Hey everyone. If you are on LinkedIn, you may have seen posts by two of my favorite accounts: Crappy Funding Practices, which publicly names and calls out the malarkey and shenanigans of certain funders (while occasionally giving kudos to really awesome ones), and The Home for Wingless Unicorns, which publicly names the organizations that do not disclose salary on their job postings, because not disclosing salary perpetuates inequity.
Generally, the feedback to these groups has been positive and encouraging. But once in a while, there’s the predictable “Why are you being so mean to people? Why name and shame?! You’d get your message across so much better if you just offer chamomile tea to people and speak to them in a calm soothing voice while swaddling them up like a baby!”
OK, I exaggerated a bit. But here’s a recent response to a CFP post that called out a funder who gives six micro grants of $500 each, and who discloses on their website that they get over 4,000 applications each round:
“in this situation, a phone call would have done it. Publicly lambasting a single human is against our energy. Sheesh. All of us have had to learn new paths. Let’s lose the self-righteous angle to it all and be kinder. I actually think that this approach is destructive, not helpful.”
First of all, this is not “a single human” but an organization; and second, as CFP points out in its post, this funder wastes approximately $400,000 of the sector’s resources each round, at the conservative estimate of 4,000 applicants spending 1 hour each on the application at an average cost of $100 per hour in grantwriting time. Nearly half a million dollars of sector resources, for $3,000. Sheesh. I need some chamomile tea.
Meanwhile, here’s a criticism of our friends at The Home for Wingless Unicorns:
“The basis of this site is to shame organizations into changing behavior […] correct? Behavior modification 101 is that education and demonstrating positive outcomes are effective tools. Not outing or shaming.”
These types of response are so common and predictable. So let’s talk about Toxic Niceness. There seems to be two types of this unfortunate type of niceness. One is personal, where people can be so nice that they put others’ needs ahead of their own; here are some signs of that, and it’s good we all check, because I do see a lot of this in our sector, with our trademark propensity for martyrdom and all.
But for this post, I’m talking about the other kind of Toxic Niceness, which I’m defining as the “expectation and perpetuation of pleasant, agreeable attitude and behaviors that ultimately work to reinforce the status quo of inequity and injustice.” Here’s how it plays out in nursing, where “niceness” is weaponized to silence nurses who try to change problematic systems.
Our sector attracts nice people. And for the most part, it’s great. There’s already enough assholery going on in the world; so niceness is vital and should be encouraged. But Toxic Niceness is not the same as Niceness, just like Toxic Masculinity is not the same as Masculinity. At its core, Toxic Niceness is a sign of White Moderation, which is what Dr. King warned was the biggest barrier to justice, this prioritization of niceness and civility above equity.
And all of us do it from time to time. We often focus our energy on making sure people don’t feel bad, and that we all get along, than we are on addressing inequity and injustice. Often, there is little analysis of the power dynamics, white privilege, patriarchy, or other factors at play in the situation. And it happens frequently in our line of work. I receive this type of feedback all the time, such as last year, when I said “philanthropy has often become a hobby for the wealthy” and it started a firestorm, where people became super upset at my hurting the potential feelings of unspecified donors and demanded I apologize for being so mean.
A significant part of our work is to find inequitable systems and use whatever means we have to fix them. And to do that, we need to think critically. Before you jump in and use a “niceness and civility” lens to criticize people and movements that are trying to address harmful practices, stop to consider whether you’re engaging in Toxic Niceness. Ask yourself these questions:
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