Sure. A person's existence may "be political" in certain spaces and not others, and it is helpful and necessary to be able to sort out where your existence challenges other people, whether it should, and whether you are projecting undue fears onto other people based on a biased history or an unexamined worldview. It is further useful to examine your worldview to understand what is fundamental to your self-understanding and to your beliefs. Sometimes you write a sign or a headline and it doesn't include the nuance that you exhibit in the world around you.
If you "are not political" in a space it is because you do not challenge it, either because you agree with the existing culture or norms or have decided that it is not worth the cost of doing anything about it. If someone else does challenge those norms or that culture, they become political, but if that comes from something that is fundamental to their identity their choices are to either suppress that part of themselves to fit in or to stick out, "be political", and experience whatever reactions to that challenge.
My claim, here, is that creating workplaces that "are not political" is a way of enforcing the authority of people who already have it, and encouraging people not to challenge what they may see as unethical or inequitable practices in a business or other organization. It is a form of authoritarianism, soft-sold under the guise of civility.
I understand. The trick is that a person can believe and practice all that and still not actually be any sort of meaningful political or ethical challenge to their coworkers, even though they imagine so. Leaving the only available challenge to be trying to work with someone who doesn’t understand themselves or their environment.
Companies are publicly committing to a priori support of one or the other of the conflicting views rather than do the more difficult work of helping someone get past this, in the US, but in other parts of the world it seems possible for culture to exert itself and heal the misperception over time.
If you "are not political" in a space it is because you do not challenge it, either because you agree with the existing culture or norms or have decided that it is not worth the cost of doing anything about it. If someone else does challenge those norms or that culture, they become political, but if that comes from something that is fundamental to their identity their choices are to either suppress that part of themselves to fit in or to stick out, "be political", and experience whatever reactions to that challenge.
My claim, here, is that creating workplaces that "are not political" is a way of enforcing the authority of people who already have it, and encouraging people not to challenge what they may see as unethical or inequitable practices in a business or other organization. It is a form of authoritarianism, soft-sold under the guise of civility.