TINA OPIE: If you're like me, you
may be a little bit overwhelmed by the social media posts
and headlines about racism and sexism
at one company or another.
When I get frustrated and overwhelmed,
I tend to go into my creative mode.
That led me to develop an idea with my co-researcher, Dr. Beth
Livingston.
And that idea is Shared Sisterhood.
Shared Sisterhood is our radically optimistic philosophy
on how to dismantle systemic inequity.
At an individual level, it equips people with tools
so that we can feel less frustrated and overwhelmed.
We can actually do something to make the workplace better.
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Shared Sisterhood is a philosophy
that's comprised of three practices-- dig, bridge,
and collective action.
Dig is at the individual level of analysis.
And that's about surfacing your own assumptions and biases
about identity for yourself-- so your own identity as well as
the identities of other people.
Bridge is interpersonal or relational.
And that is about connecting with people
who are different than you, developing authentic connection
with people across difference.
Collective action is about dismantling systemic inequities
together, and how you engage in collective action.
So one of the reasons that we have found diversity, equity,
and inclusion initiatives may fail
is because oftentimes, employees and leaders and managers
jump right to the collective action phase.
They say, we're going to recruit to have
a more diverse workforce.
But they have never, ever thought back to,
how do they even relate to the people
that they're trying to recruit?
OK, you may successfully recruit people
who help to diversify your workplace.
But they join a culture where they don't feel welcome,
where they don't feel as though they're understood,
where they have to deal with microaggressions
and any other number of isms in the workplace.
When you dig you are going to learn things
about your own belief systems, your own identity,
and how you perceive other identities.
And that is going to affect how you connect with people.
Let's dig into dig.
Dig is very much about understanding
your identity but also the identity of other people.
So this is as an individual.
But when you do dig, you also need
to understand your membership in a power-dominant
or historically marginalized collective.
It can be challenging.
I use the terms "historically marginalized" and "historically
power-dominant."
Those may be new terms for you.
Historically marginalized are people
who have tended to have less power than people
from historically power-dominant groups, and vice-versa.
And most of us belong to both.
So, for example, I can talk about Beth Livingston and I.
We're co-researchers.
We're good friends.
We're also-- I mean, I would consider her a sister.
We engage in dismantling systemic inequity together.
I learned about being a Black person at a very, very
young age.
And specifically, my parents were
proud to be of African descent--
lots of history books, lots of learning, et cetera, et cetera.
I also-- my parents had to inform me
about being a Black person, for example, when I was little,
and I got into the pool, and all the white kids got out.
I didn't understand that.
But they might have thought that my skin
color was going to come off and make them dirty.
I mean, literally, this is something
that actually happened to me.
So my parents at a young age had to equip me and almost
inoculate me from the racism that was
swirling outside of our door.
Beth-- and we talk about, and we've
explored how she really dealt and delved into the power
dynamics of identity when she was in college, so
a much later age.
So what does that mean?
That means that when you show up in the workforce--
let's say Beth and I, we, hypothetically,
if we work together, I would have
been wrestling with what it meant to be a Black person
and what whiteness means from a very young age.
Beth may have wrestled with that at an older age,
and then we meet in the workplace.
And so that's why I talk about, with dig,
it's really important for people from power-dominant backgrounds
to listen a lot more than they talk because you probably
could gain a lot of information from learning
from the experiences from historically
marginalized people.
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A common reaction when doing dig--
power-dominant people may commonly become defensive.
They may deny what they're hearing.
They may distance themselves from the information
or from the people.
And this is coming from research by Dr. Miguel Unzueta.
And I'll give you some examples.
So you might say, if you're denying it, well, OK, Tina,
you're saying that our organization has
an issue with recruiting women.
That's not the case.
Women don't want to come work for us.
If that's not really an issue, if they wanted to,
the positions would be available.
Hello.
OK, so what you're basically saying
is that this entire group of people
is all behaving in the same way, but our systems and processes
are 100% accurate.
There's nothing that we could do to improve
our systems and our processes.
If you find yourself in that defensive stance,
or that stance where you're denying things,
one of the things that we ask you to do
is to pause and then to say, what if it's true?
What if there is something biased
in our system and our process?
Then what would we have to do to make it different?
And the reason we do that is because in psychology, there's
something called approach and avoidance stance.
And an avoidance stance, it's when you get defensive,
when you deny things, when you're trying to prevent
some harm to yourself.
It's threatening to the ego if you admit or acknowledge
that you might have a biased system
or that you might have a racist ideology
or belief in operation.
That causes you to go into the avoidance stance, which
means you're trying to prevent a harm, which actually has
negative implications for how well you can engage
with the argument, for how productive
you can be in terms of solving problems, et cetera, et cetera.
By writing down your issues or your concerns
and asking yourselves questions like, well, what if it's true,
you're beginning to-- you're diffusing your defense
mechanisms.
And you are then beginning to think
more about the accomplishment of something positive.
So what if I was able to make this system or this process
more equitable?
What would that look like?
You can then open yourself up.
You begin to approach this idea of these positive outcomes,
as opposed to referring to the absolutely normal defense
mechanisms or denial situations.
You may be wondering, if you're a member of a historically
marginalized group, are there hurdles that I
might confront when I do dig?
And the answer is yes.
And I will use myself as an example.
When I first met Beth Livingston, my co-researcher,
I did not trust her.
She had done anything wrong to me.
But at a conference, she basically skipped up to me.
She was all happy and goes, hey, I want to meet you.
I was like, girl, who are you?
I didn't know who she was, and she's a white woman.
And I was like, wait a minute.
What's happening here?
And that was because I later learned when I did dig,
in my prior workplace experiences,
I had been betrayed by white women.
And so when white women approached me, specifically
in the workplace, I was reticent to accept
their friendship or even any kind of connection
because I wondered--
I was suspect or skeptical-- of sincerity.
I assumed that they wanted something from me.
And as a result, I would keep them at arm's length.
But Beth was a little bit different.
She persisted.
And I later found out that she and I
knew a Black woman in common.
And this Black woman, Dr. Charlice Hurst,
could vouch for Beth's sincerity.
And then, over time, Beth and I got
to know each other a little bit more.
And now we have an amazing friendship,
research relationship, personal and professional relationship.
And the takeaway from that story is that as a Black woman,
I could have missed out on an amazing, life-affirming
relationship because Beth was white.
So a tool that you can use--
I paused.
I literally said, Tina, why are you reacting this way to Beth?
Has she done anything to you as an individual?
Yes, there are collective issues that you know about,
that you've read about the history of.
But I paused.
I began to interrogate my own emotions, my own cognition.
I literally tried to hold them up and analyze it
from different angles.
Then I did some sort of risk assessment.
What could happen if you trust her a little bit
and she betrays you?
So then another tool for me was to trust Beth incrementally.
I didn't show her my bank account from day one, right?
Because you could be betrayed, or you could be--
et cetera.
So what I did was there were small ways that I could see,
you know what?
Beth is a real one.
I can really trust Beth.
Beth is someone who actually has my back.
And as a result, over time, now we trust each other with money,
with children.
We're right there with each other.
There is a warning, though.
There's a caveat.
I'm not telling you to dig for two years, OK?
This has to be urgent.
Engaging in dig and bridge for a long time
is not an excuse not to begin to look
at the systemic inequities.
So I really want people to have a sense of urgency
around Shared Sisterhood and around dismantling
systemic inequities.
And people will say, no, just be patient.
This takes more time.
Well, let's think about--
sorry, COVID.
COVID happened.
Organizations immediately, from top to the bottom,
had to figure out a way to continue to exist.
What would happen if we applied that same urgency
to what I would consider as a global pandemic of racism
and sexism?
What would happen?
I think the challenge is that racism
and sexism, for some people, is just not urgent.
It's something that happens to other people.
If you understand that the cure for cancer,
the cure for anything that might ail your company,
could very well be in the community
that you're not urgently trying to include
in your organization-- so from a business perspective,
and even from a moral perspective,
it makes sense to ensure that everyone
is able to show up at work fully in their authentic selves.
And that will improve the workplace.