Allyship with Integrity

Hello all,

This spring we have celebrated Ramadan, have just celebrated Passover, many are about to celebrate Easter, and on my campus students and faculty are getting ready for a Holi festival (it's just too cold in Plattsburgh in March!), Earth Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day.

This week we are focusing on allyship and antisemitism. It's critical that we all learn more about how to recognize and push back against vilification of all marginalized groups, and to reaffirm our support for our entire community. SUNY is a diverse university, located in diverse communities, with a shared mission of educating and uplifting all the people we serve. We all have access to professional development on antidiscrimination and SUNY policies, and I know that I've referenced other specific antisemitism resources in past WIT posts. Make sure that you are up-to-date on all the required and optional training that your institution provides.

The WIT vision is that "all members of the SUNY diversified IT community are achieving at their highest potential." As part of our work to ensure that women and non-binary identifying folks can achieve, let's make sure that we keep growing in our understanding of how to prevent harmful discrimination of all kinds against all peoples. Allies who work to counter discrimination also need to guard against going too far, to where their efforts intended as allyship could cause harm. It's not helpful or wise to advance the safety of one group at the expense of others. We have thousands of years of history to show that societies do not fare well when communities are fractured with small group loyalties and fears.

Guard against overgeneralizing:

"Being aware of the signs of overgeneralizing is the first step to avoiding it. This includes using words such as 'always', 'never', 'all', 'none', 'every', or 'no one' to describe a group, situation, or behavior, as well as ignoring or dismissing evidence that contradicts your generalization. Additionally, relying on stereotypes, anecdotes, or personal experiences to make general claims and assuming that what is true for some cases is true for all cases is a surefire way to overgeneralize. If you find yourself feeling confident or certain about your generalization without checking its validity or accuracy, it's important to pause and question your reasoning and assumptions."

Guard against oversimplifying:

"Oversimplification is a logical fallacy that refers to the act of reducing the complexity of a subject or issue to the point where essential details or nuances are lost or overlooked. This can lead to misunderstandings, misinterpretations, or incomplete perspectives on complex issues. It may cause poor decision-making, misinformed beliefs, or a lack of appreciation for underlying nuances and intricacies."

Guard against dangerous speech:

"No one has ever been born hating or fearing other people. That has to be taught – and those harmful lessons seem to be similar, though they’re given in highly disparate cultures, languages, and places. Leaders have used particular kinds of rhetoric to turn groups of people violently against one another throughout human history, by demonizing and denigrating others. Vocabulary varies, but the same themes recur: members of other groups are depicted as threats so serious that violence against them comes to seem acceptable or even necessary. Such language (or images or any other form of communication) is what we have termed “dangerous speech.”

"To predict violence by another group is especially powerful (whether the threat is real, false, or exaggerated) since it makes violence against that group seem defensive and necessary. In this sense, accusation in a mirror is a collective analogue of the defense to homicide that is available in virtually all legal systems: self-defense. To believe that you, your family, your group, or even your culture faces an existential threat from another group makes violence to fend off that threat seem not only acceptable (as dehumanization does), but necessary."

All the best,
Holly