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Decoding Human Behavior

When was the last time you found yourself in a blood-boiling disagreement with a partner or friend that evokes a high level of anxiety every time you think about it? You picked your battle that day and decided not to say anything. Why? Maybe you were worried about retribution, maybe you didn't want to be labeled as "difficult" or "confrontational," or maybe you simply did not have the emotional capacity that day to allow an argument to get instigated. Or perhaps you did say something, and in turn were completely disregarded. This culminated in your anger and disappointment growing and festering until one day you reached your limit and finally left that relationship. This is how a portion of the population feels on a daily basis: forced to withstand wave after wave of aggression, even aggression masquerading as friendliness.

When such actions continue to go unchecked, people will reach a point at which they will leave relationships and situations that do not give them the grace to be heard or supported. When people try to speak up and are disregarded, a growing tension starts and festers. So how can we equip ourselves with the tools to both actively listen and advocate for ourselves to be heard? Please lean on me as we begin our journey of exploring the intricacies of building a truly inclusive organization, but before we can start to construct solutions, we must take a moment and understand how these problems arose in the first place. I ask that you remain open-minded and open-hearted as you read some of the historical pieces I'm going to explore in this chapter. I assure you that I am committed to growing a relationship with you on your journey to unfolding all the pieces within this book.

I believe that this journey requires a renewed cultivation of our limbic system-the part of the brain that enables each of us to understand our behavioral and emotional responses. This limbic cultivation may not always feel pleasant, and there will be parts of this book that will touch on painful topics and may evoke feelings of vulnerability. I want you to know that even as I write these words, I am aware of the effort it may take at times to relive or uncover some of the uglier parts of our history, but that I am here with you every step of the way. Let us hold each other's hand through this process and come out on the other side, stronger and together.

History of Race

In 1449, Spain passed an official proclamation that would later be known as the first set of discriminatory laws based on race. This edict would lay the foundation for the Spanish Inquisition, in which racism was fully legalized and culminated in the murder and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews, Muslims, and Protestants. While I understand the Spanish Inquisition to be the first recorded instance of sustained and strategic violence on the basis of race and "othering," the tactics of racial oppression and discrimination that were conceived in the 15th century gave birth to what I call the Great Divergence. All of the atrocities we have seen follow the Inquisition-from genocide to slavery to internment camps to the Holocaust-demonstrate that these "historical" actions may not be as behind us as many would like to believe. People generally would like to think that we have made some massive improvements, that our society now is eons beyond the hate and violence of previous centuries, as illustrated in the black-and-white photographs documenting the 1960s Civil Rights movement. But the first in-color photos were developed in France in 1907, and yet all of the powerful photographs depicting the resilience of the Civil Rights era were purposefully printed in black and white and are still distributed as such, pushing a false narrative that the days of bus bombing, police violence, and white people spitting in the faces of Black folks are far gone. But had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not been assassinated, or Anne Frank not been sent by Nazis to perish in a concentration camp, they could both be alive today, and would have still been younger than the late, vivacious Betty White. See, although it is far easier and far more comfortable to let history stay in the past, we must confront the painful and uncomfortable truth-that this suffering, this discrimination, this violence, are still very much embedded into daily life, even in the 21st century, and we can see it everywhere, if we are willing to open our eyes and look. From playgrounds to understocked grocery stores to overflowing prisons to our own workplaces, we are still living every day with the legacy of some of our most painful historic miscarriages.

But this book is not meant to be a history lesson. This book is meant to act as a guide, to provide you, the reader, with a specific toolkit to equip you to really create the change you want to see in your workplace. Maybe you are currently a leader of a huge corporation looking to help lead a cultural shift within your organization. Maybe you are a leader of a startup wanting to ensure diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is proactively embedded in the infant stages of your organizations. Maybe you are currently navigating the workplace and struggling with the weight of feeling othered or unseen by your fellow colleagues, or maybe you are someone who is simply curious to learn more about DEI and understand why it's been such a point of conversation in the last few years. Wherever you are in your journey, whatever perspective you are bringing or guidance you are seeking, this book will-I hope-provide you with the context to truly understand and verbalize what you are seeing and experiencing, and impart on you the practical and actionable steps to empower yourself and your colleagues to bring forth and sustain impactful solutions within your workplace.

The Great Divergence

And that brings me back to the Great Divergence. The last few years have sent the world into an upheaval in a way that we've never seen before. Never before has technology tied communities across the globe so closely together with social media platforms updating us on every occurrence across country and continental lines. Along with constant access to information, we are also given constant insight into everyone's opinion on the information we are receiving. What we are seeing across the board is that there seems to be a strong sense of division. People are feeling polarized, and we've felt that gap reverberate from the family dining table to the company conference table.

It used to be commonplace to differentiate the outside world from the workplace. Professionalism seemingly encompassed a strong need to leave politics at the door. It wasn't professional to discuss certain topics; the workplace was for work, as simple as that. However, coming off of multiple years in which we were isolated out of necessity for safety, those lines have become heavily blurred. It is no longer possible to draw those strong boundaries of global events, personal experiences, and the professional workplace. From folks who lost their entire source of income due to the pandemic and were unable to work, to other industries that switched to operating fully remote, our homes became the physical space in which every part of life happened. From an influx of news about hundreds of thousands of lives lost to the insidious coronavirus, to people flooding the streets in outrage refusing to be silenced as we watched documented murder after murder, to a political insurrection that blatantly challenged our country's pillar of democracy, it has been an incredibly scary and challenging world to navigate. However, even in the midst of this global calamity, when it felt like we just needed to stand still and fully process what we were seeing, time kept ticking and the Earth kept turning. Businesses were doing their best to stay afloat, governments did their best to keep morale high and assure the public that our economies would survive. Unemployment skyrocketed, and those fortunate enough to work in industries that were able to weather the shift to remote work took on the new and unique burden of attempting to maintain a sense of normalcy in a world that felt like it was anything but.

As a DEI executive, I have seen a recurring theme across companies both large and small: there is a divided experience that is informing a divided understanding. We can no longer afford to pretend that this divide doesn't exist. In fact, I have seen the overwhelmingly positive potential that comes when a company chooses to address this divide head on and create a space for their employees to connect in a deeper and more meaningful way than ever before. It's certainly not to say that it was the pandemic that exacerbated the Great Divergence, but more so it removed the niceties that shrouded a divide that has existed for a very long time and has made plain the urgency with which we must address the situation.

So what exactly is this Great Divergence? I define it as the divide that separates individuals into two groups-the first group feels like the discrimination of today is a much improved version of the discrimination of the past, that we are living in much safer and fairer times and therefore there really isn't a need for a strong shift in how we understand and address inequities. And the other group? Well, they disagree.

It is within this tension that the Great Divergence remains. Although the world does indeed look different than it did half a century ago, take just a...