Critical Consciousness, The Tilted Room Theory, Resilience & Swiss Cheese For Visionaries, Luminaries & Disruptors…

If you have ever imagined a future that does not exist for the most vulnerable among us, but yet one that we are all entitled to as citizens of this country…and you continue to fight for all of us…and you remain proximate to the struggle, addressing injustices across all the systems with which we interface…this post is for you.  

While there are many pathways to advance justice for vulnerable populations, collectively, there is space to do it all…knowledge construction and scholarship – creating a lens for us to understand our collective experience of injustice, academia, policy and advocacy, training and professional development, working directly with individuals, families and communities, the list is incredibly expansive.

But where does the intrinsic motivation to create transformational change begin?

Critical consciousness expands our capacity to analyze, navigate and notice inequities, hierarchies, and exclusions built into the systems with which we interface, throughout our lived experience. It gives us a framework to deconstruct this reality and to challenge it in order to advance justice for marginalized communities.

We live in a society that is tilted by systemic racism and structural inequities. In order to illustrate the implications of our society’s tilted room let’s explore a post-civil war cognitive psychology study that employed several situations to investigate the roles of visual and bodily standards in perception of the upright.

In this study, study participants were placed in a tilted chair, situated in a tilted room, and then asked to align themselves vertically. In some cases, an individual who tilted as much as 35 degrees, to align themselves with the room, reported being perfectly straight. In other cases, regardless of the position of the surrounding (tilted) room, other individuals adjusted their body to stand upright, despite the tilted room.

Scholar, political scientist and professor, Melissa Harris Perry’s application of this theory was utilized as a lens to explore concepts related to the lived experiences of African-Americans, in her book Sister Citizen.

We can use this tilted room theory to explore the concept of resilience and its implications for marginalized communities. Resilience is an awakening that allows us to see that we are not crooked, the room is.

Our resilience is defined by our privilege to access protective factors that promote resilience, like supportive relationships, emotional intelligence, coping skills, access to quality healthcare, access to quality education, safe housing, a sense of purpose, etc…Failures across these systems exacerbate vulnerability and decrease our capacity to recover from difficulties and challenges.

Let’s think of resilience in the context of The Swiss Cheese Model of Safety. The Swiss Cheese Model is a conceptual framework used to visualize and understand how failures occur in systems. It is often used in risk management, safety analysis, and systems engineering. If we imagine a stack of Swiss cheese slices where each slice represents a layer of protection in a system, these slices represent barriers, safeguards, or factors that promote resilience. The holes in each slice represent weaknesses or failures in each of the factors that promote resilience. While most of the time, failures in one individual layer do not cause a catastrophic event because the holes (failures) in different slices (layers) don’t align. However, when they do align, this provides a clear path for a threat or hazard to bypass all defenses, leading to an adverse event or accident.

The Swiss Cheese Model provides a visual way to understand how failures of our social system strip away factors that promote resilience and can cumulatively lead to exacerbating vulnerability.

Examples of failures in our social system are poverty, segregated neighborhoods and inadequate housing, discrimination and racism, unequal access to educational resources, unemployment, underemployment, Incarceration of a caregiver, lack of transportation. These are all holes that disrupt our safety net. When we experience these holes in our safety net, we are vulnerable…and our ability to recover from life’s challenges is . Resilience is directly tied to our privilege to access protective factors that serve as a buffer to the aforementioned holes in our safety net. Expanding the resilience of individuals, our community and our society-at-large will require a body of work that is multi-tasked, multi-generational, and multi-system focused.

For visionaries that have awakened through their critical consciousness, the charge is to identify your generation’s leg of the marathon.

What will be your contribution to this collective body of work?