Leveraging The Interpersonal for Social Change
A discussion with Kara Murray-Badal, The Mosaic Project, and Dr. Michael Baran, inQUEST Consulting and Advisory Board Member, The Mosaic Project
Transcription:
Kara Murray-Badal: My name is Kara Murray-Badal. I am here because of my connection to the Mosaic project. The Mosaic Project is a nonprofit organization based out of Oakland California, we work with people of all ages from preschool students up to adults in the workplace. We talk about diversity and inclusion, but we are really an experiential education organization and our primary program is an outdoor school for fourth and fifth graders. This program intentionally brings kids from different cultural, economic, social backgrounds together, three different schools from three different backgrounds, mixes them all up and empowers them with skills to communicate across lines of difference with assertive communication and conflict resolution. So that’s me! I’ve been involved with Mosaic for 12 years now, I have played every role there and I now sit on the board. What about you Michael?
Michael Barran: Michael Barran here, let me first start off by asking everyone to mute themselves to reduce the background noise and if you logged in on video and I turned off your video please don’t take it personally, we love seeing your faces but there’s a lot of folks joining. For most of this time you are just going to see me and Kara and then we may have time for a small session where if you want you can be on video. I am just going to tell you really briefly about me. I am actually an advisory board member of the Mosaic Project, I have known Lara Mendel forever and I am so excited about doing this with Mosaic. My background is a cultural anthropologist and cognitive psychologist. I have been working in this space doing research, consulting on issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion for over 20 years now, so this is my life’s work here and I am really excited to share with you some of the things I’ve been thinking and writing about lately. So with that I think we can get started. We are going to just start with a little check in. You know, there’s kind of a lot going on Kara.
Kara Murray-Badal: There is a lot going on, I think it is obviously a really critical time and for those of us who have the inclination to get active, we want to, I want to, but also am feeling a little bit emotionally drained. You know I feel very privileged, everyone I love is safe and taken care of, but also as a black women you feel like it could be anyone and you also feel a real kinship to the folks who have died and been killed and so it is an intense time for sure, what about you Michael how are you feeling?
Michael Barran: Ya, you know so many things and I am not going to get into all of it, but you know I work and live in this space of issues related to racism, diversity, equity and inclusion and have for the last 20 years. There are a lot of ups and downs, a lot of pain, there is a lot of sadness and a lot of frustration and this doesn’t affect me in the ways it does others as a white man. It affects me in different ways and out of all of the things I’m feeling right now one of the things is just kind of confused and fascinated and bewildered. For 20 years I have been doing this work and others have been doing this work and activists and researchers and academics and all kinds of people trying to get people to pay attention to these issues that we are gonna talk about today.
A lot of people have been in it and a lot of people are like “you know whatever things are kind of okay I am not going to get worked up about this” and now we are seeing those same people turn on a dime to get motivated and to stop being silent and we are also seeing things like statues coming down and confederate flags being banned, there is so much happening and the speed at which things are happening is a little bit bewildering and exciting and intense. I am also really grateful to be sharing this space with all of you, there is so much happening and it is nice to connect. I mean that’s another part of this we are in the middle of all this COVID and social distancing stuff and so just being able to connect with you all and have this space where we talk about this on a real deep level is great.
Let’s just take one second for everyone on the call to take a breath together and check in with yourself, how are you feeling? And acknowledge that, honor that and it is important to recognize that we are all showing up here with very different experiences and perspectives and emotions around this and taking a minute to acknowledge everything. Kara and I were talking earlier about how we would love to hear how you are all doing and have a whole listening and processing session and have it just be that and maybe we will have another opportunity to do that. But for now, just take a moment to acknowledge everything, we ask you to be present with us as we go through a lot of material. We aren’t going to do any one piece of it justice because there is so much we want to talk about.
Kara Murray-Badal: Ok we will go ahead and jump in here and hopefully this will all work well together. Michael’s book is incredible it is “Subtle Acts of Exclusion” and you are going to talk about it a lot so I won’t try to own your book, but as we talk about subtle acts of exclusion which is also something referred to as micro-aggressions and thinking about the context under which that lives, I just thought it was important to bring up why we are talking about that in the midst of violence. Maybe some of you have seen this before, but this pyramid shows how prejudice leads to discrimination leads to violence and war. At the Mosaic Project we talk about how segregation leads to ignorance and fear leads to prejudice. Prejudice doesn’t come from nothing, it comes from being separate and then ignorance and fear are derived from being separate. I think the subtle acts of exclusion really fits well, like the unconscious bias, the structures that affect people which I know you are going to talk about Michael, really fits into the lower runs of what really happens when we don’t understand one another.
The fact that these things perpetuate each other, segregation leads to ignorance and fear leads to prejudice and discrimination leads to violence and those things all help go back to the bottom and create more segregation and separation, more ignorance and fear. The reason why we are talking about these subtle acts of exclusion right now is to talk about the fact that these things are all deeply interconnected, the interpersonal way that we handle things matters as well, it is not the only thing that matters, there are lots of ways, but it’s one of the ways. The other thing is we can’t just say we want to end segregation we also have to transform it and create something new. The thing that we are trying to do is create a pyramid of peace. We are trying to build connections instead. We will talk about this idea of respect so we actually have a peaceful world and we aren’t thinking of peace as some utopic thing, it’s like those are the actions we take all of the time to create a world in which we can actually thrive in. That is what I am thinking about.
Michael Barran: Thank you Kara, that is great and ties directly into what we want to focus on today, which is obviously there are a lot of visible horrific things that we are seeing, but there is a lot that is invisible too that we still need to focus on. If we are talking about moving to a place for real that is decentralized and everyone is valued, respected, heard and understood that is going to take some work and time. There are some powerful things sitting at the bottom of the pyramid that you showed Kara that we are going to talk about today. Structures, biases and subtle acts of exclusion so we are going to spend some time going over those and then move on to some things we can do to disrupt them, some concrete and actionable strategies for making a difference now and building a better future. Okay, Let’s get into it. Before we get into it. Kara mentioned a book that I co-authored that I came out with in March. We are going to get into the ideas of the book, but before I get into the idea I want to credit my co-author Tiffany Jana. We have known each other for ages and had a fantastic experience thinking and writing together about this issue. I acknowledge her contribution.
The three things that I mentioned that we really want to focus on. Structures, unconscious bias and subtle acts of exclusion. So structures, I am not going to spend nearly enough time talking about each thing. What I want to make sure we are all keeping in mind is structures and how they lead to unequal outcomes for certain groups over others and this is critical and they are all related. I have wealth, housing, education, health and criminal justice written down here and just to give you one example right, like black people systematically being denied loans to buy their homes so they had to rent so they didn’t build up equity so wealth didn’t accumulate and didn’t pass to generations so the property values are affected so that the tax base in certain areas leads to less funding to schools in certain areas. These areas have housing that is not as healthy so you start to have health outcomes that are unequal, lower access to healthy foods disproportionate policing because of all these things and the visibility of it all. This is a part where I am not going to go into much detail, but putting it up there to remind us all of how important this is. When we see isolated incidences we need to recognize that there are these deep structures underlying it all.
I have done focus groups and research for years and years asking people how they think all this works and it has been amazing and consistent that we have these cultural models and if we ask people why there are differences in wealth, in education attainment people have this model that its individuals choices and decisions and it’s like if you aren’t making it in the world, it’s your own fault, pull yourself up by your own boot straps, but it’s really about individual decisions and values and work. The other thing I have done is interview experts who study this, scientists who study this and you ask them how does this all work and they’re never saying that. It is all about the underlying structures and history and how it is all related. That is really important, if we want to look at large scale changes now and in future these are the things we have to focus on.
What do you have to add to kara?
Kara Murray-Badal: I was just gonna say that as we get into these subtle acts of exclusion thinking about these structures as the invisible forces that have helped to create all of the interpersonal too. Looking back to the pyramid, all of these things lead to individuals who have been deeply impacted and affected. It’s hard because we do have choices, obviously each of us makes a choice, but there’s also something going on in the background that is maybe harder to acknowledge especially if you have benefitted from the structures in place.
Michael Barran: Yes and they are largely invisible especially if you have benefited from them. This was striking, we would sometimes do focus groups, I am thinking specifically about the ones we did on the criminal justice system, asking white people about how it works, the disparities and statistics and asking the same question with black focus groups too. We were finding that often the people most affected understood the issue in very similar ways to the experts since they are living in it and those least affected had more of these cultural models about individual choice. Thank you for adding that. So now, haha that’s like the fastest summary of structural inequalities. I think it is very important to mention and talk about. And I want to talk about the other stuff too because this is where my research was really focused.
Unconscious bias what it is? I want to describe what it is by giving you an example first. This is a fairly famous example that you might have heard before. In the mid 1900’s if you look at these prestigious new york city orchestras they are almost all men. So think about how this all happens they walk on stage they play their music a jury of people sitting in the audience are making the hiring decisions. If you ask people in audience “hey are you just trying to hire men here” they say “of course not we are the New York Philharmonics, we have to hire the best musicians possible, we are trying to be the best orchestra in the world, we aren’t trying to hire just men we are trying to get the best musicians” and they aren’t lying that’s what they really think they are doing. Then researchers had this idea that what if there’s something unconscious going on that they don’t even realize so they put up a big screen at the front of the stage and they had the musicians walk in behind the screen, play their music and then looked at what happened. So the first thing they found was that there was no change and they were puzzled.They realized you could still hear women’s high heel shoes so they weren’t seeing the people, but through their ears they could still categorize people as male or female. Then they had people take off their shoes and walk on a carpet play their music from behind the screen and just like that more women were hired because the bias wasn’t affecting the decision they were simply listening to the music.
This is important for a couple of reasons. One because you often hear people saying ya you know sure there are stereotypes but they are basically true and what this so clearly illustrates is that, no this bias was actually making you make worse decisions so that’s really important. Also an important metaphor for if you recognize that everyone has bias which everyone does have these unconscious biases whether talking about gender, race,sexuality, religion,weight whatever it is that you are talking about we all have these unconscious biases and that has been shown through research. That screen is a metaphor for recognizing that we have it, that it’s going to disappear tomorrow and what we can do to block it, so it doesn’t affect decisions you have to make whether in your job or your life. That is unconscious bias, a lot of people use it to mean anything, but it’s really specific it’s the bias that you are not aware of. Why do we have them? A lot of the biases we see being passed around on social media they get it partly right but partly wrong. They say we have these because we are human and that’s just how it is. That is partly true we categorize people because we are human that is true that is how our brains work, we can’t process all the stimulus that we are bombarded with every second. However, the fact that we associate some groups of people with good and other with bad or some with high potential and some with low or some with violence and others as non violence that is all cultural and I want to talk about where that comes from.
Let’s talk for a second. I know this group is largely interested in children. Maybe you had kids who went to Mosaic etc. so hopefully this will be interesting to you. If you think of a tiny child 0–3 years their brains are growing at an astonishing rate, when I started talking about this work years ago. I did work at the Harvard Institute of Children’s Study and we learned that a child’s brain from 0–3 is forming around 700 synaptic connections per second, that number used to blow me away. Then they got more fine grain tools to test this and now they talk about how they can show that a child’s brain from 0–3 is forming 1–2 million new synaptic connections per second, they are surrounded by this culture and people caring for them and their brains are building the foundation for everything they are going to understand later in life. We have this idea of how they learn about race, we have this idea that they look across the world and they see differences and they form categories and then they go and find out what fits into the categories.
What researchers have found out is that that is actually kind of impossible, if you think about the way we all look physically different we aren’t bounded clear groups, there is a whole spectrum of difference along any physical feature you want to talk about. If they were to look out they wouldn’t see bounded groups they would see spectrums, it would be impossible to form categories visually like that. They form those categories from language. An example is a mom on the phone and her little boy is sitting next to her, she’s not really paying attention to him and thinks he isn’t either, but on the phone she says “i’m excited for Billy to have a black preschool teacher” she thinks her kid isn’t paying attention, but the kid actually learned a ton about the world from that simple little utterance.
We weren’t trying to teach them, but their brains are trying to seek out that information. Their brain hears that and thinks “every other time my mom said teacher there wasn’t a color in front of it, there is something different about this category. “There is a category of people called black” they then form a cognitive place holder, they don’t know what it means or who fits into it, but now they have a start of a category of people that their brains are then going to go try to fill in.” The little boy also learned how his mom feels about the thing. This is really important and their brains are on heightened alert for those kinds of things. That is happening and meanwhile, if that child starts to ask about it to an adult, a teacher or a parent, here I am talking about white children and white parents. We know that parents of color don’t have the luxury of not talking about race with their children, but white parents often will not talk about race with their children. Kids will often ask questions and white parents will go through mental gymnastics to not talk about it with platitudes of “we are all equal’’ and move on.
It is so extreme, there is a study I always talk about where they wanted to do this study where they looked at what was more impactful for children developing ideas of multiculturalism, was it a sesame street clip on multiculturalism, was it parents talking about the same type of things from a script or was it both of those things, people often get mixed answers and the truth is we don’t know and we may never know because all white parents who had been given a script of what to say dropped out of the study because they didn’t want to talk about these things with their children even when it was approved by people who study these things.
On the surface we have “we are equal” and under the surface we have children picking out information like “ok if adults won’t talk to me about it, my brain will pick up info from what I see on tv, movies, billboards, what people say around me, when my parents lock the doors in certain areas.” The children’s brains pick up on all of those subtle clues. Consciously it is “we are all the same” and unconsciously we get bias.
Kara Murray-Badal: I think that really relates well to the work we do at Mosaic. Part of my job used to be to go to parent meetings and talk to parents about why they should send their kids to mosaic and very often I would get one of two responses one was “we already talk about this, my kids know everyone is equal and we talk about it” or “my kids are too young, they aren’t ready to start talking about these issues” the fact of the matter is that children start showing bias ver very early maybe as early as two, they are recording information about the world from a very very young age. If we are not talking to them we are leaving them to the devices of our society, where there is tons of stereotyping and differences being presented to us without even realizing. Unless we are talking to them about it then what they are picking up are the things that are already being presented to them and that are often prejudicial.
Michael Baran: Ya and some of those things are so subtle that people don’t even know that they are there. For example, thinking about disney movies that have a lot of subtle messages about race and gender, especially the older ones. Here we have the situation that we have a child starting to develop the patterns of thinking that unconscious biases. We have this infographic that shows all the different cognitive biases that brains have. I know Kara you wanted to touch on some of these.
Kara Murray-Badal: Well ya I just wanted to call out selective attention bias in particular with the kids and I don’t know if parents are on the call, it is something they can really understand. The way we explain this to them is that we see what we expect to see and don’t see what we don’t expect to see. The example we give is if we have a stereotype that all kids with glasses that read during lunch time, then when you go out into the playground and see all the kids reading during lunch time, but what you don’t notice is the kids with glasses on, playing basketball or on the play structure and what you also don’t notice is the kids without glasses reading during lunch time. Selection attention bias is us looking for the things we want to see and not looking for the things we don’t want to see. This idea of perpetuating stereotypes is a myth because it is our brains looking for the thing we expected and confirming our own bias, it happened entirely in our own brains it has nothing to do with the people committing the perpetuation of the stereotype. This is why it is so important to catch yourself when you find a stereotype and start enforcing that stereotype.
Michael Barran: Great, that’s really helpful. Ok so what are the consequences of this unconscious bias, because they are huge. I know Kara, you wanted to give an example.
Kara Murray-Badal: I have seen many examples at schools. One example is at the Mosaic Project kids from different backgrounds and schools come together and each class comes with their teacher. Because schools are so segregated in the bay area even though we mostly work with bay area schools it is not very hard to get both kids from higher income mostly white schools and also kids from lower income schools, which unfortunately, are made up of mostly black and brown students, that happens all the time. There was one week in particular where two black boys got in a fight which happens when dealing with children and feelings. Then they did conflict resolution which is a part of our program and they did it beautifully and they resolved the conflict.
Later on Lara our executive director was talking to one of the teachers from one of the upper income white schools and he was like “ya it was so great, the kids learned so much, but I just wish you had sent those two black boys home because it reinforced my kids stereotypes of little black boys.” That was like wow when we realized that we had to really nail down how we were teaching this because our teachers did not recognize that first of all, the kid we almost sent home was one of his kids a little girl who was white and had been causing havoc all week and the only reason why we didn’t send her home was because it was too late in the week. The teacher was saying “these two black boys were ruining the experience” the person who had been more fundamental to hurting the kids during the week was one of his students. He completely ignored what was very blatantly in his face. I have no idea if that is how his kids perceived it that way, but based on what you are saying, kids expect to learn all the time, they spend an entire week learning about differences and it is quite possible that they did not interpret it the way that he interpreted it, but he had a very specific lens based on the fact that he had a perception about little black boys. This is why we have really shifted our curriculum to talk about the fact that unconscious biases are something that everyone has and that we have to take a pause to break them apart, which we will talk more about later.
Michael Barran: That story makes me think about a study that I sometimes talk about that is related to everything going on today too. This is a study that is really gut wrenching and it was done at Yale and they had preschool teachers watch a youtube video of 4 young children playing. A black boy, a white boy and a black girl and a white girl. They asked the teachers to look for problematic behavior and there wasn’t any in this 10 minute clip, but the real study was that they tracked the teachers eye movements, these are preschool teachers and they watched the black boy almost the whole time. That is unconscious bias, where when you are doing that you are going to find problematic behavior at a disproportionate rate even when it isn’t being committed at a higher rate, so it is really devastating. There are so many ways that unconscious bias plays out in schools, who gets pushed in certain subjects, who gets challenged and who isn’t expected to do really well. There is so much.
Kara Murray Badal: I was also going to say that we are going to work now and there is research about how in workplaces black people are more closely watched by their supervisors so that the pattern that happens in school, happens at work and a lot of black kids get told when they are young that they have to be twice as good and work twice as hard and unfortunately there is a lot of evidence that that is true because they are being watched much closer for their work, micromanaged in different ways and their managers are far more likely to remember their mistakes when they make them.
Michael Barran: It affects performance reviews, it affects promotion, affects who gets trusted with the big project. There is one study that you may have heard about, a famous resume study, where they took the exact same resume, same education, same work experience, word for word same resume and they just changed the name on it so some resumes got a white sounding name and some got a black sounding name and they sent them out across the city to different jobs. The ones with white sounding names got 50% more callbacks for interviews, 50%! Not a small number. These are people evaluating resumes and if you ask them “are you just trying to hire white people” and they would say “not only am I not just trying to hire white people if anything I am trying to hire less white people because I am under pressure to increase diversity and yet that still happens, 50% more callbacks.
Kara Murray-Badal: I didn’t mention this earlier, but I am a dual degree student at the Wharton School in their MBA program in the Harvard Community School. One of my advisors there Corinne Lo does research on this topic as well and she actually worked with some of the top hiring companies. She worked with firms and asked them I am going to send you MBA resumes and you are going to send me back the ones you liked. The purpose of the study was to be able to tell them what kind of traits they liked, but also for her to be able to track if there were indicators that a person was a black, brown or a woman in the resume would it be less likely that she would get the resume sent back. They got almost the exact same results as that study and even when these companies knew they were being watched and were being asked to be careful when talking specifically about diversity and inclusion, the people reading the resumes automatically put down resumes that had mentions of african american association or a women’s club, automatically those resumes were dropped.
Michael Barran: Wow I need to read that study
Kara Murray-Badal: Corinne Lo she is awesome
Michael Barran: Ok, I am going to check that out for sure, There is so much unconscious bias that comes in day to day life. To say that for example police officers have unconscious biases should not be controversial we have already gone through in great detail how we all have unconscious bias and it is clear from research. One study that I am thinking about analyzed 700,000 police stops and found that blacks and latinos were way over represented in terms of getting stopped and searched and it was the whites that had way more contraband. So again the biases, the police might just say “we are going with our gut we know ‘’ but it is showing us that their bias is making them do their job worse. They repeated that in the big Ferguson research report that came out. So that is obviously tremendously serious consequences right, because of the fact that we all have these biases we have to take it so seriously because of the way that these people interact with others. If we look at medical professionals doing the same thing right, we know that unconscious bias makes it so African Americans are given less pain medicine for the same exact symptoms that a white patient might come in with, that is hugely problematic. Things like infant mortality which is way higher for African Americans than white people.
There is another study that makes this so clear too, they did a study where they found that in cities that their sports teams were playing in a big game if that team lost the next day they analyzed the court sentencing and they found that the sentencing was harsher the day after a sports team lost. But do you think that was done equally across the board? It was discriminatory for non white people, unconscious bias coming into play with huge consequences for everyday life. Financial consequences to, I often talk about the study that Malcolm Gladwell talks about where they took people and dressed them up same clothes, same back story, same script, same techniques and sent them out to buy the same new car at different dealerships and to make a long story short, the black folks were charged 1,000 dollars more for the same new car because of the unconscious biases. Serious serious consequences for these unconscious biases.
Kara Murray-Badal: The comments are going kind of crazy right now Michael, but someone asked about “why white people have such a hard time talking about this” and I see someone talking about how “it is a very American idea of self sufficiency and making it without help and so if anyone had benefited which they had it makes people feel defensive and uncomfortable.”
Michael Barran: Yes, yes, so there are obvious benefits. I liken this to the age when you are sure that your kids must know about Santa Claus, but they aren’t telling you and they are acting like they still believe in it. Sometimes I think they are just like “I have a great thing going here, why would I mess that up” there is a lot written about this. A lot of the not talking with children specifically is this desire to have a better future and idea that “if I don’t talk about this then maybe they won’t learn racial discrimination and they will grow up to treat everyone equally if I don’t point it out’’ There is an un-comfortability to talking about anything hard with children like death or abuse and people have a real resistance to talking about any of that with children. There is all this stuff with people talking about white fragility these days, there is a lot there. Should we get into Subtle Acts of Exclusion?
Kara Murray-Badal: The title of your book? Yes!
Michael Barran: Ok so, I wonder how many of you have heard of this word micro-aggressions, I have done some research and lots of people have not ever heard of this word. Kara and I were laughing because literally right before this session started my phone popped up with a NPR news story called micr-aggressions. So maybe more and more people are starting to know about it, but a lot of people don’t, a lot of people have heard about it,but don’t really know what it means and a lot of people have a totally wrong idea of what it means. They think it means micromanaging etc. We will talk about it anyways to all get on the same page. There was some research done by Kim Kayun where she went around and asked people to write down the most common micro-aggressions they hear. Some are “What are you” “Can you see as much as white people, because of your eyes” “Why do you sound white” “You don’t speak Spanish?” These are things that people aren’t necessarily attending to be cruel, hateful or exclusionary they are just trying to be curious, or give you a compliment, or to find more about you, or to bond with you. Yet that is not the impact it is having; it is having an impact that is making people feel excluded.
These are serious issues. These really threaten inclusion. A lot of people talk about diversity and inclusion as though it is one thing, but to get everyone on the same page. Diversity is all about who, the people, who do you have in the room? What are the demographics? How are we similar and different along all of these dimensions? There is no such thing as a diverse person, a person is just a person with all of these dimensions of their identity. Any two people, you put them together there is always some diversity, even with genetic twins for example, there is always some diversity. Inclusion is how we relate to one another and everyone feeling welcomed, valued, respected, heard, understood. It is about how we fell. It is something we all have to do actively, a lot of people think they are inclusive in their mind, but it is about whether the other person feels it and there are things you can do to make them feel that.
These micro-aggressions threaten inclusion and they keep happening these are the kind of things, there is research done showing that some areas of diversity and inclusion and representation and equity that some areas are making progress, but you look at micro-aggressions and there is like no progress. They are a real serious issue, they are affecting people’s health actually, that is how much they are affecting people. Now, what I would find doing workshops is that because they are so serious, we try to get people to understand them and we talk about some common examples and on one hand we find that so many people got really offensive like “I don’t even think that’s a micro-aggression” how would you even know if you don’t know the person’s intention. So the term is focusing people’s attention on the intention rather than the impact it had on the other person so it is creating this defensiveness and it is signaling to everyone that these aren’t really a big problem.
So here we are trying to make progress on an issue that is really complicated and requires a lot of attention and empathy and listening and openness and dialogue and maybe the term itself is making that even harder for us. Tiffany Jana and I got together and said what can we call these instead. For a while I was giving talks and would mumble under my breath “someone needs to come up with a new term for this” and at one point I said let’s just do that. So Tiffany and I came to start to call them “Subtle Acts of Exclusion” They are subtle a lot of times they are, a lot of times their not, especially if they are happening to you they might not feel subtle at all and that is sometimes why it can be so hard to identify and speak up about, that is the challenge you are like “was that a” and then the moment passes and you decide to not say anything at all. They are acts they are not intentions, it is not an intention and it is not a character judgment it is just a thing you said or did and we can talk about that without you having to get so shameful or feel like you are being called a bad person, it is just something you said and we can talk about that.
What is the problem with them? The problem is that they create the opposite of inclusion, they create exclusion. In the moment they make people feel excluded and they contribute and perpetuate a system where people with marginalized identities are continuously excluded and that is a serious problem.That is why we came up with the idea of subtle acts of exclusion. One of the really important things we wanted to do is figure out, so I did research looking across all the definitions of subtle acts of exclusion I could get my hands on, from literature, from our experiences, from people I talked to I did 100 interviews with people on the street with a videographer that would videotape people and I would ask them questions about their experiences. I looked across all the different examples of weather related to disability, race,gender, sexuality, weight and tried to isolate the things that were being subtly communicated under the surface.
On the surface you might be saying “where are you really from” it’s a question you might want to find something out about someone. That is what it is on the surface. Underneath what is being conveyed is “you don’t belong, you are not normal” or maybe you are indian american and your name gets confused with the other indian american who works in your office and that makes you feel like you are not an individual. You are a black man walking into an elevator and people clutch their purses a little tighter “you are a threat.” Someone walks into a room and touches a black woman’s hair and says “wow your hair is looking so great today” on the surface it is a compliment under the surface you are a curiosity you are not normal. Someone says to a gay man “you don’t even look gay” trying to compliment, but under the surface its “you aren’t normal. “Someone says you are so articulate” and they say “what?” it’s just a compliment, but under the surface it is communicating you or people like you are inadequate like “I didn’t expect you to be so articulate” so I am so presently surprised. These are the things that are being communicated under the surface.
Now for some interactivity, I am going to play you a clip and have you think about what is being communicated here under the surface and we will do a little poll. So here is the clip here and hopefully it is communicated well. The clip says “you are so professional” Lets see what you think is being conveyed here “you are invisible” “you are not an individual” “you or people like you are inadequate” “you don’t belong here” “you are a threat” “you are a curiosity” “you are a burden” “you are not normal.” Subtle acts of exclusion are going to happen, we don’t want to create an atmosphere where we expect them to never happen and then we are shocked, if we are really trying to connect and bond and live with people who are similar and different then us, we are going to have subtle acts of exclusion all the time and if we expect that we can be prepared and we can actually practice good ways of responding and we will talk about that too. Let’s take a look at the comments, most people said “you or people like you, are inadequate and you aren’t normal and don’t belong” so you can see that any given subtle act of exclusion might be communicating any of these things at the same time and we wouldn’t really know unless we talked to the person and asked her what she was feeling in that moment. It might be that she felt one way when one person did it and another way when another person did it.
These things are complex and complicated because we are human. Let’s show the next clip. Ok, so I should clarify after that clip. Refusing to speak to someone because of the assumptions of their identity or their race, that is not a subtle act of exclusion so we are asking what subtle act of exclusion took place, we are talking about the second part that took place “you are almost as dark as that one” so what do you think is being communicated there? Steven asked a great question “if you are curious about someone’s origins, can you ever ask? Or is that always a subtle act of exclusion?” Kara what would you say to that?
Kara Murray-Badal: I think when in doubt, maybe don’t, but I think the bigger thing is that as you get to know people naturally you find out more about them, so I think if you come from a real place of integrity where you just are wanting to get to know someone as a friend, you will automatically just eventually learn that. The question about “oh I just love learning about people’s origins” is why? Asking yourself that question, and what is it that you can gain from that and if it is something like “I love to hear about different countries and things” then you can ask a different question that isn’t necessarily “like where are you from, like where are you really from, you look like you could be this” and actually getting to the root of the question you want to ask and leading with the intention that you want to actually talk and get to know the people you are speaking with.
Michael Baran: Yes, exactly and you know there are ways of asking that, that are recognized as subtle acts of exclusion like “what are you” people want to be treated as an individual and as a person. Later on when we get to have a relationship and get to know each other you will get to know lots of things about me, maybe even including my heritage, but just out of the blue like “what are you” is often taken as a subtle act of exclusion. It is important to keep it in mind like how it is going to feel to the other person. It isn’t just about you being curious and wanting to know, you have to think about how it is going to feel for the other person. The idea of empathizing is important, are you asking that question of everyone or are you asking it to specific groups of people?
All things to keep in mind. Let’s look at what people said for that last clip. “You aren’t normal” “You are a curiosity” right, good, so the idea is to keep thinking about what might this be conveying to the other person. Here is the last example, I will play the clip. What may be conveyed through this one? “You are invisible” “You don’t belong.” Right, yes and let me just say, I did 100 of these interviews, so we have people talking about all different dimensions of diversity, we picked one that focused on race here, but those videos are focusing on all dimensions of diversity and that is really important to recognize.
Why are they happening? The idea here is to practice the muscle of recognizing these and what they might be communicating to people, why? Well first because if they aren’t happening to you, you might not even recognize when they happen because they are subtle. If we are trying to create a culture where people say “no it’s not just on you to talk about these when they happen and to educate us, it’s on all of us to point it out when it happens, we all should be being allies.” Sometimes you just have to do the first step of getting people to recognize what they even are and then giving people language to be able to talk about it. So you could be like hey “hey when you said that, I know you were just meaning this, but it made me feel like I was invisible or like I didn’t belong or like I wasn’t normal” having that language is so important in terms of having those conversations.
We were going to do an activity where we were going to put you in breakout rooms where you can share some subtle acts of inclusion that you have experienced or observed, it’s really nice to be able to share and feel heard and seen, but we are cramming a lot into this presentation and we knew we were probably going to have to cut this part off, but we want to encourage people to think about subtle acts of exclusion that you have experienced or felt and have conversations about them with others. I want to clarify something with you guys, there is a whole world and range of discrimination,exclusions, violence and they aren’t all subtle, some of them are totally overt and intentional, that is not exactly what we are talking about when we are talking about subtle acts of exclusion. Those have to be addressed too, but those are often more visible then these subtle acts of exclusion which is why we are directly bringing attention to these and we aren’t saying these are the only things to notice and watch out for, but there is something that often flies under the radar in a serious problem so that is why we are specifically drawing attention to these because they really do impact the way people are connecting. Ok, so I wanted to make sure that we spent some time on strategies for doing something about all of this.
Kara Murray-Badal: I do want to say that I am going to forgive us for skipping over it because I know a lot of people here are in community together and it is our challenge for the people on this call to have these conversations in your community.
Michael Barran: Another caution, if you are doing sharing in those groups it is really important to just really listen to people, it seems so easy and obvious and there is nothing easy about listening when it comes to topics about this. If people are sharing something really emotional, painful, personal, vulnerable with you you have got to take that seriously and listen without trying to filter it through your own experiences and filters, listen without thinking about what you are going to say in response or without feeling like you have to jump really quickly to action. Listening without counter arguments or playing devil’s advocate, don’t play devil’s advocate with these issues. Interrupting subtle acts of exclusion when they happen, this is very important
Kara Murray-Badal: These five tools are the five tools we use at Mosaic for conflict resolution. Reading Michael’s book and seeing some of the things he talked about, I think they align very closely, I think that’s because, well conflict resolution is we tend to think of it as 2 people against each other, but conflict resolution can be used really when anything arises that needs to be dealt with that’s always a form of conflict resolution. I think how we deal with subtle acts of exclusion we can talk about this when trying to interrupt a subtle act of exclusion or when you’re experiencing one. I want to acknowledge here that for black people it feels very unfair to have to deal with this because it’s like “I am already being oppressed there is already subtle acts of exclusion happening and now it’s coming upon me to deal with this and that feels terrible and unfortunately and to a point you made earlier, we are uniquely qualified because we have the unique benefit of our experiences which is a true benefit, but can also be burdensome as well.” I just want to own this because it doesn’t necessarily feel good to do this especially if it’s happening to you directly.
With that said, because we do care about ending oppression because we do want these things to end, it is in our best interest to deal with these things as they arise. I think the first thing to do is to stop and take a moment. Lara and I had a conversation earlier about the fact that sometimes you do have to say something in the moment and you don’t have time to bring it up later. We tell the kids if you need a break you can take a break, a lot of times if you are in a room I remember bringing in an organizing event once and there was a very clear micro-aggression that went out to the whole room like black people. I was like if I let this slide what am I saying about this to everyone in the room if I don’t address it. I think taking the time to at least take a breath and let your mind calm down just a bit, taking a moment to stop and think about what is happening is really really important. I think the difference between 2 and 3 deep breaths is the difference between catastrophe and coming to a real conclusion. I really recommend this and it’s my new obsession. Take a breath, take a couple of moments even if it is only a couple of moments.
We talked about listening a little while ago and about just how hard listening is. Conflict resolution, this is a bit different, but here it is all about listening to the person who experienced it and trusting that experience. Also talking, if you have experienced or witnessed it, how do you talk about it? With our young people we often use I statements and I know a lot of people are like “oh, I statements, what is this therapy?” Honestly the most effective way for people to understand how something impacted you is to talk about how it felt for you, it is very hard for people to argue about how you felt, “I felt hurt” “I felt sad” “I felt angry” those are all very hard to dispute. Chris had an example about what happens when you are feeling invisible because of a group of adults or sometimes kids are looking to the white man in the room for answers even when some people are speaking up. So you can use your I statements, but also use this affective messages template which is like “I am observing that most of the kids being called on in this room are the white people in the room, the impact of that on me is making me feel like I don’t have anything to contribute even though I care a lot about this and think I have a lot information to share. Are you able to be more thoughtful of that process and be more thoughtful about calling on other voices other than the white person.”
I think you can also do that with an I statement and you could say “I feel hurt when only white people are being called on” I think speaking from personal space, being able to actually talk about what happened talk about the impact and not the intent to your point earlier, it has nothing to do with what anyone wanted to happen it is only about what actually happened and how the person received it, then making a specific request about how you want that to change. That goes into the 5 steps of conflict resolution slide as well, the planning. It’s not like we are just going to say “oh my bad” but actually thinking about how you are going to do it differently.
At Mosaic we talk a lot about respect, looking again, re- which means again and inspect like spectable- so what we are talking about is looking again and again and never getting complacent or comfortable that a person was a certain way, like the way a person was before is the way they are going to be in the future. The way you understood a person to be because of your own understanding of the world and because of your own prejudices and stereotyping that we all have isn’t always the correct way. So we are going to break it down and take that break and stop ourselves and catch ourselves as those feelings arise. Empathize is in there as well, I am kind of going out of order, empathize is in there because we have to be able to understand how people are feeling, we have to be able to do our best to understand how others are feeling.
Michael Barran: Thank you Kara, I love what you said and I love that there is so much alignment between the way you were just talking about this and the way that Mosaic approaches this and the things we read about in the book which is fantastic. With subtle acts of exclusion, one of the keys is that stopping the action even if you don’t know what you want to say yet, and not letting things slide. Also you talked about how if you are a black person and you might not feel like educating someone else, especially if you are an ally maybe just stepping in and being like “hey other white person like me, that was messed up” we have to do that work, that is really important. There might not even be a black person in the room, it may be all white people, but maybe someone says something messed up, you still have to stop and say something, there have been so many spaces where white people have just been allowed to say things and not get called on it and it is partly why it gets perpetuated again and again because people are comfortable saying those things and there aren’t social consequences so I think that’s really important.
Kara Murray-Badal: I see someone is asking a question here about “how do you talk about feelings in raising an issue especially when that can be used to say that we are reinforcing a stereotype, like “women are emotional” or the example that comes to my mind is “black people are angry” I think there are two ways you can deal with it, one being you go with the more affecting messaging of this is what happened, this is the impact, what you want to happen now or I think also if you are feeling brave you can address the fact that, that stereotype may be invoked and you can say “I am angry because I have a reason to be angry, not because I am an angry black woman, but because this is a situation that is upsetting” and then talking about the impact very specifically. I think the reason why talking about subtle acts of exclusion is so hard for a lot of people is because there is a lot of plausible deniability like “oh no that’s not what that was it was this other thing” but again when you talk about the actual impact and focus on impact it is hard to deny that the impact of the thing was hurtful. Important to trust that for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ folks, for overweight folks, or folks considered unattractive in our society that they have experiences with these issues.
Michael Barran: Ya, that is great that you are saying that, another thing that comes to mind with subtle acts of exclusion and being able to interrupt them and speak about them, is I want to emphasize the responsibility on the person that’s getting the feedback, that they said something that made someone else feel bad. That is where the responsibility should be, and if we all get in the habit of “ok, someone is risking their own comfort and taking energy to point out something that we did that made them feel excluded, that is a gift” if we are all in this project of trying to become better people, it is a gift that someone speaks up and says that to us and we should acknowledge it at that. I know it sounds a little silly, but it is great feedback and we have to get in the habit of not getting defensive about our intentions, yes of course most people are not waking up in the morning trying to be a jerk, trying to exclude people, we know that, so what if you could put away your defense of your intention and try to focus on the effect it has on the other person. At least at first, you might eventually get around to your intention, but that shouldn’t be the first thing you focus on and you have that responsibility, so that is really important.
We could go on and on about this, but let’s talk about some other things that you can do. Diversify your network, Kara talked about segregation, our social segregation, you need to diversify your network and get different perspectives and understand what people are going through and that included your media consumption and where you get your news, because if you think about your own go to networks, who are you going to when you really need a trusted perspective or trusted friend? Who are you going to when you need to get something done fast and consistently, who are the people you go to consistently, we all have those people.
If you took a moment you could think of who they are and you could take a minute and write it down and analyze how are those people similar or different then me in terms of race, gender, backgrounds, family status age, all of those things and it is not bad to have go to people, it helps you get stuff done and there is a level of trust, they are trusted and help you get things done and that is really important. But think about that network and who is in your network and how you could potentially diversify that network. Obviously you are not going to go up to someone and be like “hey you are different from me, do you want to be part of my go to network?” no, these relationships are built up over years, but you can start getting different perspectives in your network and having more contact and building up more occasions for trust to be built and maybe you do get to the point where you have a more diverse network.
Kara Murray-Badal: Ya you are right you can’t build it overnight, but you can start now you absolutely can put yourselves in situations where you are going to meet people who are different. I want to acknowledge that, that often means discomfort, I think a lot of things that happen is people saying “that makes me uncomfortable, I don’t want to be uncomfortable” but that is where growth takes place. We talk about that with the kids all of the time. The Comfort zone is where you are boring, the stretch zone which is where you grow and get better. I think right now there are a lot of folks sending text messages to black folks to say like hey you know can I do anything or can you tell me about how to get involved, if you can think about if these people are not your normal friend group and you really don’t know how they are doing because you never talk to them then probably there is some room there for you to start cultivating those relationships in a more meaningful way. That way when a crisis happens that is not the only time you are interacting with them.
Michael Barran: Ya, something else that is fresh on my mind is also if you are checking in on black people that you know, maybe don’t ask them to take care of you, maybe just a simple “hey thinking of you, love you” and don’t ask people to educate you on things. There are so many resources out there to do the work on your own. Literally you can type in crazy questions like “why shouldn’t I touch a black woman’s hair” and you get a million resources within a nanosecond, it has never been easier to get information. You don’t have to bring in other people to teach you.
Kara Murray-Badal: There are lots of ways to educate yourself now, but putting that end to action is super super important. You can read every book in the world, but if you aren’t actually connecting with people. I don’t think it will have the same impact as if you are actually going across those lines of difference. I see lots of people talking about books and media and I hope everyone seeds those great recommendations, but also feeling like “if I read the book, that makes me an ally” you have got to take the actions and build relationships and you have to interrupt those subtle acts of exclusion.
Oh and one last thing, I see my good friend in the chats talking about this challenge we are doing where we are only consuming media and art, food and lots of things from people of color. You were talking about consuming diverse media and I think as someone who has never consumed such diverse media, it is really exhausting because so much of what comes to us easily is not diverse media. When I open my phone I get New York Times updates, the news updates on my I phone are generally from sources that don’t include people of color. When I hop on Netflix, right now everyone has a “black history addition of yelp” ,but genuinely when you open whatever you are using to consume media, book lists etc. they are just very very not diverse. You have to put double the effort in shifting that and that is really important too.
Michael Barran: Thank you for that, we are running out of time so we are going to move quickly, let’s mention trying to bring your biases from the unconscious realm into the conscious when possible. I won’t talk about it, but there is an implicit association test if you haven’t done it you can check it out. It is free online, the Harvard folks do it. It is not perfect. You will do it and it will tell you, you are slightly biased in this domain or you are very biased etc. It is not a perfect assessment of your character or your unconscious biases, in the target it shows some really interesting trends, but take it with a grain of salt. Communicate with people, you have to put this in an action you have to talk to people and connect with people including children from earlier ages then you probably think is appropriate, there are age appropriate ways to do this. You can get children’s books that are incredible at telling these stories, that are beautifully written and tell the real stories and history and they can help you facilitate these hard conversations. This is what you all do, do you want to say something about that Kara?
Kara Murray-Badal: I was going to say, Mosaic just put out an action guide on our website, if you go to our website mosaicproject.org there is an action guide with our curriculum and also some questions, that was a big part of doing this is that we would be able to actually take in some information and be able to have conversations with your families.
Michael Barran: Finally, all the other things you can do to change structural inequality, vote, protest when it is not equal, advocate to change those structures. What would you say to wrap this up Kara?
Kara Murray-Badal: I think we talked about this earlier, but there is a meme going around about racism that it is like the coronavirus, just assume that you have it. Obviously we all have different levels and ways we have been affected by society and different unconscious biases, but I think if we operate under the assumption that we might have something to learn in an area and take that pause and try to catch ourselves when things are happening as much as possible, we will do better then we have done.
Michael Barran: Great, and also I want to echo this and say thank you for spending this time with us. I am getting a sense of your energy and connection and this is a long journey we are all on and let’s not lose momentum and passion for really changing the paradigm for justice and equality in this country so that everyone can be valued in the same way, it is super important and it is kind of an incredible time in that respect. Thank you all for being here.
Kara Murray-Badal: Thank you all and thank you Michael it has been lovely to speak to you and your book is amazing. If you want to share a book that people should read, you should share and read Subtle Acts of Inclusion!
