Yesterday, all members of Toastmasters received an email about the resignation of International President, Margaret Page. The organization had received a complaint that she had given a speech “that included statements about people of African descent and African Americans that were racially and culturally inaccurate, insensitive, stereotypical, and offensive.”
I don’t know her exact words. I wasn’t there. But, I do know how easy it is to offend, not even realizing that what you said was offensive because of unconscious bias. A few years ago, I gave a speech at my Toastmaters club about how I realized I had unconcious bias. Unfortunately, my speech evaluator (a white woman; there were no Blacks in the audience) was so upset about my use of the N-word (which I used to describe something my mother said), that she couldn’t even give her oral evaluation, nor did she send me a written evaluation for a few months. Yes, it is ironic that a speech about unconscious bias was offensive.
But, it was also a lesson to me to be very careful about my speeches, to be more racially and culturally aware. Margaret Page’s resignation was yet another cautionary tale that your words matter. They can help or they can hurt, even if you don’t mean to hurt.
Below is the speech, I gave in early 2019 at Readership Toastmasters, as we were discussing the book, The Neuroscience of Inclusion. In this written version, I have not spelled out the N-word.
An Unconscious Racist
Last summer, as my husband and I were taking an early morning walk in our neighborhood, I saw a black man in the distance. He was standing next to a car parked on the side of the street we were walking down. As we approached, my muscles tensed, and my breathing quickened.
Why? The man hadn’t threatened me, and we were half a block away.
It was because, my brain, my basic instincts took over and I saw him as a person in an “out-group” a potential foe. My brain was moving from a higher brain state toward the Limbic Land brain state, where as the authors of the book, Neuroscience of Inclusion, say that anxiety and negative emotions start to take over. And, I was on the way down to the Threat/Stress Response state. My brain was preparing my body to take flight or to fight.
Again, Why?
If you were to ask me if I were racist. I would emphatically say, “No!” That would be my conscious self talking. But the truth is, I do have unconscious bias.
As with most people with unconscious bias, it goes back to experience, particularly childhood experience. My childhood had primed my response.
As a child, I grew up in a very white community, in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The only blacks I ever saw were those who would come into town from the nearby Air Force Base, or who were students at the University. And the students were largely foreign blacks. I met some of them because they were my father’s students. My father taught statistics, and since we lived near the University, some of his students would stop by. I remember being intrigued by the black students, not because of their skin color, but because of their accents and the fact that they came from a far-away land. My father seemed largely color-blind, but not my mother.
My mother was an Italian-American and grew up with strong affiliations to her in-group of Italian family and friends. Everyone else was an out-group. I can recall hearing her using terms like “dirty Mexicans,” and “Drunk Indians.” And, every year at Christmas time, we had these special brown-shelled nuts that my mother called “N****r toes.” Yes, Brazil nuts.
When I was a teenager, there were some black students from the air force base, at the high school. That was the first time I really had conversations with a black person. And, as I got to know them as people, their color faded, their differences faded in my mind and they were just people.
But it was as if they were a different category in my mind. There were still the “others” the ones who lived in the big cities, and were in violent gangs and sold drugs. TV played a part in strengthening my unconscious bias.
I, of course, was not the only one.
The summer before my senior year in high school, I had won a trip to NYC and Washington, DC, along with about 25 other all-white students from North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa. As we approached New York City, we pestered the bus driver to take us through Harlem. We wanted to see black people like we had on TV and in the movies. This was in the late 70s, when black Harlem was filled with poverty and violence. Imagine a bus full of white teenagers gawking out the window . . . the bus driver wisely refused our request.
Later, when I was in college at San Diego State, majoring in civil engineering, the number of black engineering students out of hundreds was exactly . . . zero. Even as a woman, I was one of 5 female engineering students.
Then, as I entered the workforce, working for a large defense contractor, again, the number of black engineers . . . zero. Things have improved . . . today, black engineers are a whopping 4% of engineers.
Blacks remained largely an “out-group” for me. I didn’t consciously dislike blacks or other races, I was just never around them. Even when we moved from lily white Rogers, MN to St. Paul in 2011 with our son, Yuri, who would be entering 11th grade, I considered race and poverty demographics as we decide where to live, and specifically did not consider living in attendance areas with schools with fewer than 10% white students. While I was all for having a racially diverse experience, I didn’t want my Russian-born son who still had an accent to be in such a great minority.
Even in Toastmasters, most of the clubs I have been a member of are not that ethnically diverse, with at most one or two black members. And at higher leadership levels, Division Director and above, again, mostly white. Interestingly, in recent years, our speech competitions have been more ethnically diverse with black contestants often winning or placing in the top 3.
In the 2014 District 6 Fall Humorous Speech Contest, as the Lieutenant Governor of Marketing (now the Club Growth Director Role), I was the Contest Toastmaster, and had a great time warming up the audience, running the contest, and interviewing the contestants. Afterwards, I had many people tell me I was the best district contest Toastmaster they had seen. I was feeling pretty good about myself, until a black woman, a toastmaster, approached me, her chin out and eyes narrowed.
“You committed a microaggression in your interview of the contestants!” Now that I’ve read our book, I’d say the better term would have been “microinequity.”
I was shocked, but asked her what she meant. She proceeded to tell me that I had made exclusionary comments in an interview of one of the foreign-born, black contestants, who had given a hilarious speech about shopping in Walmart after coming here from a country in Africa. He had a very difficult-to-pronounce name, and although I pronounced it correctly, I mentioned in the interview that I had to practice it a lot. I also asked him about other experiences he had, what was most challenging, coming here from another country. It was those questions and the focus on his name that she felt were insensitive. I apologized for the offense, and thanked her for bringing it to my attention, although I felt that she had over-reacted. I now realize from reading our book, that for historically marginalized groups, negative effects can be cumulative resulting in strong reactions to even very small messages of exclusion. The in-group, can see this as “over-reacting.”
The in-group can also “over-react” when feeling threatened by an “other.” We have seen the sad results of this in recent years when white people call the cops on black Americans for simply being black. Or when police officers disproportionally kill black people, even those who are unarmed.
Last summer, that’s what my brain was doing—over-reacting— as we walked toward the young black man standing by a car. As we got closer, I could see the man had a chain around his neck, with a cross. My body started to relax. And then he smiled at us. I smiled back, and my higher brain came back online, with a feeling of appreciation for this young man’s friendly gesture.
My conscious appreciation was a step toward overriding my unconscious bias. And that is the main message of the book, recognize your reactions to those who are different from you, and make conscious choices to be more inclusive, with appreciation being the main tool of inclusion.
I may be an unconscious racist, but I am changing my thoughts and behaviors.
Change your thoughts, change your behavior, change your destiny, and maybe even change the world.
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