President’s Report
https://youtu.be/MmrvW-KXVb0
Inclusivity: Our Shared Responsibility Jonathan Webb, Ph.D CI and CT, NIC Advanced President
I
n case you don’t read much further, let me get right to the point- we are all 100% responsible 100% of the time. I understand that statement reflects several concepts, including the cultural value of excellence. Excellence is mandatory when we talk about engaging in change and transformation relative to a profession and people’s participation in such. Audism and racism, if we follow Critical Race Theory, are permanent and pervasive. The first step might be to unpack what permanent and pervasive really means. The US Constitution was constructed by hearing (and sighted) users of English. These white, literate, formally-educated, land-owning men wrote the document through the lens of 6
VIEWS Issue 37 • Volume 4
their lived experiences. The structure of the US was then modeled after how these men saw the world. And because systems replicate themselves, this meant that subsequent systems were based on the same frames and ideals held by those men. We’ve all been raised in these systems. We’ve lived within the context of not only the country that was founded by these men, but in the states, communities, school systems, job markets, professional societies and other systems that replicate those original systems. Fundamentally, we can enter a school, a place of employment, a place designed for social gathering, a medical care facility, or any number of places and see that audism is alive and well. And it isn’t that there is a conscious intention to perpetuate and promulgate audism. Rather, audism is an unconscious foundational element to these systems. Likewise, racism is an unconscious foundational element to the systems we live in. Whether
