Anti-Bias, Pro-Earth
MJN currently thinks about biases as the default preferences or assumptions underlying the behaviors that we carry out each day. We all have biases. But justice demands that we undo biases that are based on grouping, stereotyping, and passing judgments on people because of the way they look, what their religion is, where they come from, what their race or ethnicity is, who they love, and more.
Systems, however, add layers of complexity that shape personal biases. Today, our systems default to biases that are supportive of structural white dominance — in terms of ideas, cultures, looks, lifestyles, and more. Even if you know this shouldn’t be true, systems in which structural white dominance is the default reinforce it every day.
Among defaults, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and other forms of racism and prejudice rooted in structures have led to wealth inequality, broken schools, broken elections, lost wisdom, and a broken justice system that has been designed to tear up the path to redressal, reparations, and healing for Black and Indigenous peoples the most.
Bias affects not only how we see people, but also how we advance ideas by groups that do not come from cultures with greater structural power. For example, we live in a system with an anti-Earth bias that teaches us to love nature for her beauty, but doesn’t teach us mutual respect and our intrinsic weaving into a life fabric of air, plants, animals, land, and so much more. Pro-Earth world views are common in many cultures, but biased systems steadily erase or suppress them.
It is a constant uphill battle for diverse cultures and systems to show their genius — including those that teach sustainable strategies for long term collective benefit, respect for the Earth of which we are a part, and alternatives to an economic paradigm in which all things are owned or seen as financial assets.
With an anti-bias, pro-Earth mindset, we hope to collect system strategies that expose defaults we take for granted and give us pathways to redesign with a fullness of diversity at the center. Knowing that every one of us has a bias and grounded in an understanding of historic and systemic suppressions and oppressions, we believe we’ll innovate differently as a result. Here's what we're asking to continue evolving our philosophies:
What ideas, groups, and cultures are suppressed, oppressed, and undermined by dominant systems? How? And how will we center them, as a daily practice? For example, what does it look like to design our system to center Blackness and Indigeneity in everything we do?
What stereotypes and racist ideas are programmed into our consciousness by broad cultural narratives? How will we undo them, in our own minds, organizations, and societies?
What are specific and practice-able anti-bias strategies that we will turn into daily habits?
“The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites one family. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.”
