Listen to thisI find it very difficult these days to focus on the everyday context of child and youth care practice, including issues of case management and therapeutic intervention, particularly as these apply to professional responses to individual children’s needs. I recognize and appreciate that such matters continue to be important, and furthermore, that child and youth care practitioners showing up for their shifts every day need to preoccupy themselves with how to do this work well. All of it seems a little banal at a time when the world is rapidly changing, and the mass murder of children seems perfectly fine. It also seems a little banal at a time when resistance to such crimes is immediately framed as treason, or as insurrection, or even as terrorism threatening to undo the reassertion of the hegemony of white supremacy. I somehow feel we have bigger problems in this world than whether a particular child can avoid suspension from school, or should be put on psychotropic medications, or might respond best to this evidence-based practice or that one. Although I absolutely support every effort to make a positive difference in the life of any child, the mantras ‘every child matters’, or ‘one child at a time’ seem oddly incongruent with the reality of what is happening for children around the world. In theory, we are debating children’s rights, and we are doing so with increasing sophistication and with ever-deepening nuance. In practice, however, we have not yet decided whether children have a right to live or whether they are fair and reasonable targets of genocidal regimes. At the moment, we seem to lean toward the latter. Why is that and how does this relate to child and youth care practice?
Although I dislike binaries of any kind, let me use one (a very imperfect one) now: I think there are two spheres of power in this world competing for mass allegiance. One sphere of power is that of the Matrix, represented by an odd mix of ideas ranging from Foucault (as a critic) to the Nazis and self-proclaimed corporate messiahs. The other is that of the Relational, represented by the grassroots and community efforts focused on creating care, belonging, and an authentic engagement with our ancestral, current and future stories, the good ones and the bad ones, as sources of strengths, health, healing, and self-determination. We tend to use seemingly soft concepts to describe the sphere of power represented by the Relational that are often associated with femininity and womanist thought and therefore disassociated from sources of resurgent power. I would argue, however, that the Relational is in fact a source of power, but one that is widely distributed and interdependent. As such, it is a less visible source of power and one that becomes insurgent through its accumulated and collective presence. This is very different from the Matrix, which is a hierarchical source of power with clear leadership, a concentration of resources, and a quasi-religious legitimation mechanism in which power is something to be served by the masses. Racism, patriarchy, colonization, heteronormativity, and neuronormativity are all symptomatic of the Matrix because they all reflect top-down constructions of narrative, truth, and faith in the glory of the leadership.
What sets these two spheres of power apart is their goals. The Matrix aims at totality, or totalitarianism, in which one way of being, one truth, and one earthly God determines the fate of everyone. Its mechanisms are designed to destroy competition to this oneness. Relational power aims for the opposite; a diffusion of being where multiplicity, pluralism, diversity, and tension are ever present, and resources are negotiated, shared, and controlled by many. The Relational has no endgame. It simply seeks to promote the humanity within the social, and as such, the Relational does not aim to squash competition per se but instead aims to make competition a growth process in which collectively we all win something. In other words, the Relational is driven by a core value of equity, or lifting up communities of difference, and of thriving in the complexity of the social. It is not governed by a singular earthly God, although it often is spiritually sophisticated in its humility toward the other worldly.
Given these two very different goals, the Relational presents a threat to the Matrix, because it allows for power to emerge in places that cannot be controlled by the Matrix. For the Matrix, it is the underpinnings of the Relational that are the problem. Sharing, caring, resources without ownership, indeed social spaces of any kind are incongruent with the earthly God of the Matrix’s desires. The Relational is framed as a resistor to the oneness of the totality. It is sinful in its ignorance of the deity of the leader. It must be destroyed.
We are seeing the war on the Relational play out every day now, with impunity, and as an expression of a promise of nirvana. The Matrix has militarized in its reassertion. It facilitates genocides wherever possible, commodifying children as legitimate targets to disrupt the generational succession of the Relational. It aims to paint community values, whether these are driven by faith, by race, by culture, by language, or by care as insurrections, and in some cases as terrorism. It defunds collective activity ranging from childcare to education to health care. It criminalizes equity as a value and an action, ensuring no power can emerge from the relational context of communities of difference. It fortifies borders to avoid dilution of its purity and cleanses itself from differences. It exercises surveillance to identify and then destroy those upholding the power of the Relational.
Beyond these very obvious weapons, the Matrix increasingly and relatively quietly extends its tentacles into the very heart of the spaces of the Relational. Agents of the Matrix are operating within the Relational, offering performative nods to the Relational while undoing its vey foundation. This manifests in many different ways, including the insertion of anti-oppressive rhetoric in the name of exclusion and invalidation of difference to create the new oneness; the insertion of evidence-based practices in social spaces that weren’t meant to solve problems or generate specific outcomes; and attacks on those seeking to uphold the Relational that are framed as resistance to change. In so doing, the agents of the Matrix are merciless and often sacrifice their own communities to achieve their ends, be that through lateral violence or through rejecting and invalidating different ways of being and of knowing within those communities.
And here we are in child and youth care, promoting relational practices and in fact identifying such practices as the core our professional field. It is good that we are doing this. The Relational sphere of power must be protected. Through relational practices, we seek to generate and unleash the powers of care, of belonging, and of self-determination. But we also have to understand that a war is being waged against the very essence of our field. Relational practices are inconvenient to the Matrix. They allow for difference, for uncertainty, and for forms of knowledge that violate the oneness sought by the Matrix. There is no earthly God in the Relational. There is no glory for One, no credit for One, and no role for One. Our commitments to relational practice seek to transcend totalities and allow for, indeed promote, intersectionalities.
We are going to lose this war unless we confront the mechanisms by which the Relational is being attacked. We must resist oneness. We must resist outcomes. We must resist leadership that claims to know the way. And we must double down on not just talking about relational practice but actually being relational across all our social and professional activities.
Our challenge is simply this: it would be easy to unleash the power of the Relational in an all-out war with the Matrix. Where there is genocide, we can fight back. Where there is performative anti-oppression, we can intervene and exile the Matrix. But the most fundamental value of the Relational is the love of difference and caring for that difference. As such, we don’t deploy soldiers to fight those deployed by the Matrix. Instead, our fight in this war is fought with care, understanding, patience, humility, and yes, relational practices. It is going to be a rough ride.
