Time to end painful conformity contortion act
It’s fair to say that when “Black on Bay Street,” the piece by lawyer-turned-academic Hadiya Roderique in the Globe and Mail, went viral, it lit flames of #IAmHadiya in many of us, and not just those belonging to Bay St., not just lawyers and not just Black, even though the Black experience of racism is uniquely painful.
Roderique’s piece should once and for all silence the proponents of the politics of respectability — the idea that you won’t be discriminated against if only you pull up your socks, do the right thing — as in, do everything you can to fit in with “mainstream” culture.
Mainstream in this country is, of course, Anglo-Euro settler culture. The truth is no matter what marginalized individuals do to change, to fit in, to be just like everyone else in the workplace, most have to be brilliant to be considered good enough.
So how far should you go to try to fit in?
Roderique referenced diversity consultant Ritu Bhasin, who says in her book The Authenticity Principle, “there’s only so much conforming and masking we can do. It eats away at your spirit.”
Quite by chance I was reading the book when Roderique’s article appeared. I’m usually leery of self-help gurus whom I tend to see as dishing out quotable words of wisdom whose sole role is to land on eminently re-giftable Hallmark mugs.
But at one point in the book, whose subtitle declares it’s about resisting conformity and embracing differences, Bhasin, herself once a Bay St. lawyer, writes she realized how even being authentic can be a performance.
I found that revelation honest. “I would try to signal ‘Look how real I am,’ ” she writes. “For example, I chose to wear bright colours in the business world to signal ‘I’m so anti-conformist.’ ”
Reading both these women revealed to me — a rank outsider to Bay St. types — what an anally retentive bunch the people who make big decisions must be if wearing bright colours is considered rebellious in their world. “I filled my arms with two colours,” Roderique wrote about suits she bought, “black to blend and the more daring light grey.”
I gripe about the whiteness of newsrooms, but at least the bar for non-conformity is higher. Thank goodness for the reporters who shuffle in wearing jeans and sneakers or berets, or the editor- in-chief with pink hair, or the managing editor in leather pants and bright yellow or red jackets.
Beyond clothing, though, conformity can be extracted in multiple ways. Do you shine at meetings? Do you laugh at the boss’s jokes? Do you toe the line with group think?
In order to not fall afoul of those narrow constraints, to a certain extent everybody adopts behaviours and habits that don’t come naturally — white men might, for instance, force an interest in golf.
But the more marginalized you are the more you have to contort your personality to fit those expectations. Women might tone down talk of motherhood, feign an interest in hockey, pretend to be extroverted, laugh at stupid jokes and even allow men to take credit for their ideas just to see those ideas in action.
Add colour to your skin or a scarf on your head or fluidity to your gender and workplace constraints begin to suffocate. At that point, you’re not just masking your likes and dislikes, or adjusting aspects of your personality.
What’s at stake are your values, your fundamental identity.
Bhasin says, as a child of immigrants, she learned at a young age to not act brown, but to act white.
“By the time I ended up in the workplaces I had already learned how to switch codes and navigate through white male culture. The more I conformed, the more I was rewarded, and I succeeded . . . that continued to the point where I was living a binary life. So I was one way at work and evenings and weekends, living in a very different way. And ultimately I was profoundly unhappy.”
She talked to hundreds of women and found that, “my story is the story of people who come from marginalized communities. We’re taught to conform and that cannot be the way we live any longer.”
Embrace yourself, be yourself are great mantras. Yet, as Bhasin writes, even authenticity is a privilege.
“I have found that those with higher status, power and success are often better positioned to practice authenticity more consistently than others.”
There’s your chicken and egg — being true to who you are might liberate you to attain some social power, but until you’re powerful, you may not have the confidence — or the leeway — to be authentic.
So please, if you have the privilege to do so, carry on. Work out your own formula, make your choices, resist if you can.
Carry on, because you are unfairly burdened with the task of challenging the system. Carry on until leaders stop looking at “others” with a condescending gaze. Carry on until they exhibit openness to hiring practices people like Roderique are advocating, or change the framework of what they consider “successful.”
Carry on until sweeping systemic changes give everyone a fair chance. Just don’t keep calm, because that is one thing they’re definitely counting on. Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar