Leading with Purpose: Allyship and Leadership in DEI

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Jessica Beckendorf: Hi, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I’m Jessica and I’m joined again today for our final practicast in this series, 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 finding your voice as an ally, and Anne will be sharing a practice with us. Hi, Anne, how are you?

Anne Phibbs: Hi, Jessica. I’m great. I’m sad it’s our last chance to chat because I’ve really enjoyed this.

Jessica: Let’s learn more about finding our voice as an ally. I’m particularly interested in this. I think that this can be a tough one as it has been for me. I think it can be tough for others as well. Let’s start with the most basic of questions. Is it okay to just call yourself an ally? Can you just decide that you’re an ally and then go forth and ally, or do you need others to identify you as an ally?

Anne: Yes, that’s an excellent question actually. My guess is there may be some debate about that. I think it all really comes down to what do we understand to be an ally. I have a simple way I talk about being an ally. Three things you need to do, speak your truth, stay in relationship, and be respectful. Now, one could be an ally who never pays any attention to history or doesn’t learn much, just talks off the top of their head. That’s not a good ally. Is it okay to call yourself an ally? Yes, in the sense that it’s like it’s okay to call yourself a friend, but if you’re a horrible friend who never listens, never takes care of your friend, talks over them, has no emotional intelligence, you can call yourself a friend, but you’re really not a good friend.

I think the idea is what does it mean to be a good ally? I think one thing I want to differentiate here is to take away the idea that we have to be perfect in order to call ourselves an ally. I think that gets us in trouble, particularly when we have privilege. I’m going to speak from the experience as a White person, because I think while cisgender, heterosexual people have privilege, people without disabilities, men, et cetera, people who were raised Christian all have privilege, a lot of our thinking about allyship often comes down to how can White people show up for people of color and Native people in ways that are not either somehow re-centering us in the narrative, which is common.

Somehow showing up as a savior or helper where there’s no vulnerability and where we maybe get it wrong, and we don’t give people agency, and we take over. All of those things are not good allyship. If you are calling yourself an ally and your allyship looks like that, that’s a problem. I think it’s a little tricky personally to say, “Does someone need to identify you as an ally?” I’ll give an example. Imagine a White man who works in a predominantly White male-dominated field. I work with clients like that. You might not have many women of color, men of color, White women there to say, “Hey, I think you’re doing the right thing.”

I don’t ever want to connect allyship to somehow having it have to be approved by people because we need to speak up when we’re the guy on the hockey team and everybody is getting changed and somebody is telling gay jokes in the locker room. In that moment, you’re not going to look for the gay guy to say, “Hey, you’re good to go on allyship.” You need to find your voice then. You need to say it. You might get it wrong. I think what gets in the way of a lot of allyship is not wanting to risk things and possibly get pushback for trying to challenge racism.

White people are going to be really nervous about getting pushback from people of color and Native people. We have to get over ourselves and go, “Okay, if I do, then I can learn from that.” If what I’m doing is waiting to get a approval from certain people, it puts too much of a burden on them. They might not always be in the space. They might not be in the locker room. They might not be in the boardroom. They might not be in my room filled with White women in HR, but I still need to find my voice. What I would say is if you say, “I’m a really big ally,” and you are getting feedback from people with marginalized and underrepresented and oppressed identities that you’re not helping, yes, you should stop calling yourself an ally, and you should learn from them.

Jessica: Are there some people who feel like being identified as an ally is an important part of being an ally?

Anne: I definitely think there’s been some pushback, and some of it good, about seeing certain people come in the space. Let’s think about what happened after the murder of George Floyd four years ago. We’ve seen a tremendous rollback, and not just DEI initiatives, but active anti-racism within organizations. There’s reason to think, “Oh, here comes White people once again saying, “Oh, sign me up. I’m a big ally.” There’s distrust. Okay. If you are a White ally, a White person who’s an ally around anti-racism, pay attention to that.

Pay attention to the fact that somebody might be like, “Yes, that’s great, Anne, that you said this, but I’m actually going to wait and see if you show up to the meetings.” Not just this month, not just this year, not just when it’s great, how about when it gets tricky? How about when other people fall away? Are you still here? That idea that we need to prove our allyship by continually showing up, again, not being perfect, but showing up when it gets messy because it will get messy, when it gets difficult and challenging, because it will, when it requires us to be vulnerable, when we mess up, if we’re staying in it, that to me is real allyship. I think that’s the idea behind, don’t just walk in here, say you’re an ally, come to a meeting, and then when suddenly there’s pushback, I never see you again. That’s not allyship. Stay in it.

Jessica: What is the difference between being an ally and being actively engaged in allyship? I think one of the things you just identified is show up, but is there a difference and what is it?

Anne: One of the ways you know you’re an ally and you have some privilege is when you can leave. When you say, “Ugh, this anti-racism work is too hard,” then partly, you know you’re White because people of color, Native people don’t get to walk away. When you say, “Oh, this LGBTQ ERG is so conflicting because we’ve got some older people who are gay and lesbian who aren’t understanding the non-binary younger folks, this isn’t even my community, and I don’t even understand it, so I’m going to back out,” people notice that, instead of staying in and going, “Okay, it’s making me feel vulnerable because I’m not quite sure where I should come down. I’m not quite sure of my place.”

Stay in that and stay accountable. I’m much more likely as a White person to make mistakes around race than people of color and Native people. That’s already a disincentive to stay in that space. Nobody wants to join the sports team where they know they’re going to be bad. That’s not fun. You’ll never be the best softball player. You’ll never be the best soccer player, but you have to go in there and go, “Am I going to show up even though I probably have so much to learn that I’m going to be continually challenged? How do I stay in and not take the glory and not take the voice away from folks who are here?” If I’m really committed, I’m going to stay here even as there might be some complexity and pushback.

Jessica: Then when we’re in these spaces, how can I be sure I’m not showing up as some kind of social justice savior when I use my voice and my privilege to challenge injustice and bias?

Anne: The simple answer is actually, we’re not always sure. It’s that uncertainty that we have to live with. This ties back to another theme of emotional intelligence. We got to hold on to ourselves. Let’s imagine we’re talking about workplaces right now. When we go into the workplace, typically we have a job description. We know what’s expected of us. For many of us, we want to do a good job. We want to be seen as doing a good job. We have a pretty clear idea because of things like informal and formal feedback, performance reviews.

I know I’m doing my job. Now I want to show up as an ally. It’s not so clear-cut. There’s not some supervisor there saying, “Oh, Jessica or Ann, you did a good job trying to be an anti-racist ally.” What happens is it makes us a little bit hesitant to do it. We get nervous, we get scared, so we got to hold on to ourselves and go, “This makes me feel vulnerable because I’m not exactly sure if I’m going to do it right. I’m going to trust that people will tell me if– I can always solicit feedback. More importantly, I can be open to it when it’s given to me.”

I might be in a meeting. I might say something like, “I have some access to so-and-so who has some resources, and maybe I could ask them to support our program. Maybe that’s a great idea. Maybe somebody says, “I don’t think it should come from you, Anne, because you’re White. I think it should come from someone else. Someone who’s been with our organization more, who’s a person of color or a Native.” My tendency is to immediately go, “I messed up. I should never have said anything. They don’t like me.” What I’ve got to do is go, “Okay.”

I’m learning, I’m paying attention. Now it all works out great when they’re respectful. Somebody might be just annoyed or edgy for any reason, including they’re a little edgy that the White person is stepping up. Okay, but I’m going to stay in it because my experience as a White person doing this, and let me be really clear, I did a lot of my activism as a queer person. That was a lot, lot easier to come from my marginalized identity. I was very active in the LGBTQIA-plus movement for many years. It’s much harder for me to try to do anything around ending racism as a White person.

Big learning curve, but what’s been important for me is to stay in it and keep talking about it, even as I make mistakes, and to forgive myself because I’m holding myself accountable in this way that I feel all the shame and blame, when we talked about accountability, doesn’t get me anywhere. This is why, for allies, you’ve got to really embrace vulnerability. That is hard because we want to do well, we want to succeed, we want to know we’re doing the right thing, and we want someone to give us that instant feedback. That’s not always what allyship is, that someone who’s queer turns to you and says, “Thank you so much for how you just supported the queer community.” That’s great if it happens, but it might not. Are you still going to show up?

Jessica: We’ve started to get a little bit into this, but I think that’s a great segue to talking about some of the biggest challenges for people being able to consistently practice active allyship. What gets in the way of us consistently practicing and not walking away when things get hard?

Anne: The challenges are that sometimes we do this without building community. I think doing this work in community is what sustains us. Let me be clear, I’m queer, I’m a lesbian. I feel like I’m an ally to bi folks, I’m an ally to trans folks, I’m an ally to non-binary folks. I’m an ally to gay men because there’s biphobia, there’s transphobia among gays and lesbians, there’s misogyny and racism in the LGBT movement. I feel like, want to be clear that even within movements, even when we have marginalized, minoritized, underrepresented identities, we still need to be allies even within those communities.

I think this work is emotional. It’s about our identities. It can be very challenging. There’s pushback. We’re talking about challenging systems of hundreds of years that have been cemented into our institutions. When we go do that by ourselves, it’s going to burn us out. Let’s face it, burnout is one of the biggest issues for people who are allies, is it feels like we’re just pushing our head against a wall or we get promised things or people think certain things are going to happen. I’ve had this happen to me, where you work and you’re strategic and you’re doing all the work, and all of a sudden, one particular leader just puts the kibosh on something.

It’s so tempting to just walk away, especially if you’re someone with some privilege, but the community can sustain you. By that, I just mean that you have people that you’re doing this work with where you can vent, where you can say, “I need to take a break,” and just go watch television, whatever, go for a walk, whatever it is you do. Say, “I’m going to take a break for a few months and then come back,” or, “I’m going to do this work but it’s going to be different.” Maybe less direct organizing work and more writing, who knows, but have a community of people to sustain you.

For me, that community is also about just laughing. I just had all my consultants together, we have a retreat every year. It was just so amazing to be in the same room with all these people who are feeling a lot of the same things about how challenging this time is, how much work there is to do, but there was also so much laughing and just enjoying each other and people came up to me. I felt the same way of, really re-energized but just heard and seen and cared about. I think that’s one of the most important things that gets missed sometimes is the need to build a community.

It doesn’t just mean you come into the ERG and say, “I better make sure, as a White person, that the people of color are friends with me.” They may not have that energy for you. Be friends with other White people who are also allies. Men can find other men who care deeply about ending sexism and racism, other things, and say, “Hey, I grew up as a man, not really talking about my feelings, but I’m trying to work on that. Can we have coffee?” Just starting to build that community. It doesn’t even have to always be focused on deep things. It can just be being around other people because this work is intense.

It can be draining, it can be traumatizing, and can bring up trauma from what we’ve grown up with. To take that seriously, that you are in this for the long haul for the rest of your life, so you don’t have to go from 0 to 100. I’ve seen that happen too. I hear that sometimes from newer allies, like, “I’m so overwhelmed, I’m so angry.” I hear that. I’ll have people say, “I don’t think I could talk to someone because I get so angry.” Part of that is, for newer allies, let’s take for White people, starting to realize things that they didn’t have to realize.

Suddenly you do a little deep dive into the racist policies and practices of the United States of America. You’re overwhelmed by how horrible it is and how intentional the racism has been. The anti-Black racism, the genocide toward American Indians, the racism, all that we’re seeing with the demonization at the border, everything going on. You’re overwhelmed and you’re angry. Then suddenly, you’re not a very effective ally. Someone who’s constantly angry is not going to be able to bring people into a relationship. That’s why you need the community.

That’s why you need to remind yourself that our people of color and Native people living in a deeply racist society, they find ways to be in community that sustain them. If you go in as the angry White person spouting off all the time, and then you’re like, “Why isn’t anyone else in this meeting angry?” Well, because they’ve been living with it their whole lives. Starting to realize, okay, that’s some emotional stuff I can do some work with. Maybe I do it with other White people. Maybe I do it with people of color if they’re willing to talk to me about it, but I don’t expect it. Part of the challenge is that it’s very intense work and that we can burn out. I encourage people to say, “How can I sustain myself?” I think it’s much more important that I show up in two or three years than that I attend every single meeting right now and do everything because a lot of people, especially the people with privilege, drop out when it gets hard.

Jessica: Yes. Oh, thank you for sharing that. That makes a lot of sense. This concept of building community reminds me of something I learned through Heather Plett’s The Art of Holding Space. Basically, there’s a concentric circle and the people at the center of the circle are the closest to the event in this case, if it’s an event. She talks about this concept of, you’ve got the concentric circles around and then dump out. Dump toward the outside of the circle and comfort in. Comfort is probably not the right way to talk about it in this case, but it does remind me of that building a community of support that are maybe in the same concentric circle that you are in or possibly on the next tier as well. It’s a concept that makes a lot of sense to me. I’d like to talk a little bit about the difference between allyship and leadership. Is there a difference? Is it appropriate for people with privilege to be leading social justice and DEI efforts?

Anne: Great questions. I would say to me, allyship is really the first step, but really, where people want to be is to see themselves as leaders now. The idea of leadership is a really fraught concept for a lot of people. We have very good reason to have these images of leaders are White, cisgender men. Every president of the United States with the exception of President Obama has been a White man, and all the statistics about how many White men and millionaires are still in the Senate and things like that, you start to realize that leadership for us sometimes seems like, is that something we even want to go toward?

I think of leadership as more with not a capital L, but a little L, from wherever you are. You don’t have to have a lot of power and resources. You don’t have to supervise people. There’s the concept of informal power, the idea that people listen to you. What I like about leadership is just taking it to the next level and saying, someone who’s a leader around diversity, equity, inclusion is someone who’s going to stay with it. Again, that might look different depending on if you’re getting burned out and you need to take care of yourself, but you’re going to see that this is not something you just do for one year, or you just do because of the particular place where you work.

This is something about more of your identity, that I want to be someone who’s really working towards social justice. It’s complex about if it’s appropriate for people with privilege to be leading. On the one hand, you want to be really, really careful about that because the way that implicit bias plays out is we still see White people as leaders more than people of color and Native people. We still see men as leaders more than women. I’ve had some experience looking at organizations focused on disability justice. You would be amazed at how many are led by people without disabilities.

Partly that’s connected to a deep paternalism that is one of the strongest stereotypes around disabilities that people with disabilities need to be cared for and are not full human beings. You see people running organizations who have a child who has a disability, they’re very connected to disability, but not people living with disabilities themselves. For that reason, we want to be really careful about that. That said, we desperately need people of every kind of social identity to be leading. If there’s a DEI committee and it’s gone defunct, not surprising. The people are getting back up and running, you have some good organizational skills. You’re a White person.

Let’s say you’re a White woman and, no one else is stepping up. Could you step into that role with a really committed anti-racist focus and say, “For the next year, I’m willing to step in and do some work, but I want to move us toward co-chairs, I’m going to build some capacity with some colleagues of color.”? I think that would be great. The idea of, I’d never step in because I’m White, I think that’s the wrong approach. I think we can be very deliberate and intentional in how we do our work because the how is always as important as what the work is.

I just had a example of this working with a DEI committee as a client, and there was one member of the DEI committee who just talked over everyone. I’m not even saying that this person didn’t have good ideas, but how they related to the other people on the DEI committee was pretty appalling. That is not allyship. That is not good leadership, saying, “I have a big budget,” or, “I know this stuff,” or, “I’m really smart.” It happened to be someone who was male and two of the other people were women, and he just talked over them. I’m just like, “Okay, this is a problem.”

Even though we had good ideas, the dynamic did not feel good. What you need, and this is a central piece of allyship, is that self-awareness, and that’s the emotional intelligence. How am I bringing people along? How am I not making this about me? How am I making sure that we’re really being equitable and inclusive in everything that we do and how we do it? Yes, the bottom line is we need everyone to see that they could be a leader, but leader in a way that’s really inclusive, and really equitable, and really self-aware.

Jessica: I think you brought a practice with you.

Anne: I did.

Jessica: Let’s go through that. How can we find our voice as an ally?

Anne: Yes. It’s interesting, when I was writing this practice, I wasn’t really thinking that I’d be talking so much about that idea of community, but it really does relate to that because my practices are really about seeing how there are people around you, you can learn from and to not see yourself as alone. I recommend taking a moment to identify someone in your life that you see as an ally, advocate, champion, accomplice, there’s always a new word, whatever word works for you, and to write down why you think they’re an ally.

What is it they do and don’t do that causes you to see them as an ally? This may not necessarily be someone that is running the DEI committee. This may not necessarily be someone that has a particular identity. We want to look at their behaviors. Then now consider how you measure up to this person. Not in some kind of creepy, “They’re better than me,” but what actions do you do and not do that are similar to this ally? Can you identify areas, topics, opportunities where you could use more knowledge, skill-building, and practice?

How can you get more of what you need to develop as an ally? Then actually, my last piece of this was, and this gets it a little bit of vulnerability, what would it be like if you reached out and had a cup of coffee with them? Took them to lunch or just, on a Zoom call and said, “Hey, here are some things that I’ve seen you do that I think are really great. Here are some ways that I’ve seen people relate to you.” I’m thinking about a male leader that clearly respects the women that work with him, and another male employee saying, “I’d love to talk with you about what it means to be a man growing up in this system where we have this certain idea of what it means to be a powerful, assertive male leader. I see you do that kind of leadership in really different ways than was modeled for me. That’s who I want to be, but here are some of the ways I’m feeling challenged.”

That’s vulnerable. We all know mentoring is a great idea. We all know the reverse is true. Of course, you could also be thinking, “Who might be someone that I’m seeing that I think I could take to coffee and actually mentor them?” Maybe they don’t even know they need mentoring, but I could check in with them. That idea of building community, I love the idea of a practice of development. If I could finish with one story. I had done a lot of queer activism, worked in the LGBTQIA-plus office at the University of Minnesota, and I went to the University of St. Thomas.

They were doing a big workshop on anti-racism. I went because I knew I needed to do some things, but I didn’t quite know what to do. I felt stuck as a White person. I went and they paired us off with someone, and they said, “We want you to commit to something. We want you to commit to something and stay connected to this person and then be an accountability buddy.” Okay, I’ll be honest, never talked to that person again. That’s true. However, it was in that moment of actively committing to my wanting to develop as someone who’s actively anti-racist, I stayed committed to it.

Now, I, again, didn’t commit with this person, but I love the idea of accountability pairs. I’m a big fan of that even though I’m sharing that I didn’t do it in this instance. There was something about making that commitment, overtly writing it down, that made a difference in my life. I’ve made many mistakes since then. There are things that I have done and haven’t done, but I definitely have moved toward trying to be an active ally around anti-racism, and I will for the rest of my life.

Jessica: As you were sharing that, I wrote down a couple of names of people that I know and I admire who I think are excellent allies. They are people who I haven’t had coffee with in a while, so I think I will talk about this with them.

Anne: Oh, cool.

Jessica: I’ll follow through on your exercise. Thank you so much for guiding us through that. I think building community and doing some reflection in this area is really, really helpful idea to helping you find your voice. 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 to celebrate National Veterans and Military Families Month with Ms. Amy Rodick, Director of the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy. 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, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense under award number 2023-48770-41333.

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