Originally posted on August 9, 2017 at Voices at the Corner, a blog from the Center for Social Empowerment in Ferguson, MO.

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Since January, I have been working on policing reform in Ferguson, and thinking a lot about being an “outsider”. I don’t belong in Ferguson, geographically. For the past ten years I’ve been moving around, following academic degrees and jobs around the country. In terms of personal experience with policing, I’ve never feared for my life at the hands of a cop, or really at all. I’ve always imagined dying of old age, in my sleep. If a police officer shot a white girl like me, the whole world would be up in arms. I grew up believing that “bad people” are arrested by the police. There was no chance that I would ever go to jail. When I learned that 1/3 of all black men might spend time in jail during their lives, I couldn’t stop thinking about it – how different it would feel to always be at risk. By title, I’m no expert in criminal justice. I’m a designer trained to learn what people need and make new products and services, unhindered by politics and public opinion.

So what am I doing here, attending meetings in Ferguson to think about how policing could be different? People wonder. Before I know them, they know me: the new face in the room, every month. At one of my first meetings, a woman in the crowd asked, publicly, “Who are you?” and after I said that I’m working with Washington University, “Are you researching us?” I wasn’t sure how to respond. To others who were visiting, observing, she asked, “When are you going to invite us to your home to observe?” I admire these sharp, quick questions. They get to the core of my own anxiety and validate the questions I ask myself. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m here to learn and see how I can help. But it’s also true that I have some ideas about processes and projects I’d like to try out. I’m curious how design can play a role in community conversations. I’m aware that I could build a career with what I learn here, which is not true for everyone in the room.

So what is the best response? Sometimes I feel I should just walk away and avoid subjecting this group to my ignorance and potential ulterior motives. But people say that I have something valuable to add to these conversations – that it’s important to struggle through. They say, It’s simple: Just listen. Lift up the voices of those you mean to serve. Don’t go where you’re not invited. I’ve clung to these rules in the hope that they can calm the anxiety and make decisions easy. But it’s never that simple. I’ve learned new things about each of these pieces of advice along the way:

Listen

This rule finds me sitting silently at public meetings, scribbling notes, head turning from speaker to speaker. I misunderstood it at first, thinking “listening” was the same as “not talking”. Convenient, since speaking in spaces where I don’t know anyone is scary anyway. Not having to talk is a comfort, and I’ve used this rule to justify it as respect and politeness, when really I am not talking because I am scared of saying the wrong thing.

Without ever sharing my own viewpoint, I am a mystery, which easily becomes a threat. Nobody knows why I’m here, or when I might betray them (as evidenced by the “Are you researching us?” question). Having never had to defend my purpose, I also don’t fully know the answers to these questions. In my silence, I am not offering anything to the group, helping myself to their welcome but not giving anything in return.

Rather than “not talking”, I’ve learned that listening is about being open to what people have to say both before and after you talk. This can be much more difficult. It involves being vulnerable both in sharing opinions and ideas, and doubly so in listening honestly to what people think of them. This doesn’t mean that ideas might not hurt people. No matter how much I try to immerse myself, an outsider is inherently more ignorant to community dynamics than an insider is, and ideas may be irrelevant or even offensive. All you can do is: attempt to avoid this, listen to these perspectives when they come up, and be serious about learning from them for next time.

Lift up the voices of those you mean to serve

Last March, I found myself proposing an idea to the event committee for a table that I wanted to run at an upcoming event. Before I had finished describing the idea – an activity to engage people in re-imagining policing – the room was alive with dissent. “It’s too late in the game,” they said. They needed my group to volunteer at other booths. I had quickly heard enough. The community has spoken, I thought.  They don’t want the table. Again, I was conveniently relieved of the stressful task of fighting for the idea. After all, who am I to fight? I’m supposed to be listening and lifting up the voices of others.

At the next large group meeting, another member presented the minutes from our last discussion, faithfully describing my idea to have a table at the event. I sunk into my seat, embarrassed that this was being re-presented to the community who – as I already knew – hated it. Sure enough, members of the event committee spoke up, surprised that the idea had resurfaced despite their dismissal. But then other members began speaking as well, asking why we couldn’t have the table, saying that it sounded like a good idea, confused why the event committee had the authority to turn it down. After the meeting, even more people came up to me, voicing their support. I began to realize that it wasn’t the “community” who had dismissed the idea. That was just the people who were sitting in the room that day. The community was alive with diverging opinions, as I began to realize it always would be. If I was going to lift up and support other people’s voices, I was going to have to choose: which people?

In choosing who I would support, it became clear that I would need to have a position. Before, I had seen this rule as a way to be comfortably neutral. In building on other peoples’ opinions, I wouldn’t need to have opinions of my own. Continuing to step around this responsibility, I thought I could have a simpler cause: it’s important to me that the people who make the decisions are those who experience the oppression. In this case, dealing with policing, I could use demographics, supporting black community members first. But of course, there were black people on either side. There was no way around it.

I also realized that my own desire to avoid the stressful work of speaking up is likely felt by everyone else involved as well. Most of the people who spoke to me in support of the table at the event did so in smaller groups and private emails. Through these conversations, I learned that the idea was not mine, but all of ours. The general goal of engaging a broader community base in re-imagining policing had been a constant refrain long before I arrived. I was lifting a weight off their shoulders by representing it, talking about it, continuing to bring it up.

Don’t go where you’re not invited

Getting an invitation from a community sounds like a great way to level power structures, ensuring that community members have the final say in who is involved in their decision-making processes. It is a response to the question asked of the observers at our meetings, “When are you going to invite us to your home to observe?” In Ferguson, this issue is especially raw, as people remember a city swarmed by outsiders to make a point, and promptly deserted in the aftermath.

An invitation forces a kind of formality that may be useful in the effort to engage ethically. So far, I have attended meetings and ended up working on things organically, but perhaps a more developed, formalized project could help define answers to some of the questions about my motivations and make sure that everyone is on the same page about my involvement. Again though, who gets to respond to this proposal, especially if it’s made outside of the context of these meetings? How many people have to sign on to a project for it to be certifiably community-endorsed? Does it have to be agreed on by everyone?

Along the way, I’ve worried about invitations in more trivial moments: who invited me to go to Ferguson in the first place? To attend the meetings as a non-resident? These become anxieties that I used as excuses, again, to disengage. If walking down the street in downtown St. Louis doesn’t require an invitation, then I should be free to do this in Ferguson too.

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Last month I attended my first protest, a gathering at the Workhouse in St. Louis city to fight for better conditions for the inmates in the heat, and ultimately the destruction of the jail. As the crowd called out “Whose streets? Our streets!” I politely banged my pot lid in support. Participating in the chant – I felt – might be a subversion of the power that this group was trying to take on. They weren’t my streets. I had only lived here for a few months. I was just here to learn.

One part of this comes from what I think is a respectable place. There are people who are working harder than me at this protest. There are people who have spent years building expertise and knowledge, people who spent time organizing this particular event, people who are willing to put themselves in harm’s way, who stand drenched in the lightning as I head for the car to go home. But I also began to see that this is just another way of saying “This isn’t my problem. I’m doing this for someone else” and releasing myself from that responsibility.

At some point in the night, lined up side by side with everyone, I stopped holding myself back. The point is not that the streets belong to me or you, but that they belong to us as a whole. As I joined in the chanting, I still felt that I hadn’t earned it yet, but it wasn’t a badge, it was a promise. If these are my streets too, I can’t just be here observing. I have to commit.

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Thank you to everyone who spends long hours discussing these challenges with me, and especially to those in Ferguson who have welcomed me, held me accountable and forgiven my mistakes. Your passion and words of encouragement are what keep me coming back.