Lately, I’ve been reading about a lot of different kinds of mindsets: a growth mindset, an innovator’s mindset, a winning mindset, a design mindset.… They all sound lovely! Sadly, I only have one brain—a trainable one, but still just one organ up there tucked inside my cranium.
One mindset that I haven’t read about is a diversity and inclusion mindset. Maybe D&I hasn’t yet quite penetrated the pop psychology literature to the extent it has populated virtual bookshelves in the Industrial/Organizational Psychology and management corners of the Internet.
I’m a white, cisgender male who wears a tie to work, has some savings in the bank and all the privilege those characteristics entail. I carry all of that with me mindlessly throughout the day.
Also in my grey matter is the knowledge that I’m another man’s husband and Papa to a precocious, gorgeous, six year-old daughter—who is black. I also carry that knowledge with me throughout the day, although I tend to be a bit more mindful of these characteristics.
When we’re out as a family, people’s social schemas readily classify us as what we are: a family with two white-guy-dads and a black daughter. When our daughter is apart from us, one’s social schema would categorize her as what she is: a young, African American girl—and all the absence of privilege that entails.
With research showing that boys are called on and praised more often than girls in classrooms, I encouraged my daughter to raise her hand and to speak up in class so that her voice is heard (and, admittedly, so her teachers would be awed by the genius of my Kindergartener!). I patted myself on the back for great parenting until I came to learn that black girls are severely penalized for exhibiting this very behavior. So, on the one hand, she won’t get as much attention or positive reinforcement as other kids in her class on account of her gender. On the other hand, she is more likely to be suspended or expelled than other kids in her class because of her race if she asserts herself to overcome the implicit gender bias in the classroom. As my daughter would say, What the wha…?
I carry my African American girl with me wherever I go.
When I’m in meetings at work, I search out the room for a black or brown face or any complexion darker than my late-fall pale, olive skin. Knowing that I’ve climbed the corporate ladder in a function (marketing) in an industry (legal) that both skew heavily white, I’m relieved when I see people who don’t look like me—people who look more like my daughter or friends from the diverse neighborhoods I’ve called home in San Francisco, New York and now in my Benetton ad-hued Mayberry-esque suburb in New Jersey.
Outside of work, I find that I’m alarmed when I’m in a public space where as far as I can see, everyone looks like me. When I moved to the South of France for my junior year abroad, I thought it was cool that practically everyone looked somewhat like me because of the French and Italian genes thrown into my double helix. Now, however, I’m uncomfortable when I’m in a crowd or a room full of people that look a lot like me. To my mind, that’s a D&I mindset in action.