The author views these rules as upholding white supremacy because someone needs to make decisions about cutting off speakers or allowing extensions of time to speak. The author extends from that to assume that taking turns in speaking necessarily means that people from cultures who value patience and humility do not get to speak.

> In terms of conflict resolution, what if we stopped having debates or hearings in which people “claim their time” in order to see how scathing a blow they can deal out?

This is basically blaming Robert's Rules for people being rude and inconsiderate to their community. You're not going to fix that through any process, however informal that process is. At some point someone is going to have to tell the holocaust denier to sit down and shut up because this meeting is about turning King street from a road with pedestrian access into a pedestrian mall with vehicle access.

Sitting around the table and talking in informal turns works okay if you're Jada Pinkett Smith and a bunch of like-minded allies. I'll not a recent study claiming that women are more likely to ask questions, and more questions will be asked, if the first person to ask a question is a woman, and put that alongside the Jada Pinket Smith panel being all women of colour. This model falls flat on its face if the first person to speak is the town sex pest labelling all women a tool of the devil, and all the women in the audience give up and go home.

> For instance, while writing this, I was awaiting the results of a Doodle poll for the meeting of a subcommittee that I am serving on. When I hadn’t heard confirmation, I checked in and was informed that the meeting is being postponed because the Police Chief couldn’t make it … He has been invited (by the facilitation team I will point out, no one asked me) as a consulting expert. I don’t mind him being invited and giving us answers to questions we might have, but the fact that they cancelled the meeting because he couldn’t be there speaks volumes about who really has a seat at the table.

There's a lot more that's going on here than "Robert's Rules are white supremacist," most notably that there is clearly some breakdown in communications because someone along the chain is using multiple modes of communication and not repeating communications from one mode across the other modes.

It's vitally important that if you're organising meetings with people who correspond with you via Twitter, Email, SMS or face to face, that you repeat all incoming communications to all outgoing channels (even if only in summary form). In this case for example it was clear that the meeting agenda had not been communicated otherwise the author would know that the Police Chief was speaking as a consulting expert.

To me the act of suggesting that cancelling a meeting due to the invited speaker not being available is because of "who really has a seat at the table" is itself inherently white individualist and selfish ("the meeting was cancelled because of someone who is not me, that makes me not important"), considering that the meeting was clearly about consulting with this expert.

Good grief I could go on for days about the ways that some people seem to desire to find racism everywhere. The racism here isn't in the system, it's in the people who use whatever system is available to prop themselves up.

Casual talks over coffee and cake work only when the people involved can be polite to each other. It is not a failure of Robert's Rules that leads to white supremacy, it's white supremacy that uses any system to get its way.

I'll just drop in here a summary of Tema Okun's characteristics of white supremacy (which to me reads like a list of characteristics of any oppressive culture) that was mentioned in this article:

- perfectionism

- sense of urgency (no time to digest, demand that we act right now)

- defensiveness

- quantity over quality

- worship of the written word (I'd reword this as "inflexibility in communicating to stakeholders")

- only one right way

- paternalism

- either/or thinking

- power hoarding

- fear of open conflict

- individualism

- I'm the only one

- progress is expansive

- (pseudo-)objectivity

- right to comfort

Full article here: https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/4/3/5/7/43579015/o...

Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. I just needed an opportunity to get my thoughts into words so that you can tell me how wrong I am.