Spaces without balance

The shift has occurred

I came across an article, a commentary on how organisations, establishments, and corporations are lacking in accommodation and inclusiveness. Sadly, given the direction of our public conversation, we are expected to promote and reinforce a particular perspective or risk ostracism.

Having experienced times of political correctness, which evolved into woke culture, and now the topical issues of identity and how diversity can imply exclusion, one might wonder what has changed in our discourse that no-platforming and cancelling have become more common, along with the need to punish those who dare to think differently and voice those thoughts.

The balance has tipped towards an unrelenting intolerance of broader perspectives and dialogue. For instance, my idea of safe spaces used to be forums with a range of viewpoints available for all participants to consider, regardless of their beliefs. However, what currently exists is a safe space not to feel uncomfortable or challenged; rather, it is a space to reinforce biases instead of questioning preconceived notions.

Can we think for ourselves?

The brave space to dissent and debate respectfully without being disagreeable has been lost to a different kind of safe space. It is safe for the timid or entitled, but unsafe for the brave.

Grievance, offence, upset, and outrage often dominate, at the expense of open-mindedness and tolerance of opposing viewpoints. As a result, we fail to step into another's shoes because we believe we are already wearing the most uncomfortable shoes imaginable.

How we arrived at this unidimensional situation involves curating inputs, confirming biases, a lack of curiosity, and perhaps a lazy mind as well. Meanwhile, certain purveyors of extreme perspectives stand to benefit from homogenising and intensifying positions that leave no room for compromise or consensus. We are unwittingly pawns on their vast chessboard of power, profit, and politics.

We must ask ourselves whether we are still thinking for ourselves or have become subsumed into the malign thought processes of others. In voicing these thoughts, we become megaphones for ideas we would have once rejected.

We are not the same

This debate is ongoing in Australia, where those involved have initially faced punishment but then found themselves reprieved through legal actions and protests. It is a debate we should be having across the Western world, as exemplified in this excerpt from the article.

“All right-minded organisations try to make their workforce more diverse. But are we going to accept people from different ethnic and political backgrounds only to the extent that they behave like middle-class white people? That is, those who dominate our culture largely as a result of their luck, and who have not got a family legacy of colonisation, war, trauma and holocaust?

Sometimes, encounters in brave spaces might lead to us changing our minds, or question our own assumptions.” [The Guardian: Opinion: The ABC and Creative Australia panicked in the face of controversy. These vital institutions must not be so timid. - Margaret Simons]

Essential Snobbery 101: The waning art of discretion

In view of the setting

It is interesting to review a day in which some settings within which I found myself brought a mix of behaviours, attitudes, prejudices, and indiscretions which, on reflection, just indicated how much we need to be self-aware of how what and how we do things can affect others.

In the first instance, the engagement, which had moved from the necessities and essentials of effective communication last week, was initially an exercise in how the same instructions given to a group can present different results in comprehension and action. Though the core element for the day was the broader subject of diversity, equality, and inclusion.

An undress in address

In a multicultural grouping of diverse and variant abilities, this would bristle against the learned long before the acquired suits you to the environment. My first encounter came with an enthusiastic fashion aficionado who, in my view, probably knows what goes with what for what time of the day but forgot to recognise we were not being groomed for either the catwalk or the red carpet.

As I asked to sit with them, my acknowledgement of compliments on my apparel seemed to open the door to a level of intrusion that should have been invited rather than imposed. However, she took it upon herself to instruct me on what colours and styles should match what I was wearing. I could have brusquely rebuffed her and asked her to mind her own business, but I made the allowances in observation of an intriguing display of the use of discretion.

Absent filters of sharing

As the day progressed, there was something about just giving out too much information, where even as you begin to cultivate familiarity in a grouping, you let down your guard too easily to reveal what probably should be kept to yourself in some eagerness to share something that might yet not be known about you.

Even though I can be quite expressive, I still filter the products I share and consider what a no-need-to-know in consideration of how what one dares to share might affect others. Discretion is an art in and of itself.

Once some secrets of others were shared, there were a few instances where I could have interjected with ‘Me Too’, but I was not so inclined. I learned much and revealed little else, but in the observation of character, you appreciate who to keep in your confidences.

Of prejudice in scowls

Then came the apologies, this was in the aftermath of both discrimination and prejudice that some would have observed as redolent of a stereotype belonging to a certain demographic that, for a matter of discretion again one would think but never voice.

The need not to voice everything that comes to mind, even when there is irresistible prompting, is a discipline in awareness and sometimes necessary not to upset others.

That I found myself in the middle of the exchange whilst offering an example to buttress a point was incidental, but I was only ready to reveal so much about myself without laying myself out to avoidable vulnerability and exposure in sharing information that was not germane to the discussion. It was rattling and eventually resolved; uncomfortable would not fully describe what happened.

Platform pearls before swine

Back at home, I happened upon a tweet that included a clip of a BBC interview with an unctuous ingenue, a Nigerian male YouTuber who, with little urging, seemed to spill the beans on the immigration inclinations of his fellow countryfolk, just at a time the UK government has been looking for a means to reduce net immigration and dependants joining students during their sojourn in the UK.

He, apparently a dependant himself, in his excitement, ingratiated himself with a forwardness lacking self-reflection that could implicate him in immigration fraud when he inferred that he had helped some falsify documentation, apart from painting Nigeria and Nigerians in a very bad light. His quest for notoriety and clout presented more than an opportunity for indiscretion and lascivious boast of questionable ability or prowess. If ever the pearls of a large platform were cast before swine.

We remain, good ambassadors

He no doubt irked many a Nigerian at home and abroad, but I, being a 25-year resident of the UK and another 12 in the Netherlands, and we Nigerians, by birth, heritage, or allyship, are unwittingly ambassadors in the communities wherein we are, and no upstart, regardless of the platform they gain, can rubbish the good and useful contributions we make in our communities.

Honest Nigerians need not fear a backlash in their quest to emigrate; this would blow over, as we have always faced hurdles from as far back as memory would allow and have still made the moves and progress we have desired. Our YouTuber, who would not be granted even basic recognition, would fade into obscurity at just the same speed at which he came to our notice. An irrelevance in the scheme of things.

In the sidebar, I joined a Twitter space to assure Nigerians of continuing our good work, and for all I had to say, one was too distracted to listen, for he had read my profile and all he could glean from it was to ask why I am gay. I could have been exasperated, but when you realise that some can never learn to mind their own business, you make a cursory note and ignore it.

Decade Blogs - Japheth J. Omojuwa - The Power of Purpose and Persistence

Decade Blogs

Japheth J. Omojuwa probably needs no introduction on Social Media, he is one of the few young Nigerians who has found the means of leveraging reach and platform to inform, to change or to muster.

It was when he won the Nigerian Blog Awards 2011 for the Best Political Blog that I discovered him and his influence that had a really big following on Twitter.

He comes across as passionate, engaging and forceful, sometimes almost forgetting the huge responsibility on his shoulders as his simple humanity takes to the fore in a cause, a campaign or a controversy, yet he can be as effective in raising funds for charitable and humanitarian causes or getting the ear of the powerful as he can be devastating in rubbishing positions, people or policies that appear to serve hypocritical or selfish interests.

I am honoured to have him contribute a blog to my #YourBlogOnMyBlog Series commemorating my Decade of Blogging.

Blog - To Celebrate My Decade of Blogging

Omojuwa as we know him, blogs on at Omojuwa.com which he also offers as a platform for the views and opinions of others, he tweets with the @omojuwa Twitter handle and he writes for various media organs.

Here, he writes about how time, patience, dedication, determination, purpose and persistence governs longevity and success. Please enjoy reading this piece.

The power of Purpose and Persistence

Anyone can do a thing consistently for a decade if they get paid for it, doing it for that long without pay is noteworthy; even more extraordinary if it is a venture that helps to make others better.

If there were ever anything I’d guess would keep such a person going, persistence would be my first guess. Whatever Akin Akintayo has going for him that keeps him running a blog for ten consecutive years, persistence must definitely be part of that mix.

I have a reason for thinking persistence must have played a huge part in his story, but this must never be assumed to mean his being persistent was all he needed to keep going. This is about his persistence though. There are exceptions, but the central theme in the stories of most successful people is that of persistence. There are people who have succeeded without being overly talented; there are loads of people who have succeeded without attending the best universities.

I can bet you know many people who have succeeded despite their very poor backgrounds, but if you were tasked to find ten men or women who succeeded without persistence, you’d need a bit of persistence to endure the search and even at that, you’d be lucky to find any.

Why is persistence such a crucial factor for success? It is simple enough; everything takes time. Time is one of the fundamental realities in our world. Everything we do is subjected to it. Our universal laws are a function of time. We live within time so we’d never get to succeed at anything without time as a sort of reactant in our mix.

It is a kind of limiting reality, but like Friction, it helps us in ways we may never really appreciate. If you ever do a thing that does not take time, please kindly reach me to tap into your powers. How much you are able to succeed depends on how long you are able to wait.

Stories abound of people who missed out on greatness because they left their craft just before they got the break. We all know people that missed out on being rewarded just because they were impatient to wait a day, a month or maybe even a year longer.

It takes persistence to spend 4 weeks focused on passing an examination without being distracted by anything else. Those four weeks, if wasted by some others could be the difference between a life of great success and a life of mediocrity.

Sometimes, if you are not willing to wait, you are not deserving of the prize. When next you meet a man or woman you deem successful, ask him or her how hard it was to persist at their craft. They’d tell you it never came cheap but it is what it is, if you really want it, why give up on it?

So you see, we have lessons of our own to learn in this story. We should ask him many questions about how he kept going for so long but before then we should thank him for showing us it can be done!