Quote of the day

“I’m not here to collect your pity. I’m here to disrupt your confidence.”

– Hannah Gadsby, Douglas

I posted this on LinkedIn, where a colleague posted this comment: What does that phrase mean?….asking genuinely.

How awesome that they bothered to read, wonder… and then ask!

My response:

Thank you for asking! I can offer my interpretation: Hannah, who shares personal, traumatic experiences of homophobia in her comedy, doesn’t do it for pity, but to challenge the confidence and the privilege of perpetrators, passive observers and deniers.

Is it just me?

Ever have a hard time talking to someone because they’re just so wrong (and you’re obviously so right)? For instance, about climate change, the pandemic, systemic oppression…? Or is it just me? I found these two articles helpful.

1. When Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Something extremely bogus is going on. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD,” instead of calling Musk a “Space Karen,” Harvard professor Michael Mina acknowledged that Musk was raising a “great question” and provided education and an invitation to educate others.

2. Which reminded me of this opinion piece: “How to Talk to Friends and Family Who Share Conspiracy Theories.”

Basically, these articles are about being effective when it matters most, which requires: safety, valuing this person as a person – not an avatar for the issue, an obstacle or something for you to fix – and recognizing that learning and growth are processes that are inherently social, nonlinear and, hopefully, continuous, mutual and impactful.

It’s about class, not race! (How about: both. And…)

I caught this headline today: “Study suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has altered Americans attitudes toward inequality and the poor.”

(I admit, my reflexive response was: changed how? I wasn’t necessarily going to assume changed, for the better.)

Citing the study “Recognizing the Impact of COVID-19 on the Poor Alters Attitudes Towards Poverty and Inequality” by Dylan Wiwad et al., PsyPost reports:

The study indicates that people became more likely to blame external factors for poverty and less likely to blame personal failings after the outbreak of the virus.

To which my next question was: which people were “less likely to blame [the] personal failings” of whom?

This is actually how I intentionally try to think about anything that refers to “people.” You know, as a collective. Because diversity (similarities and differences among us that activate systemic, group-level disparities of status, access to resources and opportunities, and privileges and disadvantages) is a social fact. It’s also a social-emotional fact.

Thus, any time we presume homogeneity within a group (for instance, our community, the students, people…) we actually reinforce the potential and actuality of inequity and exclusion.

Check out this study “Empathy-Motivated Helping: The Moderating Role of Group Membership” by Stefan Stürmer et al. that found “that while all the people felt empathy for someone in distress, they only tended to assist if the needy person was viewed as a member of their own ‘in-group.'” In other words:

• When German and Muslim* men in a study “learned that another participant was having difficulty finding housing, they all felt empathy for the other regardless of what group they were in. However, when asked about their intentions to help the participant, empathy had a stronger impact when the other was categorized as a member of their [ethnic] in-group.”
• When culturally-like** male and female participants “learned that another participant needed financial help due to the loss of money and a credit card, they all felt empathy, but actual assistance was provided only when the distressed person was a member of their [gender] in-group” (Stürmer et al., 2006).

[* Yes, this study refers to German and Muslim men as two separate groups. Obviously, you can be German and Muslim. I read this as ethnoracial code for the two groups studied: white Christian Germans and brown Muslim Germans.]

** “Culturally-like” is also code, apparently for: “a mixture of people with no obvious differences besides gender.” Again, sounds pretty racial to me. Science really needs some DEI fluency.]

And it’s not just research that makes me suspicious of reading Wiwad et al.’s findings to mean that “people [across all social identities] became more likely to blame external factors for poverty and less likely to blame personal failings [across all social groups] after the outbreak of the virus.

Just look at perceptions of and responses to crack and heroin addiction in the US. According to Marc Mauer, Executive Director of the Sentencing Project:

The response to the rise in heroin use follows patterns we’ve seen over decades of drug scares. When the perception of the user population is primarily people of color, then the response is to demonize and punish. When it’s white, then we search for answers. Think of the difference between marijuana attitudes in the “reefer madness” days of the 1930s when the drug was perceived to be used in the “racy” parts of town, and then the 1960s (white) college town explosion in use.

The point isn’t just that it’s highly likely that “people’s” attitudes about “personal failings” as a cause of poverty are not equal, but that variances in attitudes about how much some groups are still to blame for failing could be direly consequential.

Specifically, if the majority of community leaders, policy makers and their legislative aides are white, and they have an implicit bias linking whiteness to “hard work,” then how might pandemic relief be unfairly allocated to communities based on their ethnoracial demographics?

So. Working through all of this in my head, what I end up with is nothing new:

• Color and other identity-blindness is not the path to equity, inclusion and justice.
• It’s vital for leadership to presume diversity. Always to ask: which stakeholder groups could this apply to? could this overlook? And not whether identity matters, but how it could.
• We have to connect attitudes to impacts and outcomes. It matters what people implicitly believe because it will inform their discernment and action, especially if it’s unconscious.
• Through and after this pandemic, we can’t dismiss DEI because “we don’t have time we’re in a pandemic.” We. have. to. practice. now. Because it’s not about DEI for DEI’s sake. It’s about how DEI matters and could be advanced or not in everything we do.

More on POC and BIPOC (right/wrong? yes, and…?)

Step 1: Consider what your purpose is in reading this, yet another post, on POC and BIPOC. To get it right, once and for all? To learn more, OK. To learn more… then what?

Step 2: Prepare yourself react, and to notice your reactions.

Step 3: Find a time when you’re able to activate your curiosity, because who knows where this may lead?

I was just facilitating a workshop in which someone expressed their frustration with “BIPOC,” and then someone else shared this NPR Codeswitch episode: “Is It Time To Say R.I.P. To ‘POC’?”

Let me just say that there are several articles that share the etymologies of: citizens of color, people of color, women of color and BIPOC, and what I’ve gathered is that there are a few versions of these histories, which makes sense, because language doesn’t get produced at a conference where everyone is present and votes to ratify. Language gets produced in life, so as with Latinx, there are a few origin stories, as well as meanings that we’ve given these terms (an example is BIPOC, which may mean black and indigenous people of color or black, indigenous and other people of color).

In the above Codeswitch article, I appreciate that they share perspectives on what POC and BIPOC mean to their listeners. Here’s one that stood out to me:

“I liken the term … to mean solidarity among our collective experiences as nonwhite, especially our experiences as nonwhite in the United States. There’s obviously a lot of variation within those experiences. I just wish these terms were used more often to mean this coalition and not as a euphemism, like the way ‘diverse’ is often used, especially by white people who don’t want to say Black.” — Maricela González, 29 years old

I hope the takeaway from Maricela isn’t: got it – POC get to say POC but white people don’t. What I read is more nuanced and requires more than just memorizing a rule. Maricela highlights that what someone means when they use a term like POC matters, and that who they are informs their positionality regarding the language they’re using, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously and even unknowledgeably. So each of us has to ask ourselves: what am I trying to say? and what am I maybe trying not to say… like “black”?

“I feel that the term POC is nonsense, and I think it’s a way for non-Black people to sit comfortably in their anti-Blackness because they’re so afraid to say Black. So they come up with these terms that make them feel comfortable, with their whiteness or their adjacency to whiteness. And I get irritated — not irritated, vexed — when people refer to me as POC or BIPOC. Like, no, absolutely not. I’m Black, don’t play me.” — Christine Harris, 21 years old

And I think about pronouns. How nonbinary pronouns have prompted some folks/x to say: I just won’t use any pronouns (read: so I won’t get it wrong or offend anyone).

Well, good luck with that. And even if you don’t say pronouns out loud, the odds are good (because of lifelong training) that you’ll still think and assign them to others.

So the question then becomes… well, see Step 1: what’s your purpose?

** Thanks to those workshop participants for sharing and (re)igniting my own thinking on POC and BIPOC and so. many. more. words.

Highly recommended chapter

If you only read one chapter of David Chang’s memoir Eat a Peach (although I recommend the whole book), maybe choose “Blind Spot.” In this six+ page chapter, Chang writes about misogyny in the restaurant industry.

Reflecting on the backlash to this Time cover in 2013:

Chang explains:

At the time, I thought the point was about representation: there should be more women chefs covered by the food media, just as there should be more people of color. But no, we’re talking about something much more vicious. It’s not just about the glass ceiling or equal opportunity. It’s about people being threatened, undermined, abused, and ashamed in the workplace. It’s embarrassing to admit how long it took me to grasp that.

Chang also writes about his reaction to the firing of an executive chef who saw but didn’t report “an inappropriate photo of a female co-worker” that another employee was showing at work, naming that his “gut reaction was to think that the punishment was harsh,” and then asking himself, “What was I not getting?” It’s this question, this openness to owning how his reaction was as much about himself as it was the situation that led Chang to wonder:

… what kind of photo would have caused me to drop everything I was doing, send the chef packing immediately, and alert everyone in management to the situation [emphasis added]? As self-centered as that approach may sound, it helped me understand what I was missing. What if a cook had been spreading around some racist meme he’d made of an Asian co-worker? What if my chef ignored it and I found out about it later? I imagined the years of insecurity and humiliation flooding over me, and the sense of betrayal I’d feel after my staff had let it slide. How would I have reacted? I would have lost it.

I would only say to Chang that our approach to everything is always self-centered. It’s just a question of whether we notice it and then what we do about it. In this case, he applies his experience to activate his empathy.

Then, Chang admits that he considered not talking about #MeToo in his memoir, and was urged not to be colleagues who warned, “There’s no way for you to get it right. Better to keep your head down.”

Of course, keeping your head down is exactly what permits misogyny, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and every other campaign promoting hatred and inhumanity to trundle on. So Chang did write this chapter, concluding that despite warning from his peers, “The only fatal error world be to stop trying.”

I’d really like to tie a more satisfying bow on this, but I’m now realizing that that may be a brutish impulse, too. How can I hammer out a resolution to this right now? Whose fault is it, and how do I make them pay? The need for quick resolution points to a desire to get it over with, when, in fact, the only solution is to sit and marinate in how uncomfortable this all is. I have to commit the years it will take to learn about the people around me and reject my baked-in biases. I’m somewhat soothed by one thought: we are supposed to grow as people. We’re meant to ask questions, see things differently, build empathy. That’s the hope, anyway.

Reading this, it occurred to me that it’s been a long slog for me as a DEI consultant to articulate this for myself and to others. Sometimes – frequently, I suspect – not even half as clearly as Chang just did. And I do DEI full-time! He figured this out while running a global restaurant (and media) empire! And that’s the thing: we all have to do our work in our own work. There’s no having someone else learn it for you, or paying for a great workshop or retreat that will change everything when you go back to work the next day. It’s all on the job learning. There’s no way through this except to practice with the intent to learn and grow. Which takes vision, time, effort, humility and chutzpah (Parker Palmer), and the willingness and follow-through not just to stop what you need to stop but to start something new to fill the vacuum.

By the way, the first line of the next chapter? “Change is guaranteed, but growth isn’t.”

What’s your vision?

In an open letter to President-Elect Joe Biden, filmmaker and activist Michael Moore posed an aspirational question and provided some possibilities:

What could our lives be like in four years or eight years (with a Democratic Senate to boot)? How ’bout no one ever goes bankrupt again because they got sick? How ’bout no one is sitting in a prison cell for possessing marijuana or actual drugs? How ’bout every child gets to go to a great school and every neighborhood has an expanded free library open seven days a week? How ’bout paid family medical leave so you can take care of your elderly parents and not lose your job?

Maybe Moore’s vision isn’t yours.

So what is?

We need to aspire, folks. Not just maintain or stop whatever’s happening now.

Want to end injustice?

What do you see in its place? Because something is going to fill the vacuum. And without a vision of what we want that to be, we’re setting ourselves up to expend a lot of effort, possibly without making any actual progress.

Still digesting this (and it’s 4 years old)

I just saw this, without the context that it’s from 2016, but it’s still relevant, I think, to 2020:

And in words:

In summary, this how many electoral votes Clinton and Trump might get if the following groups were the only ones allowed to vote:

People of Colour*: Clinton 538, Trump: 0

Women: Clinton 461, Trump: 71

College Educated Whites: Clinton 216, Trump: 322

White Women: Clinton 211, Trump: 327

White People: Clinton 169, Trump: 369

Men: Clinton 158, Trump: 350

Non-College educated Whites: Clinton 64, Trump: 474

White Men: Clinton 45, Trump: 493

*Note this include all splits by ethnicity, gender and education.

I don’t think it’s helpful to draw essentialist conclusions. More to wonder what this could mean or be about.

And what if we looked intersectionally at people of color (like the author notably does with white people).

On “unconscious bias” training

Wired‘s “Our obsession with unconscious bias created a diversity disaster” has so many NMH (nod my head) moments. At least for me:

“When you deliver training to people who don’t understand diversity, equity and inclusion from an impact-centered perspective, they’re going to love the training if you can entertain them. And so all the feedback that I was getting was really positive… People were walking up to me afterwards and telling me that it really made a difference. That masks the fact that it’s not actually creating long-term change.” – Lily Zheng, DEI consultant

So many yes’s here. Why “positive” feedback in our field isn’t necessarily good. I’ve gotten all kinds: from you actually impressed me (which seems like a compliment that’s not) to I loved the workshop and even I’m a fan…

After a workshop (not on unconscious bias – I don’t do unconscious bias “training,” although I do facilitate understandings of implicit and explicit biases as part of developing a DEI fluency that recognizes the intrapersonal, interpersonal, cultural and systemic arenas of responsibilities and opportunities for equity and inclusion) that elicited particularly divided and impassioned feedback, I saw a lot of similarity in the hate/love: regardless of whether folks loved or hated the workshop, I discerned that it wasn’t useful. That’s the questions I’ve asked for 16 years now: not whether you liked it, but whether our work was useful.

On that “impact-centered perspective” that Lily mentioned:

“Whenever I speak to an organisation that says they’ve done unconscious bias training, they always say, ‘Oh, it was great for raising awareness. I say, ‘Okay, but what did you want to happen? Has your hiring of x, y, and z [underrepresented groups] increased?’ When I ask them to quantify [their results] in some way, shape or form, they are unable to do so.” – Jonathan Ashong-Lamptey, The Element of Inclusion podcast

Whenever I see diversity statistics, even if they’re “good” (given that even then, there’s usually a minoritizing mindset about under-represented groups: not enough people think like RBG about how much representation is enough – why should currently under-represented groups remain under-represented? why not aim for 100%?), my questions are: How do these numbers matter? What do they actually indicate about people’s experiences, about culture – about equity and inclusion? Because diversity, while a vital indicator, is also an incomplete and unreliable indicator of justice.

But caring about and committing to impact requires owning, not just buying into DEI. And:

“Why pay $50,000 for a deep-dive strategy engagement when you can pay some practitioner that no one’s heard of $2,000 for a 90-minute workshop, and then not need anything else for another two years until people get mad again? I think this gets to the heart of performative diversity, which is that most companies don’t actually care about [diversity and inclusion] and are far more willing to put in the bare minimum amount of money required to make it look like they’re doing what’s asked of them, both to their employees and to their consumers.” – Lily Zheng

While practice can feel performative, especially before you’ve habituated it, you know when you’re actually going through the motions for show. Or actually, let me temper that: it may be harder to be honest with yourself about it, because the bar is currently still so low. Performative DEI is still an industry standard for “doing something,” not just for corporations – for schools, community-based non-profits and other organizations, too. As Mellody Hobson, President/co-CEO, Ariel Investments, says:

“This is the only area in corporate America that people want to get credit just for working on it. There is no other aspect of corporate America where you can work on something for a long time and make no progress and still have your job.”

To me, the point isn’t to do implicit bias training, or not to do it. To have affinity groups or not to have them. That’s buying into a partial prescription for a symptom without treating the disease, as if all you have to do is pop a pill (that someone who’s not even necessarily a health care professional shook out of a bottle they found in their medicine cabinet), and you’ll personally feel better. For a while.

To put it another way (and confuse metaphors): Folks/x, we are the canaries. Implicit bias training alone is an attempt to equip all the canaries with our own oxygen masks. As if the issue is just that canaries have weak lungs – there’s nothing wrong with the mine! But injustice can’t be resolved with an either-or fix: it needs to be both-and-all. Yes, we need to help the canaries and the coal miners, individually and collectively, to thrive. And we need to notice the mine, and ask what part of the inability to breathe is about the system we’re in, not (just) us. We need to reckon with what we must or will abide. And what we must and will transform. 

** And here’s RBG on sufficient representation of currently under-represented groups: “When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, ‘When there are nine,’ people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

This is how to respond to criticism

Or, at least, it’s an example that I admire. Here’s the situation:

While cast in later history as an abolitionist, it turns out that Alexander Hamilton may have been a little more complicated on the issue of slavery (new research asserts that “his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally”).

As The Guardian reports:

Hamilton has long been thought to have had an antipathy to slavery instilled by a childhood among the brutal sugar plantations of the British Caribbean. [Jessie] Serfilippi [historical interpreter, Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site, NY], however, writes that “to date, no primary sources have been found to corroborate” the idea.

Hamilton married into the Schuyler family, a powerful force in New York, then, like the rest of the United States, a state where slavery was legal although it was in local decline. Recent research on the Schuylers’ ownership of enslaved people has turned up skeletons as well as plentiful evidence.

Biographers including [Ron] Chernow have long noted that Hamilton may have owned enslaved people. Serfilippi cites evidence from his account books which suggests that he did, for example a payment of $250 to his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, for “[two] Negro servants purchased by him for me”.

… which brings us to the mega-hit musical Hamilton.

This summer, [Hamilton creator and performer Lin-Manuel] Miranda responded to criticism of his musical for not engaging with the realities of slavery and Hamilton’s relationship to it.

“Appreciate you so much… All the criticisms are valid,” he wrote. “The sheer tonnage of complexities and failings of these people I couldn’t get. Or wrestled with but cut. I took six years and fit as much as I could in a two-and-a-half-hour musical. Did my best. It’s all fair game.”

I think this is a great example of how to respond to criticism (also known as getting called out or called in):

1. Appreciate the effort that others thought was worth investing in you.
2. Recognize what’s true and valid in the critique.
3. Own what you have to own. (Without performatively or otherwise beating yourself up.)
4. (More implied) Figure out what you’re carrying forward with you from this experience.

Textbook growth mindset.

Love that Lin-Manuel even more.

“Have you heard the term ‘Latine’?”

A colleague asked me over the weekend if I’d heard the term “Latine,” which I hadn’t.

And I’m now grateful to add Latine to my lexicon, along with Latina, Latino, Latinx and Hispanic.

Confused yet?

Let me recommend an excellent pair of mini-comics by Terry Blas: “I’m Latino. I’m Hispanic. And they’re different, so I drew a comic to explain” and “‘Latinx’ is growing in popularity. I made a comic to help you understand why.”

But wait! Before you click!

I have to ask you to try reading these without practicing WSPCR (white supremacy patriarchal cultural) thinking. That is:

• Either/or thinking. This is not about the one “right” term. Case in point: Hispanic is not just a term that indicates Spanish-speaking people. It refers to people who speak Spanish, in many cases by force of colonialism and imperialism. So, Hispanic is bad to say, right? Well, there are still many people who identify as Hispanic. Like the term Negro, Hispanic may fade over generations, and for now, it is both ethnoracist and preferred by some folks to describe themselves. Then there’s Latinx, which was pioneered for gender inclusion… in the US, and to the alienation of many Spanish speakers who wonder how to pronounce it. So as just as the intent of Latinx may have been, it is and isn’t.
• Worship of the written word. This is not about studying and proving our way to correctness in our speech. The etymology of Latinx is still a little murky. While there’s consensus that “Latinx” was coined in the US in the 2010’s, I’ve been asked and wondered myself: by whom? by Spanish as a first language speakers in the US? by bilingual from birth Spanish-English speakers? by English as a first language speakers? I think it matters, and it doesn’t. So too with etymologies of people of color, BIPOC and even “women of color” (see the BIPOC article). I read these articles and note differences and lingering questions among them, not to say “A HA!” when I discover discrepancies, but to recognize the truth that language is dynamic, often produced in the moment, and–like some scientific discoveries–potentially spawned contemporaneously by more than one person or group.

I suggest learning and collecting language so you may speak from a reasonably informed basis, with versatility, depending on occasion, context and community.

And here are some highlights from those awesome comics:

Thank you, LM, for helping me to continue to grow my lexicon and understandings!