“Leadership isn’t about making complexity disappear.
It’s about creating clarity without pretending the world is simple.”
Dr. Kulneet Suri
“Dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives…. These ideological limits have to be contested. We have to begin to think in different ways. Our future is at stake.”
(Angela Y. Davis, 2024, p. 8, in Imagination, a manifesto)
Marcia
One thing I’ve seen in the roughly two decades I’ve been leading different Indigenous health and antiracism work is the ever-increasing complexity. As actors in the health system or health system leaders we are not strangers to complexity. Any of us who have tried to figure out how to decrease emergency room wait times knows that it’s not as simple as a single linear flow of patients in and patients out. It’s not even multiple parallel flows of patients in and out. It is a complex and interdependent web of a system influenced by the aging population, COVID-19 hangover effects on population health, the health workforce crisis, technology’s interface with health and health care, generational shifts in how people are designing their careers, and this list of factors that could go on and on. What this illustrates to me is that our goal isn’t and can’t be to eliminate the complexity or fall into the temptation to reduce these challenges to oversimplified linear pathways. Instead, we need to be increasing our systems thinking, our ability to see the whole, to prototype and test solutions while monitoring for both the intended and unintended impact.
In a similar way, I encourage us to think about different forms of racism and systems of oppression as inter-connected and complex systems. In an increasingly polarized world we have to resist the drive to reduce or oversimplify, and we have to resist the temptation to consider one form of racism or one form of oppression the most severe or important. We are all entitled to be free of any form of discrimination. Perhaps this is where focusing on the complexity and connections can help us navigate the general approaches and specific focuses that social justice and antiracism work requires within the realities of our resources and capacity.
Delia
Meeting the challenges of this moment…where to begin?
Reflecting on why navigating complexity is vital to anti-racism, my work is anchored in the understanding that we live in a present structured by the enduring legacies of dispossession, genocide, enslavement, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.
Thinking about the interconnections between these histories and systems enables me to map out how they reinforce each other to protect and maintain injustice and normalize inequality.
Consider these examples:
1) In 1982 Black American feminists Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith published a groundbreaking book titled All the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave. The collection addresses the theoretical invisibility of Black women in feminist and racial discourses, pointing out how race, sex, gender and sexuality, are typically constructed as exclusive categories of theory and analysis.
2) Parallel pandemics: COVID-19 and systemic racism(s)
Alongside the disproportionate impact of the virus on Indigenous, Black, and racially marginalized folx we bore witness to the murder of Mr. George Floyd, the uncovering of unmarked graves on former Residential School sites, incidents of Islamophobia and antisemitism, and racism directed at those perceived to be Chinese or of East Asian descent.
The targeting of diverse groups of people demonstrates how racism is not a simple or singular entity, rather, it is systemic and multifaceted.
3) White supremacy:
White supremacy has conceived of Blackness and Indigeneity in very specific aways to ensure white racial power. That said, white supremacy involves more than beliefs about racial superiority. As Anita Naidu White (2026) astutely argues, “it is a system of power that determines whose relationship to land matters, whose knowledge counts, what land is for, who has the right to extract from it and whose lives and communities can be sacrificed to absorb the consequences” (para. 4).
Simple frames typically lead to simplistic outcomes.
Kimberlé Crenshaw describes the inability to see how different systems reinforce each other as “intersectional failure.”
Losing complexity also undermines our ability to see points of connection.
We don’t see how people are differently visible, differently vulnerable, differently targeted.
People get left behind and No One is disposable.
Challenging dominant ideologies and structural arrangements is difficult and very necessary.
While the principles of divide and conquer are the familiar institutional response, we can refuse the assignment.
Addressing one system alone is insufficient. Focussing on one group or one issue may result in a shift, but not a dismantling of a structure.
Relying on narrow frameworks undermines our capacity to understand each other, to recognize each other, to care about each other. As a result, our inability to comprehend how these systems and their related violences are interconnected means that folx tend to not be interested or invested in issues that they perceive as irrelevant to them.
Resistance and solidarity are about survival and working towards creating more just futures.
Complexity is linked to connectivity.
We can build bridges.
If you would like to continue this conversation, please join us in person, on October 5, 2026, 12 -1 pm, in Brodie 405, for the launch of our Community Conversation series.
Registration information will be provided shortly.
References
Ruha Benjamin. (2024). Imagination: A manifesto. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company
Anita Naidu. (August 2026). There is no elsewhere a world is burning. Counterpunch.
Marianne Schnall. (14 May 2026). ‘They’re taking our humanity away’: Kimberlé Crenshaw on her memoir, America’s future and why the fight for justice requires ‘backtalking.’ Ms. Magazine.