a.k.a. Why Living Hyphen’s Creative Director Is A White Man
This post was originally published on our Medium blog.
“Justine, if Living Hyphen is all about amplifying diverse and historically underrepresented voices, then why is your Creative Director a white man?”
A handful of people have asked me this since launching Living Hyphen and to be quite honest, I’m surprised more people don’t continue to ask. It’s an important question and it’s one that I dwell on a lot especially now as Josh, our Creative Director, and I ramp up on the design process of Issue 2.
Here’s the thing — I believe deeply in amplifying diverse voices, but I also believe deeply in allyship. These two truths are not, in any way, mutually exclusive. If anything, achieving equitable diversity is impossible without allyship. While it’s important for our communities to create alternate spaces for ourselves, we also need allies to use their existing power and access to resources to share opportunities with us, to lift while they climb, and to redistribute their power.
Being an ally means being willing to act with and for others in pursuit of dismantling systems of oppression to achieve equality and equity at all times. Even when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient. Especially when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient.
If the last year has taught me anything, it is the urgency with which we must all act in pursuing a just, equitable, and sustainable world — not just in achieving feel-good representation.
The global pandemic, with its devastating loss on lives and livelihoods, the latest wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the innumerable environmental disasters, has shown me that it isn’t enough for us simply to listen and learn anymore (though that is always an important and necessary start,) we need to take all that energy into deliberate and decisive action.
We need to act. To organize. To mobilize. And whether we like it or not, we have to chart paths and find ways to move forward together across racial lines and across all other intersections of identity.
It’s messy work and I don’t have the specific answers to what exactly all those paths should or could look like. But I do know that working with Josh has been one way. Our partnership through Living Hyphen, and I’d argue, our friendship over the years, in general, has been an ongoing exercise in this work. Our partnership has been a powerful practice in the allyship that is so necessary for change.
Josh and I first met in 2012 through our work at an experiential education organization called Operation Groundswell (OG) where we first learned how we could become better activists in our home communities and abroad. Josh facilitated travel programs in East Africa connecting Western youth with local grassroots organizations who were (and still are!) mobilizing positive change within their own communities.
True to our organization’s educational approach, he facilitated these experiences prioritizing listening over speaking — a practice our current political and cultural climate is in dire need of. These programs aimed to bear witness to the power of these local activists, educators, artists, entrepreneurs, and community leaders in cultivating change in their own communities, as well as to question and actively challenge the power dynamics between nations and the dominant narrative that Western nations know all the answers. (And by dominant narrative, I most certainly mean a myth created and nurtured by Western white supremacy and colonialism.)
Since then, Josh has been running Loop: Design for Social Good, a design studio that serves the social impact space with projects that run the gamut from environmental conservation to poverty alleviation, from law and justice education to LGBTQ rights. And I’ve had the privilege of working alongside him on some of these projects as a freelancer over the years.
Over the course of our friendship, we have spent many weekends hanging out, sharing our latest reads on anti-racism, white supremacy, colonization, and Indigenous history, and having in-depth conversations calling into question all the systems of oppression we have been conditioned to embody (…all over a glass of wine because hello, heaviness!)
From the minute I conceived of Living Hyphen, I knew Josh had to be my creative partner. He is a dear friend, yes. And he’s also the most talented designer I know. But most importantly, his ongoing interrogation of his own privileges and positionality matches my own critical thinking.
This trifecta of friendship, talent, and critical consciousness is what makes up the foundation of trust that is so crucial in this partnership.
As a passion project of mine, I knew I needed someone who I trusted deeply and who I knew would put as much attention, care, and love into this as I would. Josh has done that every day since joining me on this journey.
Every single element you find on every single page of our inaugural issue has been designed with deep intention and deliberation in collaboration with me. Josh immersed himself completely in this experience and delved into every single story to try to fully capture the sentiment and feeling of the artist.
As Josh himself explains, “Every design decision was made to highlight the sheer impact of the contributed content. Every detail was carefully selected to frame personal experience, and bring these stories to life…Even the size and stock choices were selected to feel tangible, using a variety of textures and weights that speak to the importance of the conversations that the magazine can spark.”
For full transparency, you can learn more about the design process on Loop’s blog.
In all the media interviews we do, I always ask Josh to join me because he has put as much skin in this game as I have, pouring hours of his weekends and weeknights into this passion project that was once solely mine, but has now become ours. To no fail, he will always push to have the contributors of our magazine — artists and writers from all across what is now known as Canada and who hail from over 30+ ethnicities, religions, and Indigenous nations — front and centre, first and foremost.
Josh understands inherently that this isn’t about him, but something so much bigger. He does everything he can to learn about the different cultures and peoples our magazine represents, and to pass the mic instead of continuing to take up space as a white man. And if he ever does tread that way, well then, I’m there to keep him right in check!
I write all of this not to defend my choice in partner (ok, sure, maybe a little…) or to elevate Josh any more than he needs (though I’m sure he loves this love!) but to hopefully demonstrate the tangible ways in which we can chart a way forward with our white allies. Our liberation — across all intersections of identity––is bound up in one another’s. We simply cannot pull one thread without unraveling the entire tapestry.
Audre Lorde once wrote that “we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.” Josh and I are trying to find those patterns and ways, and while we may be just a small drop in the bucket, it gives me hope that our drop can act as a ripple of change.
As we leave the mess of 2020 behind and move forward into the new year, I hope we can all work to find real and concrete ways to move forward with one another.
We simply must.
