8. Safety Words
TFW you find out your personality quirks are actually post-traumatic stress
Following CBC, I saw many men on social media expressing what seemed to be genuine confusion about the safety issues others were highlighting, asking if a trans person got physically attacked on the premises of CBC. Safety as a concept is not just physical safety - it also includes social safety, emotional safety, and psychological safety.
During one of the several CBC follow-up conversations I had, I realized that white people, white men specifically (i.e. the majority of the brewing industry), do not have the same understanding of safety that historically excluded communities have.
This is not news to some of you reading this. For those of you - like me - who are only starting to understand the layers involved in safety, recognize and reflect on how systemic racism has benefited you with the privilege of not having to figure out how you affect other people.
When your experience is the default experience foisted onto the rest of society, you don’t have to develop the same skills to assimilate into the dominant culture. You are the dominant culture, and everyone else assimilates with you.1
Last year during judging for the Great American Beer Festival, a group of friends and I went out for post-judging beers. There were three women in the group and one guy, which is relevant for reasons you will learn shortly. While the three of us were staying in the same hotel, the guy friend had rented a bicycle for the week and was staying in nearby Boulder, commuting each day by bike. He asked to be dropped off at the warehouse where we were judging so he could ride his bike back to his hotel (yes, we asked if he wanted a ride to his hotel and he declined). The three of us waited patiently in the car while he walked behind the warehouse to change into his cycling gear and begin his trek back. We didn’t need to discuss that we would wait to make sure he left okay, to make sure he didn’t have a flat, to make sure his lights worked, etc. We just waited. To make sure.
Ready for the ride back to Boulder, he rode up to the car genuinely confused.
“What are you doing?” he asked, “Why are you still sitting here?”
We replied that we wanted to make sure he got on his way okay and asked him to please message one of us when he got back to his hotel so we’d know he made it okay. He agreed, still a little confused. As we drove back to our hotel, we talked about how something that is so important to us as women didn’t even register with him. I couldn’t imagine a world in which I was in a similar situation and my friends just dropped me off and left.
During CBC, I outfitted myself in my finest pro-trans, pro-drag, pro-women attire.2 Walking through the streets of Nashville as well as the spaces of CBC, there were times when I felt physically unsafe. Times when people glared at me. Walking out of the trade show at CBC, one very large man looked at my Pro-Trans Beer Club shirt, locked eyes with me, and began walking directly at me, glowering the entire time. At a Broadway rooftop bar, I had to order drinks next to a man in a Blue Lives Matter shirt, and we took turns giving each other dirty looks.
The privilege I have in these situations is that I can simply change clothes and blend safely into the crowd.3
In a recent The Share newsletter, Stephanie Grant discusses the state of the industry address given at CBC, noting that Bart Watson, the Chief Economist for the Brewers Association, suggested the stagnant craft beer industry could see growth if the industry figures out how to attract more women and BIPOC drinkers. Stephanie emphasizes that growth is not possible until the industry invests in reducing harm to vulnerable populations.
The concept of safety, and psychological safety specifically,4 is hard to communicate to people who have not had to deal with things like, I don’t know, having roughly 50% of the population being biologically stronger than you are. Or not having a skin tone that is deemed attractive or superior. Or living in a society that places the burden of safety squarely on the shoulders of those who do not have the freedom to move safely through the world, without requiring anything from those most likely to make people feel unsafe.
At the end of March, I was in Montreal at the MBAA Eastern Canada technical meeting and caught myself doing something that I’m rarely aware of doing - scanning the room to count how many women were in attendance. It’s become a habit with its own methodology. First, I do an initial scan to gauge how many women I see. Then, I count the number of tables or rows and estimate the total number of people present. After a while, I lose count or focus and generalize that maybe 10% of the crowd is women. Which means there’s probably closer to 5%.
At World Beer Cup judging, I did the same thing. I was the only woman at my table, there were about 6 people at every table, about 12 tables, and approximately two-thirds of the other tables had one woman as well. If my not-great math skills are correct, then about 10% of the entire judging phase was women.5
I texted a friend later that night: “Random q - are you aware of a word or phrase that describes being in a minority and scanning the room to see how many other people ‘like you’ are present?”
Neither one of us could think of one - if one exists, please let me know.
Otherwise, let’s invent a word that describes the emotional concept of how it feels to be one of the onlys in the room, scanning to identify how many other onlys are there with you. This is an emotional concept of safety for many people.
I’ve been read-listening to How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett. In it, Barrett discusses emotional concepts, and the steps that must take place before a group can perceive an emotion. We need a word to teach a concept effectively. Barrett provides several words in foreign languages that embody an emotional concept, such as schadenfreude (pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortune) and Forelsket (the Norwegian emotional concept for the intense joy of falling in love).
Collective intentionality requires that everyone in a group share a similar concept, and we need an emotional concept to experience or perceive the associated emotion. Your brain must be able to take a concept and be able to predict with it.6 We need words to teach concepts efficiently. All words are invented and invented words are the definition of social reality.
If your brain can’t predict how an emotion feels, then you will be experientially blind to it.
Recognizing the various ways people feel unsafe in our environments is a necessary step in reducing harm. There is a difference between a space allowing you to be there and a space made with you in mind.
How can you remedy that? One way I suppose is to put yourself in situations where you feel unsafe, although that will likely only deliver a semblance of the safety concepts we’re discussing here and, like me being able to change my clothes, you can opt back into the dominant group at any time.
Or - even better - you can actively listen to the experiences of historically excluded communities and trust that they are the subject matter experts of their lived experiences.7 From listening and reflecting on those lived experiences, you can construct a conceptual combination of your own emotions to become more empathetic. We cannot move forward until we address and validate the various ways in which people can feel unsafe in the beer community.
And finally
Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:
Working on my Crafted for Action presentation, Turning the Beer Judging Tables: Strategies for an Inclusive Judging Environment. Get! Your! Tickets! For! This! Conference! Watch past conference sessions here.
Resigning from the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) Governing Committee and withdrawing from presenting at Homebrew Con. I’ve typed and retyped a lot of sentences about this decision. Being that the BA is the parent company of the AHA, I’m sure you can deduce some of the reasons why I resigned. The main takeaway is that it became impossible to reconcile my participation in an organization that has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not value me as a member of the community beyond the free labor I have contributed over the years.
Listening to Gastropod’s All The Feels: How Texture Makes Taste. I’ve listened to it a couple of times and it’s one of those sensory episodes that had me excitedly texting friends mouthfeel facts. Plus there’s a delightful story about how Ben & Jerry’s ice cream came to be.
Please note I have little to no patience for any “well, actually” fragile masculinity responses. If you feel the urge to contact me about why you’re the exception or how you feel you have incredible empathy for historically excluded communities’ psychological safety, your time will be better spent reflecting on why you feel defensive.
This can be a nice shorthand for letting people know your beliefs, but buying and wearing allyship merch is not the same as actually and actively showing up for communities you say you support.
Although in Tennesee specifically, I better have on “lady clothes” since I was assigned female at birth and could be arrested otherwise. And those clothes shouldn’t be too revealing or I’ll be asking for anything violent that happens to me.
There are some really great resources out there to learn more about psychological safety, so I will provide the generally agreed-upon definition here: Psychological safety is “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking in the workplace” and, most relevant to our discussion here, is the “ability to show and employ one’s self without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.”
A popular joke among law school students is that if we were good at math, we would be in grad school for something else besides law.
This is a very broad explanation by a very amateur armchair neurologist, but our brains operate mostly by predicting what may happen, which is why you may have heard that your brain fills in a lot of your perceptions for you. This is also why it’s more common to get into a car accident closer to your home - your brain has seen these surroundings a lot and fills in your neighborhood, which may cause you not to process that you’re pulling out of your driveway in front of an oncoming car.
By “actively listen,” I do not mean asking or expecting historically excluded communities to retraumatize themselves for the sake of your education.