Good morning, friends.
A playground incident was recently shared publicly in which a child said she would not play with a dark-brown child because he is Black. Her family was held responsible for her words.
Her words require an antiracist, pro-harmony response that takes a wider look at the world from which she inherited these ideas, because one child and one family cannot carry the weight of that pain alone.
I heard that my previous response was too long. I listened. Here are the central ideas:
1. Address the words without scapegoating the child. Her family must guide her, and the wider community must examine what shaped her words.
2. Scapegoating protects the pattern. Blame finds a target. Awareness finds what must change.
3. Shame buries racism. It does not dismantle it. People can perform equality while continuing to carry hierarchy underneath.
4. Children absorb our contradictions. They hear that everyone is equal while watching who is trusted, heard, followed, and included.
5. Fondness is not equality. Friendship, admiration, or intimacy across race does not dismantle assumptions about who leads, teaches, rescues, or defers.
6. Integration did not always produce equality. Desegregation was necessary, but centring White institutions while dismantling Black ones preserved paternalism and White Saviourism.
7. Devaluation makes exploitation possible. Nobody’s worth or success should depend on treating another person as less capable, less human, or less valuable.
8. Service can reproduce hierarchy. When identity depends on being needed or in control, a community’s fracture can reinforce one person’s importance. Collective agency is the solution.
9. Threatened status can produce humiliation and exclusion. Once devaluing one person becomes acceptable, the pattern can spread throughout a community.
10. History shows us the stakes. Slavery, dispossession, the Indian Act, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, Japanese Canadian internment, the Komagata Maru incident, and Woodlands show that devaluation costs people freedom, land, culture, belonging, and life.
11. Accountability and dignity belong together. We can name harm, interrupt it, require change, and repair systems without devaluing people.
Nobody needs to become less valuable for another person to know their worth.
Our children deserve nothing less.
It is the big people’s job to build and maintain that world.
I believe we can do it.
With love from the arena,
Saran
Remember that you are valued here.
I am therefore asking us to notice where devaluation, or its effects, exists among us and within us, so that we can repair the wholeness of each and all together.
My question is simple: How has the devaluation of any person or group of people served us, and what does devaluation look like?
David Hawkins, in Power vs. Force, wrote: “The statesman sacrifices himself to serve others; the politician sacrifices others to serve himself.”
I understand Hawkins to be distinguishing service from exploitation. When our sense of worth becomes dependent on accumulating money, possessions, recognition, influence, or control, exploiting others can begin to appear beneficial to our own success.
Slavery is an extreme expression of this pattern: a living being is devalued into a commodity or tool whose purpose is to serve another without mutual care and benefit. Across different systems of exploitation, the underlying pattern is similar: one person’s elevation is pursued through another person’s devaluation.
The same pattern can enter service.
When we do not know our intrinsic worth, service can become a way to construct and validate ourselves through being recognized, influential, necessary, or in control. Hawkins calls the self-serving person the “politician.” I don’t agree with the use of politician as pejorative and I do understand that Hawkins hopes to bring awareness to a particular pattern of leadership engagement.
A person can become increasingly identified with the work they do. Their face becomes associated with service, their service becomes associated with the community, and eventually challenging the person can feel like challenging the work itself.
When a community is already fractured, that person may become perceived as the glue holding everything together. Yet if their worth has become connected to being needed, the continued existence of the fracture can also continue to reinforce their importance when the community focuses on the person as the solution. It would be in the community’s best interest to recognize that their collective agency is the solution, while they continue to hold gratitude for the person’s service.
What I believe Hawkins noticed, as I have also noticed, is that a community is at risk of becoming broken when a leading person whose identity is tied to being the community’s solution feels that even one person may take away from their identity.
This is where humiliation and devaluation may begin to appear.
Kofi Annan said that “all the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, start with the humiliation of one individual.” When the humiliation of even one person becomes acceptable, devaluation can spread and eventually become embedded in the identity and practices of a community.
History shows us the devastating possibilities when devaluation becomes systemic. In the history of Western and Canadian culture we see examples of this in chattel slavery, the seizing of unceded land, the creation of the Indian Act, First Nation reserves, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, prolonged treaty negotiations, the internment of Japanese-Canadians, the Komagata Maru incident, and the history of the mistreatment of persons with intellectual disabilities at Woodlands in BC. These are testament to the fact that in British Columbia, in Canada, and across the world people can lose freedom, land, culture, belonging, personhood, and life when we are not careful to treat all persons with dignity and respect and as persons who have the capacity to both contribute to and benefit from collective success. History shows us that harm does not remain with those who were first devalued. Every loss creates another wound in the relationships that support the well-being of the whole.
And this is precisely why I am not interested in finding someone to blame.
Blame is useless. Awareness is valuable.
Awareness allows us to ask:
Where is devaluation happening?
Where have we normalized humiliation or exclusion?
Where has our own worth become dependent on recognition, influence, control, or someone else’s diminishment?
Where are we participating in patterns we inherited rather than consciously chose?
And most importantly: what does repair require of us now?
Accountability remains necessary. We can name harm, interrupt harmful behaviour, examine systems, and require change without devaluing the people involved.
Our task is not simply to identify who caused the fracture. It is to become aware enough to stop reproducing it.
Then we can move toward greater equity, mutual care, shared well-being, and wholeness together.
Because nobody needs to become less valuable for another person to know their worth.
And our children deserve to inherit a world in which they can live fully, freely, equitably, and as themselves.
It is the big people’s job to build and maintain that world.
I believe that we can do it.
With love from the arena,
Saran
Remember that you are valued here.
