Hello Hello,
Happy Memorial Day weekend! I hope everyone has something planned that will give them energy and feed their soul! I continue to fall behind on sharing ideas and content on this site. While I’m full of explanations for why that is, there’s no excuse as our work here is far from done. It’s been a year since the murder of George Floyd. While Derek Chauvin has been held accountable through the judicial process, accountability is not synonymous with justice.
As I’ve embarked on my own journey this past year, a few things have become apparent:
- My formal education left out A LOT of crucial pieces of history
- My own privilege is more pervasive than I could have imagined or could have acknowledged before
- The atmosphere in the corporate spaces I’ve occupied has shifted for the better – more transparent conversations, space to feel/express, acknowledging the work to be done
We need to continue to put power to our privilege, name the injustices we observe, and have the tough conversations.
Pressing on, I have to share Part 2 of the Adam Grant series on race at work. In this episode, How to Bust Bias at Work: Transcript | WorkLife | Podcasts | TED, Adam outlines one technique we can use to combat our biases. If you mentally swap out the person in a given situation, do you trigger the same unconscious reaction? For example, when Serena Williams slams her racket during a tennis match, too many people think of the stereotype of angry-black woman. But, if we keep the situation exactly the same and replace Serena with Rodger Federer, we call him a passionate competitor. It’s a great way to gut check a reaction to see if it’s valid or possibly rooted in unconscious bias.
#powertoprivilege #courageousconversations #blacklivesmatter
-Jessica