Double Binds & Competing Needs

Have you ever felt trapped as a white person, trying to figure out how to respond to a racist remark when people of color are in the room?

On one hand, silence is violence. You have a responsibility to speak up.

On the other hand, white people have a responsibility to amplify the leadership of people of color. You might worry about being condescending, seeming performative, stepping on toes, or saying something that hurts someone more.

If you're silent, you mess up. If you speak up, you risk screwing up, too.

Meanwhile, if you're a person of color and someone makes a racist remark, you might feel trapped in a similar — yet even more costly — double bind. If you speak up, you risk paying a price: emotional labor, lost status, strained relationships, or worse, professional consequences. If you don't speak up, you risk letting yourself or others down and not naming the truth that needs naming.

That's a double bind. And it's not the only one.

Maybe you're facing an entirely different set of competing needs in your work for change right now. The nonprofit leader feels pulled between honoring donor expectations and community needs. The newly promoted manager wants credibility with senior leaders and a sense of belonging with her team. The city councilor wants to reach across the aisle without alienating their progressive base.

Many double binds are painfully real. Right now, so many immigrants face the double bind of either losing their status if they don't attend a court appointment — or risking detention by ICE if they do. Nothing I share here will make those terrifying choices easier.

And yet, many of the double binds and either-ors that I see my clients grapple with are actually mental traps. Stories we've inherited and never questioned. Those are the ones we'll focus on here.

So why does dominant culture train us to think in false binaries?

Largely, trauma.

Millennia of imperialism, patriarchy, war, and violent separation from the land gave rise to the dominant culture we live in today. One of the primary symptoms of personal and collective trauma is rigidity — a strict adherence to behaving in certain ways in an attempt to protect ourselves from future harm. One flavor of this rigidity is left/right, good/bad, win/lose, black/white thinking.