DoIT’s Race & Diversity Dialogue session, held on October 9, provided a welcoming place for the DoIT community to learn and share in a safe and non-judgmental environment. Having had this successful dialogue, DoIT’s goal is to continue to provide safe spaces for people to connect and learn about others, and to encourage these conversations as part of our everyday lives.
The following article offers some highlights from the event.
As he kicked off DoIT’s Race & Diversity Dialogue session, Equity & Diversity Committee Chair Derrian Jones couldn’t help but think about superheroes.
Whether it’s “The Boys” on Amazon, “The Watchmen” on HBO, or “Umbrella Academy” on Netflix, all three superhero-based shows currently feature story arcs centered around race and racial justice.
“That’s just an indicator that race is dominating our national consciousness,” Jones observed in his opening remarks for DoIT’s October 9 Race & Diversity Dialogue Session, “Courageous Conversations: The Role of Race in the Workplace.”
And it’s within this context of a prominent nationwide dialogue around race and longstanding structural racism that DoIT leadership and the Equity & Diversity Committee chose to emphasize race in DoIT’s learning session, Jones explained.
“But while the emphasis is on race for today’s work and dialogue, it really is applicable across all the dimensions of humanness,” Jones said, adding that learnings from the session apply to conversations about gender, disability and other diversity, equity and inclusion topics.
Human Resources Director Jenny Kvistad described the diversity dialogue as a starting point in cultivating community within DoIT, and demonstrating our values of openness and inclusion.
“Our hope is that today you will be able to develop tangible skills we can all take away, to help us better hold conversations and improve our understanding of inclusion,” Kvistad said.
The first step in a continuing journey
DoIT’s diversity dialogue is the first of many steps DoIT will take toward creating greater inclusion in the organization, and honoring and creating more diversity within DoIT, CIO Lois Brooks said as she thanked the 165 participants for their honest engagement, and for holding the organization to high standards.
“We know people are happiest when the work they do is valued, when they feel part of the community, and when they feel seen and heard,” Brooks said. “As an organization, we’re making a commitment to providing opportunities for us to learn the skills we need to create this kind of environment for everyone—where every lived experience is acknowledged, affirmed and valued.”
Session facilitators from the Wisconsin School of Business and the Building Inclusion@UW Program shared some historical information related to race, and led participants through a guided discussion—introducing some key definitions and shared vocabulary around:
- Personal identity (the story you say about yourself)
- Social identity (the story others say about you)
- Race and racism
“If we know how to talk about race, we can become more comfortable in talking about it, and actually acknowledge experiences that influence each of us in this part of our identity,” explained session co-facilitator Binnu Palta Hill, Wisconsin School of Business assistant dean for diversity and inclusion.
The power of acknowledgement
As human beings, we tend to “ingroup” and “outgroup” people, mostly based on superficial characteristics, Palta Hill explained. And social science studies show that once we outgroup someone, we tend to “other-ize” their experiences and have less empathy toward them.
“In the workplace, if we ‘other-ize’ the experiences of our colleagues—where race is a critical component of their identity and influences how they walk through life—it has an enormous impact on how much we can connect with them, and how productive we can be as team members,” Palta Hill explained.
“It’s amazing how powerful it is for your experience to be acknowledged,” Palta Hill added, emphasizing the importance of affirming each other’s experiences as we work to eradicate systemic racism. “If we can’t even acknowledge that my experience is different than my colleague’s, who is a black male, we can’t even more forward.”
And yet, people are often socialized to avoid pointing out race or color.
“We’re socialized to play it very safe. Somehow along the way, we learned that that’s rude,” Palta Hill said. “Well it’s only rude if we assign a judgment to it. It’s not rude if we’re just simply acknowledging it as a fact.”
Listening deeply to ‘climb another person’s mountain’
One way to begin to have productive conversations about race is to practice “deep listening”—or paying attention to the emotional resonance of an interaction, co-facilitator Tamie Klumpyan explained. This practice includes:
- Listening for perspective, including details about your conversation partner’s personal identity and history
- Listening for values and needs
- Listening for emotion
- Listening with empathy
“Imagine this framework as a mountain—the lens you see your world through. Try stepping down from your mountain momentarily, and climb up another person’s mountain. Listen deeply to what their experience or story is,” explained Klumpyan, program manager, facilitator and consultant with the Building Inclusion@UW Program, part of Learning & Talent Development in the UW–Madison Office of Human Resources.
“Deep listening and being deeply listened to is truly the starting point to race relations,” Klumpyan said, as diversity dialogue participants then paired off via Webex to practice deep listening by sharing early memories related to race with their partners.
“It just starts to create that bridge between the mountains—to allow, then, for continued investigation, or clarification, or connection, or relating to another person’s story,” Klumpyan added.
That sentiment was reflected in a quote attributed to Maya Angelou, shared at the conclusion of the exercise: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Offer your input
Before the session ended, participants were encouraged to fill out a survey, intended to inform future activities related to DoIT workplace initiatives. All employees, whether they attended or did not attend, are encouraged to complete the 2020 DoIT Race & Diversity Input Survey. In addition, session participants are encouraged to share their feedback about the session using the 2020 DoIT Race & Diversity Dialogue Attendee Feedback Survey. All feedback and input is due on Tuesday, October 20.
Deputy CIO Dave Pagenkopf closed the session by thanking those who chose to participate on a sunny, unseasonably warm Friday afternoon: “It really is an expression of your values.”
“As we learned today, this is not the ending. This is just the beginning,” Pagenkopf added. “This is really a journey, and we’re really just getting started.”
Resources
- Learn about the “RACE” framework developed by Stephanie Creary, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, whose research centers on improving the quality of relationships across differences at work.