A Web of Microaggressions

A word about a mind

In 1851, a New Orleans physician named Samuel Cartwright published a report on the diseases of enslaved people, and in it he named a new one. He called it drapetomania, the illness that made enslaved people run away (Cartwright, 1851). A century later, Soviet psychiatrists diagnosed political dissidents with "sluggish schizophrenia" and locked them in psychiatric hospitals, where their criticism of the state could be treated as a symptom (Bloch & Reddaway, 1977). In Michigan in the 1960s, the psychiatrist and historian Jonathan Metzl found that doctors at the Ionia State Hospital increasingly diagnosed Black men with schizophrenia, and some charts tied the diagnosis to the men's part in civil rights protest. Two psychiatrists published a paper in 1968 that gave the idea a name, "the protest psychosis" (Bromberg & Simon, 1968; Metzl, 2009).

Each of those stories has the same shape. A person objects to how he is being treated, and the people with power answer the objection by deciding something is wrong with his mind. Once that decision is made, the objection never has to be answered on its merits. I call that move pathologizing dissent. It means taking a person's disagreement, anger, or hardship and recasting it as a sign of mental instability, so the argument can be set aside along with the person making it.

Those are the extreme versions, backed by hospitals and governments. The everyday version is much smaller and much easier to miss. It looks like a colleague, a comment, and a word like "unhinged," written where the people who decide who gets work can read it. Researchers who study workplace bullying have watched this move up close. Heinz Leymann (1990), who studied what he called mobbing in Swedish workplaces, found that it usually starts with an ordinary conflict over work and then turns into a campaign to damage the target's reputation. Kenneth Westhues, who spent decades studying the mobbing of professors, compared two cases in which colleagues turned on a target. In one, the target was condemned mainly as dishonest. In the other, he was condemned mainly as crazy, described as "mentally unstable" and "erratic and unpredictable" (Westhues, n.d.). A review of academic mobbing found targets routinely described as difficult, under extreme stress, or mentally ill (Khoo, 2010).

Leymann's definition of mobbing is strict. He meant hostile acts that come at least once a week for six months or more, inside one workplace, and a few public comments scattered across a city do not meet that bar. The everyday version lives somewhere the mobbing research rarely looks. It is made of small remarks, each one easy to deny, passing between people who do not share an employer, and it works because of where those remarks land.

The network I helped build

When I was fifteen, I carried a camera into The Meadows apartments in Indianapolis with Bill Rasdell, and we taught kids who lived there how to take pictures of their own lives. That was about thirty-five years ago. I have been introducing people to each other in this city ever since. I helped found Public Allies Indianapolis, which put young adults to work inside neighborhood organizations and paid them to learn how a city runs. With Mike Mather and De'Amon Harges I started the Zawadi Exchange at Broadway United Methodist Church, where we went door to door asking neighbors what they were good at instead of what they were missing. In 2006, I went to work at the Indianapolis Neighborhood Resource Center on the engagement side of the city's quality of life planning, and I built a citywide committee of neighborhood leaders, called IMAGINE, so that the people who lived in the neighborhoods made the funding decisions themselves. I ran Health by Design and the Indiana Public Health Association. I worked at Serve Indiana, Playworks Indiana, and the Centri Tech Foundation, and before all of that I did community data and evaluation at the Polis Center at Indiana University.

I list those places because each of them is a room full of people. Every job I have held came from someone who knew someone, and every person I hired, funded, or recommended went on to know other people. Sociologists have a name for what that kind of life produces. They call it social capital, the value that sits inside relationships and can be drawn on later for a job, a reference, a board seat, or a favor. I spent my working life building it, for myself and, much more, for other people. It is the closest thing I have to savings.

Those rooms are the setting for this essay. Over the past year I watched a few small public remarks about my state of mind pass through them, at a time when I was out of work, and my housing was not secure, and I wanted to know what remarks like that do once they are loose in a city where nearly everyone in my line of work knows everyone else.

I do not know that anyone passed me over because of a comment. The claim is larger than my case, and harder to shake off. A professional network can turn small, deniable remarks about a person's mind into lost work without any one person deciding it, admitting it, or answering for it. Ivan Illich spent his life showing how institutions built to deliver a good can turn around and produce its opposite, so that schools teach people they cannot learn on their own and medicine makes new kinds of sickness (Illich, 1971, 1976). A network built to pass along opportunity can pass along doubt just as well, over the same strands, and the web needs no spider.

What happens when the social capital you spent your life creating becomes the infrastructure through which your credibility can be questioned, your professional relationships weakened, and your economic survival threatened?

Part 11. Small words, deniable one at a time

In 1970, the Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce gave a name to something Black Americans had always known. He called them microaggressions, the small, automatic put-downs that arrive every day and that the person delivering them rarely notices (Pierce, 1970). Derald Wing Sue and his colleagues (2007) later sorted them into kinds. Some are open insults. Many more are what they called microinvalidations, remarks that brush aside a person's experience or reality, often from people who believe they are being helpful.

Lauren Gonzales, Philip Yanos, and their colleagues asked people living with mental illness whether this happened to them. In focus groups, people described being treated as less capable, being feared, being shamed, and having their own accounts doubted, frequently by friends, family, and professionals who meant well (Gonzales et al., 2015). A word like "unhinged" fits easily into that list. So does a remark about "personal stuff you seem to have going on," and so does "be well," which can be care or dismissal depending on where it lands.

The research has critics, and they deserve a hearing. Scott Lilienfeld (2017) argued that much of it rests on self-reports, that the definitions are loose, and that the harms have not been well measured. The argument here needs less than the strongest claims in that literature. It does not depend on proving that any single remark wounded anyone. It depends on something easier to see: small, deniable remarks are spoken in front of audiences, and audiences carry them.

That is the piece the microaggression research mostly leaves out. It studies what the remarks do to the person who receives them, the stress, the second-guessing, and the work of deciding whether to answer. It rarely follows them outward. A remark made in a public thread lands on its target and on everyone reading at the same time, and in a professional network the readers are the people who hire, fund, and refer. One remark is a slight. A remark repeated, half remembered, and passed along becomes a strand in a web.

Part 22. How the web is built

Pierre Bourdieu (1986) wrote that capital comes in more than one form. There is the money kind, there is cultural capital, which is the education, manners, and taste that let you move easily in certain rooms, and there is social capital, which is the sum of the resources you can reach through a lasting network of people who recognize you. The key word in Bourdieu is recognition. Social capital exists only as long as other people keep acknowledging that you belong. It is held in their heads, and you cannot take it with you if they stop.

James Coleman (1988) looked at the same thing from a different side. He was interested in why some groups can trust each other enough to do business on a handshake, and he found the answer in what he called closure, a network where the people you know also know each other. In a closed network, information moves quickly, and everyone can watch everyone else. That makes cheating expensive, because word gets around. Coleman saw closure as a good thing, and often it is. It is also, by his own description, a machine for enforcing norms. The same feature that lets a neighborhood keep an eye on its kids lets a professional field keep an eye on anyone it decides is out of line.

Robert Putnam (2000) split social capital into bonding ties, which hold similar people close, and bridging ties, which link people across differences. Mark Granovetter had already shown why bridges matter for work. In Getting a Job, he surveyed 282 professional, technical, and managerial workers in Newton, Massachusetts, who had recently changed employers, and found that 56 percent got their jobs through a personal contact (Granovetter, 1974). Of those who used a contact, only about 17 percent saw that person often. Most saw the contact occasionally or rarely. The job leads came from acquaintances at the edge of a person's life, which is what Granovetter (1973) meant by the strength of weak ties.

If most good jobs travel through weak ties, then a person's chances depend heavily on what acquaintances say about him in rooms he is not in. Ronald Burt spent years studying exactly that. In a chapter called "Bandwidth and Echo," Burt (2001) found that in closed networks, people talking about a third person tend to repeat and reinforce what the listener already seems to believe, instead of adding new information. He called this echo. People pass along stories about colleagues partly to bond with each other, and politeness filters what gets said, so a mild impression can harden into a stereotype as it circles. Burt (2005) later argued that the same closed networks that build trust also produce distrust and character assassination, and that extreme reputations should be treated with suspicion because they are often products of echo. His most unsettling finding, for me, is that reputation belongs to the people who discuss it. A person who does good work but is not discussed has an unstable reputation, and a person who is discussed has whatever reputation the discussion settles on.

So can stigma travel through a network without a formal accusation? The research says yes, and it says the mechanism is ordinary. Nobody files a complaint. Someone with a central position, a person many others watch and trust, says something in public. Others who saw it remember it. When my name comes up later, at a hiring table, in a search committee, or on a call where a funder asks whether anyone knows me, the comment can come back as an impression: I heard he's been having a hard time, or he's been posting some strange things. Lauren Rivera (2012), who studied 120 hiring professionals in elite firms, found that employers weigh cultural fit, meaning whether a candidate seems like someone like them, alongside and sometimes above skill. Fit is a judgment made privately, and it leaves no record.

In my experience, Indianapolis is a city where the nonprofit, philanthropy, public health, and planning worlds overlap heavily. A fairly small circle of people sit on each other's boards, review each other's grants, and serve as each other's references. That is the closure Coleman praised and the echo chamber Burt warned about. I helped build parts of it. I know how efficient it is, and I know it has no complaint desk.

Part 33. How the web holds a person

A word like "unhinged" is a social label. It works through the reader's imagination, and it carries no test, no standard, and no way to appeal. A diagnosis at least has criteria a person can argue with. A word like "unhinged" asks the people who see it to fill in the meaning themselves.

Erving Goffman (1963) described stigma as an attribute that turns a whole person into a tainted, discounted one. He drew a line between people who are already discredited, whose difference everyone can see, and people who are discreditable, whose difference could come out at any time. A public label moves a person from the second group into the first. Once it is said in front of an audience, every reader carries a little of it, and the person labeled has to manage what Goffman called a spoiled identity in every room afterward, without knowing who saw what.

Bruce Link and Jo Phelan (2001) gave the field a sharper definition. They said stigma exists when five things happen together: a difference is labeled, the label is tied to a negative stereotype, the labeled person is set apart as one of "them," the person loses status, and the person is discriminated against. They added a sixth condition that I think matters most for my case. All of this requires power. A person without standing can call someone names all day, and little follows. When someone with standing does it, the label can produce real effects. In a later paper, they called this stigma power, and argued that people who have an interest in keeping others down, in, or away get what they want most effectively through stigma processes that are indirect and hidden inside ordinary assumptions (Link & Phelan, 2014).

The ordinary assumptions about mental illness in this country are not kind, and they have not improved as much as public campaigns hoped. Bernice Pescosolido and her colleagues at Indiana University compared national surveys from 1996 and 2006. Over that decade, more Americans came to believe that conditions like depression and schizophrenia had biological causes, and more supported treatment, but the desire to keep distance from people with those conditions did not go down, and for some conditions it rose (Pescosolido et al., 2010). Fear of unpredictability and danger stayed attached to the idea of mental illness. That is the backdrop any public hint of instability lands against, whether or not the person making the hint means to call it up.

The hardest part of a label like this is what it does to everything you say next. Social psychologists call one version of it behavioral confirmation. In a well-known experiment, men spoke by phone with women they had been led to believe were either attractive or unattractive, based on a photo that was not actually of their partner. The men who expected an attractive partner acted warmer, and the women they spoke with responded with more warmth, so the men's expectation produced the behavior it predicted (Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid, 1977). The same loop can run with instability. If people expect someone to be erratic, they may treat him coldly, cut him off, or answer his arguments with comments about his state of mind, and any frustration he shows in response becomes more evidence.

A second version is interpretive. In 1973, David Rosenhan reported that healthy volunteers admitted to psychiatric hospitals found staff reading ordinary actions as symptoms, including note-taking recorded as "writing behavior" (Rosenhan, 1973). Later investigators have raised serious doubts about how that study was conducted (Cahalan, 2019), so I lean on it only as an illustration of an idea that other research supports better: once a label is in place, people read new behavior through it.

The trap closes from every side. If the labeled person stays quiet, the label stands. If he objects, the objection can be read as proof. If he writes at length, he is obsessive. If he writes with feeling, he is unstable. If he names ableism, he is being dramatic about a passing comment. Sara Ahmed (2010) wrote about the person who names a problem in a room and then becomes the problem in the room, because pointing out the trouble disturbs everyone's comfort. Margaret Price (2011), studying mental disability in academic life, argued that people perceived as mentally disabled can lose their standing as speakers altogether, so that what they say is heard as a symptom instead of as an argument. A label like "unhinged" works fine with very few believers. All it needs is a moment of hesitation before someone takes the labeled person's words at face value.

The research shows these mechanisms are real and common. It cannot show that any one of them worked on me in a particular hiring decision or conversation. I can show two public comments, and I can show what comments like these are known to do in general. What happened in between is the part I do not know yet.

Part 44. Who gets believed

Miranda Fricker (2007) gave a name to a harm I had felt for years without the word for it. She called it testimonial injustice, which happens when a listener gives a speaker less credibility than he deserves because of a prejudice about who the speaker is. Her central example is Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, whose true account of what happened is not believed by a white jury because he is Black. The harm is double. The person loses the case in front of him, and he is also wronged in his standing as someone who knows things. Fricker also described a second form, hermeneutical injustice, which happens when a group lacks the shared words to make sense of what is happening to it, because the people who make the words have not lived it.

Philosophers and psychiatrists have since applied Fricker's ideas to mental illness. Paul Crichton, Havi Carel, and Ian James Kidd (2017) argued that people with psychiatric conditions are even more exposed to testimonial injustice than people with physical illnesses, because the stereotypes attached to mental illness go straight to the question of whether a person can reason. A patient with a broken leg is still assumed to know what he saw. A patient labeled mentally ill may have his account treated as part of his illness. The authors gave real cases in which patients told the truth and were not believed, with serious results.

That pattern moves easily outside the clinic. A remark calling someone's writing "unhinged" does not need a diagnosis to work. It borrows the credibility discount that attaches to mental illness and applies it to a person who has simply been described in those terms. That is what I mean when I call it ableism. The word assumes that being seen as mentally unwell is a reason to stop weighing someone's arguments on their merits.

Kristie Dotson (2011), writing from Black feminist philosophy, added a concept that fits a common kind of career advice. She described testimonial smothering, which happens when a speaker cuts his own testimony down to only what his audience has shown it can hear fairly. Dotson built the idea from the experience of Black women, and I do not want to flatten that. But the shape of the mechanism is clear. If a person is told that his opportunities depend on posting less, or posting differently, he is being invited to smother himself in advance, to trim what he knows until it fits what the room is willing to credit.

Who gets to decide whether a professional is credible? In the worlds I have worked in- nonprofit leadership, philanthropy, public health, planning, and community development- the answer is rarely written down. Funders decide whose proposals are serious. Executive directors and board chairs decide whose name gets passed along. Credentialed professionals, people with letters like AICP or MSW after their names, are treated as the experts on neighborhoods they may not live in. Sherry Arnstein (1969) described this in planning more than half a century ago with her ladder of citizen participation, where the lower rungs look like involvement but leave power exactly where it was. I built the IMAGINE committee at INRC because I believed the people living in a neighborhood should decide how money is spent there. That is a claim about who is credible. It puts lived knowledge on the same table as professional knowledge.

So when a public conversation about housing turns to one participant's personal circumstances, the move deserves a hard look. In a fair exchange, a person's hardship would be either irrelevant to his argument or relevant as evidence that he knows something. In a prejudiced exchange, it becomes a reason to discount him. Fricker's point is that the listener often does not feel the prejudice working. He simply finds the speaker less convincing and believes that finding is his own sober judgment.

Part 55. What the web costs

Researchers have measured what mental health stigma costs in the job market. In one field experiment, Crosby Hipes and his colleagues sent fictional résumés to real employers. Some explained a gap in work history with a hospitalization for mental illness, and others explained it with a physical injury. About 15 percent of the candidates with a mental illness history were called back, compared with about 22 percent of the candidates with a physical injury, on otherwise matched applications (Hipes et al., 2016). Mason Ameri and his colleagues sent 6,016 applications to real accounting job openings. One-third of the cover letters mentioned a spinal cord injury, one-third mentioned Asperger's syndrome, and one-third mentioned no disability. The applicants who disclosed a disability received 26 percent fewer expressions of employer interest, and the gap was largest for experienced applicants (Ameri et al., 2018). Experience did not protect the disabled candidates. It was where they lost the most ground, which should worry anyone who assumes a long career is a shield.

There is a second stigma in my situation, and the research says it stacks on the first. Jo Phelan, Bruce Link, and their colleagues ran a vignette experiment comparing how people judged a poor man who was homeless and a poor man who was housed. The homeless man was stigmatized more severely; the stigma of the homeless label was as strong as the stigma of a psychiatric hospitalization, and the two stigmas operated independently of each other (Phelan et al., 1997). In plain terms, a person who is seen as both mentally unwell and unhoused can carry two separate discounts at once.

There is a strong alternative explanation for my unemployment that has nothing to do with any comment. Being out of work is itself a stigma in hiring. Kory Kroft, Fabian Lange, and Matthew Notowidigdo (2013) sent fictional résumés to job postings in 100 American cities and varied only how long the applicant had been unemployed. Over the first eight months, the longer the gap, the lower the chance of a callback. My last position ended [DATE]. The June comment itself talked about my finding opportunities, which suggests I was already looking for work when it was written. That means some of my difficulty may be the ordinary penalty of being out of work, the narrowing of a nonprofit job market, and the specific choices I have made about where to apply and what to write. An honest account has to separate unemployment that came before a public incident from any loss that can be traced to what happened after it. Right now I cannot draw that line with evidence, and I will not pretend I can.

The field experiments above can detect discrimination only because researchers control everything except one detail and send thousands of applications. A single person never gets that view. I see only my own outcomes. I cannot see the search committee that moved on without explaining why, the funder who did not return a call, or the board that filled a seat with someone else. Each of those decisions is private, informal, and defensible on its own terms. In community work, many opportunities never get posted at all. They pass through phone calls and lunches, which is where Granovetter found most good jobs moving. Recruitment, referrals, board appointments, and consulting contracts all run through the kind of informal judgment that Rivera (2012) found leaves no trace.

So a professional network can make stigma cost a person money without anyone ever deciding to do it. No single person has to believe I am unstable. It is enough that a few people hesitate a little. A reference is a little less warm. A name is left off a short list because someone remembers a comment and does not want the trouble. Each person can tell himself honestly that he made a small, reasonable call. John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968) showed decades ago that when responsibility is spread across many people, each person feels less of it. Their experiments were about emergencies, but the shape fits. When harm is spread across a network in small pieces, it can add up to a closed door that nobody remembers closing.

The legal system is not built to catch this. Employment discrimination law asks for an employer, a decision, and a reason. Informal exclusion offers none of them in a form anyone can hold up in a hearing.

Part 66. One case from Indianapolis

The web is easier to see in a single case. Mine involves Jeffery Tompkins, AICP, an Indianapolis urban planner and the founder of Proformus, and two public LinkedIn threads. The quotations come from screenshots of both.

On June 7, 2026, my birthday, Tompkins commented under one of my posts: "lowkey but out of love, you'd find more opportunities if you stop posting unhinged stuff on linkedin." The sentence carried two claims, that my writing was unhinged and that my writing was why opportunities were not coming, and it came wrapped in care. I answered within minutes, asking what he meant, and in my last reply I told the thread I was jobless, about to become unhomed, and had just cashed out my last retirement fund. I put my circumstances into the public conversation myself.

On October 15, Tompkins posted about the 99-page Indy Metro Housing Study, which carries his firm's name. I commented, "Human rights are missing." He answered, "It wasn't a social justice study." That was a fair professional answer, and I argued with it, and then I went further and called it "one of the concerns I have about your leadership," which was personal in its own way. His reply was: "Judging from some of the personal stuff you seem to have going on, perhaps your concern is better spent elsewhere. Be well -jt." I answered angrily, writing in part, "Damn you for doing that to me."

The whole pattern sits in those two threads. A word about a mind stood where an answer should have been. Concern served as the wrapping. Hardship I had shared in June came back in October as a reason my point about housing could be set aside. All of it happened in public, in front of the planners, funders, and nonprofit leaders who make up both of our networks. The October comment does not mention mental health, and I do not know what Tompkins intended, what he knew about me, or whether he has said anything privately to anyone. He may have meant both comments as blunt advice, as he said. None of that changes what the remarks do once they are written.

The private side of the web is harder to see, and I have seen it once. People who used to work for me, and who are still my friends, told me that a former supervisor of mine at Indiana University had been saying things about my character. I have worked at IU more than once, and I will leave it there. I did not hear the words myself, and I am not repeating them as fact. I took the report seriously enough to send that person a cease and desist letter. Most people never learn when they are talked about in rooms they are not in. I learned because the same strands that carried the words carried them back to me.

Part 77. The disclosure trap

Nearly every organization I have worked with in Indianapolis has had words like inclusion, belonging, equity, and dignity somewhere on its website. Many mean them. And yet a field that says those words so often can still treat a colleague's hardship as a reason to discount him.

The best research on stigma tells people to be open. Patrick Corrigan and his colleagues (2012), pooling 72 studies, found that for adults, direct contact with people who have lived with mental illness reduced stigma more than education did. Openness changes minds. In a web, though, openness has a cost the research says little about. What a person shares in one conversation does not stay there. He tells a thread he has lost his job and his housing, and months later, in a different conversation about a different subject, that hardship comes back as a reason to set his argument aside. A field that asks people to bring their lived experience to the table, and then uses that experience against them when they disagree, is running two rules at once.

The federal government has already answered one part of this question, at least on paper. Under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, organizations receiving Continuum of Care money must have at least one homeless or formerly homeless person on their board or equivalent policymaking body (42 U.S.C. § 11386(e); 24 C.F.R. § 578.75(g)). The local Continuum of Care board itself must include at least one homeless or formerly homeless person (24 C.F.R. § 578.5(b)). The law makes that requirement because people who have lost housing know things about the housing system that people who manage it do not. They know what a waitlist feels like from the inside, which rules make no sense, where the gaps are between one program and the next, and what it costs to keep a job while you have no stable place to sleep. If the federal rule treats that knowledge as necessary for making housing policy, then a person's housing instability cannot reasonably be used as a reason to wave off his questions about a housing study. It is closer to a credential.

Paulo Freire (1970) built a whole theory of education on this point. He argued against what he called the banking model, in which experts deposit knowledge into people treated as empty. Real learning, he said, starts from the knowledge people already carry from their own lives, and those who are oppressed often see the structure of their oppression more clearly than those who benefit from it. John McKnight (1995) spent a career in Chicago watching professional services define people by their deficiencies, until a neighbor became a client and a client became a case. He made that argument most sharply in a small book he wrote with Ivan Illich and others, called Disabling Professions (Illich et al., 1977), which asked what happens when the people paid to help start deciding what everyone else needs. With Jody Kretzmann, he built asset-based community development around the opposite idea, that every person and every block has gifts worth finding (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1993). That idea is the reason the Zawadi Exchange went door to door. We were asking people what they were good at, because we believed a neighborhood's knowledge lived in the people the systems had written off.

Grace Lee Boggs, who organized in Detroit for most of a century, argued that the work of a movement is to grow our souls as well as change our institutions, and that the people living through a city's collapse were the ones inventing its next way of life, in their gardens, schools, and block clubs (Boggs, 2011). The disability justice movement adds a principle that fits my situation exactly. In the framework written by the performance collective Sins Invalid, one principle is leadership of those most impacted, and another rejects the idea that a person's worth depends on keeping up with the pace of production the economy demands (Sins Invalid, 2019). Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) wrote about disabled and chronically ill people building care networks for each other because the professional systems that claimed to serve them so often did not.

Set against those traditions, the professional world I belong to has a habit that is hard to see from inside. It invites lived experience in on structured terms: a seat on a panel, a story at a gala, a quote in a grant report. It is much less comfortable when the person with lived experience is also a peer, with credentials and a long record, who disagrees in public and does not stay in the role of grateful recipient. Then the hardship stops being testimony and starts being evidence against him.

There is also a pattern in who gets this treatment. Most professionals are careful about what they say regarding the people and institutions that can affect their careers, the city, the university, the funder, and the board. The caution drops when the person being discussed has nothing to offer or withhold. Link and Phelan's point about power shows up here in ordinary speech. Remarks about a person's mind tend to run downhill, toward the people least able to answer them.

So can community leadership systems accept criticism from people whose lives do not look like conventional success? I think they can, sometimes, when the people with standing decide it matters. The IMAGINE committee worked because the institution behind it was willing to hand residents real decisions. That willingness has to be built and defended each time, because the field drifts back toward comfort whenever nobody is pushing.

Part 88. The right to remain credible while suffering

There is an unwritten job description for a leader in the nonprofit and civic world. He is calm in public. He is financially secure, or at least looks it. He disagrees politely and briefly, and mostly in private. He is personally successful, which is taken as proof that his judgment is sound. Joan Acker (1990), studying how organizations are built, showed that the imagined ideal worker has no body, no family needs, and no illness, which is to say he is a person almost nobody actually is. The ideal leader is a stricter version of the same fiction.

That fiction costs a great deal for anyone going through trauma, unemployment, disability, poverty, or the loss of a home. Melvin Lerner (1980) described a belief many people hold without noticing, that the world is basically fair and people get what they deserve. When we see someone suffering, that belief pushes us to find something in him that explains it, because the alternative, that it could happen to us without cause, is frightening. In professional life, the belief shows up as a quiet assumption that a person who has lost his footing must have done something to lose it, and that whatever it was probably affects his judgment too.

History is full of people who did their most important work while struggling. Abraham Lincoln lived with what his friends and he himself described as severe melancholy, and the historian Joshua Wolf Shenk (2005) argued that his long reckoning with suffering shaped the patience and moral seriousness he brought to the presidency. Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper who was evicted from the plantation where she had worked for years after she tried to register to vote, and she was beaten in a Mississippi jail, and she went on to become one of the clearest voices of the civil rights movement. Nobody serious argues that her poverty made her less credible on the question of who gets to vote. Her life was the evidence.

They were far bigger than me, and their lives still prove a simple point. A person can be struggling badly and still be an excellent researcher, executive, organizer, advocate, and leader. Sometimes the struggle is where the knowledge comes from.

None of that puts anyone beyond criticism. Accountability is about conduct. Was what a person wrote accurate? Was it fair to the people named? Were someone's words taken out of context, or was something posted that should have waited? Those are fair questions to ask of anyone, and anyone who writes in public should expect them. Stigma is about condition. It skips the question of whether what was said was right and goes straight to the question of what kind of state a person must be in to say it. One test helps tell them apart. If the same words had come from someone with a secure job and a paid-off house, would the criticism be made in the same way? If the answer is no, then the criticism is about the person's circumstances, and circumstances are not an argument.

Every professional field is full of people carrying something heavy at any given time, a layoff, an eviction notice, a sick parent, or a diagnosis they have told no one about. Grief and anger are reasonable responses to loss and to unfair treatment, and saying so out loud is a form of honesty. A professional culture that cannot tell the difference between a person who is upset and a person who is unwell has made a decision that only comfortable people get to be believed.

Part 99. How to recognize it

Pathologizing dissent rarely announces itself, and the people who do it usually believe they are being reasonable, even kind. It has a shape, though, and the shape repeats.

The first mark is a reply that leaves the argument and turns to the person. Someone raises a point about a housing study, and the answer is about his life. The second is the vocabulary. Words like unhinged, unstable, erratic, going through something, and personal stuff stand where a counterargument should be, and none of them can be checked or answered. The third is hardship carried from one place into another. A person shares something hard in one conversation, and it comes back months later in a different conversation as a reason to discount what he says there.

The fourth mark is concern used as cover. The remark comes wrapped in care, out of love, be well, I'm only saying this for your own good, which makes any objection look ungrateful. The fifth is the audience. The remark is made in public, in front of the people who hire, fund, and refer, by someone with more standing than the person it is about. The sixth is the trap closing. When the person objects, his objection is taken as more proof that something is wrong with him.

None of these marks proves bad intent, and any one of them can show up in an honest exchange. Together they describe a move a field can learn to notice, the same way it has learned to notice other kinds of bias in hiring and grantmaking. Noticing is the first step toward refusing to pass it along.

Part 1010. Who is responsible

The usual advice to someone who has been labeled is to go quiet, look stable, and wait for people to forget. That advice treats repair as a test the labeled person passes by proving he is normal, and it asks him to stop making the arguments that got him labeled. It is Dotson's testimonial smothering offered as a career strategy.

Openness changes minds best face to face, and the same holds for a single person. A working relationship with someone who knows a labeled colleague answers a label better than any post can, and the colleagues who have worked beside him for years already hold the counter-evidence.

The law offers less than people expect. Most harmful speech is legal. Harassment, in the legal sense, means repeated conduct aimed at a person, and defamation requires a false statement of fact, so a loose word like "unhinged" would very likely be treated as protected opinion (Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., 1990). The Americans with Disabilities Act does protect people who are treated as if they have a mental impairment, whether or not they have one, which shows the law already understands that the perception of instability can cost someone work (42 U.S.C. § 12102(3)). That protection reaches employers making decisions. It leaves untouched the informal network where the perception spreads, and that gap is where pathologizing dissent lives.

That gap is the deepest problem the web exposes. Leymann, Westhues, and the bullying research study organizations, and every remedy they point to, from anti-bullying policies to human resources to the ADA, assumes an employer who can be held to account. Much of civic life runs on people with no single employer: consultants, organizers, adjunct faculty, nonprofit leaders between jobs, and neighborhood volunteers. Their workplace is a city's professional network. Nobody runs it, there is no office to report to, and a remark made in it leaves no file. This is mobbing without a workplace, and its remedy has to live in the habits of the people inside the network, since no policy and no office owns it.

What would collective responsibility look like? It would start with the people who were there. Public comment threads have audiences, and audiences make choices. A colleague who reads a comment calling someone unhinged can let it pass, can quietly carry it forward, or can say, in a sentence, that the argument deserves an answer and the person deserves respect. Burt's research suggests that reputations harden in the telling, which means they can also soften in the telling. A professional community that wanted to take this seriously could adopt a simple norm: answer the argument, and when a person has shared his hardship in one place, do not carry it into another conversation to answer his argument there. When hardship is part of what he knows, treat it as knowledge. Funders, boards, and search committees could ask themselves one question before they pass on someone they have heard things about: did I hear evidence about his work, or an impression about his state of mind?

Most of the repair belongs to the people who were watching. Whether a network looks at a colleague through his work or through a word is a choice the network makes, one person and one conversation at a time.

The people I connected

At The Meadows the idea was simple. Kids pointed a camera at their own lives and decided for themselves what was worth showing. Every Wednesday, at the same time, Bill and I would roll up to the Meadows clubhouse, and kids would come running from all over the complex, maybe twelve of them a week, eager to learn the science of photography and to try to capture the magic of living. That is what I thought community work was, and I still do. You hand people the tools to be seen as they are, and you trust what they show you.

What happens when the people you spent your life connecting begin to see you through a label instead of through the work you did together? The research gives a hard answer. The label travels a little way, through the same weak ties that once carried my name toward opportunity, and a few people hesitate. Each hesitation is small, private, and easy to defend. Together they can close doors. And because no one decided to close them, no one has to answer for it. I would like other people to test that, in my case and in the cases of everyone else this has happened to who had no platform to say so.

If belonging in a professional community depends on looking successful, stable, agreeable, and untroubled, then what we have been calling belonging is a membership that anyone with standing and a comment box can revoke. Real community has to be able to hold a person who is struggling and still take his work seriously, because sooner or later every one of us will be that person.

In 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the American Psychological Association, a room full of the people whose job is to say who is well adjusted. He told them there were some things in American life to which no one should ever adjust, and that the world might be saved by people who were creatively maladjusted (King, 1968). Pathologizing dissent runs that sentence backward. It treats the person who will not adjust to something wrong as the thing that is wrong.

So I leave this with the people who make up the network I spent thirty-five years helping to build: the funders, the executive directors, the planners, the public health leaders, the board members, and the neighbors. You are the infrastructure now. A word moves through you or it stops with you. When a colleague who helped connect you falls on hard times and says something you find uncomfortable, what do you owe him?