From Awareness to Action: Practicing Allyship

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Jessica Beckendorf: Hi, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection podcast. I’m Jessica and I’m joined here today by Dr. Anne Phibbs, founder and president of Strategic Diversity Initiatives. Anne has over 25 years experience helping organizations advance their equity, diversity, and inclusion goals. She’s a trainer and a teacher who has delivered hundreds of workshops and classes for thousands of participants in corporate, government, higher education, nonprofit, healthcare, and faith community settings. Today we’ll be talking about social identities, privilege, and allyship.

Anne will be sharing a practice with us. Hi, Anne, how are you?

Dr. Anne Phibbs: Hi, Jessica. I’m great. Thanks so much for having me.

Jessica: Oh, I’m so excited to dig into this topic. Let’s dig in right away. Let’s learn more about social identities, privilege, and allyship. Let’s begin with social identity. What do you mean by the idea of social identity and how is it different from other kinds of identities that we all have?

Anne: We do all have different identities. We might be an athlete or an artist. Somehow I always think about the identities I’m not. I’m neither of those things, although I have a lot of respect for people who are athletes and artists. I myself love movies. I love dogs. I’m a gardener. Those things make us who we are but we are also impacted by identities that are acted on by social forces, whether we recognize that or not. What do by acted on by social forces? By politics and public policy and laws, by finances, by education, by the media.

These would be identities like our racial identity, our gender identity, our sexual orientation, our disability status, our nationality, age, social class, religion. The thing about those social identities is they typically, at least talking in an American context, afford us a certain amount of access. Some people would call it unearned access where things are open to us. We don’t face many barriers. There’s also, of course, identities that cause us to face more barriers. This is the notion of marginalization and privilege that those of us in diversity, equity, and inclusion work talk about.

Jessica: What about marginalized identities or underrepresented identities? Don’t those phrases just stigmatize people and put them in boxes?

Anne: That’s a great question. People use different phrases to talk about this idea of having fewer barriers or more barriers. I myself identify as lesbian or queer, and I’ve met people in my community who don’t like the idea of being marginalized or they don’t want that to be their whole identity. I don’t recommend that either. I think the reason that we talk about it is it reminds us that those social forces do impact us. I was just doing a workshop around social class and talking about how I believe, and I might get this figure wrong, but the average white family has 41 times more wealth than the average black family.

What explains that? If we’re not careful, we say, I guess white people are just more diligent and hardworking, and that’s why they have more wealth. That is one explanation. It’s not the one that I believe. I think if you look at all the racial barriers, all the practices, policies and laws that have been founded on racism, on myths and stereotypes about people of color, about black people, about Native people. You see that those have created educational barriers, financial barriers, who could get loans, redlining. We start to see that it’s not just a matter of, somebody isn’t hardworking or someone isn’t this or someone isn’t that.

Someone faced a lot of barriers. The same is true around my own community of thinking about access to things like– not just like public policy, like marriage, which was something that impacted me where I wasn’t able to get married in a 25-year relationship and that impacted my family in some ways legally. Also part of the idea of being marginalized or underrepresented is also the idea that you had a lot of stereotypes about your identities, that you didn’t grow up seeing yourself in the media. You didn’t see maybe this might be because you are neurodiverse or have a disability.

Maybe this is because you grew up Asian-American. Maybe it’s because you’re both Asian-American and neurodiverse. All that intersectionality. In terms of who were our images, what were the messages we got? Did we get messages that we’re a good person, that we’re smart, that we’re capable, that we’re able to achieve our dreams, that we should have children, that we should get married, that we could hold powerful positions? Or did we get messages–

Jessica: Yet we work hard, right?

Anne: Yes. Oh, absolutely.

Jessica: We get messages that we’re hard workers or not.

Anne: Yes, exactly. Absolutely. Did we get a message that we could be a leader or was that for someone else? That’s the idea of being marginalized or underrepresented. Not that we want to say that is the only important thing about someone. It’s not but it does explain deep-seated inequities that still profoundly impact people’s chances. When we say that overwhelmingly white men are still in senior leadership positions, what explains that? Again, either white men want to be leaders or they’re really good at it or they’re just better at it.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Less than 5% of all tenured faculty in the U.S. are women of color. I don’t think that’s because women of color don’t want to be tenured faculty. I think it’s because of barriers. That understanding that how social identities work can help us, I think, see the world more of the way it really is. Then the challenge, of course, and this is how we move toward allyship, is how do we get rid of those barriers?

Jessica: You started to get into this a little bit, but let’s focus on privilege for a second and why it’s a really hard concept for some people to understand or use for themselves. Can you explain how you use the privilege wheels in the work that you do?

Anne: In the handout that we have, there’s an academic one from Acevedo and there’s another one from Julia Duckworth. These are two colorful representations of what it means to have these social identities. We see gender there, we see economic status, we see mental health, we see sexual orientation, racial identity, ethnicity, religion, nationality, your competence or speaking English, things like that. The idea is that in the privilege wheels, when you’re more toward the middle, it means that you have more of that privilege or another word for that is unearned access.

Jessica: I’m looking at the wheel right now and you’ll see it if we’ll conclude it in our show notes. In the middle are things like rich, white, slim, robust.

Anne: Able-bodied, heterosexual, right? The idea is not that there’s anything automatically wrong with being heterosexual or white. I say this as a white person myself, or well-off or neurotypical. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s that it just opens doors for you. Part of the way privilege works is we often don’t see it. We think that, for example, I like to say, my story was that I got my PhD because I’m smart and hardworking. I did write a 208-page bad book, which is the best description of a dissertation I’ve ever heard.

I think I’m reasonably smart. I’m hardworking but I’ve come to realize that it helped that I’m white. It helped that I grew up speaking English. It helped that I’m middle class and the product of middle-class education. That in many ways, I was someone my professors in my doctoral program perceived as someone who was smart enough to get a PhD. That is what I call a both/and frame that we use. It doesn’t mean that I’m not still a good person. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard. It doesn’t mean that I don’t get to see the effects of my individual actions and effort.

It means that it also helps that I didn’t face as many barriers as some of my colleagues. That’s the idea of privilege. Quick story, a woman once told me a story about going up to a makeup counter, a white woman, and the first thing she encounters is a woman behind the counter who says, “How can I help you?” Just, and if we leave the story there, we don’t see race. We just think that’s just how the story should be. When we add the race component, which is a black woman who shows up next to her, and the first thing the person behind the counter says is, “Are you going to buy anything?”

Suddenly this white woman who was telling me the story said, “I felt so bad because I didn’t say anything.” This is moving toward the idea of allyship. She said, “But the first thing I noticed, of course, was, wow, she didn’t treat me that way.” We think that’s normal and that happens for everyone. Part of our developing allyship and recognizing privilege is start to say, “Oh, maybe if I’m a man and every time I talk in a meeting, people support me and they listen and they give me the space. I start to notice that women are talked over.”

I don’t know, Jessica, if they did a study of Supreme Court justices. Do you know this?

Jessica: No.

Anne: They found out that not only were the female Supreme Court justices more likely to be interrupted by the male Supreme Court justices, they were more likely to be interrupted by the lawyers arguing in front of them. If when you’re a Supreme Court justice, which is pretty much the pinnacle of your career, I would believe as a jurist, as a lawyer, attorney, when you’re still interrupted, it tells you how deep the stereotype is. Part of the goal is then to start to say, what do I just take for granted as behavior, as respect, as people listening to me or offering me a job?

Or assuming I’m a good mother, a good person or a good parent, or that I should deserve to be married or fill in the blank. What do I assume happens for everyone that actually doesn’t happen for everyone? Again, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad that you have that privilege, but it does mean that it won’t change if you don’t notice it. The idea is we want it to be more equitable. We want everyone to have the same kind of access, whether it’s education, jobs, et cetera.

Sometimes people don’t like thinking that if I have privilege, that means I got everything handed to me and that is not what it means. If you grew up a poor white person, you definitely had challenges, absolutely. I’ve talked to people who grew up in poverty who are white. Part of understanding privilege is to say, how would it have been that much harder if I had been a person of color growing up in poverty? It doesn’t mean that we want to negate the bad experiences because I don’t think very few people have it perfect, but it’s noticing that something’s compound when–

I’ll just say me as a lesbian, I’ve faced homophobia, but I haven’t faced homophobia coupled with ableism or racism, things like that.

Jessica: Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. I have lots of very personal experiences related to the Supreme Court example that you gave. I remember at one point I’d been tired of that and I was older. I was the older woman in the office. I remember at our team meetings, the supervisor, there was only one male in the office. He would allow him to go on and on and on with his updates. Then every time one of the women, like it was their turn and they had the floor to give their update, he would literally do this thing with his hand, “Come on, hurry it up, hurry it up.”

Anne: Oh my goodness.

Jessica: He would cut them off all the time. At one point I looked at him and I said, “I want to hear what she has to say.”

Anne: Good for you.

Jessica: It happens and he didn’t notice he was doing it. The other guy in the office, because I talked to the other guy in the office, he didn’t notice that was happening either. It was very creepy.

Anne: I think allied behavior, we’ll talk some about that.

Jessica: Oh, yes.

Anne: Yes, absolutely.

Jessica: Isn’t it possible for people of all identities to face bias or oppression? You started to talk about this. Can white people face racism and can men face sexism? Does a man who works with mostly women have an underrepresented identity? Why don’t we talk that much about it?

Anne: Those are great questions. Those are excellent questions. What I would say is that, I think anyone can face a bias. I’ll just use myself as an example because I identify as white. Can I face racial bias? Yes. Is it possible there’s someone, a person of color who doesn’t like me because I’m white? That’s racial bias. Yes, that’s possible. Would it be a good thing? No. Do I think it would be likely hurtful? Yes. Do I think it’s common? No, not necessarily, but here’s the key. It’s not racism under my view because racism, it’s racial bias.

Again, that’s not a good thing, but racism is when we connect it to this history of institutionalized bias. When we say, isn’t it possible that a male Supreme Court justice could be interrupted by a woman Supreme Court justice or a woman attorney just because he’s a man? Yes. Would that be gender bias? Yes. Why isn’t it sexism? Partly because that man didn’t grow up with the idea that he should be demure, that he should acquiesce, that he didn’t deserve a voice.

Jessica: He should be a good boy.

Anne: Exactly, and be quiet, right?

Jessica: Be quiet, be a good boy.

Anne: Right, and give the space to all the women. That’s not the stereotype we have for men. Likewise, it’s not the stereotype for me as a white person. I did not ever grow up thinking that because of my racial identity, because I’m white, I would be denied jobs. I would have to work twice as hard. I would be judged inequitably, judged, with a much harsher critique. The idea of doing twice as much to get half the credit or whatever the phrase is, I didn’t grow up with that because I didn’t grow up with negative stereotypes about white people.

That is very different for people of color and Native people. An example to me of this idea of racism versus racial bias, I had a black woman who was in one of my trainings and she said, “If one more white person calls me articulate, I’m just going to lose it.” She said, “My husband too, who’s black, he gets it all the time.” This person said, “I don’t understand. Why is that racism, because that’s a compliment, isn’t it? To say you’re articulate.” She said, “Yes, here’s the thing though. Nobody ever says it to my white colleagues.”

The idea behind this compliment is that I didn’t think you would be articulate. What it brings up for this black woman is all the stereotypes she’s lived with her entire life around competency and quality and things like that. That’s how racism works. That’s why we have to think about it as about being marginalized and underrepresented. Technically as a man underrepresented, if he’s surrounded by women, technically he is. I would argue that by virtue of how women and men are socialized, he’s going to get a lot more attention.

I’ve trained where you have tables of women with like one man at the table. I’ll say, okay, someone needs to report it out. It’s not the man who jumps up, but all the women turn to the guy and say, “You should report out.” I’m like, “Is this 1950?” That’s how women are socialized. I see women step back all the time, even in professional positions. Part of understanding how privilege works is starting to recognize it, to notice it, and realize that it’s connected back to a very ingrained system. That’s difficult to challenge, but that still needs to be challenged.

Jessica: We’ve done some pretty good groundwork here. Let’s get into allyship. What does the word ally mean to you? Why are some people saying that we shouldn’t use it anymore? That you can’t just call yourself an ally, you have to prove it or you have to have someone else recognize you as an ally.

Anne: That’s great. Yes, it’s interesting, this idea of ally. I sometimes call it like an old-school word. People now say accomplice, they say co-conspirator. Some people say champion or advocate. I’ve always said, just use whatever word works for you. For whatever reason, I’ve continued to hold on to ally. Then in another state, other than Minnesota, I was asked to come in and do a training around LGBTQ issues at a company. They said to me, “We like your content.” They looked at my training and they said, “but we just don’t want you to use the word ally because that will be triggering.”

I realized, maybe ally isn’t as old school as I thought. Maybe it’s still perceived as about notice things in effect change, because that’s really the core to me. I do say three things about what it means to be an ally. I say it really just takes three things. One is speak your truth. One is be respectful. One is stay in relationship. Notice none of that is change someone’s mind because you have no control over that. None of this is, don’t show any emotion. You can be upset as long as you’re relational. It’s like, what do I mean by relational? Stay in relationship with someone.

If they want to say something back to you, listen to them. Don’t just be an ally and walk away. Always be respectful, but also speak your truth. I think it’s a very interesting idea that we can’t just call ourselves allies when so many people are still scared of it. I still think it’s almost the positive thing for people to want to try to hold on to allyship. I’m not convinced that we have to have someone else call us an ally. I think we want to push ourselves to make sure we really are doing the acting part of allyship. One of the first steps of allyship, I’ll talk about this a little bit in a moment, but one of the first steps is also noticing things.

Just starting to notice the privilege, notice who’s at the table, notice who gets listened to, notice who gets hired, notice who gets promoted, notice who gets disciplined, notice who’s on the billboard or starring in the new sitcom or whatever it is. You’re starting to notice how the world works, but you got to go take it to the next level and start to challenge that. That’s where the vulnerability comes in. To me, an ally is really someone who’s willing to put themselves out there, particularly if they have privilege to use their privilege.

Because we don’t just say, “I just want to get rid of my white privilege. It’ll go away.” It’s not going to go away. People are still going to respond to me whether I want them to or not as a white person. Then how can I use that privilege, that access, unearned, but still, it’s still access to get people to do the right thing, to challenge racism, to challenge homophobia, biotransphobia, whatever it is? In that respect, I’m not so concerned about someone being able to say, “Anne, I think you’re an ally,” as making sure I can just review my life and say, am I showing up the way I want to show up?

Am I speaking out when I can? I don’t think we can speak out every moment. If our boss is really homophobic, it could be really challenging to call out that boss and we get to keep our job. We have material things that impact us. If I also know that I should have said something, but I got nervous, I can push myself the next time to push through my nerves. I like the idea that, yes, it’s important how others see us. It’s also important for us to bring that to challenge ourselves. Here’s where another word that’s really important in all of this work is the idea of accountability. How can I hold myself accountable?

Jessica: What holds people back from being allies? I have a whole book called, I think– I don’t know the exact title, but I think it’s something like, What If I Say the Wrong Thing? I imagine that that’s something that, it’s held me back in the past too. Like what if I say the wrong thing and the person that I’m trying to be an ally to, that I overstep or I don’t know. I’m sure there’s a number of fears, but what are some of the things that hold people back?

Anne: I’m as guilty of all of these as anyone else. I’m as human as the next person, even as I do this work. We’re held back because some of us really want to get it perfect. We really don’t want to jump in until we know all the facts and it doesn’t always happen that way. You might have a colleague of color who is claiming that something is racist and another colleague who’s white, who says, “I think they took it the wrong way.” In that moment, it’s, you’re like, “Oh, well, we should just do all this fact-finding.”

I’m not sure that’s the most important thing. Personally, I would say, “I think it’s pretty important to give a lot of care to the person who’s claiming that they’re sharing their lived experience of racism.” It’s not the case that we can always get it perfect. It’s not the case that everyone we speak up for or try to help in that respect is going to love what we do. That’s okay too. I’ve had conversations with people who have said, this really isn’t necessarily about you having to get approval from someone. It’s about living your values.

If I see someone, there’s a story I tell when I train, I won’t go into the whole story, but it’s black man, room full of white people, white woman, like cuts him off. Nobody in this particular space says anything. He was in a training I was in, and he said, “Look, I just needed one person to say something.” He said, “It might not have changed that woman’s behavior, but I would have felt less alone.” He said, “Even if I didn’t like what you did, you still could have done it because you think it’s not a good idea for someone to budge in front of someone else.”

The other thing that keeps us is we have this very misguided idea. This is to me, very upper Midwest, very Minnesota. Even though I wasn’t born here, but 35 years, I’m getting to learn the place, very upper Midwest. We think two things. One, we want everything to look okay at the outset. We somehow think if nobody’s saying anything, it’ll go away. That’s not how it works. We have to let things be messy in order for there to be healing in order for there to be learning. The other thing is we somehow think if I’m the one who brings up this racism or brings up this homophobia, this ableism, then somehow I’ve made everyone uncomfortable.

I like to remind people this reframe. People are already uncomfortable because of racism, because of sexism, because of homophobia, biotransphobia, ableism, et cetera. All we’re doing is shifting the discomfort when an ally speaks up. The myth is everything’s fine. I had a faculty member once, a white man who said, “Now in my search committee, you want me to start talking about race and gender?” I said, “Look, I want you to explicitly talk about those things because you’ve always been dealing with race and gender and other issues.”

We know that from implicit bias research, everyone shows pro-male and anti-female bias, pro-black and anti-white bias, but we’re comfortable not talking about it. The ally shifts it and says, “Hey, let’s talk about it because A, we know that’s the only way we actually minimize it and get rid of it.” What’s going to happen is that discomfort. “Oh, I feel better if everybody’s just quiet,” except somewhere someone’s hurt. Somewhere someone’s possibly thinking of leaving the organization or checking out.

There’s a lot of ways to leave. You can actually physically quit your job or you could say, “I’m not giving more than 100% or maybe 85. I’m going to phone it in because I’m tired of all this bias. We don’t really have engagement that we want in our organizations or in our families or in our social settings or in our schools or teams or in the military for that matter. If we don’t say we’ve got to talk about what’s going on, even if it seems to make people uncomfortable, that’s how we get to the accountability and ultimately the best teams.

Just real quick, what we know is that the teams that are most diverse and have the most psychological safety, the ability to have those conversations, they will do the best.

Jessica: Let’s talk about practicing. Let’s talk about how do we dig in? I think you brought three things anyone can do to try to be an ally or champion or advocate or co-conspirator, whatever language you choose to do. Basically to try to do the right thing around diversity, equity, and inclusion, especially when you’re the person who has privilege. What are three things that anyone can do?

Anne: I think the first thing, and this is particularly for someone who has privilege, the first thing is notice. Because part of the way privilege works, it’s a little bit like, I think, the fish in the water. You just don’t notice it. I remember talking to a woman who was heterosexual. I was doing a training around LGBTQ issues. I’ll tell you two quick stories about this. One woman said, “I went up to go to dinner and my husband was parking the car.” She said, “I went up to the stand to say, we have a reservation. The person said, “Oh, is your husband with you?”

She said, “I never would have noticed that until recently I realized, oh, this person assumed to have a husband and not a wife or not a partner.” Similarly, a woman who said she did that on the phone with someone where she assumed someone was heterosexual. Part of it is just noticing that when we think someone has a spouse or a partner, we assume heterosexuality. We assume everyone is cisgender, that they’re not transgender. I once had someone say to me something, I said something about a weekend. They said, “We assume everyone has the weekend.”

That for everyone, they don’t work on the weekend. For all sorts of people, they don’t have a weekend. There’s just so many little things that it’s not again to say, oh, it’s bad that that popped in my head to notice. I’ll give you one more that’s about me. I’m going onto an airplane. I’m not proud of this, but I know where it comes from. I’m almost 62 years old. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. I walked by the pilot who’s saying hello to me. She’s there with her cap and her pilot’s outfit. I just, for one minute, I didn’t say anything, but for one minute, I’m like, “Oh, female pilot.”

I’m like, “That is pathetic. I’m a feminist.” Just noticing that’s how deep sexism is, even in me, a woman. The next piece is to reflect. Notice it and then reflect, start to put the pieces together. Oh, I realized that every time I find out someone is a millennial, I’m making these assumptions about them. I realize, I just assume that they are always on social media, but that actually might not be true. Maybe someone who’s older is always on social media. Just start to reflect on the patterns that you start to see.

Then the third and final piece is that act or practice of actually calling out someone. An example of really great allyship was a man, a senior leader in an organization. He happened to notice that another man in his leadership team would talk over all the women in their meeting and he pulled them aside. This is similar to your story, he said, “Did you notice that you talk over all the women?” The first thing the guy said is, “No, I didn’t.” He goes, this ally, the man who’s an ally said, “Yes, I didn’t used to either, but now I notice it. Now that I see it, I can’t unsee it.”

It’s one thing to just see it. It’s never enough to just notice and reflect. You have to have that acting. Typically that third part, that acting practice, that finding your voice, that’s the part that’s vulnerable because you don’t know. Maybe someone will be mad when I say something. Maybe someone will shun me. Maybe someone will laugh at me. If we can hold on to ourselves and in our next Practicast, we’ll be talking about emotional intelligence. That’s why we talk about EQ, emotional intelligence, because this is hard work to hold onto yourself when someone’s pushing on you and saying, “Why are you making such a big deal? This is all just millennials”

Blame everything on millennials. That practice of actually saying, “Even if you don’t agree with me, even if you don’t understand this, I’m still going to find my voice and say, I’m still noticing you’re treating someone differently because of stereotypes, because of their social identity.” Those to me are three steps. Even if you’re just in the noticing, especially about– one thing I’ll just challenge most people is like, just imagine for a minute if you are someone who doesn’t use a mobility device, if you are someone who is not blind or low vision, deaf or hard of hearing.

If you’re someone who doesn’t have a mental illness or is neurodiverse, how does moving through the world just make so much sense? Imagine now you’re someone who gets migraines from overhead lights or who has a hard time getting into doors or can’t handle steps and just notice the next time you can’t figure out how to get into a building without steps. You start to realize, oh, this idea of accessibility is nowhere near as universal as I think it is. That’s just an example of how we can show up and start to notice this step one.

Jessica: I really love this three-step kind of framework, notice, reflect, act. It’s something that you can also remember. Speaking of reflect, in the handout that we’ll link to in the show notes, there are some reflection questions in there. There’s some really inspirational pieces for you to take a look at. Thank you so much, Anne, for guiding us through that. That was really meaningful.

Anne: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. The last thing I’ll just say real quick is the next person who tells you, “Hey, I’m an expert on this,” don’t trust them because I come as someone who’s made as many, if not more mistakes than anyone else. That’s what we want to do is create this community of all of us making mistakes, but also trying to do better. Thank you for letting me share. I really appreciate it.

Jessica: That’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We’ll be back next week with a practice for how to use emotional intelligence in our allyship. Until then, keep practicing.

Kalin Goble: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, U.S. Department of Defense under award number 2023-48770-41333.

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