Forum Facilitator Vanessa Faloye on holding spaces of conflict to build radical belonging
Vanessa Faloye is the learning designer and facilitator of the Forum and is developing an introductory course on bridging and belonging for Forum members. In her role, Vanessa commits to resourcing people with what they need to dismantle cultures of oppression, supremacy, and dehumanization while creating a practice ground for solidarity, co-creation, and relating to difference alongside her co-founders Priya Ghai and Alexander Lyons at Held. The Democracy and Belonging Forum’s Evan Yoshimoto met with Vanessa to discuss her role with the Forum, why she strives for collective liberation, and how we can hold spaces of tension and disagreement to build belonging for all.
What does belonging mean to you? And what do you hope to achieve as the Forum’s learning designer and facilitator?
Belonging starts with unconditional humanity to me, which means that there is nothing that we might say or do that could compromise, delegitimize, or take away our humanness and therefore what we are entitled to by birthright. Belonging is regarding all the weird, wonderful, and unwelcome ways of our being that each and every one of us is capable of, from one minute to the next. James Baldwin has a beautiful quote that says it all—“Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon and look around you, what you've got to remember is everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person, you could be that monster; you could be that cop; and you're to decide in yourself not to be." The way we show up in our humanity and what we contribute to humanity is a decision that each of us makes every day and there is an unavoidable responsibility that comes with our decisions that should not be ignored.
But when I think about belonging, I remember my capacity to do terrible things just as much as the next person and I try to remember that we as people are more often than not doing the best we can with what we have and what we are shaped by. There is an inconvenient but undeniable complexity that comes with our actions—whether it’s fear, trauma, upbringing, or something that can’t be explained. And yet, we all belong to this human species, to this natural world, to these social systems that tell us that we don’t.
Radical belonging can be tough to both practice and embody in a world that constantly puts us in a hierarchy of superior to inferior. I sometimes struggle with my own sense of belonging, within myself and in relationships with others. I also sometimes struggle with relating to others from an acceptance of their own belonging. It feels important to be honest about my imperfect struggles with radical belonging, precisely in practicing my own belonging. What I mean by this is that I’m not perfect and yet that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be doing this work. It’s also important to share because belonging is not always easy or pretty, in fact, it’s a journey that requires a deep commitment to love, freedom, and dignity for people we may despise the most and so it should not be romanticized. The practice of radical belonging is not for everyone, and yet, we all belong.
As the Forum’s learning designer and facilitator, I hope to create a practice ground for solidarity, co-creation, and relating to difference alongside my co-founders Priya and Alex at Held. We love to quote Toni Cade Bambara because it’s a wisdom that guides our movement-building work, “the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.” I want to be part of building social movements in which the differences between us are not only permitted but encouraged—differences in ideology, identity, perspective, worldview, experience, knowledge, and values, to name a few. That’s true diversity. To create the conditions for people to not have to fear being punished or ostracized for speaking uncomfortable truths or thinking unthinkable thoughts. I’m working on building a learning journey that supports Forum members to understand, feel into, disagree with, and practice the paradigm of belonging and bridging in service of collective liberation.
At Held, you and your partners are building a world liberated from oppressive systems, dynamics, and relationships— a world of collective liberation. Why do you strive for collective liberation (liberation for all)?
Collective liberation is a conversation we need to be having more of as a species. Each of us is born free and so we deserve to live into our freedom. The question “How do we all get free?” is what we grapple with at Held. Something that we see happening in social justice movements is an over-emphasis on identity and ideology in ways that create rigid and dehumanizing binaries of “us and them,” “good or bad,” “black or white,” and “privileged or marginalized.” These either/or ways of thinking and being are damaging to our sense of belonging and solidarity, and to our movements as a whole.
I think we often talk about collective liberation in justice spaces without fully comprehending what it means and what we might have to give up in order to pursue it, such as our personal sense of goodness, fairness, and certainty. It’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be, but we need to be clear about what we’re saying and what we’re doing and where those things don’t align. Flipping the hierarchy so that the haves become the have-nots and vice versa may seem fair, and at a transactional level it probably is. But does that get us closer to a world in which everyone is free from oppression, supremacy, and dehumanization? Or does it perpetuate oppression regardless of who the victim is? These questions matter to us at Held and we are committed to breaking the cycle so that we can imagine and initiate a world in which everyone is free to be and has what they need to lead a dignified, self-determined life.
This might sound crazy, dangerous, unethical perhaps? It’s important to remember that while history has been shaped by war and conflict, it has also been shaped by co-existing in difference. Bridges can be built just as much as they can be broken. There are plenty of conversations about identity and representation and the oppressive ways that privileged identity groups enact power over others; but we find that there is not enough conversation on the quality of our relationships and the destructive ways we are with each other irrespective of identity. Collective liberation invites us to have these difficult conversations and reach for something more.
Another reason why we strive for collective liberation is that it is a paradigm and practice that is expansive enough to hold other approaches such as: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Anti-oppression; and Transformative Justice. This is important because, at Held, we got tired of the neverending requirement to critique, tear down, and destroy things (with people often being the collateral damage along the way). Dismantling systems of oppression is absolutely necessary work, and it is also true that we need to learn how to create and build liberatory alternatives.
Held, therefore, becomes an entry point for people to experience and engage with the possibilities of collective liberation and the different paradigms it contains. We actively hold the tensions between abolition, Transformative Justice, identity politics, Emergent Strategy, sovereignty, and belonging. What we’ve come to understand about ourselves is that Held is all of these things and none of these things and this is our unique contribution to the movement ecology of justice. Our role feels important for collective liberation because it feels like ours. Collective liberation is our way of putting our name on a world that sees us as more than the hierarchy of bodies we have been put into.
This work of creating the conditions for collective liberation requires learning new ways to approach and hold difficult conversations. What are these new ways and how do you hold spaces of tension and disagreement?
The first step towards holding difficult conversations in more generative and life-affirming ways is to build self-awareness of our own personal emotions, wants, needs, boundaries, triggers, worldviews, narratives, and so on. More simply put, it’s important to be able to honestly and accurately pinpoint what’s going on for you and within you, particularly in moments of tension and disagreement when we are more likely to react instead of respond. Understanding the ways in which our nervous systems and egos are designed to protect and preserve our sense of safety, worthiness, and belonging is helpful because we can see how our default behaviors are useful but limiting—they only get us so far. Self-awareness enables choice and discernment and it asks us to engage our responsibility in practicing the kinds of relationships that can hold, heal, and free us. Self-awareness is lifelong work and it can be grueling work, but it doesn’t end there.
At Held, we go further in building people’s capacity to relate to others in ways that allow the differences between us to live and breathe without necessarily killing the conversation or our relationship. We are committed to unlocking the possibilities that exist beyond the story that difficult conversations of conflict, difference, or injustice must be avoided out of fear, won out of righteousness, or bulldozed with aggression. We want to co-create a countercultural movement of people relating to difference, reframing conflict, and practicing bridging and belonging in ways that both ground in and build toward our vision of justice and liberation.
The third step that we’ve come to learn is really important and yet so often gets overlooked is attending to the conditions that shape our conversations and relationships. Something we’ve noticed in social justice spaces is the tendency for activists to internalize shame and individualize blame for being in persisting conflict, for example, with little to no attention paid to the micro and macro factors that contribute to particular oppressive dynamics. If people are overworked, tired, underpaid, undervalued, under-supported, in fear of punishment, and subjected to top-down decisions without their input, the likelihood of trusting conversations and healthy relationships is significantly reduced. We need to create the conditions for people to arrive at difficult conversations with a sense of dignity, freedom, belonging, safety, and legitimacy.
And when did you decide to become a bridger?
I would say I became a bridger in 2019 when I realized that I was the common denominator in all my relationship breakdowns and I’m able to hold myself lightly in seeing and sharing that. I was habitually defensive, mistrustful, and/or submissive and I continued to receive both feedback and the consequences of the cyclical dynamics I was in. Eventually, I connected the dots and realized that it was my way of being, born of my old wounds and stories, which were no longer serving me or anybody else.
Through the work of Dr. Jenn McCabe, I turned towards the possibilities of bridging with people who I considered oppressors and adversaries, and my personal life has been transformed ever since. In terms of my professional life, Held was formed between myself, Priya, and Alexander because we were tired of facilitating justice work from a methodology that was rooted in and reinforced superiority, manipulation, punishment, and dehumanizing binaries. We wanted something else for ourselves, for each other, and for the world around us and beyond. Our old ways of being were no longer working for us and we couldn’t unsee the deeper divisions that breaking and othering were creating in our learning spaces. And so, with the help of Dr Jenn McCabe’s work in radical relating, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, Luna Hughson’s Conflict Transformation work, Creative Interventions Toolkit for ending interpersonal violence, and Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse, we realized that bridging and belonging, or as we put it, collective liberation, was what Held was in and of itself a bridge to.