The DEI Chronicles (Part 2 of 5): “New Attitude”
Seven steps to becoming an organization that can thrive in the non-majority society we’ll soon be.
“I’m feelin’ good from my head to my shoes. Know where I’m goin’ and I know what to do. I’ve tidied up my point of view — I’ve got a new attitude.” — Patti LaBelle, New Attitude
When Patti LaBelle, in her 1984 hit sang, “I’ve tidied up my point of view,” and the subsequent difference doing so made, though she was speaking personally, she could easily have been singing about American society and the shifts we’re undergoing. Because the greater the change we’re attempting, the more important our outlook on things, our attitude, becomes.
I remember Rev. James Graves, a charismatic African American pastor and founder of one of Birmingham’s first intentionally interracial churches, telling a story during a sermon about a little girl whose mother forced her to sit. “I might be sitting down on the outside,” the little girl said, “but I’m standing up on the inside.” That’s often where our organizations are, and why this matters. Because until we change our “want to,” none of the “how-tos” will matter.
In This Land Is Your Land, I quote Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, who, in partnership with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps, revealed how most white-identifying participants and more than half of all African Americans hold an unconscious negative bias against dark complexions when given their implicit association test. The test works by asking people to sort negative and positive words while random faces flash on the screen. In an interview, Dr. Banaji gave an example of how implicit association works.
I am a woman, I have worked outside the home all my life, and yet, when I take a test that requires me to associate female with career and male with home, I can’t seem to do that as well; as if you gave me the opposite. If you asked me to associate female with home and male with career, that turns out to be relatively easy for my brain to do. Why? I don’t have this belief that women don’t belong in the workplace or anything like that, and yet, my brain contains the thumbprint of the culture in which I live, and that culture has repeatedly associated female and home, more so than male in home, and that’s now in my head.
And the effects are powerful. Research shows that even African American cardiologists and oncologists take complaints from African American patients less seriously, contributing to higher mortality rates among affected groups. But, this isn’t the half of it. Turns out, African American students are disciplined more severely by teachers of all racial identities; including teachers who identify as black, and a similar dynamic plays out among everyone from judges and police encounters to public assistance providers and apartment leasing agents and, of course, hiring managers.
And this goes beyond ancestry. The “thumbprint of the culture” that Dr. Banaji describes can’t help but effect the way women see other working women, how immigrants see others who are undocumented, why masculine gay men ridiculed feminine gay men, and so forth. In This Land Is Your Land’s I, Darkness, I describe how, growing up, I had a lighter complexion than my younger brother, Joe. I had more of a copper coloring, and he, coconut. But the difference in the ways we were treated, and over something so random and inconsequential, was palpable.
African American teachers naturally expected that Joe and other slightly darker-skinned boys would be “trouble” and treated them accordingly. And in general, adults seemed to believe less in the potential of boys with his complexion than in those with mine. “It broke my heart that Joe had to work so much harder to prove that he, like me, was smart, pretty and good,” I wrote.
All this is because the systems we’ve built aren’t neutral and benign as we’ve been told they are. This means that it’s quite possible for us to be, say, intensely anti-racist while unconsciously using tools that validate, perpetrate and perpetuate the same racism that we’re against. We carry the thumbprint of the culture in which we live, and all the ways that culture has shaped the way we see others, the world and ourselves. Grasping this is key to our understanding of everything from the problems inherent in proxies for discrimination, to disparities in sentencing and the biases built into every aspect of our employment processes.
But perhaps the most important takeaway from Dr. Banaji’s and Dr. Elizabeth Phelps’ research is that while bias might be implicit, it’s by no means innate. In fact, you know that fight-or-flight response that’s triggered when we see someone we deem dangerous? That’s our amygdala firing, and studies show that this syncing of our amygdalas and the prejudices we’ve been taught doesn’t fully happen until we’re in our teens, and even then, that it’s mitigated by the amount of exposure to diversity we had growing up.
The first step for any organization that’s truly serious about being a place for all is addressing the assumptions that have shaped so many of our choices so far. That starts with grasping where the problem lies; not with those relegated to the margins, but with us insiders. Outsiders aren’t manning the controls of the mechanisms that keep them out. We are. As such, this is our work to do, not theirs. It’s up to us to embark upon the hard work of adopting new mindsets; of changing our own minds. Below are seven ways we can get started.
1. Reverse our social orientation.
Right now, our tendency is to respond to anyone we identify as different with fear and suspicion, guilty until proven otherwise. In that framework, sameness is next to godliness, leading to cultures dominated by conformity. And this increases over time. The walls between us and them get thicker, the ways we can self-express get narrower, and our enforcement of the rules gets more ruthless.
But that doesn’t stop diversity. It’s a far more powerful force than our constructs can ever be. The key is rejecting the notion that difference is evil and that diversity is a threat. It isn’t. In an ever-changing universe, our continual diversification is humanity’s greatest asset, and our saving grace. That means we want to cultivate it rather than eliminate it.
2. Own our own stuff.
We so desperately want to distance ourselves from this problem, as if it has nothing to do with us. It’s a struggle for those of us who have grown up included to admit that we’ve benefitted; that there’s privilege attached, and that much of our success can be attributed to that privilege.
But the wood we’ve been burning in our hearths was pilfered from society’s foundation. We’re still deriving benefits from those actions today; in everything from the money we inherited and the property we own, to the way we’re catered to in stores and are accepted wherever we go. We can’t erase the past, but we can rectify it. And like the slave-owners-turned-abolitionists before us, the starting point is owning our own stuff.
3. Challenge our ideas of fairness.
In a fundamentally unequal system, the use of any tool that was not designed to account for such inequality is, by definition, discriminatory. It can’t help but be. That’s because we built it, and if we built it, the biases of the builders are baked in. And the more we insist that the tool is bias-free, the more vulnerable it is to misuse. That’s because everything’s in flux, and as Howard Zinn said, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
This applies especially to instruments like the Big Three proxies of discrimination — credit scores, background checks and work visas, all of which are touted as being fair and neutral when they’re anything but. Each of them, in different ways, unfairly penalizes the poor while appearing to do the opposite.
4. De-stigmatize difference.
Today, from diversity awareness on college campuses to dealing with mass shootings, we’re finally working to address the systemic factors behind bigotry and violence, instead of insisting that the problem is individual bad actors. Bad apples. But even here, even as we work the problem, we can find ourselves unintentionally validating a false narrative; one that’s less about how we’re different from those people, and more about how we’re the same as these people.
Despite what we’ve been told and how we’ve been groomed, diversity lives in all of us, and that’s a good thing. Educating people on how to treat others they perceive as different is a first and necessary step. But we only truly solve the problem by destigmatizing difference itself; helping everyone recognize the ways in which they’re also diverse, how they’re better because of it, and how society is better off because of the diversity we all bring.
5. “Get” it.
“If only they’d just…” Any time we find ourselves using the word “just” when describing how they could solve the problem they’re facing, we’re already off course. The longer we’ve moved through the world as an insider, the more likely we are to insist that even the most complex problems “can’t be that hard”.
With inclusion, even as we become increasingly aware of its importance, our tendency is to minimize it, to somehow shrink it down and frame it as something we can fix by tinkering around the edges, by applying a new coat of paint, rather than a complete rebuild. We do that by relegating it as a problem for one department to solve, or thinking we can fix it by tokenizing. We try to market our way out; telling ourselves that if we can change the narrative, we don’t need to change the way we actually do business. But we don’t get it. American society itself has shifted, and the only way forward is if the very DNA of our companies shifts to reflect it.
6. Defer to the disenfranchised.
One way of understanding the saying, “The last shall be first,” is how the very act of surviving on the margins endows a person with extraordinary capabilities. Simply being among the enfranchised makes us all but blind to its limits; we’re both ill-equipped to see where the system is breaking down and how to fix it. But not those on the margins. If inner qualities are often developed through challenges, then those who’ve suffered most have already outpaced the rest of us.
In the face of relentless hostility, adversity and ill-will, enduring alienation, adversity and isolation, and in a society that tells them that they should be on their knees, they stand tall. They get stronger. They master resistance and resilience, ingenuity and insightfulness. It’s those people, the ones who have lived their lives facing down the pointed end of the spear who, when trouble comes, have what it takes to lead us through it.
7. Define success by outcomes, not inputs.
DEI isn’t an end in and of itself, but a means to an end. As such, attending diversity job fairs, changing our hiring protocols, and posting public statements of tolerance are all excellent actions. But all too often, we declare victory prematurely, solely based on inputs, then retire from the field. But little about real life and how people experience it is changed.
Every social entity exists in community, with all kinds of stakeholders whose fates are bound up in its own. This gets us back to the “network of inescapable mutuality,” and how no society that allows some of us to exploit the rest of us can survive for long. Success is only achieved when outcomes for all stakeholders, and especially the least served, have shifted, and when we’re all positioned to thrive.
Getting to Work
Matt Damon’s character, Mark Watney, in the film, The Martian, when describing to a bunch of college students how he’d survived, explained it this way:
At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you and you’re going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.
This applies just as much to organizations seeking to survive in this new landscape as it did to a stranded astronaut. Because bottom line? We simply can’t embrace the future by pining for the past, even one that was more favorable to us, like in the All in the Family theme song — “Guys like us, we had it made; those were the days.” Then, there’s the second of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits, “Begin with the end in mind.” There’s power in envisioning the outcome we want, then determining the steps that will actually get us there.
The challenge is that so many of our efforts are meant to look like reform but not enact it. It’s what the Florida farmer in the 1960 Edward R. Murrow documentary Harvest of Shame, about those who pick the food for the people of “the best-fed nation on earth” was describing when he said, “We used to own our slaves; now we just rent them.” The comment reminded me of those I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter commercials. But, in my mind, I imagined the woman in pearls saying, “Looks like slavery. Tastes like slavery. I can’t believe it’s not slavery!”
The path forward is simple. We start by heeding Patti’s wisdom — getting ourselves a new attitude. Second, we acknowledge our implicit biases, the thumbprint of the culture we carry, and commit to deconstructing them, beginning with the end in mind. And third, we commit to the same course that allowed Mark Watney to save his own life — we come together as a people, roll up our sleeves and get to work.
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The DEI Chronicles is a five-part series about diversity, equity and inclusion, and the importance of us incorporating these virtues into every aspect of our society if we want to become a nation that can endure. ”New Attitude” is the second article in the series.
RD Moore is an artist, minister, lifelong social activist, emancipationist and founder of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Social Justice (MMI). He credits the people who crossed his path starting in his formative years in post-Civil Rights-era Birmingham for the person he’d become and for his unyielding faith in who we can be together. Known for his intimate storytelling and insightful understanding, his work continues to explore that fertile space where diversity, spirituality and humanity all intersect. His blog, Letters from a Birmingham Boy, can be found here.