The Label Libel, A New look at Diversity: Philip Patston at TEDxAuckland

Thank you. Thanks for having me. You may be interested that I didn't sing a single note in that song, and you've got Auto-Tune to thank for that, believe me. Because comedians can't sing, ever. So labels, we use them a lot. don't we? We label just about everything, and you may notice that there are more and more labels being used at the moment. I want to introduce you to Driving Forward, if I can push the button. She's a greyhound. She's fast, she's a winner, and she's a moneymaker. And because of that, the first few years of my life were pretty crappy, actually. But I'll come back to driving forward at the end. This is me when I was about 3. I was a happy chappy. I had no labels. I was just a little English kid. And a couple of years later, I went to a special school, and it freaked me out. Why? I would have thought, WTF, but that phrase wasn't around back then. The reason I'd never thought of myself as disabled before that day was because of my twin brother. In my eyes, I was just like him, only I'm not quite sure what's going on with my grey shorts there. There you go, it's on the internet now. Step forward about 10 years, and you may realise that apart from the hairdo, I was developing another label. About 2 years after that photo was taken, I realised I was gay, and nobody was really surprised. So in the next 20 years, I trained as a counsellor, a social worker. I then became a comedian, a social entrepreneur. I was confused. I was confused. And so was everyone else. I'd grown all these labels. You know, I was a white male gay disabled social working entertainer. So to other white men, I was the gay disabled guy. To Māori disabled lesbian feminists, I was the bloody white guy. When I was trying to be serious, everyone thought I was kidding, and my audiences didn't know whether to laugh or not. It was tough. But this is what we're doing with diversity. What we're doing is we're creating labels and then we're categorising people by these labels and trying to represent them better. And I think that what we're doing is creating this black and white world. And unfortunately for me, I fell on both the black and white sides. I'm not saying the labels aren't useful, they are. They've created awareness, recognition, they've given groups of people human rights, and they've created understanding. understanding of different groups of people, and we need labels to understand the world. But we have to also remember that labels have another side, and they also create assumptions, judgements, sometimes entitlements, and I believe more and more they're creating separation in the world. We've got transsexual versus transgender. We've got gay versus queer. We've got ADHD versus autism versus Asperger's syndrome. How do we stop this decay? You'll notice this leaf. It's a lot more diverse than the growing leaf that you've seen in the slides before now. There's actually more opportunity for diversity in decay, and there are more conditions for things to decay in than for things to grow. So I think one of our challenges is to stop the labels, to take away the labels, the categorisation, and the representation of all these categories. But you may ask, what the hell do we take away actually? So I want to give you some ideas. I don't want to say that I'm right or wrong. This is just what I think about before I go to sleep at night these days. It seems to me, for individuals, we need to start thinking about decaying our identity. The labels that we use to identify us lock us into ideas about ourselves and others that don't allow the other parts of who we are to show. I think in organisations, perhaps we need to be decaying culture. We may be so sure about what makes us efficient, productive, the way to do things, we disallow diversity to flourish in our workplaces. Communities need to decay the need for agreement. Communities often want to find the right words and hear the same language, but actually communities are just Messy, uncertain, paradoxical groups of people, and we need to learn to work with that, and it's hard work to do that. If we want diversity in economies, we need to get over our obsession with money. Everything in our world at the moment is measured in value By profit or loss. It stops us developing technology, and it causes probably 98% of the social problems that we then throw more money at to solve. It's a bit nuts, really. And lastly, I'm likely to lose all credibility by trying to posit one single thing that humanity could decay in order to experience our true diversity. And I think we need to decay the need for answers. Not scientific answers. So all the scientists, it's okay, you can keep finding answers. What's good about your answers is that you try and disprove them before you say you're right. And then even if you say you're right, somebody else I apologise for this question. But I think we need to be asking more questions about who am I, who are you, who else am I, who else are you, so that we can begin a different conversation. We can start talking about the shades of grey. of humanity, and there are more than 50. Thank you. I haven't read the book, but I've heard it's very good. So we need to start asking more questions. Questions about gender, ethnicity and culture, sexuality, you can read them, function. But the question we need to be asking is, how are we unique in these aspects, and how are we common? Because that is how diversity Right now we have a common experience of being in this room together. I have the unique experience that you're all looking at me. But you also have the unique experience that you're looking at me from different places in the room, With different ideas, different values, whether or not you agree with me, and the synergy of that uniqueness and commonness is our diversity. Remember driving forward? She got delabelled. She's now Meg. She's still unique in that she's fast, but it gives me great privilege and pleasure to allow her to celebrate her commonality. In that she's a dog. And a lazy one at that. So I hope that you will go away and start having really weird conversations with people and starting them off with, How are we unique and common? And hopefully in the future, we can get along without having to know and label each other. Thank you. Thank you.