Why Creativity is Essential to the Multiracial, Multicultural, and Multilingual Democracy

In the last essay, Transformative Empathy to Challenge Supremacy: Creating Multicultural Democracy in Schools and Organizations, we offered the following ideas for contemplation:

First, transformative empathy can challenge all permutations of body supremacy, with the designer seeing herself as a part of the design challenge, not separate from it. The notion of a fragmented thought system would create the ground for this type of thinking and the supremacist acts engendered. Accepting that two humans are a part of the same experience, a unified experience, halts the thought processes and thought routines that will allow supremacy to exist. 

As a reminder, supremacy exists when there is first fragmentation or separation in ways of thinking, and then a particular way of thinking or singular thought process is elevated as being worthy. Without separation, the thinking and ideas remain interdependent—linked and bound together. If we are to exist together as one unified whole—a healed self, a healed environment, and a healed relationship with other living beings, humans included — we not only need to interrogate our thinking and its impact on our actions and relationships, we also need to prepare ourselves for a wiser response. The notion of a ‘wiser response’ is not solely restricted to the words and sounds we make, while they may be important. This is especially true as DEI initiatives and executives are actively being sidelined, and the rights of the poor, women, and the LGBTQIA+ communities are shocked back into the perverse fantasies of the oppressor. 

The wiser response lies within what we build, what we design, and what we scale. 

How do we create a multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual democracy? 

What do we prepare? 

What do we test? 

And how do we know that our ideas are oriented towards healing ourselves and our collective consciousness and getting us closer to this daily deliberate democratic practice? 

How creative are we willing to be? 

And what is in our way?

These are the questions we must ask to begin this work.

The Paradox of Perfectionism and Creativity 

Tema Okun's widely circulated resource White Supremacy Culture offers that one of the first characteristics of white supremacy culture is perfectionism—the idea that mistakes are not allowed and that there is only one way of completing tasks. Perfectionism is often pedestaled as it can foster a professional climate of competition and achievement. Advocates argue that without perfection, a climate of low-quality work products abounds, and productivity and professional standards are compromised. But when designing and bringing forth the work of the multiracial, multicultural, multilingual democracy, we need to take a closer look at perfectionism, how it operates to create the context for supremacy, and how it can strangle creativity. 

For a closer look, this thought experiment may help:

Imagine you have been on the moon looking at the Earth for 1000 years. Suppose you watched the past 500 years through a particular lens of thinking and thought processes. In that case, you might notice how efficiently and effectively European thinking has conquered the Earth’s people through colonialism and industrialization. Jared Diamond would remind us it was not only the guns, germs, and steel that conquered other lands—ideas were conquered too. While we will not discuss or argue the quality of these ideas for this thought experiment's sake, each time there was a clash of cultures, one thought system prevailed by either conversion—using violence to make others think like them—or by annihilation. If we are one unified whole, then all of the world's people have ways of thinking and making sense of the world that contribute to that whole. When those ways of thinking are unavailable, our collective consciousness is imbalanced. It is as if we are still trying to create, elevate, uplift, and build with an incomplete toolkit. Our designs suffer, and we suffer. Perfection in colonial thought systems, conquest habits, and separation efficiencies only direct our agency toward violence, trauma, and distress. We get good at that type of thinking and those habits are acknowledged for it. This recognition comes at a high cost. 

If supremacy and its thought routines have been the tradition and culture for the past 1000 years, the new democracy and its ways of thinking and thought routines are the counterculture that is needed for balance and to right the relationship. The new democracy may be supremacy's much-needed, right-sizing complement. But getting there and practicing this daily will be difficult. 

First, tradition values and celebrates the past. Tradition creates spaces of belonging. Tradition is familiar with its blueprints and plans. Creativity breaks tradition and requires a different way of thinking and being. It recognizes the current dominant patterns of thought and makes the conscious choice to change direction. Rarely are radically different ideas socialized. Rarer still is the socialization of the humans who steward the radical ideas. Instead, we marginalize and terrorize those that dare to offer a different way of thinking or being. 

However, when we apply a lens of healing and wholeness in a world of separation, it becomes apparent that a new thought pattern and thought routine are required. Too often, we perceive highly skilled people as creative people simply because they are fluent in dominant thinking and thought habits. And while these skills are essential, they alone do not incentivize creativity or change thoughts and patterns. Sometimes having more skills incentivizes and cements tradition.  

A true quest for creativity guides us to the edges of society. Different thinkers live here. The margins shelter humans who love in ways that challenge the storms of convention and tradition. They create new ways of being, new ways of relationships, and new languages to hold and share their experience. The margins root the humans whose skin holds the sun, creating spaces to critique the shade of dominance and oppression. The margins leave both the apex and the blade that bend and move in a multitude of forms as they give shape to the wind. They hold the space for those who have decided to come to live on their terms, creating new spaces of inspiration, freedom, and belonging. But this freedom comes at a cost. Too often, humans pay the price of their creativity in blood. 

But this kind of free and permissionless thinking, or at least its spirit, is necessary to balance supremacy and build a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual democracy. The genius at the edges reminds us that the diversity of thought and body can give us the best approximations of our equitable designs. 

When we lean into ways of being that mirror the past, perfection as a condition and state becomes the safety belt that straps us in, keeps us stable, and gives us a feeling of invincibility. It changes our relationships with each other from companions to competitors. For those fluent in the tradition, it creates a power dynamic that fuels a one-way ticket to the past— perfectionism becomes the supremacy's perfect travel companion. We have to become perfect in unpracticed ways, not for the sake of progress but for balance. This is hard when the dominant thought system is so rigid it cannot absorb the threat of difference; instead of integrating this difference, it is rejected. Enabled by the thinking of the past but moved by the body in the present.

But when we enter new relationships where body supremacies do not exist, we must create new knowledge, ideas, and insights. We need new racial knowledge. We need new cultural knowledge. We need new traditions. We may even need new words and a new language to express ourselves. Our old ideas become obsolete. 

We would need each other differently, knowing that the blueprint, the new tradition, and the new way require meaningful contributions from all of us—our thoughts, actions, experiences, and ways of being. The state of perfection becomes obsolete—as a living process, we collectively live, design, and build together. 

The paradox of perfection lives in the human need to belong and be seen. We desire creativity but rarely lean into the experience of our own marginalization for wisdom or stay close enough to the suffering at the bleeding edge to let it transform us. We love the nostalgia of tradition, the community it creates, and the perfection and recognition it inspires. We also know this tradition, sense of belonging, and perfection may inhibit our creativity. To ease the tension, we may elevate one at the expense of the other instead of finding a new relationship that can hold both of them in an interdependent manner. 

How about we create a healthy relationship between perfectionism and creativity? 

How might a design stance guide us on this journey? 

Prototyping the Multiracial, Multicultural, Multilingual Democracy as Deliberate Practice

Democracy can be taught as deliberate practice. It is the conscious and intentional act of our words, stories, and actions. It exists within and beyond the franchise and cannot be contained or fragmented into two, four, and six-year intervals. It is what we do every day. 

Democracy is a lifestyle. 

To prototype this new lifestyle, it is not only necessary to change our thinking; we have to intentionally put our bodies in new and different spaces to allow our thinking to change. This is why co-design, co-creation, and collaboration with the expertise at the margins are essential design practices of the new democracy. 

Our thinking, assumptions, and beliefs are made visible in our relationships. We can see them. We can feel them. Other people can help us hear them. This will feel unfamiliar. This dissonance is a challenge to perfectionism. There is no traditional blueprint for assessment or judgment when doing something new. We are guided as friends, companions, and collaborators, not competitors. 

Changing our bodies without changing our programming will result in the same output. But when the practice of transformative empathy elevates the expertise of those living at the margins, it also lifts up the thinking of the margins. When we determine ways to unify collective thinking, uniting both differently, we make the space for a new direction.

Democracy welcomes learning. The multiracial, multicultural, multilingual democracy will require new learning for all of us. Learning requires us to see each other as fully human with unique stories, gifts, and insights to contribute to the whole. It may sound like I don't know, but we can figure it out together. 

Learning sounds like specific feedback, assessing, and rewarding brilliant mistakes to balance our incessant traditional need for perfection. It could be acknowledging the wired and analog technologies designed to unify our collective consciousness to balance our fragmentation. We synthesize and bring ideas and people together to still our restless need to analyze, separate, and differentiate. It could be why we struggle and stress to do things the right way, and the real lesson is learning how to relax into the struggle, be still, and breathe. Our assessment becomes more about being balanced than being perfect. Our assessments look for alignment and fluency. We value stillness in movement. 

But before we engage in the practice to unify the collective consciousness, we must attend to the individual consciousness. Alignment may sound overwhelming, but we can start by assessing our private and public selves and ensuring they are in harmony with each other. 

Do we show up as the same person in public and private spaces? 

Are we living in ways to create new and different relationships with the most marginalized and excluded to create openings for creativity? 

Are we organizing and aligning our time and resources to create new racial and cultural knowledge?  

Are we always trying to keep our focus on alignment and balance, correcting and healing ourselves first? 

The multiracial, multicultural, multilingual democracy as deliberate practice starts with us. Realizing and aligning ourselves first in our power to emerge as creative beings freed from tradition, far from perfect, but more balanced and aligned every day, is the prototype and building blocks we all need to unify and heal our collective consciousness.

Getting Started Anyway: Building the Multiracial, Multicultural, Multilingual Democracy

As we acknowledge that deliberate practice starts with us, we can each embrace ideas and practices to help us begin this work. In that spirit, these are five design challenges for equity-centered designers to embody the multiracial, multicultural, multilingual democracy as a lifestyle starting in the here and now.

Challenge Perfectionism: Designers need to challenge the culture of perfectionism, which can stifle creativity and innovation. Create environments that embrace mistakes as opportunities for learning and growth and foster the understanding that there may be multiple valid approaches to solving a problem instead of just one 'perfect' solution. This could create assessments that value mistakes as learning. 

Codesign at the Margins: Actively involve people from marginalized communities and embrace their expertise in the co-design process. This challenge involves breaking away from traditional thought patterns that may have been influenced by supremacy and embracing diversity in thought and experience as essential to equitable design. This could include stories of marginalization and exclusion to balance the dominant narratives.

Cultivate Transformative Empathy: Challenge designers to practice transformative empathy by understanding and elevating the perspectives of marginalized communities. This involves recognizing the value of different ways of thinking and integrating these insights into the design process to achieve more inclusive and innovative solutions. This could look like regular meetings with the most marginalized students and families and redesigning your professional work to support their success. 

Reevaluate Classroom and Boardroom Traditions: Equity-centered designers should critically examine traditional values and practices ingrained in design culture how they may perpetuate supremacy. Creativity requires breaking away from tradition and adopting different ways of thinking. The challenge lies in promoting creativity without alienating those who find value in tradition and harmonizing both aspects to foster innovation. This could be reevaluating grading practices, assessment design, and student grouping rituals. 

Integrate Equitable Tools and Frameworks into Instruction Design:  Develop tools and frameworks that facilitate inclusivity and diversity in the design process of instructional experiences. This includes reassessing existing methodologies and technologies to ensure they do not perpetuate supremacy or exclusion and creating new ones that are inclusive and responsive to the needs of a multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual society. This could look like determining standards of learning that support equity literacies as leadership competencies. 

Equity-centered designers challenge supremacy at each stage of the design journey. Not just racial supremacy but all types of body supremacy. Challenging supremacy in action means loosening our grips on the past just enough to allow us to inspect, interrogate, and make space for new ways of thinking and being. This first starts with the designer. 

Most of us define perfection as being free of flaws and defects. But in our world designed by oppressive social hierarchies, our thought routines and, thus, our relationships with other humans have been designed to see those at the bottom of the hierarchies as flawed and defective. This tradition has a tight grip on our imaginations and creativity. The imbalance itself threatens our perfection. Our creativity is needed for balance—a place where the wisdom from the margins and the knowledge of tradition can be held together without submission or elevation. This creative endeavor is worthy of our attention, energy, and pursuit. Perhaps this is a practice worthy of perfection.

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