There is no way to inclusion. Inclusion is the way.
This is not just a phrase I carry close to my heart. It is a personal motto. It’s a compass I live by.
Born into a tapestry of cultures, I’ve always been immersed in multiple stories. I’ve known languages that spoke between walls, rituals that lived in silence, and people that cared in flavours, not only in words.
I have spent years wanting to hold space for something deeper. For something that was large enough to contain all our multitudes.
Culture is not a performance. Culture is presence.
It’s not something we wear for festivals. It’s not a checkbox or a heritage month. It’s in the pauses of our speech, the music of our laughter, the way we enter a room. It’s in how we belong to each other, to place, to memory.
I have immersed myself in all these nuances at every move, at every travel. At times more challenged than amazed, and sometimes confused and scared.
Diversity is not a challenge to solve. It’s the ecosystem we inhabit. A multiverse. A sacred network of ways to be.
And yet, in this era of acceleration, of data, algorithms, AI, we are watching something precious erode.
The narrowing of stories.
The flattening of difference.
The silent erasure of what doesn’t fit into the “training set.”
Technology is not neutral. Much of today’s AI is trained on data steeped in a dominant worldview: Western, white, English-speaking, and male. And in doing so, it learns to center some while marginalizing others.
Cultures that don’t code their knowledge in text, that express through gesture, sound, land, are dismissed as “noise.”
But there is wisdom there.
Ancient, embodied, living wisdom.
If we are not careful, we will automate “vanilla”.
I want us all to become curious and make an effort to look for and listen to the voices that tremble with the weight of unsaid things.
Can we invite and welcome stories that arrive in unfamiliar rhythms? Can we make spaces that don’t just speak for us, but with us?
Inclusion is not an initiative. It’s a practice.
A way of being. A way of creating. A way of listening through someone’s else hears. A way of seeing through someone’s else eyes. A way of inhabiting the world through someone’s else life. All ways to imagine something different that requires both empathy and creativity.
It begins with curiosity. Not interrogations, but profound honour and dignity. It continues with courage to hold space, to step back, to create… together.
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