Nicey-Nice is Not Neutral: Unlearning Complicity
Unlearning compliance, disrupting complicity, and practicing resilient disobedience. The scripts that keep 'good girls' complicit in the oppression of themselves and definitely others.
Like a broken record, my mother used to tell me - and anyone within earshot - how Child Me ‘argues with a wall’ and would make a great lawyer. But I wouldn’t have. I’ve spent much of my life as an educator and social scientist. And for all the disobedience she saw in me, by the time I stepped into kindergarten, I was primed for rule-following.
I learned young that questioning wasn’t welcomed. I was the second and youngest and the only daughter in a conservative, working class, evangelical-lite, Southern household. Yet, as my astrologically inclined friends love to point out I suffer from the added layered effect of my Capricorn sun, Capricorn rising, and an often-ignored Pisces moon, leaving me disciplined but deeply feeling, stubborn but intuitive. All critical components in the good girl → good student → good overing employee pipeline!
As you see, a disobedient Child Me was not in the cards. I don’t think my so-called disobedience then was rebellion for its own sake. I think it was stubborn curiosity and a high sensitivity to the lived experience of Nature beings (especially their suffering - and that’s the non-compliance that got me in the most trouble). The questions that made me a difficult child took root and have grown into the ones that drive Menopaused Me to disrupt complicity.
Nonetheless, growing up, my mom worried about me - not because I was wild. I wasn’t my older brother, who fit the gendered definition of disobedient - not the cool punk kind, but the self-serving, toxic-masculine kind that we see running rampant now.
The reasons I see are twofold. One, maybe, she worried I wasn’t compliant enough. I can see evidence of an internalized belief that survival depends on playing along. In a way, she’s right. Obedience keeps the peace. Makes things easier on the surface, definitely for other people. And it makes you complicit. And it eats you alive from the inside out, which I see a lot in coaching clients by the time they get to me in chronic burnout and needing to radically transform their work lives.
The other reason I saw with my mom was that she couldn’t quite bring herself to fully resist her own complicity. I’d witness a pendulum of resistance and then acquiescence. It actually caused me quite the confusion in my early 20s as I saw her, and my grandma, in ways as feminist paving their own path - then the rub, it was only to a degree. And the point it stopped, confused me then. The stop largely came disguised as the role of nurturing care that always ended in the self-sacrifice of voice and body. A mask of know your place and role as ambitious women in the South.
It took me years to understand that being the ‘good girl’ turns into the ‘good student’ and then the ‘good employee’ didn’t actually mean being good enough or worthy but being good for the systems in place to benefit. How our educational (and later workplace) systems demand acquiescence and conformity (more on that in another post). The ‘good’ part is about being the consummate giver in an attempt to control something in your life. And unlearning that, my friend, has been an adult long process.
Where did you first learn or learn the loudest that compliance is necessary for belonging? Or from whom did you learn that lesson? How do you make sense of it now and what part of it do you want to unlearn?
Because here’s the thing, being labeled disobedient when it actually means difficult to others because they want your compliance isn’t the same as actually disrupting or self-sovereignty.
My same child instincts would be the ones that helped push me towards unlearning, which was hard early on, I won’t lie. Now it just feels more necessary and critical on the path to liberation. Unlearning is about peeling back the stinky onion layers of social conditioning to reclaim what the systems try to make us forget. I’m grateful for the hard life lessons and choices - and I know there’s more ahead. Which actually bring me to what’s been gnawing at me again, especially after the MF-ing election results. So here’s the question I’ve been sitting with:
How have we, as white folks, especially white women, been conditioned - by our relationships, education, and work systems - for complicity - the nicey-nice, people-pleasing, keep the peace behaviors? (and of course there has to be the next part of ‘and what are you gonna do about it?)
As this is a new Substack, and the intent is ‘writing through the messy, unruly edge,’ I don’t have any clear answers because we all have to grapple with our collective journey through the continued discomfort of collapse. Like many others, I do believe that if we want to have a chance at slowing down the social and climate collapse that we’ve created - that we’ve been complicit in and benefited from, we have to have these conversations and questions. In Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira weaves how our continued complicity in harm is one of the main four denials that, if not confronted, will limit or prevent our collective ability to imagine other future options other than a violent collapse.
Importantly in this, is we have to be willing to do the inner self-work. I’ve seen too many white folks have the terminology without the inner accountability and those become even more pointed weapons. The cognitive dissonance of tension between what is said and what is done is massive. I saw this when I was in academia often. The cognitive work is the easy work - but what about the embodied and communal work of those same concepts? It took me a while back then to unravel the pain point - we expect students to have the personal foundation of the inner work of what pre-executive order bullshit we called, social justice, yet so often, especially with white folks, they haven’t done it. The emotionally and somatic work has been bypassed with the cognitive.
I get it. If you’re anything like me (a white woman), you were likely taught compliance in obvious and insidious ways. It’s hard to see and sit in the discomfort of your own shit. Not to mention the continued willingness to sit in shit and then repair. Part of the disobedience then is accepting that this is just the part of the journey. It has to be.
If this all irritates you like a bad poison ivy itch, here’s a great resource that will make you even more uncomfortable in all the necessary ways: White Women: Everything You Already Know About Your Own Racism and How to Do Better by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao. I read it last year in a book group and it sure cleared the room of the women who had zero tolerance for feeling questioned in their own complicitness in white supremacy and patriarchy. A big takeaway was how we’ve been conditioned to police other women through nicey-nice, perfectionism and comparison, and self-proclaimed exceptionalism.
And how women police others and their conversations that might question their own complicity, like that woman on the call who, in the middle of people sharing what is being done (and not) on their campuses to resist anti-DEI orders, abruptly inserts, “so who here is going to that conference next month?” Whiplash. WTF, talk about your need to hijack conversations back to your comfort zone of compliance.
Fast forward since Jackson and Rao’s book cleared my friend’s dining table, our book group now is like a challenging fresh of breath air. It’s mixed up in all the ways necessary to actually promote learning and growth towards accountability and mutual aid. In part because it’s full of capacity to question. Curiosity, like creativity, is actually viewed as disruptive by those who want your complicitness and in that same way, curiosity is disobedient.
With whom and where in your life can you engage in curious examination of your own complicity in systems of harm (e.g. racism, patriarchy, environmental degradation)?
Disobedience is resistance. It’s the intentional practice of unlearning and rebuilding resilience - not the bounce back kind that keeps us in line, but the ecological kind - adapting and transforming in relationship to our changing environment. The environment has radically changed so now what?
Disobedience is regenerative resilience. Compliance keeps the status quo intact; disobedience disrupts it. And as white women (and I’m sure many others), we need to reckon with how we’ve been conditioned to comply - because it perpetuates harm - to ourselves and definitely others.
Writing through unlearning complicity is resistance and hopeful; hopeful in that ‘we’re together and present in a loving way of this is hard; not that let's ‘going back’ to some easier time of ignorance way. It was Toni Morrison who said:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.” (March 23, 2015)
Here you and I are - engaging in language, not ignoring the pain, saying the things that need saying in kind (not nicey-nice) ways, and asking the hard questions that hold space for each other. As I’ve been holding this for myself and others, I share it with you:
Where am I complicit in advance? And what’s one thing I can unlearn by making the uncomfortable choice to do better?
I’ll continue to examine this is my own life and actions. Will you join me?
“Curiosity, like creativity, is actually viewed as disruptive by those who want your complicitness and in that same way, curiosity is disobedient.” So true.
I will join you.