Education builds bridges to new understanding. (educare: to bring up; to nurture). Indoctrination burns bridges and prevents new ones from being built. (endoctriner: to instruct; to imbue with an idea or opinion). Education makes the world bigger. Indoctrination keeps one sequestered in a silo.
The reason anti-woke folks rail so hard against indoctrination is that they were shaped by indoctrination that was presented as education; and in the absence of actual education, it’s easy to conflate the two, or confuse one for the other. Their impulse to resist indoctrination is sound. The target of their ire is misplaced.
The people who built these systems often believed in them completely—which is exactly what makes indoctrination so effective. You don’t need cynics at the top. You need true believers who’ve never crossed the bridge themselves.
That’s how the confusion between indoctrination and education perpetuates itself—not through deception, but through unexamined inheritance.
‘woke’ just means ‘educated, and ready to cross the bridge when it presents itself.’
‘anti-woke’ just means ‘bridges are dangerous: it’s only safe in the silo.’
Good for you, for recognizing the importance of education, and the power of indoctrination to limit education’s reach. If you’re sitting with the anxiety of a world widened beyond the scale of what you were prescribed, just reach out. Folks are here for you—just over the bridge.
to be woke is to have a visceral sense of justice, as reliable as the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and cognition—that allows one to recognize that the current language of justice is inadequate, as justice is not applied equitably across all who would access it; and to participate in creating language that leads to equitable application.
to be a woke ally is to recognize that one lacks the visceral sense of justice; to believe those who experience it; and to use the other senses to fill the gap, trusting that the language will mature if allowed to do so—to be blind, but willing to coexist with the sighted.
to be anti-woke is to deny the existence of the visceral experience of justice; to belittle those who would enrich its language—to be blind, to deny the existence of sight, in the most literal sense, and to refuse to coexist with the sighted.
only a person who has had the sense of justice bred out of them can own humans or force them through contract into unpaid labor; deny them equal access to the right to vote; justify and continue to fund genocide; or accumulate wealth while others starve.
knowing that the path of the ally is available, one follows it to redemption.
never suspecting that justice is lived experience, the whole world becomes one’s adversary.
I recently received pushback from the usual channels when I posted about decolonizing the gender binary. As is my way, I went looking to history to see if I was being unfair to white guys. What I found was pretty clear, and it’s not just related to race (like gender, a relational construct), but more about power.
Gender flexibility tends to appear in cultures where gender is understood as a relational/functional/spiritual category rather than a biological one. The binary hardened historically where:
Roman law codified sex/gender into property and inheritance structures: strict gender roles ensure that only certain people are eligible to pass along the family name, and that eligibility is determined by the accidental conditions of one’s birth, framed as divine right—the same power structure that legitimized the emperor.
Abrahamic traditions systematized binary creation theology: by encoding the male/female pair as the first and foundational act of divine sorting, the binary was lifted out of social negotiation and into ontology—it became not a human arrangement subject to revision but a feature of reality itself, which meant that any person who didn’t fit wasn’t merely unusual but was an offense against the created order, converting natural human variation into theological emergency.
Colonial administration required legible, fixed categories for population management: census-taking, taxation, land assignment, and conscription all demanded that bodies be sortable into stable, enumerable units—and a population with fluid gender categories resisted that enumeration, making it ungovernable by the ledger’s logic, which is why colonial law didn’t merely discourage gender variance but criminalized it, converting a bureaucratic convenience into a moral imperative.
Industrial capitalism needs stable labor and domestic role assignments: the factory and the household have to be administered as separate spheres with non-overlapping populations, because the system’s profitability depended on reproductive and household labor remaining unwaged. Enter binary gender roles, enforced at the level of law, medicine, and social shame simultaneously.
Each of these systems borrowed legitimacy from the one before it, passing the same externalization cost forward in an unbroken chain.
What’s lost if we only recognize the one narrative? We miss that the relational/functional/spiritual frame for gender is much older than the biological one—many traditions that include multiple genders are thousands of years old. The binary as a rigid universal is, relatively speaking, a recent and geographically specific imposition.
And in many countries around the world where gender and sexual binaries are strictly enforced after the supposed retreat of colonialism, it’s not a return to some older tradition. Many of the countries with the most prescriptive gender codes had some of the most complex and dynamic relationships to gender in pre-colonial times: they are literally continuing to do the colonizers’ work. It turns out that the gender binary’s effectiveness as a sorting mechanism is often seen as more important than recognizing a history that embraces human variation.
So yeah, it’s looking like mostly white guys. I look enough like a white guy that I don’t have any trouble pointing out this information. My inner white guy can handle it. I choose to transcend the binary. How? Understand the history of the sorting mechanism, and for whose comfort it was designed—and then decide whether your discomfort with dismantling it is really yours, or just the mechanism doing its job.
as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.
how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?
maybe—but what other options are there?
considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?
Let’s consider a moment like this.
dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.
California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.
Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.
Let that sink in.
One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.
For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?
If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.
that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.
Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.
They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.
They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.
They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.
We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.
they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.
Leave no trace, indeed.
They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.
They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.
They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.
They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.
They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.
They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.
Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.
Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.
I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.
What is the alternative?
Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.
If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;
and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);
what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?
Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:
(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)
Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?
Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.
Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?
Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.
Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?
Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?
Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?
Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?
Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?
Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.
Shellmounds? Were these people even human?
Let’s pause, and reflect.
Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.
This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.
The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.
California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.
What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?
From where we are, in this present moment,
what would buddha do?
Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?
Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?
What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?
What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?
there’s no decolonization without dismantling the gender binary.
the intersectional person is the one who binds community—because they actually understand and empathize with everyone.
countries and communities who stigmatize nonbinary identity and orientation are doing white colonizers’ work: one-drop purity tests don’t build you up—they prove you’re not good enough.
if you’re judging someone for their nonconformity, just know that you’re doing the white colonizers’ work. no reason not to say it out loud.
here’s the thing that’s so hard to reconcile as i move into the last third of my life:
as much as i appear to my peers to overshare about my inner life, i feel like a tentative teenager when i consider the world i thought i would find myself in as an adult human,
growing up as i did on the expressive output of people whose writing i resonated with:
walt whitman, a.a. milne, gertrude stein, e.e. cummings, countee cullen, langston hughes, henry miller, anaïs nin, julio cortázar, charles bukowski, james baldwin, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, frank o’hara, kenzaburō ōe, anne sexton, sylvia plath, audre lorde, angela davis, maya angelou, david bowie, jim harrison, erica jong, jim carroll, eve babitz, kate bush, prince, kathy acker, dorothy allison.
the world was supposed to be more gay, more unmasked, more nuanced, more accepting of complexity, more nonbinary. we were supposed to have seen through the inhuman demands of industrial capitalism. we were supposed to find ourselves on the other side of the world we had inherited. we were supposed to have embraced obvious but nontraditional solutions. we were supposed to have found family in people willing to be authentically themselves.
we were supposed to not get mad when someone disrupted the narrative. we were supposed to welcome disruption of the narrative.
instead, we find ourselves beholden to the productivity cult, to getting-things-done, to apologizing for oversharing, to wondering how to monetize our downtime and create passive income, to figuring out how to remain relevant. to deciding how many dead children are a fair trade. to fitting our expressions into a platform, our visibility decided by an algorithm. to sidelining the skills we invested skin in when we were young. to surviving in this economy, in the richest country the world has ever known. to choosing whether it’s worth the effort to just be authentic.
what. the. fuck. happened?
and why is what i am doing considered oversharing, when i feel like i’m late to the game, and barely scratching the surface, just saying the things i think are supposed to be obvious?
do you feel me? am i an old mf, shouting at a cloud?
I’m 60Mf (that’s how I’ve been indicating a male-presenting femme-relating person). I’ve always known that I’m different on the inside, and I’m so glad that it is becoming normalized to express ourselves about the nuances of our experiences relative to gender.
I’ve also recently been diagnosed AuDHD, and that has really helped me understand a lot about myself. None of the labels around gender or sexual orientation have ever landed in a way that gave me a feeling of “yes! that’s me!” but the term neuroqueer feels really right, and bigender has been feeling close enough since i’ve tried it on.
I’ve learned that I was living fairly unmasked through my 20s, but became very high masking starting in my 30s until recently. the way that that relates to gender, for me, is that i experienced a lot of cultural acceptance around gender fluidity in the social circles i moved through in my teens and 20s, but then a couple of things happened. i feel there was a cultural shift in the 90s back to more binary norms, which has kind of continued to this day. But then also, moving into my 30s i felt a certain need to ‘grow up,’ and ‘get with the program,’ so i tried to become as consistent and legible as possible, if that makes sense. As someone who has always been recognized as being ‘different’ or ‘off,’ i think i just kind of minimized those parts of myself that i recognized would create friction. A lot of my masking behavior I chalked up to ‘adulting,’ and just thought it was what everyone my age had to do to survive. It was only after I found myself in burnout and sought diagnosis that i started to understand that what i thought was adulting was costing me a lot of energy and was totally draining me.
I wasn’t, by any means, trying to make myself into a heteronormative male—i’ve always had more women friends and felt fairly unsafe in male-oriented spaces—but i just wasn’t out and proud about my nuanced self, and in intimate relationships there has been a lot of effort devoted to responding to what I now know was me not matching the expectations that my partners brought with them about how a male partner was supposed to relate.
With the diagnosis, i have decided to unmask as much as is possible and practical, while still trying to read the room and pay attention to when it is to my advantage to kind of disappear into my appearance, if that makes sense, and just not challenge people’s perceptions of me too much. Choosing my battles.
But mostly, unmasking has been great for my mental and physical health, and for many of my relationships. And that speaks to one of the ways I’m not trans (one of my offspring is a trans adult, so there’s a relationship to how the terms are different within our culture, even though they’re arbitrary social constructs).
Even though I experience the world in both masculine and feminine ways, both through my internal perception and through others’ perceptions of me, it feels safer to me (i have a lot of issues around relational safety) to live in the body that i have and to allow my inner feelings to be what they are, and not interfere too much in trying to conform to any specific track. In practical terms, that means that i recognize that for me to be perceived as either heteronormatively male or female would require a great deal of masking, and that’s just not something i’m willing to do anymore. I’m fine with the contrasts and contradictions of having both things going on within me at any given time, and i’m more and more comfortable continuing to be myself even when i recognize that who i am is confusing to someone i’m interacting with.
The result, at least at the place I find myself, might be described as a precocious girl or young woman who presents as a rather salty older gentleman, who is attracted to feminine people, regardless of gender, and kind of put off by performative masculinity and the feminine counterpart it attracts. I respond to any pronouns—masc, femme, neutral, singular, or plural—at any given moment. I try to tread lightly through the busy world of public life, and be as rambunctious and outside the lines as i feel with my 2 or 3 trusted people. In that regard, I recognize the privilege of masculine presentation, in terms of safety, and don’t take it for granted. I wish i could give every woman i know the opportunity to wear a giant mansuit out in the world, and feel the safety that comes with that. I need to go cry for a minute. Be right back.
I know this has all been about me. That’s because, you being young, I feel a responsibility to model how a nonconforming person comfortable with themselves describes their experience of themselves, at least one version of that. I don’t want to give advice, because we all have to discover our own way. I hope that this has been helpful, and i just want to send all the hopes—that you experience deep relational safety with at least a couple of trusted people; that you experience ’enough’ relational safety to test the boundaries of who you see and feel yourself to be and how that person wants to present themselves; that you find fulfilling work that sustains you; and that if partnering is something that you want for yourself, that you find your way to people who see you and accept you as you see yourself.
We have been acculturated to the language of equity masking a reality that simply doesn’t add up.
When a business is telling you they pay a living wage, 9 times out of 10 they either don’t understand the term or they are gaslighting you. This is allowed to happen because most people don’t do the math, and most people over a certain age grew up in a very different ecosystem.
Living wage for the East Bay is $100,000/yr. Most people think that looks like a big number, but if you figure for living alone in a market rate apartment, current food, utility, and healthcare costs, $100k is modest at best. Living wage, then, if you factor in 50 40-hour workweeks, a living wage is $50/hr. It’s just that simple. So if you’re working anywhere that’s paying $20/hr, the only way that’s a living wage is if you have another job paying far above $50/hr to make up for the deficit that is created by working a $20/hr job. And it’s clear that most small businesses would not be able to pay the equivalent of $50/hr full time for most positions.
Life no longer adds up. When I was my son’s age, I could work less than full time at a cafe and pay all of my rent and bills and save money and travel a few weeks a year. My son works at an equivalent job, and doesn’t have enough to rent an apartment.
We can battle with small business owners all day. It doesn’t add up. That’s why everyone is trying to unionize, and getting tons of pushback. If we don’t solve income inequality, places like the East Bay will just become unlivable for the average person.
About tip culture: Because I’ve worked lots of restaurant and service jobs, I don’t buy into the “tipping as a reflection of service quality” mindset, and see tipping for what it is—a wage subsidy for low paid workers. Tipping-as-merit is a way to make the consumer think like a privileged person—the power to bestow and withhold is intoxicating, until you recognize the reality that low paid workers often simply couldn’t afford to work their jobs without tips factored in, because employers, due to margins being what they are, simply wouldn’t be able to pay what a worker needs to make without that subsidy.
Because it’s become part of the ecosystem, it buries a portion of the cost of doing business—in other words, consumers would be unwilling to pay the price that businesses would have to charge for goods and services if they reflected the actual cost of doing business. Understanding this, I automatically add 20% whenever I’m at an establishment where I know the workers are making a lower-tier wage; but first, I ask an employee how the management distributes tips—some businesses keep them outright, while others distribute them equitably.
I’m writing this as a person who has never earned what has been considered a living wage for the area. Rent control, beans and rice, and making sure to never become sick or injured are all that are allowing me to stay in the area.
Please vote! And remember that as long as capitalism doesn’t have safeguards that manage the ratio between the highest and lowest earners, things can only get worse.
I was recently trying to explain equity in education to someone who experiences language around equity as “mumbo jumbo,” (in their words). My mind makes analogies, and tries to find common ground. As we (me and my debate partner) are both Californians, my mind latched onto car culture—Americans love their cars, and California has a specific stake in the dissemination of car culture. Also, there is a deep relationship between car culture, social structure, and education culture, and, for reasons that will become clear, the Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, is a major player in this landscape, and works elegantly as a character in my story.
Thanks for bearing with my complex sentences. Neurodivergents love sentences with bonus content.
Recognizing that this metaphor might be helpful for others, I submit to you: the difference between equality and equity in education.
You have a central auto shop system, implemented around the country, set up by the Ford Motor Corporation when they were the dominant maker in the marketplace. You advertise that you will work on any make and model of car. That being said, when the shop is set up, the shop only receives shop manuals for the Ford Taurus. So for a while, any car that comes through the shop gets spark gaps, valve clearances, and timing settings for the Ford Taurus.
At some point, the vehicle owners, the shop managers, and the mechanics notice that all of the Tauruses that leave the shop are running great, but the Focuses, the Transits, the Broncos and Mustangs, along with Chevys, Dodges, Jeeps, Subarus, Kias, Volvos and Land Rovers are not running their best.
A shop manager from Ford comes in to investigate. “I see your problem right here: All of these cars are being tuned to Taurus specs. Where are your shop manuals for the other models?” They order the manuals for the Focus, Transit, Bronco and Mustang, and lo and behold, every Ford that leaves the shop runs at its best.
The other makes still have timing issues, are not firing on all cylinders, and experience electrical problems. The Ford Motor Corporation claims that this is evidence that the other makes are just deficient.
At some point, a team of independent investigators, with an understanding of the wider market, looks into how the shop is servicing its vehicles. They see right away that no shop manuals or supply chains are being made available for non-Ford vehicles. They submit their recommendations: that manuals, parts, and training specific to non-Ford makes and models be provided immediately, and that this will result in a) all vehicles being tuned to the proper specs; and b) all vehicles receiving appropriate parts, without the need for modifying inappropriate parts or fudging adjustments.
There are many Ford-only communities working on the same shop model, and all of their vehicles appear to be doing fine. The Ford Motor Corporation, having set up the shop model in the first place, with significant influence and a vested interest in their vehicles appearing to be the most reliable, moves decisively to thwart these findings and advocate for the Ford-only model to be enforced throughout the country.
A few communities that service a wide variety of makes and models adopt the independent investigators’ findings: they provide manuals and supply chains that ensure that all vehicles leaving the shop are running at their best.
The Ford Motor Corporation sees this as a threat to their ascendancy in the marketplace, and they advocate strongly that only Ford manuals and supply chains be standard, and that other accommodations are simply designed to steal market share from a native maker and transfer it to makers who are encroaching and have no claim to a place in the market.
They never point out that serving each vehicle to its unique specifications does not make Fords run worse—it simply ensures that each vehicle runs at its best. No one is asking that Chevys be supercharged, or that Subarus get special fuel injectors, or that Dodges get enhanced suspension. It’s just about servicing each vehicle with the appropriate parts and adjustments.
Equality is treating each car like a Ford Taurus. A move toward equity without actually achieving equity is treating each car as some model of Ford. Equity is providing the proper parts and tuning for every make and model that comes through the shop.
Equality is treating each vehicle the same. Equity is treating each vehicle like itself.
Someone who says, “but children are not as different as different makes of cars” has a fundamental misunderstanding of the trajectories that different children travel before they enter the education system. Some people have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance that every child has had access to the same resources and comes from backgrounds with the same cultural expectations. This is similar to maintaining the appearance that all cars are Fords. Only the Ford ecosystem benefits from this. By treating all cars equally (as if they were Fords) we are not treating them equitably (by giving them the parts and adjustments specific to their needs).
The Ford Motor Corporation, specifically, provides a good analogy for the foundation of our education system. Like Henry Ford, (the parent of the factory model of human organization), the people who designed the sorting system that is expressed in standardized testing in education were racists, eugenicists, capitalists, and anti-unionists. They designed a sorting mechanism that recognized the need for low-paid workers, middle managers, and highly paid executives, and devised a shop system that was predicated on labeling these social tiers early, and making sure everyone stayed in their lane.
Being a diverse and unevenly distributed nation, we have what are essentially Ford-only communities—communities that are predominantly white and culturally homogeneous—alongside mixed-make communities—communities that include a vast variety of different cultural and relational realities, as different as different makes of cars.
The culture wars around education are really an expression of different priorities regarding a variety of specific needs, and a breakdown in the translation layer between understanding the diverse needs of different models of vehicle and a variety of makes of vehicles—between communities loyal to the Ford ecosystem and open-market communities.
Since single-make communities exist, distributed throughout the country, there is a significant voice within the national conversation that advocates for the Ford-only model. Consider a variety of predominantly white Anglo communities throughout the US:
Provo, Utah
Bismarck, North Dakota
Owensboro, Kentucky
Eau Claire, Wisconsin
Rutland, Vermont
Southlake, Texas
Findlay, Ohio
Florence, Alabama
Altoona, Pennsylvania
Medford, Oregon
Alongside this homogeneous cultural distribution, just as widely represented and on the ascendancy, are the open-market communities, where a variety of makes and models are part and parcel of everyday life:
Dearborn, Michigan
Flushing, Queens, New York
Lowell, Massachusetts
Anchorage, Alaska
Houston, Texas
Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Minnesota
Oakland, California
Clarkston, Georgia
Garden City, Kansas
Miami, Florida
Viewed in this way, the culture wars we are experiencing are not so much about a competition for resources, but simply a difference in scale of specific needs. For those acculturated to a monoculture, there is a cognitive load required to understand the needs of a more diverse community. And this cognitive load becomes weaponized by actors who have a stake in maintaining a monoculture.
This is the Ford Motor Corporation’s most effective move: not the shop design itself, but the management of the conversation about it. By framing equity as a threat to Ford drivers, they redirect the legitimate frustration of communities whose own Broncos and Transits are sitting in the remedial bay—tuned to Taurus settings, diagnosed as deficient—toward the communities asking for their own manuals. The Bronco in Altoona and the Kia in Oakland are being failed by the same structure. They have been positioned as opponents. The people who benefit from the Taurus-only model funded that positioning.
The Ford Motor Corporation’s original pitch was simple: bring us any make, any model. We’ll get it running. Equity doesn’t challenge that pitch—it holds the Ford Motor Corporation to it. The independent investigators found nothing that undermines Ford’s stated goals. They found only that those goals were never applied fairly. Serving the Kia to its own specifications doesn’t make the Taurus run worse. It makes the shop better. The players in the open market that Ford made possible are simply asking the Ford Motor Corporation to honor the contract it wrote.
Equity is not the subversion of the shop’s mission. It is, finally, its fulfillment. Aren’t we better, together, when each is at their best?
In the early 90s (in my mid 20s), I was studying guitar at Musicians Institute in L.A. Our improvisation class was taught by a fusion guy with the obligatory curly mullet—nice enough, but also kind of a doofus. Our assignment was to bring in a recording of a guitar improvisation to listen to and analyze.
I was trying to understand free improvisation at the time, and I brought in this track by eastbay stalwarts (this was before I moved to the eastbay) Henry Kaiser, Hilary & John Hanes, with John Abercrombie. I thought it was ‘fusiony’ enough that the instructor would find some way to talk about the logic of the thing.
He cued up the CD and the sound came over the speakers. I could see his face trying to figure out what to make of it.
About halfway through, he turned the volume down, gave kind of a dopey smile to let us know he was kind of kidding, but mostly not, and said,
“You call that music?”
My (unknown to me at the time) autistic brain went into analysis-and-resolution mode, which can chew through a moment like this in milliseconds. Without missing a beat, my unconsidered response was,
“You call that a haircut?”
By which I meant no ill will whatsoever. I was just pointing out that one’s musical choices are not unlike one’s tonsorial decisions. But, of course, there wasn’t time to give the backstory of the decision-making process that caused my response.
There was a long pause. Then suddenly, the tension was broken as everyone in the room, besides the instructor and myself, erupted into laughter. The instructor and I just looked at one another with curiosity, awe, and a sense that we would be laughing as well if we were just witnesses, and not protagonists.
After that, thankfully, there were no hard feelings, at least that I was aware of. There was a quiet peace between us, even when I would ask overly complex (unknown to me at the time) autistic questions.
Actually, now that I’m remembering, he told me once after that that he had a dream where I was reaching my arms out to him, and pleading, “Daddy! Daddy!” I remember masking heavily (before I knew that was a thing), and trying to hear his dream in a neutral way, and not hear it as creepy, but to respect his experience, and not react.
Thankfully, that was pretty much the end of that episode of that story.
