“Hello, Nanci. Thanks so much for the pictures and great article. I really took it to heart. Since the training the biggest difference I’m noticing is that people are talking about things. It’s not always nice stuff. Sometimes it’s expressing feeling hurt by a supervisor’s treatment or the way someone addressed them. Instead of just stuffing things under the rug people are opening up and talking a lot more. The break room is just louder and more vibrant. It seems like people have held back a lot of hurt feelings over the years and now feel like they can talk about them. It’s very different with all these new voices of people who used to be pretty silent. Thank you so much.”

Having more authentic conversations, even though they bring up thoughts and feelings that can be hard to hear or challenging to have, are a sign of success. Sometimes organizations are confused by this turn of events. Organizations assume that if no one’s talking about these issues, then everything is going fine. Quite the contrary–if you create enough safety, more and more conversations will happen, and more issues will come into the light; the silences are be broken. And that is a good thing. The question: do you have the organizational capacity to handle these conversations? Skills building for effective conversations as well as a framework with which to “hold” them is essential if the organization and individuals will move through them, toward true alliances and cultural competency.

While the statements, “be who you are” or “stay true to yourself,” sound simple, they are surprisingly challenging to live up to. This is especially true in a society that explicitly values and rewards particular groups and ways of “being” over others.

Many of us purposely change how we present ourselves in work environments to be seen as more credible or to advance our projects in our organizations. On some level, this strategy makes sense as we need political support and buy-in to be effective in our jobs. However, some of these decisions —how we dress and talk, how much we reveal about our personal lives, core values and beliefs, and how we live—have become so familiar and reinforced by co-workers and society that the connection with our authentic selves begins to unravel. We lose sight of who we really are.

I recently led a workshop where a participant insisted I couldn’t be Latina because I was so “articulate.” I grew up in a household where my parents spoke Spanish to each other, but spoke to us children in English because they didn’t want us to speak with an accent. I watched my father and grandparents be “stigmatized” as uneducated or less intelligent because English was clearly not their native tongue.

I learned as a very young person that English was the language of power and access. I excelled at it, especially verbally. I knew that skillfully commanding English would bring recognition for being smart, because I would sound smart. Yet, I’m most “at home” in Spanglish. My tone softens, as does my heart, when those melodic syllables roll off my tongue. For the most part, I don’t reveal that part of me in work settings. I remain wary of both the stigma and its possible “exclusionary” effect on non-Spanish speakers, even when I translate what I say. I worry that I may offend someone in power and as a result lose a contract or client, or worse, my credibility.

When I hold back from speaking in my more familiar tongue, I have already lost credibility because I contradict my value of being authentic. In order to come more in alignment with my value, sometimes it’s enough for me to be open about how higher education and especially my decision to adopt “very formally educated” English impacted me. Other times, it makes sense to slip into Spanglish and share this aspect of myself. The outcome is two-fold:  I bring more of myself to whatever I am doing, and this benefits everyone around me. Another outcome is that by being more authentic I invite others to do the same.

I recently asked workshop participants to do an activity in their first language.  The resistance from a small group of immigrants was palpable. The room filled with nervous chatter, anxious clarifying questions, uncomfortable shifting in chairs, and even visible upset at me for making such a request. After the exercise, several of these participants shared with me, one-on-one, how powerful it was to be able to speak their own languages at work. They cried about how hard it was to speak only English and how doing so led them to forget certain words in their birth language. The grief was evident. As I walked through the lunch area after the session, the participants volunteered to teach me “thank you” and “good-bye” in Romanian, Tibetan, Arabic, and Eritrean, just to name a few. The participants felt safe enough to be more authentic in the workplace and the trust increased for everyone.

Being authentic means being willing to be all of who you are. The truth is, being less of who we are impacts our organizational effectiveness. It takes effort—more energy, more resources, more time—to be less of myself since my brain is preoccupied with what and how much to change or hold back. If you are part of a group that has institutional power—English dominant, male, white, Christian, heterosexual, etc.—you are especially poised to create more safety for others. You can do this by engaging your access and credibility to model authenticity and insist on a workplace that actively counteracts pressures to assimilate.

Where have you changed who you are in order to fit in or gain more acceptance?  What can you do to be more authentic in the workplace? How would this increase the trust level and allow others to be more authentic? How would this impact diversity and increase inclusion where you work? I forward to reading your thoughts and responding to your comments!

With provocative chapter titles such as “I’m Not White” and “I’m Not A Racist,” Kivel engages his readers and acknowledges the social context that makes people shy away from identifying as “white.”  He validates that for many of his readers, there is a strong desire to individualize their identities and distance themselves from the associations that come with that label. He goes on to illuminate how the tendency to focus solely on personal prejudice can impede efforts to dismantle racism in the greater context: the “institutional nature of [centuries of white racism] is more entrenched than racial prejudice. In fact, it is barely touched by changes in individual white consciousness.”

While shifts in individual white consciousness are necessary for racial justice, Kivel also provides strategies and suggestions to take the next steps towards combating institutional racism. He explores initiatives such as Affirmative Action, redistribution of economic resources, investment in communities of color, and supporting democratic, anti-racist multiculturalism. The revised edition includes an updated bibliography and the more current topics of anti-Arab prejudice and how the U.S.’s health care system perpetuates racial inequalities—an especially timely issue.

This book is an engaging guide to identifying the social, political, and economic context in which institutional racism is grounded. Subscribe to the LJS blog feed to read more reflections about this book. We hope you’ll add your voice to the discussion!

When I arrived at 9 am the following morning the waiting room was full.  Already the board displayed numbers in the triple digits.  How did this happen?!  When I asked the receptionist, I  was informed the clinic had been open since 6:30 am.  Patients were expected to wait up to 3 hours before the doctor even arrived!  First one line to get the forms, another line to return them, then another number for waiting to see the doctor.  I had allotted an hour for this visit.  As the second hour drew to a close, my impatience had grown.  No more phone calls to make, no more text messages to return, no more emails to respond to, no more Facebook posts to read.  I could feel my USer entitlement brewing, like a pot of milk left to simmer on the stove–for a long time it can look like nothing’s happening but then all of a sudden the liquid froths over the top of the pot and burns the bottom of the pan!

Patience, Nanci, patience.  It was the voice of my papi in my head. I tried to bring him into the waiting room with me. Almost straining I sought to hear his non-judging, gentle, coaxing words about patience.  He was born on this island and, while this may not be true of all Puerto Ricans, he understands something about connection, community and waiting his turn so that everyone is treated fairly.  I was born in the US where we call this “inefficiency”–a word laced with all the embedded judgment of superiority you can imagine and my tone can muster.

In his book “Uprooting Racism” Paul Kivel writes specifically about white people’s sense of entitlement because of racism: “the feeling that one is entitled to certain goods or services more than others are, or that is [sic] one is entitled to be served by the others because of one’s class, race, and/or gender.” (p. 42)  On the US mainland I am painfully familiar with being on the receiving end of this behavior.  I have accumulated many experiences where people simply don’t see me because I am female and Latina–and when I was little: disabled, poor and young, or all of the above.

Watching people talk over me, look through me or disdain my presence fed my passion for justice–and outrage at the unjust systems that perpetuate these behaviors.  Less obvious to me in the midst of this systemic assault, was the slow and insidious entitlement training I was receiving as a USer.  I had internalized the very attitudes and learned to act out the very behaviors that I found so baffling and outrageous.

Standing in the middle of a grocery store aisle without any apparent awareness that you are blocking the flow of carts.  Walking to the front of a line, even though there are people clearly waiting their turn to be attended.  Not noticing the people who clean the office building where you work. Ignoring the bus person or wait staff at the restaurant except if they make contact, “mess up,” or you require attention.  On countless occasions I’ve witnessed these behaviors and felt condemnation toward the person acting entitled.  I have also acted out these very behaviors many times myself and also felt these same feelings of condemnation for myself.  The condemnation serves none of us–it is yet another by-product of feeling superior to another human being.  How can we break this cycle–and bring about an end to entitlement?

1) Slow down.  When we are going fast, feel stressed and trying to get a lot of things done we pay less attention to people around us and are vulnerable to acting out entitlement behaviors.  When we slow down we are better able to pay attention and be more present–and less urgency helps us be more thoughtful, considerate and patient.

2) Ask someone close to you, preferably from a targeted group, to share some of the ways you act entitled.  Because non-targets (the group with institutional power and access) are trained to be clueless, we don’t immediately recognize our own entitlement behaviors. Inviting someone else to “see” us in this way helps us grow and also can deepen our relationships as allies.

3) Question why you feel better than someone else.  (This can also take the form of feeling sorry for someone else.) When you pulled to judge or pity someone else, notice why.  Usually feeling better than someone else is a cover for where you feel bad about yourself or less than someone else.  Remember: both reactions are inaccurate. You are neither better or less than anyone else.

4) Decide to not be clueless.  Society grooms its dominant groups into cluelessness patterns.  If we were aware we would interrupt the injustice and require the system change.  In entitlement we lose connection with other people to the point of feeling superior to them.  This is the basis for class oppression and the justification for institutional oppressions overall. When we practice awareness we take important steps to interrupting our own and other’s entitlement.

5) Have compassion. Remember entitlement attitudes and behaviors are not your personal or individual fault–nor that of anyone else with entitlement patterns.  If we can seek understanding and to see the goodness in others (and ourselves)  instead, we might be closer to having true compassion for that person (or ourselves)–without feeling sorry for them (or ourselves).

Where do you act entitled?  Where did you first see this behavior on someone else?  Which group(s) of people do you feel superior to (smarter than, better looking than, happier than, more competent than, etc.)? Why? Which group(s) of people do you feel inferior to? Why? Which of the above suggestions did you use to interrupt entitlement? What else have you tried?  How did it work?  What did you learn?

Email: Just want you to know how much you inspire me. At this training I participated in, these two amazing master-level trainers facilitated our group. They emphasized working from a positive, strength-based approach.  Yet at one point he used the word gay in a negative context:  “My son would say, ‘Oh that’s so gay.’” The next day a participant was sharing and then used the same phrase. My heart hurt and I thought….”What would Nanci Luna say?” So I raised my hand and commented, “I appreciate working from the positive and using the term ‘gay’ as it has been used certainly is not positive and, I would offer, offensive.” What was beautiful is the young man who said it came and first apologized and then thanked me for putting an end to this use. The beautiful outcome was the young man’s recognition of this exchange…noting he, too, has to continue to grow in respect for self and others. And as he took full ownership for his remarks, we sat together for lunch. I realized that we all learn and grow everyday…he taught me humility and ownership…Nanci taught me love.”