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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
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An alternative view via three books
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I appreciated Ijeoma Oluo's book, Be a Revolution, for sharing what drives social justice activists, and how each of us can take action to support those movements.
What made this book particularly powerful for me is that each chapter contains multiple interviews with movement workers who share their engaging stories of what they faced that inspired or compelled them to become activists. They either experienced something themselves that convinced them to devote their lives to fight for change, or they saw some injustice so alarming they couldn't imagine doing anything else. Their experiences were often awful, but instead of giving up, they chose to stand up and fight to make things better for the next person like them.
While those stories may make such activism seem unattainable, Oluo also ends each chapter with the call to "Be a Revolution", offering ways in which the reader can contribute to the cause of justice in small but meaningful ways.
The book also helped me with greater insight into how all justice movements are inter-related. If we allow anybody to be treated as “less than”, as not being worthy of being treated equally to others, then we have opened the door for an artificial separation to be created between “us” and “them”, regardless of whether the separation is based on race, gender, disability, class, education, etc. All of the structures that create different treatment for people based on these biases keep some people in a position of power where they can exploit those who are "less than" them.
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That's how I interpret the revolution that Oluo and these other activists are working towards, one where we start from a fundamental assumption of human dignity and equality. What makes that revolutionary is that we are embedded in a culture that treats people differentially along several dimensions (see the next book for more context). Changing that culture starts with each of us being part of that revolution by treating people with dignity and respect in each interaction, regardless of differences.
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The history I discovered in the middle room wasn’t just an alternative version of American history; it was the story of an entirely different place, wholly incompatible with the whitewashed mythology enshrined in our collective memory. I have never known that place because that America, in reality, does not exist. That story of America is a fantastical, overwrought, and fictive tale. It is a fantasy where Christopher Columbus discovered a land that he never set foot in. ... the only difference between the Black AF version of history and the way America’s story is customarily recounted is that whiteness is not the center of the universe around which everything else revolves.
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It's a sobering read at times, especially with the bloody and visceral stories from the time of Reconstruction and the KKK era of lynchings.
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His perspective throughout the book is that the White colonists would not have survived without the generosity of the Native Americans, and without the agricultural expertise and hard work of the Black people they kidnapped from Africa. And yet the White men celebrated their self sufficiency and their independence, never acknowledging the people and support they took advantage of to survive and accumulate their wealth, a pattern that continues to this day in part due to laws passed to institutionalize that story into reality. Harriott describes slavery as "intentional: a color-coded, never-ending, legally protected, constitutionally enshrined system of human trafficking that extorted labor, intellectual property, and talent in the most brutal way imaginable."
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One example of the cognitive dissonance that was required to support slavery:
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Apparently, in South Carolina, the person who sows, waters, weeds, and harvests a plant can somehow “steal” it from the people who did absolutely nothing to create it. Since enslaved people were governed by property laws, running away to freedom was legally considered an act of theft, despite the ironic fact that the whole slavemaking industry was based on abduction.
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We may think we are beyond such dissonances now, but he points out that the presidency of Barack Obama was so threatening to White Americans that the country elected Donald Trump in response as its representative:
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He made his fortune like America made its fortune: taking land, profiting off financial malfeasance, conning the masses, and refusing to pay Black and brown people for their work.
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And that is America. Like its history, this nation is a mirage. Its greatness is a figment of a collective white imagination that envisions a bright, shining star where there is only a dumpster fire. America is a con artist. It is a counterfeit farce of a white country convinced of its own supremacy.
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I don't know enough to confirm every story Harriott tells, but the overall narrative he tells is quite damning: Americans created a system where they exploited others in the most brutal ways imaginable to build their wealth, while somehow giving themselves all the credit. Again, this is a pattern that continues to this day; witness the backlash to Obama's "You didn't build that" speech. Americans erase all the support necessary to enable their success, much like plantation owners took the wealth created by their slaves, and modern billionaires take all the credit and profits from the work done by thousands employed by them.
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Which leads to a third book I read just after those two, Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond. Desmond won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, Evicted, which detailed the experience of homelessness in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In this book, he turns to a broader question: Why does the richest country in the world have such a large portion of its population experiencing poverty?
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How do we, today, make the poor in America poor? In at least three ways.
First, we exploit them. We constrain their choice and power in the labor market, the housing market, and the financial market, driving down wages while forcing the poor to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit.
Second, we prioritize the subsidization of affluence over the alleviation of poverty. The United States could effectively end poverty in America tomorrow without increasing the deficit if it cracked down on corporations and families who cheat on their taxes, reallocating the newfound revenue to those most in need of it.
Third, we create prosperous and exclusive communities. And in doing so, we not only create neighborhoods with concentrated riches but also neighborhoods with concentrated despair—the externality of stockpiled opportunity. Wealth traps breed poverty traps. ... Income inequality has endowed rich families with more political power, which they have used to campaign for lower taxes, which in turn boosts their economic and political power even more, locking in an undemocratic and unjust cycle.
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The connection with the previous two books is left as an exercise to the reader. Or you could read The Sum of Us, by Heather McGhee, which I summarized last year.
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I won't say it was an eye-opening experience reading these three books one after the other, as I already had some exposure to these ideas. But it was powerful to see them connect in a compelling alternative history to the one we are taught in schools: US history is better described as exploitation than as Manifest Destiny, treating people fairly is more important than maximizing profits, and we can change things through our day-to-day actions. Internalizing these viewpoints would be a revolution, indeed.
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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A few articles that have caught my attention:
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- Mark Dusseau wrote a wonderful article on "7 Practical Tips for Building a Profitable Mission-Driven Business as a Black Founder". I particularly like his first point that "Profit = Mission ... While “why” you start your business shouldn’t be focused on just making money, we must maintain a profitable business model that aligns with our vision and mission." Later, "having a great mission will help sell your products ... only if you are truly solving a problem worth solving and there’s a big enough market of people willing to pay for the solution to the problem.
- That idea is illustrated by this story where a startup accelerated its product launch plans by a year after it was criticized on Twitter; the ensuing notoriety led to many people giving them money to get on the waitlist, showing the great demand for the product. As the founder shared in that article, they got lucky in getting the notoriety, but they had prepared well because "First, and probably most important, we had chosen to work on a problem that a lot of people care about."
- Decisions Nobody Made, by Dan Davies. An excerpt from his new book, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind, where this line particularly caught my attention: "What do bad decision-making organizations have in common? Quite a few things, but one of the clearest signs is something you might call an “accountability sink”. ... The communication between the decision-maker and the decided-upon has been broken – they have created a handy sink into which negative feedback can be poured without any danger of it affecting anything." I am reading the book and will report back on what I learn, but felt that idea explains why the feedback of the market in the first two articles is so important to making good product decisions.
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Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks!
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It was a delight to see my book on the shelves at the legendary Kepler's Books. They even let me sign it and put a special sticker on it!
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