Beyond Covid servant leadership: 3c. learn, innovate, lead and thrive in addressing the injustices of inequities
Rick Botelho
Unite Equity Muses | Cultivate equity meta-governance: co-design and build an equitable, sustainable and regenerative future
Updated July 17th.
This blog is about overcoming structural racism and systemic discrimination, as part of the netinar or discussion group series listed below. Use the instruction on the introductory blog on servant leadership and read the previous blogs listed below to set up the learning experiences for this session.
Session 1: Understand old problems anew
c. Address the injustices of inequities
Session 2: Create an inclusive future
a. Envision an equitable dawn of a new civilization
b. Take global and and national perspectives together
c. Create servant leadership development programs
Session 3: Deconstruct problems to design scalable solutions
a. Redress wealth inequalities
c. Overcome structural racism and systemic discrimination
Overcome structural racism and systemic discrimination
The Trump-Covid-Floyd trifecta is grief, rage and sorrow that has unleashed public protests and dissent to address the injustices of the inequities, with racism, criminal injustice and the militarization of the police at the forefront of media attention at this time.
“Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.” Desmond Tutu
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King
“Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.” Rosa Parks
Structural racism and systemic discrimination has sustained stigma, chronic allostatic stresses and inequities over centuries. The 8 minute 48 seconds lynching of George Floyd created an awakening of human consciousness and global protests. As George suffocated to death, he urinated and cried out for his deceased mother.
This travesty is a cold, cruel and inhumane metaphor for how we are maltreating our mother earth and her biodiversity. The inequities and injustices of systemic racism are connected to climate and environmental issues.
With one knee down on the neck of the mother earth, we are on the road to the Holocene: the sixth extinction. We no longer experience insects killed on our car windscreens, whereas 30 years ago, we had to clean them on a regular basis. Climate change, habitat loss, and pesticides have all been implicated. Human survival is dependent on insects.
We are being unjust to mother earth with implicit bias, discrimination and prejudice, without full awareness and corrective actions against this abuse and misogyny.
- Will George Floyd's death become a humanities wake-up call to gaia (earth system science) in how we mis-treat each other and our mother earth?
How will we:
- Use the emotional pains of racism to build and sustain global civic movements for sustained action against the injustices of inequities?
- Unleash the network power for truth, justice, equity and freedom to make long-term structural reforms?
From a complexity perspective, all of the injustices and inequities are interconnected and linked to failures in ethical, political, economic and social governance, both formal and self-organizing forms. Despite the mediating effects of democracies, all political systems are rigged, to varying degrees, to support the ruling elites in favor of the powerful over the populous, and the majority over the minorities, especially native and indigenous peoples.
Focusing on one injustice without thinking of the whole or the deep roots of injustice will not create a just, fair and equitable society. We have unjust systems of structural and systemic discriminations that give unfair advantages and preferential treatments of one group over another in a myriad of different ways, without merit.
- What is your take about overcoming structural racism and systemic discrimination?
________________________
Share your learning experience online
- Share a brief summary of what you learned from this blog (a new learning, a desire to learn more, an issue, a concern or an unanswered question)
- Share a url resource (article, blog, podcast, video) related to the topic of your interest.
- Summarize your important take-home message from your group discussion.
________________________
Read blog series: Covid revelations, netinar, leadership failures, journey journal, macro-perspective blogs 1, 2, 3 and 4.
The next major blog section describes what the Covid crisis has revealed: the injustices of inequities.