Item 35: Future Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and team-building workshop.
Council sorely needs some help. The plan is to have a workshop in August. There are two main issues:
1. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Most of the council has an abysmal understanding of DEI issues – how are racial and economic inequalities baked into the ways we live? Where did they come from? How do we begin to fix it? Alyssa Garza is the main proponent of DEI issues, and really pushed for this workshop altogether. Max Baker is generally on board.
Ok: Hearing Jane Hughson speak on DEI is my favorite thing. She is genuinely trying, and she truly is approaching the whole thing in good faith. And yet she’s such a beginner. You can see the gears turn in her head as she tries to figure out what language to use. “I see this as educational. There are things Ms. Garza says and I don’t understand because they are new to me. As I understand more of these concepts that are becoming popular and important, that’s going to help me understand her.” It is so clunky, but so earnest.
2. Team-Building
Can the council and Max bridge the hostility and become less dysfunctional? Here is my diagnosis of the current animosity:
- It’s easy to blame Max Baker. When he’s fired up, he attacks everyone relentlessly and frequently insinuates that people are lazy, incompetent, and unethical.
- Sometimes people are lazy, incompetent, and unethical, but that’s also what it looks like when you’re overworked, under-trained, or being pulled in several directions. People are complex. A single situation can be both bad and sympathetic.
- Like I said in the last item, Max Baker’s moral compass is pointed in the right direction, but he has no sense of scale. Everything is a calamity of the same proportion. He can generate 50 moral crises out of a trip to the grocery store. This is very tiring if you’re trying to just make dinner.
- When things are going sideways, Jane Hughson has a tendency to act authoritarian towards him and pick fights with him. This is exceptionally counterproductive.
- The rest of city council has an obligation to wade through Max’s crises and evaluate each one on its merits. It’s poor form to vote against him out of spite.
- Max has legitimate reasons to be angry with other councilmembers. Sometimes they vote in shitty ways. I find it easy to believe that they are nicer for the camera, and act like asses to him behind the scenes. Politicians are known for this kind of thing.
(For the record, these dynamics do not really involve Alyssa Garza. Nor Saul Gonzales or Jude Prather, even though they vote against Max more often.)
If Max could prioritize the biggest problems and let little things go, and if he could use honey to catch flies instead of vinegar, he would be much more successful in implementing his agenda. As is, he is not terribly effective at convincing the majority of council to buy his arguments.
I don’t know what the path to functionality looks like. People are generally not very good at re-inventing their group dynamics. Hopefully this workshop helps.
The San Marxist 