When Does “Inclusivity” End?

A few months ago, I interviewed Celeste Headlee, one of my favorite conversation partners. Maybe it’s her long career as a radio journalist, but she’s awfully easy to talk to—and she’s expert at it. Including hard conversations. While she wrote one of my favorite books on work (the excellent Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving), I most love her books about difficult chats, which include Speaking of Race and We Need to Talk—as well as the season of the incredible podcast Scene on Radio that she co-hosted with John Biewen on misogyny. The season on race with Chenjerai Kumanyika is also exquisite.

I’ve had the privilege of interviewing Celeste a couple of times, and I’ve been turning our most recent chat over in my mind lately, particularly a simple comment she made: Black History Month was instituted as a temporary stop-gap. It was supposed to be a momentary bridge to a comprehensive retooling of the stories we tell ourselves (and our children) about the world. However many decades later, it’s still with us though. As are equivalent months and sometimes just days devoted to other groups, including women, Indigenous communities, etc. This is a terrible precedent and not only because it means that what we learn is not integrated. It’s a terrible precedent because it suggests that women’s history, Black history are “other”—they are corollary to the main thing. Black history and women’s history is not just…history—it lives apart. Apparently forever.

I read a lot. And I’ve been reading a fair amount of work that’s called “feminist,” written by “feminist” scientists, anthropologists, and journalists. The addition of “feminist” as a descriptor drives me nuts, and not because I don’t count myself as one. (I do. Heartily.) The addition of “feminist” before historian, therapist, etc. suggests that what’s being offered is an alternate view. It implies an agenda, a slant. That what you’re going to get is a spin on the facts, a “feminist” perspective that’s a deviation from the norm. And it is a deviation from the white, male, cis narrative, but that doesn’t make it deviant—I would argue that creating a wider lens—women and people of color have always been here after all, however silenced, sidelined and erased—makes it more accurate. If we’re going to continue to do this, we should label the authors of books that dominate our core curriculum as masculinist. Sounds absurd, does it not? But it seems only fair to suggest that their view is hyper-specific and slanted as well.

Shonda Rhimes has been vocal about issues like this before: She bristles when people commend her for writing “strong women”—”I don’t know any women who are not strong,” she protests. Shonda rightly argues that we don’t modify descriptors of men with words like strong. This is something I don’t think we’re particularly conscious about, although I’m seeing lots of things on Instagram that give me hope, like women arguing that we need to banish female before founder and just call women FOUNDERS.

These might seem like small quips, but well, I love language, and I believe it’s powerful. I’m trying to be extra-cognizant about how I describe women, and whether I would describe men in similar ways. And when it comes to checkboxing around things like education—and whose perspective gets to be primary to a curriculum—well, I feel allergic. We all have a lot of unlearning and relearning to do; for me, a big part of that is thinking through and processing the perspective of those I read. Those who I deem experts or authorities. Those who I lean on for expertise. You’ll notice on Pulling the Thread that I primarily interview women; there’s a reason for that. When I launched the show, I did a quick audit of popular shows and clocked that most guests on interview shows, surprise surprise, are men—particularly on popular shows hosted by men. As I wrote last summer, I didn’t even bother auditing Joe Rogan because it is so, so male, but here are some other stats: “79 out of 561 Tim Ferriss episodes feature women as guests (15.31%); 37 out of 251 Sam Harris episodes feature women as guests (14.74%); and 107 out of 333 Dax Shepherd episodes feature women as guests (32.13%). On the flipside, 21 out of 57 episodes on Brené Brown’s “Unlocking Us” feature men as guests (36.84%), which goes slightly higher on “Dare to Lead” (44.82%). Go Brené!” We so easily slip into a narrative that men are the ultimate, sometimes only, authorities; I will resist that as much as I can. (So far on Pulling the Thread, 79% of my guests have been women; 21% men.)

Do you all imagine that we’ll ever reach a time of actual integration unless we push really hard? Can we banish modifiers and work toward a truly inclusive and accurate perspective?