our own struggles and trauma and things that we're working through. We may be in an unhealthy space when we come to an organization. It's important for a leader to be able to recognize, this is their stuff and this is our stuff. What can we do to reduce the harm that we're causing?
Also, when do we set boundaries and say, "This is not something that I'm going to engage with. This is not something I'm going to try and fix. It's just that person's struggle and we're going to try and make a set of boundary for whatever we're doing."
Dedeker: I think that's related to something else that you pointed out. You talked about how, unless your group is very specifically a support group, your group or your organization isn't necessarily the place where a token is going to go to get their healing done. I think that really makes sense looking at it through a community leader perspective of being able to have that discernment of, like you said, what's their stuff and what's our stuff and what's the stuff that we can actually work on and we can actually make better and we can actually make more inviting as opposed to taking on that burden of, we also need to heal all this person's personal baggage and all that stuff as well.
Crystal: I was part of an organization called A New Culture and that was one, a couple of summers when I was doing their summer camp where I really had my own things that I had to deal with, but I was also dealing with what they were dealing with as far as racial tension. They were having a lot of things around gender. The way that I reacted then would be different from the way that I am reacting now. It took a lot of time and then healing and then talking to this group to understand, I had some stuff going on and that may have made me more critical of the organization and may have ruined or damaged some relationships. I wouldn't do the same thing if I were in that group now.
There's definitely a process and everybody has to understand their own traumas and find places and ways that they can heal from that and know that sometimes they're going to mess up and it's not always the organization's fault that they do.
Dedeker: What tips would you offer for people being able to either make that distinction or have those kinds of conversations?
Crystal: If you're in an organization and you feel like you're constantly being triggered or you're constantly being marginalized, it's okay to say maybe that organization isn't for you, it's okay to step back and say, "Somebody else can fight this battle. I'm going to take care of myself." If you do have some energy to be able to say, "There are some changes and I want to help champion." That's great for you to do, but also just know that taking care of yourself is the most important thing. If you're a leader, it's going to be a little bit harder for you to say, "I think you need to leave." You usually don't want to say that as a leader of an organization. It's important to just set boundaries and say, "I hear that you have some concerns with things like this. We're going to address X, Y and Z and then we're going to put off A, B and C until later." You have to be okay saying that. I think in the book, I talk about the order of how you address different areas of diversity. I say race is a huge thing that is still going on and that's something that you should address first, but there are always going to be other things gender, disability, age, LGBTQ. There's always all these things that you have to address, but you really, as an organization, you have to say, "We're going to prioritize some things and not others because we have limited time and energy."
Dedeker: Yes, I think that message was also really important. I feel like it was the first time that I came across that message in the space, but it is that idea of like, you can't tackle everything at the same time. I do feel like we have seen a lot of that, in particular last year of, again, people realizing like, "Oh gosh, I'm late to this party." Or, "I'm late in doing this work." Now it has to be absolutely everything at once, which it seems like in real life often results in-
Emily: Burnout.
Dedeker: -nothing really being productive or nothing really being fixed, essentially. We are going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this episode and the ways that you can support our show so that we can keep this content coming at you for free every week.
Jase: I'm going to continue this fun, fun trend of quoting you to yourself.
This is another one from you book. Dedeker always hates it when people quote her to herself.
Dedeker: I absolutely hate it.
Jase: Hopefully, you're all right with that. This one says--
Crystal: It's new to me, so.
I can enjoy it.
Jase: Now you can decide if you like or not. The quote you said was, it's vital that your work include interacting with other privileged people, instead of proving how much of an ally you are to marginalized people. Then you go on to suggest to allies that it's better not to talk to marginalized people about the work you're doing for them, but instead, to ask them about their struggles and victories without needing to jump in with, "Oh and I'm doing these things to help." Can you talk about that a little bit more, how that tends to show up?
Crystal: Yes. That mainly comes from just my annoyance with white people. Usually, when I am in spaces and somebody is really excited, they just read how to be anti-racist or they just read white fragility or they saw a webinar or they watched 13th and they just want to repeat all these facts about black suffering and racism to me. It's like, "I know all of this. You don't have to tell me, you don't have to remind me that this exists." They're excited, they're sharing and I think that's great, but I'm not the person they should be talking to about it.
Mainly that's just because I don't want to do the labor of remembering all those things and holding that pain and then assuring that white person that they're a good person, even though they haven't known about this until now.
Jase: To contrast that another refrain that comes up a lot in community is this idea that allies cannot and should not be silent or complacent. I think that people can sometimes struggle with this, where they say, "On the one hand, I shouldn't just be talking about all the work I'm doing, but on the other hand, I shouldn't be silent." I feel like it can lead people to panic and just give up because it's like, I feel like I'm doomed no matter what I do.
Crystal: Yes. That's something that people have to figure out on their own. Like I said, I think it's important that you talk to other white people or other people who are privileged about what you're learning because you're sharing information that they may not know, you may have a different perspective on it, you may have some personal stories that really impacts them when they hear it. I think it's better to talk about that with people than to ignore it or to not talk about it or to pretend like everybody's on the same page because everybody's not. We know just from the past election that people have a huge amount of things that they believe in or that they think about the world that may not be true.
Dedeker: Yes, this seems like the kind of thing that potentially plays out differently when we're all in community together and in-person community together, versus the ways that we interact in online community when it comes to things like activism or allyship and things like that and then, of course, the other complicating factors of like, how do I perform myself? How do I perform my ethic? How do I perform my activism? Things like that. I guess I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the ways that social media makes this more complex.
Crystal: Yes, I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter, because I think--
Dedeker: Don't we all?
Crystal: I think it's one of the most useless things that anybody can do, but it also has its own way of influencing the world and the way that we're doing things. I think when it comes to activism and educating people, I don't think Twitter is helpful. I think you're just talking to people who already think like you on Twitter. People are so quick to block others that disagree with them, they tear apart these short statements with, they don't have context, they don't have a lot of words, they don't have a lot of things attached to them.
I think you're wasting energy if you're trying to be an activist on Twitter, unless you have millions of followers and people that you can actually share in-depth information with. I think most people are just talking to themselves on Twitter. I think when it comes to in-person--
Dedeker: We're going to get some tweets about that.
Emily: People are going to talk about--
Jase: It's okay, they'll be talking to themselves.
Emily: Yes, exactly.
Dedeker: They're talking to themselves. Okay.
Crystal: The biggest thing that I try and challenge people to do is to talk to their relatives, talk to their friends and family, talk to their partners, talk to people who are in the world around you and say, "This is what I'm learning." That's when you realize, maybe people don't know what pronouns are. They haven't ever used pronouns. They don't know why it's important to ask for them. You can be someone who educates them, not in a way like, "Oh, you're wrong. Get with the program." But in a way that people are recognizing that gender has a lot of different elements to it, you can be more inclusive and respectful when you do this.
I think it's important for people to have those one-on-one conversations, where you're pulling someone aside and saying, "Hey, this is what I've learned. This is what I know is helpful or is supportive of different people. Maybe you should try it instead of yelling at somebody on Twitter just because, I don't know, they use the wrong pronoun."
Dedeker: I think that actually, that's a segue into something else that you covered in your book, which was about this idea of it can be very easy for us to use our privilege to shame and you make this call of, instead of shaming, can we use our privilege to help others understand harm? I feel like this is a huge topic. There's so much there, we could probably do an entire episode just on this. We've talked a lot on the show before about just what we're seeing these days, the phenomenon of being counseled on Twitter or being counseled within an online group.
Someone, a newbie comes into a group and uses the wrong term or they accidentally dropped a micro-aggression and everyone just piles on them and that person never wants to come back. I guess we're living these weird dual lives of both our offline community spaces, as well as our online community spaces within this context of this very shame-heavy internet culture. I'm wondering, what are your thoughts about what community leaders can do to actually encourage education and education about harm over shaming and counseling?
Crystal: I think it's important for leaders to take that humble learning stance themselves and say, "Hey, I'm always learning things. I mess up sometimes. I can still be a good leader, even when I mess up and I'm going to ask for your forgiveness sometimes and that's okay." That gives the members some space to say like, "Yes, I messed up." Then you have to be a little bit more active and say, "Hey, this person, they said something wrong, they used a wrong term. Let's give them a little bit of space." When it comes to Black & Poly, the organization that I run the website for, they have a Facebook group, it has 20,000 members.
I'm one of the trolls in the group. I also give information, but I troll people too. It's very common for someone who's brand new to ask a question and it has the wrong words. It comes from the wrong assumptions. It's very easy, I'll say personally for me, I can put a dumb GIF on there and say, "Hey, you're messing up or you're going to get--" What do they call it? They're going to drag you is what they say. I can do that. I guess that's what the kid was saying, but I could also give them a link to the Black & Poly website that has an article that addresses their specific concern. I can define some of the terms for them. I can be helpful or I can just throw them in the pile and say, "Haha, you didn't get it right the first time."
Dedeker: It seems like it's this emphasis on not just pointing out what was incorrect. I think that's very easy for a lot of us to stop there, is just point out and just a dual, well actually that word means yada yada yada and actually redirecting toward what the resource or what the actual education could come from.
Crystal: I think it's really important to remember that we have learned things along the way, so we have been that person who used a wrong term or wasn't quite doing it right. It's important to just have some humility and think that, if they get a little bit of help, then they can be as awesome as I am.
Jase: I love that.
Dedeker: Yes, you really express that in the book as well, it's this idea of so many of us are unlearning oppression in different ways depending on what our identities are what our backgrounds are, what our assumptions are. This idea of, everyone else around you is also unlearning oppression at the same time as you are as well, even if you're in a different place in the journey. I guess it comes back to that humility and compassion ultimately.
Emily: I wanted to ask you about, towards the end of the book you talked about compensation of people of color when they are doing emotional labor and education. If you are a person who is more of like a community leader, when are appropriate times to compensate it's the people of color who are doing educational things like this?
Crystal: I'm going to go on the side of always compensating people.
Emily: Great.
Crystal: Is there going to be people who are willing to do the work for free? That's great, but also you should recognize that they're doing something above and beyond what they could be doing as a member of your community. I think you should recognize that by compensating them. That was a hard lesson for me to learn because I was involved in my local community for so long just as a member, just as a meeting organizer, that when I started doing more of this work, they were like, "Well, we're going to pay you." And I'm like, "But--" Taking money was hard for me, but it's actually a good thing to do.
Emily: That's great.
Jase: It is such a transition to make to accepting money also. I've definitely noticed that a lot of people echo something similar of like, "Wait what? How do I accept money?"
Emily: It does feel like a lot of communities just expect people to like, oh, you're giving your time for free and you're giving your education for free regardless of who you are. I really appreciate it that you put that in the book. It's a good lesson for people to understand that.
Dedeker: It also set it up so that now that you have a book that it is very easy to just be like, "Well, buy my book."
Even before we get to the point of, hire me as a consultant or anything like that, it's like, "Here, start here."
Emily: What is your greatest hope or wish for the future of the polyamorous community? Because you've written this amazing book, you have so many great outlines for community members and leaders. What is a best case scenario future that we're hoping for here with polyamory communities?
Crystal: I went to the Loving More conference in 2014 I think and that was in Philadelphia. I showed up and there was like one or two other black people. One of the other black women looked at me and she was like, "We're it." And I was like, "Yes." I would love when COVID is under control and we start having in-person events, I would love to show up at a polyamory convention and there just be 30%, 40% people of color and all kinds of diversity and for us to look at each other and say, "Hey, I know you, we're family, we're friends." This is comfortable because the community is open and accepting and willing to do that hard work of having people together.
Emily: That's awesome.
Jase: The very last chapter in your book, the title is, Keep On Keeping On. I think that's such a good lesson I think for all of us who want to be allies to really take is that idea of, it's not just going to change overnight and finding a way to do your work in a sustainable way that's not just based on getting praise and approval for it. Because like you pointed out, you might even have people leave your group because they're resistant to it and that that's okay. That it's okay for those things. Something that I really liked is your very last line here is, you're talking about essentially how to respond when someone who is black or otherwise marginalized is telling you about their experience.
You just said you don't have to come up with a better response than, "I hear you and I'm going to do better." I think that has been one of the lessons that I think, for me, has taken a while to learn to not need to get approval and to understand that I will never get that and that that's okay, that's not why I'm doing it. I'm not going to lie, it's still hard, but I do think that's so important. I love that you ended your book acknowledging that and being real about that and that that's what we need to do.
Crystal: Definitely, I want people to keep trying. I don't want them to get so frustrated that they're not perfect and just give up. I want everybody to keep going.
Jase: This book, it's fantastic. Like we said, it's fairly short, you could probably read this in an afternoon. I would say I'd add this to our required reading list for community leaders especially, but ideally for everyone out there. It's just, like you said Crystal, you didn't spend 300 pages talking about the theory, it just gets right into just very matter of fact, this is what's going on, here's my perspective on this.
It's a lot of that stuff that you get some perspective and some answers on the questions that you might want to ask but you don't want to tokenize people in your group by asking them. I think this is an amazing resource and I hope that everyone goes out and buys it right now. Crystal, can you tell us where people can go to find you and your work and where they can go buy their copy?
Crystal: You can buy the book anywhere that sells books including Amazon or an independent bookstore. You can find me on my website, it's crystalbyrdfarmer.com. I'm going to spell it. It's C-R-Y-S-T-A-L-B-Y-R-D-F-A-R-M-E-R.com. I'm on Facebook, @Crystal Byrd Farmer, Twitter @Crystal B Farmer and you'll see all my tweets about being mean to people.
I'm on Instagram too, crystalbfarmer.
Dedeker: Then I also saw, this was listed in the end of your book, that you listed the website, Big Sister Team Building.
Crystal: Yes. I do go and talk to people for money.
If you are an organization and you want to have me come in person and work through the exercises, do a diversity training, facilitate, I can come.
Emily: Eventually.
Crystal: I can talk through Zoom. I can help your organization take those steps toward being more diverse, wherever you are on the journey.
Dedeker: We are going to be sticking around with Crystal for our bonus episode to keep the conversation going. Stick around for that. For all of you who are listening, we would love to hear your thoughts about this week's episode. Have you checked out Crystal's book yet? Are you a community leader and you're trying to incorporate some of these ideas into your group? Have you run into frustrations or struggles or victories? We want to hear about it. The best place to share your thoughts with us and other listeners is on this episode's discussion thread in our private Facebook group or Discord chat.