Radical Hope #13: If Not Me, Who?
From Generative Practice to Radical Hope #13
You are a body that thinks.
You are nature.
You are the field of awareness in which everything happens.
You are already part of the answer
In the last newsletter, A Different Way to Think About Justice, I explored how we can name a harm with complete precision — and still refuse to condemn the community the harm came from. That is harder than it sounds. The pull towards collective blame is old and deep. The practice that makes precision possible is the same attention the series has been building since Newsletter 5: the capacity to hold the whole and the part at once.
But that newsletter stayed at two extremes — a childhood fight with my brother Stephen, and a war with massive civilian casualties
It left an important scale untouched: ordinary life in our communities. The family dinner. The workplace meeting. The conversation in the street.
How do we apply our justice model to ordinary life in our community?
In this newsletter we work at that everyday scale. What stops us from stepping in when we witness harm? What makes it possible? And what does it take to stay human — and humble — when we do? And are we exemplars of a vision of how life could be?
This is the thirteenth newsletter in a series called From Generative Practice to Radical Hope. I am exploring why deep personal development — somatic, psychological, contemplative — is not a retreat from the polycrisis but the very ground from which genuine engagement becomes possible.
Standing Up, and Getting It Wrong
I remember a time when a black mother and her daughter were visiting the beautiful Hampstead Heath for a Sunday outing, and a drunk shouted racist abuse and seemed about to get violent. I stood with them, enough to see the aggressor off, and walked with mother and child on their way a little. I felt ashamed of what they endured, but I also felt good for my action.
I remember when, as a consultant meeting with clients in a boardroom, the boss asked the junior female member of staff to pour tea for us all rather than ask the male junior. Without saying a word, I got up to help her.
I feel good taking a stand for fairness and kindness.
And sometimes I also get it wrong.
I was working with a consultant from Lagos. Wanting to build rapport, I offered him what I thought was a gift: my experience of village life in the Congo, and my long fascination with the rituals of traditional African culture that build harmony inside a community.
He was a postmodern man with a modern education, building a future for Nigeria in the modern world. I had offered a romanticised vision of traditional culture.
I felt the rapport go. I still do not know what he made of it; we never had the chance to talk it through.
What I do know is what I had done. I had taken his nationality and the colour of his skin and inferred from them what would interest him, instead of asking who he actually was. A generalisation, kindly meant, arriving as the very danger this newsletter is about.
Congo is not Nigeria. Africa is a continent, not a place. I would not have offered a Norwegian my fascination with Sicilian village ritual and expected him to be charmed by it.
What I could have done was stay an outsider out loud. I noticed this in Congo, and I have no idea whether it means anything to you. Or better, and riskier: I have just told you what I find interesting about where you are from. What do you find interesting about where I am from?
That question would have put us on the same footing. What I actually did was treat "traditional African culture" as a single thing, and assume he would share my interest in it because of where he was from.
It is much easier to see collective thinking in other people than in oneself.
If Not Me, Who?
A close friend of mine, a British Indian Scrum Master at a London tech company, excelled beyond her peers — managing double the projects, sacrificing a Christmas holiday to rescue someone else’s failing project.
After a company diversity talk, her white Texan boss confided his worry that his son would not get promoted under the new diversity rules.
Her promised pay rise never materialised. He scheduled visits to the UK during her holidays without checking her calendar. Despite her excellence, she scored poorly in appraisals, while the colleague whose failing project she had rescued scored much higher.
When HR discovered she was leaving, they sent a Black colleague to investigate. Both local and senior HR managers learned of possible discrimination. They offered support for a formal complaint. She declined. In London’s tech echo-chamber, careers depend on recommendations, and she feared that speaking up would damage her prospects.
She found a better-paid role elsewhere from someone in her network who knew what a star she was. The UK HR Director’s farewell card acknowledged: "I know we let you down."
Dozens of colleagues with the power to intervene had watched silently as another talented person of colour was pushed to the margins.
Why didn’t anyone intervene?
Two forces do most of the work:
1. Diffusion of responsibility: the more people who are present, the less personally responsible any one of us feels.
2. Social influence: we look to others for cues about what is happening, so when everyone stays silent, silence itself becomes the signal that nothing is wrong. (1)
The two compound each other. Each of us waits, reading everyone else’s stillness as evidence, and our own stillness becomes the evidence they are reading.
Which is why one person moving changes everything. When somebody says out loud "this is not right", the signal inverts.
The others are no longer reading the silence. They are reading you.
If not me, who?
The most useful thing I know is to act as though I were the only witness.
Not because I am, but because it removes the arithmetic that keeps everyone still.
There is a cost, and it is worth knowing about before you meet it. Speaking up can get you excluded — quietly, by people who would never call it that. The room cools. You are asked less often. If you are not ready for how that feels, it will silence you the second time even if it did not the first.
What makes it bearable is knowing you are not the only one doing it. Somewhere today, thousands of people are doing this same small thing in their own rooms. You will never meet most of them. You belong with them anyway.
Five Ways to Step In
Intervening does not have to mean confrontation.
The organisation Right To Be teaches five options, and choosing between them is a judgement about your own safety as much as anything else.
And safety is not shared out evenly. I can name a behaviour in a room and expect, at worst, to be thought difficult. That is not everyone’s experience of speaking up, and it was not my friend’s when she worked out that a complaint would cost her more than the discrimination already had.
Right To Be put Direct last in their own sequence, and flag it as the riskiest. Four of the five are indirect. Those four are not lesser options. For a great many people they are the only ones actually available, and they work.
The five options that follow came out of a subway carriage in New York, in August 2005.
Thao Nguyen, then twenty-two, was travelling home from a job interview when the man sitting opposite her began to masturbate. She photographed him on her phone. The police were not interested — he would be seven or eight stops away by now — so she posted the picture online with an account of what had happened. It reached the front page of the New York Daily News, and the man was later convicted.
Nguyen was not a bystander. She was the one being harmed, and she was on her own.
The bystanders were seven friends in Brooklyn who were nowhere near that train. They had already been talking among themselves about street harassment — the women telling story after story, the men astonished at how different their city was from the one the women described. Nguyen’s photograph was what turned the talking into doing. They built a site where anyone could post what had happened to them. It grew into the organisation Right To Be, and it was there that the five responses below took shape. (2)
Direct. When it is safe, name the behaviour plainly. "That’s not appropriate." "Please stop." "Leave them alone."
Distract. Interrupt without confronting. Start a conversation with the person being harassed, pretend you know them, ask directions, spill something.
Delegate. Ask someone else for help — and ask them specifically. "Can you call security?" A named person with a named task is no longer a bystander.
Delay. Check in afterwards. "I saw what happened. Are you all right?" Support after an incident often does more to prevent lasting damage than the incident itself did to cause it.
Document. Record what happened, for a complaint or for legal use — weighing safety and the dignity of the person harmed.
The reason to know these in advance is simple: in the moment there is no time to invent one. What makes intervention possible is having already imagined it.
There is something else to rehearse, and it matters more than the words do.
The state I am in when I speak decides most of what happens next. Braced, keyed up, running on adrenaline and grievance, I will reach for the sharpest sentence available and the other person will hear an attack whatever I actually said. Settled — feet on the floor, breath low, aware of the whole room and not only the offence in it — I can say the same words and they arrive as information rather than assault.
This is what the whole series has been building towards. It is not a refinement added at the end. It is the difference between an intervention that opens something and one that shuts it.
If you want to practise this properly rather than read about it, Right To Be run free online trainings, open to anyone anywhere. That is where I would start.
That is the how. What remains is what you in particular bring to the room — because we do not all arrive with the same amount of space to speak.
Using your privilege for good
In the early days of Just Stop Oil I thought that getting arrested outside Parliament would change the government’s mind and make it lead the charge for renewable energy. I was wrong about that, and I have a different view now about when getting arrested would be a useful intervention.
I have friends who are a mixed-race couple, and I was at a party at their house. As I left I announced, rather boastful and excited, that I was going off on an action to get arrested the next day. A white friend said, "It is okay for you! You have white privilege."
And I replied, "That is why I am doing it! My white privilege, my education, my older male status will help ensure I get treated well by the police. It is much safer for me to do this sort of action than for a black person.
At which point people smiled at me and sent me on my way with a blessing.
If you have privilege, why not use it for the common good?
It is worth working out what yours actually are. Being white. Being a man. Being straight. Being cisgender. Being able-bodied. Being educated, or moneyed, or senior, or a native speaker of the language in the room, or simply old enough that people assume you know what you are talking about.
Most of us have some of these and not others, which is the point — this is not a score.
The following question is narrower and more useful than that:
In which rooms or spaces do you have the safety and opportunity to speak that the person beside you does not? That is your leverage point.
Your privilege gives you the power to create good in the world
Of course, the principle established in Newsletter 12 — to name a harm with precision and refuse to condemn the community the harm came from — applies to the police too.
I have met very decent, helpful police officers. I have met ones with bad behaviour too.
Both of those things are true at the same time. Holding them together, without letting either one cancel the other, is the whole discipline.
And statistically we know that in Britain black people are more than twice as likely to be arrested as white people, (3) and that the government-commissioned Macpherson inquiry found the police to be institutionally racist. (4)
So when you meet a police officer doing good, reward them. Say it to them authentically from your heart, and if it is natural, where others can hear it. Behaviour that gets noticed and named tends to appear again; behaviour that only gets punished tends to go underground. (5) Rewarding good behaviour is the best way to shape behaviour. This is not a substitute for accountability where harm has been done. It is the other half of it.
Notice what Macpherson actually named. Not a set of bad officers. An institution — its processes, its attitudes, the things it did without anyone deciding to do them.
That distinction matters more than any other in this newsletter.
We have all absorbed the assumptions we grew up inside. Not as a switch that is either on or off, but in layers, unevenly, mostly below the level at which we could catch ourselves. Which is why “is he a racist?” is the wrong question. It offers two boxes, and almost everybody puts themselves in the safe one.
Here, what can be named precisely is not an individual but a structure. An appraisal system. A hiring pattern. An arrest rate. A room in which the same person is always the one asked to pour the tea.
And here is the trap in my own principle, which a reader put to me plainly. Refuse to condemn the community — and a dominant group, such as white people, will use exactly that to protect the pattern. Boys will be boys. One bad apple. Let’s name the individual, keep the pattern out of the room, carry on.
The precision I asked for in the last newsletter has to cut both ways, or it becomes a shield.
Institutions can be named. Whole peoples cannot. That is the line.
Naming a harm is only ever half the work. We also need to be speakers of vision — the ones who say out loud what a fairer version of this team, this street, this family could actually look like. Precise accountability happens fast. Building the alternative takes much longer, and needs far more people willing to describe it.
What if you believe that how you behave locally is a demonstration of how you want the world to behave?
But Are You Sure You Know Best?
My colleague Sophia Neville put it to me squarely. "Be careful that you don’t get off on one yourself, thinking you know best — because that’s the problem. We actually don’t."
And then: "It’s not particularly helpful, I’d say… pointing it out [the problem behaviour] endlessly, you’re just going to get into a fight. All change has to come from within, I think."
Her first warning I take completely.
The second I want to answer, because there is a way to speak up that does not become a fight — and it is there in the wording of Direct, the first of the five responses.
"That’s not appropriate" — not "you are a racist". One names a behaviour everyone in the room can see. The other delivers a verdict on a soul, and hands the person a category they will simply decline. One points at something we both just saw. The other is a story I have built about someone I do not know. (6)
Another colleague, Kathleen Dameron, reading this in draft, pushed harder than I had. Repeating is essential, she said. How you point it out endlessly is the question.
She is right and Sophia is right, and the two are not in conflict. Said once, it is an incident. Said again, without heat, naming the behaviour and never the soul, is how a norm actually moves.
I knew nothing about the drunk on the Heath, and I still don’t. I didn’t need to. I was not intervening against him. I was intervening in what was happening to a mother and her daughter.
Not-knowing does not mean waiting until you understand. It means acting on what is in front of you while staying open about the person producing it.
The moment I need a theory about who you are before I can speak, I have stopped listening and started prosecuting.
A Practice
Rehearsing the Moment
Sit somewhere you will not be interrupted. Three slow breaths, letting the out-breath run longer than the in-breath. Feel the chair, the floor, the weight of your own body. Let your attention widen to take in the whole room rather than any one thing in it.
This is the state the whole newsletter has been pointing at — embodied awareness, systems consciousness, the COACH state, (7) whatever you like to call it.
Bring to mind a moment when you saw something and said nothing.
No guilt. You did what you could with what you knew and what you had at the time. Just let it be there.
Now watch it again — what do you want to say or do? Which of the five Ds is it? See the faces turn towards you. Notice what happens in your chest, your throat, your hands.
Stay with that discomfort rather than hurrying past it. It is the sensation that will meet you in the real moment, and you are getting to know it now so that it does not take you by surprise then.
Now bring in whatever steadies you — a time you did speak and it went well, someone whose calm you would borrow, a phrase that settles you. Then rehearse it again, with more ease and more room to move.
Finally, imagine similar situations in the future, and how you might meet them.
Bring to mind that you are not the only one. Somewhere today, thousands of people are building the courage to do something similar, and you will never meet most of them.
You are here with them.
Next Newsletter
In the next newsletter (no. 14), we broaden our horizons to the national and the international sphere. We have moved from the model (Newsletter 12) to the everyday scale (this newsletter). Now we ask: what becomes possible when we bring everything we have learned — body, field, awakening, emergence, living systems, calling, mastery, justice, personal agency — to the world stage? How can we flock more fully with movements towards justice and a shared vision for humanity and the ecosystem?
In which situations do I find it easiest to step forward — and which situations make me go quiet?
And when I do step in, what helps me stay curious about the person I’m addressing — rather than certain I know best?
If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.
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In hope and love
Julian
Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community — a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.
Notes
1. John M. Darley and Bibb Latané, "Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 8, no. 4, pt. 1 (1968): 377–383, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025589. Darley and Latané named the two mechanisms — diffusion of responsibility and social influence — and demonstrated them experimentally. Their work is often introduced through the 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese, but the widely repeated claim that thirty-eight witnesses saw the attack and did nothing has since been substantially discredited. The mechanisms are real; that particular story is not a reliable illustration of them, and I have not used it here.
2. Right To Be, "Who We Are," https://righttobe.org/who-we-are/, and "The 5Ds of Bystander Intervention," https://righttobe.org/guides/bystander-intervention-training/. The organisation began as the blog Hollaback NYC in October 2005, became a non-profit in 2010, and took its present name later; Thao Nguyen now sits on its advisory board. It trained over 120,000 people in bystander intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic. The five responses were built rather than invented at a stroke: in 2012 Right To Be worked with the bystander programme Green Dot, which had pioneered three — Distract, Delegate and Direct — then added Delay in 2015 and Document in 2017. Their own sequence runs Distract, Delegate, Document, Delay, Direct, with Direct deliberately last and flagged as the riskiest, because their focus is public harassment where a confrontation can escalate into violence. I have begun with Direct because this newsletter is mostly concerned with everyday prejudice in workplaces and social settings, where naming the behaviour plainly is usually the safer option. That judgement assumes a degree of safety not every reader has, and anyone for whom it does not hold should take Right To Be’s own ordering seriously instead of mine. Rockefeller University uses the ordering I have. Their free online trainings, open internationally, are listed at https://righttobe.org/upcoming-free-trainings/.
3. "Number of Arrests," Ethnicity Facts and Figures, UK Government, https://ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-law/policing/number-of-arrests/latest. In the year ending 31 March 2023 there were 668,979 arrests in England and Wales. Black people were 2.2 times as likely to be arrested as white people — 20.4 arrests per 1,000 black people against 9.4 per 1,000 white people. Among men the gap is wider: 38.2 arrests per 1,000 black men against 16.0 per 1,000 white men. Arrest rates measure police contact, not offending.
4. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, Cm 4262-I (London: The Stationery Office, 1999). The report found the Metropolitan Police investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s murder to have been marred by professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers. Macpherson defined institutional racism as an organisation’s collective failure to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin — visible in processes, attitudes and behaviour amounting to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping.
5. The principle is called shaping, and it comes from B. F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning. See B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953). Skinner’s argument against punishment was not that it fails to work but that it works in the wrong way: it suppresses a behaviour while it is being applied, teaches nothing about what to do instead, and trains the person to avoid the punisher rather than to change. Reinforcement does the opposite. It selects for the behaviour you actually want and makes it more likely to appear again unprompted. In practice, shaping means you never wait for the whole behaviour before rewarding it. You start by reinforcing some small tendency in the right direction, then raise the criterion in small steps, always staying just ahead of what the learner can already do, so that each step is easy enough to succeed at and each success is what earns the next attempt. You reinforce generously to begin with, to get the behaviour established, then thin the reinforcement out once it is reliable. The skill is in breaking a large, distant goal into a chain of small ones that can each be achieved and rewarded in turn, rather than holding out for the finished performance and correcting everything that falls short of it. The benefits follow from how it feels to be on the receiving end. Because nothing is being suppressed or punished, there is no fear, avoidance or aggression to manage — the learner keeps experimenting rather than shutting down or hiding mistakes. Progress is visible and immediate at every step, which keeps motivation high on both sides. And because the behaviour was built up voluntarily, in pursuit of a reward, it tends to persist and reappear on its own, rather than only when someone is watching to enforce it. Karen Pryor developed shaping into a practical method through decades of work training dolphins and other animals, then showed that the same approach works just as well with people. See Karen Pryor, Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching and Training, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).
6. This distinction is the first move in Nonviolent Communication, developed by the American psychologist Marshall B. Rosenberg. See Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 3rd ed. (Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2015). Rosenberg’s practice begins with observation — describing what a camera would have recorded — held strictly apart from evaluation, the interpretation we lay over it. "You interrupted me twice in that meeting" is an observation. "You don’t respect me" is an evaluation. He argues that mixing the two is what turns a request into an accusation: the listener hears a claim about who they are, defends themselves, and the original behaviour is never discussed. Keeping them separate is difficult and, in Rosenberg’s account, worth the difficulty — it leaves the other person somewhere to move to. How we communicate is just as important as what we communicate. I can communicate in a way that makes the person defensive or aggressive. Or I can communicate in a way that addresses the behaviour directly and makes it easier for them to change it. What they do with our best communication is ultimately outside our control. Being in a resourceful embodied presence state — systems consciousness — helps.
7. COACH — Centred, Open, Aware, Connected, Holding.
