Driving the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Car: A How-To that Starts with You
It's such important work, but how do we know enough to do it well?
Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that 10,000 hours of practice is required to get really good at something. Not everyone agreed with his claim, including the scholars whose work he based it on. But most would agree with the main point: achieving expertise takes work. The more prized that expertise is thought to be, the more work we expect it to take. Take, for example, the process of getting a Ph.D. in the humanities–something we both have done. In grad school, several years of coursework (even if you already have a masters degree) is followed by a year of dedicated study to prepare for oral examinations. You are supposed to learn the major scholarly conversations in your primary field and two secondary fields–including the arguments of, debates about, and relationships between several hundred studies.
Our advisors strongly believed that expertise takes work. One of Cord’s even decided to throw in an extra debate–that they expected Cord not to have studied–on the day of the exam. Their goal was to point out that expertise can never be entirely complete, and that the true expert must also recognize what they don’t yet know. And they ought to have the integrity to admit it.
When doing the work of DEIB–like all things related to race and identity–one benefits from knowing concepts, studies, and histories in a lot of different disciplines: psychology, literature, history, linguistics, sociology, biology, law and so on. In fact, critical race studies scholars hail from all these backgrounds and use methods and evidence from all of these fields and more.
Yet DEIB is supposed to benefit all kinds of people and communities–businesses from healthcare and accounting firms through publishing houses and family-run bookstores; churches and synagogues; and non-profits, too. Any place where a group of people have to work together on a consistent basis can benefit from DEIB. In other words, DEIB is crucial and elusive; narrow and expansive. In short, it’s hard to pin down. It draws from a dizzying array of kinds of knowledge and is supposed to benefit pretty much everyone, everywhere.
It makes sense then to ask: how do you operationalize such a big thing as DEIB? Wouldn’t it require expertise in nearly everything? As our experience shows, becoming an expert in even one field takes vast amounts of energy and time–even if it’s not necessarily 10,000 hours. It comes as no surprise when clients come to us, already on the verge of paralysis and asking what do I need to know to make my organization equitable, diverse, and inclusive?
Especially in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, we encountered many new clients asking this question and hoping against hope that we could tell them the one or two books to read and the ten to twelve steps to take. Then, they imagined, racism and related discrimination in their communities would be solved.
But that’s not how this works. Waiting until you feel like you know enough can lead to paralysis, and so can trying to cram in all the knowledge you can find while you’re in a state of panic. Either approach can lead to a feeling of overwhelm that intensifies perfectionist tendencies, and either can cause organizational leaders to throw in the towel or to revert to pro forma tactics that are unlikely to make real change.
Don’t get us wrong. We have read a lot of books, and we have written a few, too. But the deeply personal impact of race and the myriad ways that discrimination touches our lives means that no single book, no single paradigm, is enough to bring into being the equitable and healed culture that we wish to experience. In fact, worrying all the time about finding the right answer can increase tension and fear in a workplace, even to the point that colleagues of color lose trust and do not feel comfortable staying engaged.
So, how do we do DEIB work without paralyzing ourselves or increasing tension and fear? A mentor of ours puts it this way: the only car on the road you can drive is your own. It may seem counterintuitive, but, aside from all the learning and assessing and strategizing, first and foremost we must focus on our own healing. We’ll say it again: We aim for our own healing.
When we work with clients, we ask them to shift their focus to their own experience. We all receive messages about who we are supposed to be, and we feel pressure to conform to them. We are all products of histories, cultures, conflicts, and triumphs that long predate our individual lives. We experience their results as norms. These norms, in turn, can limit and constrict our experience, causing us to compartmentalize, isolate, and sometimes devalue aspects of ourselves in order to fit in and engage. Sometimes these limiting experiences are small, and sometimes they are huge. But their effects are always significant. When we acknowledge them and their consequences–even and especially the painful ones–we make room for new ways of being to emerge. New ways of being facilitate new networks and community structures, and we find ourselves relating to one another in new ways. When we re-integrate parts of ourselves that we had excised, we are much more likely to produce communities that are more inclusive of people who embody differences from assumed norms.
Though we can only drive our own car, the way we drive does influence how others drive around us. If we drive fearfully, for instance, others may drive more aggressively in response. If we drive more aggressively, others may drive more aggressively or more fearfully, too. We are both the driver of our own car and entirely connected to all the other drivers on the road.
When we aim to heal our own wounds, it signals to others that they may wish to do so, too. Most importantly, it shows them that they can. A person who has identified, come to terms with, and integrated into their experience elements of themselves that they had rejected can more easily see racial and diversity dynamics holistically. That is, they can both observe emotion and hold together more concepts from more books, more theories, and more disciplines, to understand how a community is functioning and how it can achieve its goals.
As DEIB coaches with training in the histories of race and their present-day manifestations, we have insight into a lot of the different kinds of knowledge involved in race and anti-racism. We also know, fundamentally, that whole people create whole communities. No discipline that strives to strengthen and understand human connection is excluded from this work. They all have transformative potential, but the greatest potential is realized when disciplines coalesce in the hearts, minds, and hands of people committed to bringing together that which once seemed disparate into harmonious accord. They’re committed to that process of re-integration because they’ve already seen its benefits–in themselves. Helping people get whole so that they can help their communities get whole–that’s what we do in DEIB coaching. Sure, we do it to make the world a better place in which more people find acceptance, reward, and value in positive ways. But we also do it because it’s healing for us, too.
Photo by Olia Gozha.