DEI in 2024: Change, Pushback, and Hope with Dr. Anne Phibbs

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Bob Bertsch: Hi, it’s Bob. You are about to hear a conversation about how the diversity, equity and inclusion landscape has changed over the past five years. Jessica and I, along with our guest Dr. Anne Phibbs, reference specific events that we think have impacted the DEI landscape. The opinions each of us chare in this episode are our own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of OneOp or the Department of Defense. Thanks, and I hope you find our conversation helpful.

Kalin Goble: Welcome to Practicing Connection, a podcast exploring the personal stories and collective practices that empower us to work together to improve our resilience and readiness in a rapidly changing world. Here to start the conversation are Jessica Beckendorf and Bob Bertsch.

Jessica Beckendorf: Hi, welcome to the Practicing Connection podcast. I’m Jessica Beckendorf.

Bob Bertsch: I’m Bob Bertsch.

Jessica: Our guest today is 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.

Bob: We first worked with Anne in 2019, when we helped produce a podcast series to help people on their journey toward a more inclusive, culturally informed way of working. So much has happened in the past five years since we recorded that podcast series, and we wondered how those changes may have affected diversity, equity, and inclusion and the conversations around it. We’ve invited Anne to join us for this conversation, and for a series of practicasts to help us all move forward toward inclusive practice. Hi, Anne, welcome back. You haven’t been on Practicing Connection before, but we’ve worked together before and recorded before. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast.

Anne Phibbs: Oh, absolutely. Thanks so much for inviting me. I’m excited to be here.

Jessica: Let’s actually kick it off with exactly what Bob was just talking about. How do you think the diversity, equity, and inclusion conversation has changed since 2019?

Anne: What a great question. That is only five years, but when I was thinking about that question, there are so many things that have changed. That’s part of the work of being an ally, an accomplice, a co-conspirator, a champion, whatever word we use, someone who cares about creating more equity and inclusion. Part of it is being prepared for the change because it is not static. I would say the first thing that comes to mind is the brutal murder of George Floyd in Memorial Day 2020, which happened in my city in Minneapolis, that sparked a Black Lives Matter movement that had been developing.

We saw, The New York Times said the protests that followed that murder in summer of 2020 were likely the largest organized social movement in the history of our country. I lived through that as a DEI person. I also lived through it as a White person, recognizing that reckoning, if you will, some people called it a racial reckoning, is still never as scary for me as a White person with my privilege as it was for my friends and neighbors and colleagues who are people of color, Black people, Indigenous people. It woke a lot of people up, and in particular, I would say it woke a lot of White people up.

I read some articles about how there was almost, especially for White Americans, a sense of, “Well, I need to be on this bandwagon. I don’t want to be the White person who’s not at the march, who’s not in the street, who’s not putting out a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard,” that kind of thing. What I find really striking, it really shouldn’t be surprising for anyone who pays any attention to the history of race and racial equity and racism in our United States because our country is absolutely built on a racial divide and racism. Still, when we think about what’s happened in those four years, it’s pretty striking that we went from this, again, the largest social movements that were around race, that were around challenging racism, that were, where the rallying cry was, “Black lives matter.”

We painted that on the streets of Washington DC, and we marched. People contacted me and said, “We want to put out a statement,” organizations, nonprofits, for-profit companies. People formed organizations, and they hired DEI people. They actually used language like anti-racism, which I had not heard as much of in DEI work, the actual phrase, anti-racism. People were reading Ibram Kendi’s work around anti-racism, and lots of other wonderful scholars. To think what’s happened in four years should give us pause, but should also remind us that this is lifelong work that is not going to happen in one movement or two movements, or one summer where suddenly everyone was in the street.

That was a flashpoint, it was this reckoning, it was this way that race came to the fore. I think what it can remind us today in 2024 is how easy it is, and I really say this for people like myself who identify as White, how easy it is for White people to let it slip back, but that’s exactly what’s happened. We haven’t just seen it slip back, we’ve seen actual pushback. I have a slide in a training I do, and the head of the slide says, “Pushback, resistance, and fear,” because we have that. Sometimes I had someone in a training today say something very smart, and that’s wonderful because I always steal the smart things that people tell me in any context, especially my trainings.

They were talking about how sometimes the pushback or the resistance is passive, the person who just doesn’t do anything. They don’t have to actively be racist or actively be homophobic or sexist. They just have to not put any energy into the equity efforts, the DEI efforts. I think that happens. I think we’ve seen an increase in pushback, resistance, and fear. We saw the whole blow-up around critical race theory, which my personal opinion is critical race theory is just understanding the history of our country. We saw a lot of things come out about it’s designed to make White people feel badly.

Suddenly, it was something that you couldn’t teach in schools in certain states in this country. We saw the affirmative action ruling from the Supreme Court in June of 2023 that made it illegal to use considerations of race in admissions and higher ed, which on the one hand you say, “Okay, that’s a narrow scope. It’s admissions, and it’s only higher ed.” The fact of the matter is having that come down from the Supreme Court really functioned to make people nervous, even people who are outside of higher ed, even nonprofits, or corporate, or business entities to say, “Oh, maybe we can’t talk about race in things like our hiring, or who we select for internships, or things like that.”

There’s been concentrated efforts to attack things like scholarships or other programs that targeted, in particular, communities of color and Native communities. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of anti-LGBTQ legislation attempt to be passed. In 2023, 525 state bills, 220 of them were focused on trans issues and 70 of them passed. Some of them were everything from you couldn’t fly a Pride flag to you couldn’t use the preferred, or really, the pronouns that are used by someone if they’re trans-identified, to bathroom bills. A whole blow-up around children listening to drag story hour somehow going to be ruined for listening to really creative people read them stories.

We’ve seen a complex, I would argue, last five years with pushback and resistance and fear because some of this is absolutely stoked by fear, the critical race theory, the anti-LGBT laws, et cetera. We’ve also, though, seen, and this is so much of DEI work is about a both-and frame that, yes, there’s pushback, there always will be. There always has been. It is really lifelong work, but there’s also things that have been happening that are exciting. We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the discussion around things like neurodiversity and mental health.

When I discuss mental health issues and talk about the fact that 20% of Americans live with a mental health condition, I share that some research shows that those younger generations, Gen Z and millennials, are twice as likely to talk about mental health in their workplace than people of my generation, like the boomers or Gen X. That’s a good thing, because I don’t think not talking about things is ever really the answer. It’s freaking some people out that people might talk about things like taking care of their mental health in an interview for a job, but that’s happening more and more.

We’re seeing significantly more discussion about LGBTQIA plus issues, and things coming out that say 25% of high school students identify as LGBTQ. That means 75% of high school students know someone likely is LGBTQ. It’s just a huge generational difference in terms of talking about it. I’m not going to make the argument there’s more queer folks, ad I myself identify as queer lesbian because we’ll never know how many people there are when it’s a stigmatized, non-appearance, or invisible community. We’re certainly talking about it more. We’re seeing it more in pop culture.

We’re seeing it more in the more in gay-straight alliances, and things like that. We’re seeing a multi-generational workplace, which is both exciting and good for business, if you will. It also means there’s tension sometimes about things like what one comes out about or talks about. Gen Z and millennials are known to be much more likely to support diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts than other generations. They want to see that in the places they work. I also think that there’s been slowly more of a focus, diversity is still a focus, but there’s been more of a focus on inclusion and belonging.

You’ll see people adding in the B especially. The idea that we can get people in the door. For example, if we’re a primarily White organization, we might be really trying to get people of color and/or Native people into the organization, but once they come in, are they at the table? Are we listening to them? Do they feel like they belong, like they matter? There’s some research that shows that there’s a feedback a supervisor gives you that is actionable. Actionable feedback would be, “Bob, you are doing a great job, but let me tell you some of the things that I think would help you move into a leadership position.”

We know that White men are much more likely, from supervisors, to get actionable feedback, than White women, women of color, and men of color. We’re seeing that we need to build workplaces where we’re training our supervisors and our leaders to have these conversations and think about when we bring people into our organization, we add that D, that diversity, how do we get to the I, and the B, the inclusion and the belonging? Then the last thing I’ll say to tie it back up, going back to what happened, the murder of George Floyd, certainly, what we have seen is a pretty significant increase after 2020, of increase in people hiring diversity, equity, and inclusion positions.

That has leveled off and even dropped, so that’s been an unfortunate change. I think part of why that is, is that maybe some people are learning that this really is not something where you just throw a position at it or you just say, “Oh, we’ll add this,” and then there’s pushback, and then there’s budget cuts or things happen. Or there’s, we know that there are some activists out there who are actively trying to call large companies out on their DEI efforts and trying to get them to backpedal. That has been successful to some degree. Part of what we learned is that there isn’t going to be this one moment where suddenly everybody realizes this is the work to do and we do the work, and we don’t backtrack, and we resource it, and we commit to it, and we move it forward.

In fact, George Floyd and the murder of George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement taught us, similarly to many other things in the history of race in America, that it’s two steps forward and one step back. I was thinking of Dr. King’s quote, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I still take that view. I think a lot of people didn’t realize quite what they were getting into. Part of what I like to do with the people I work with is remind them that this work is different than other kinds of work. In some ways harder, it’s more personal, there’s active pushback against it.

It isn’t enough to just be a good person and say, “This will be our public policy efforts. This will be our base efforts or HR,” because when we’re starting to talk about race and gender identity, and disability, and neurodiversity, and social class, and nationality, and religion, we’re getting deep into people’s personal beliefs and moral beliefs. It can get a little bit tricky, but there’s no way around it, we got to go through it.

Jessica: I was just going to say there’s so much bravery and vulnerability involved. Those are two things that are really difficult on any topic, much less something that touches everyone so deeply. A couple of things stood out to me that I’m wondering about. First of all, it’s only been five years and all this has happened. Is it because we’re feeling fired up about it now, but that’s going to go away? Are there patterns that you see, is this going to go away? Does this feel like this is shifting for the long term? You see where I’m going with that?

Anne: A couple of things. First off, there’s always been movements. There’s been social movements around immigrant rights, and farm workers, and the American Indian movement that started here in Minneapolis, and all the waves of the women’s movement, and the homosexual rights movement that turned into the LGBTQ movements. We have a long, long history of this. Part of anyone being part of this work, you want to remember that history and remember that it goes back and forth. There are wins, and there are losses. The one thing I would say that is shifting that I didn’t quite mention that I think for me means it’s going to be harder and harder for it to go back is the demographic shifts.

We are shifting demographically around race. By 2045, the majority of our country will be people of color and/or Native, but for kids, it’s already happening right now. We’re a majority country of kids of color and/or Native. For 18 to 27-year-olds, that happens in two years. That doesn’t go away, that the fastest growing racial identity in the United States is multiracial or biracial, especially young people coming out as non-binary and identifying as not heterosexual, the rise of this queer identity, it’s going to be hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

I don’t think we’re going to move back toward the binary. The fact that people are just coming out about being neurodiverse and saying, “Yes, I have ADHD. I have autism spectrum disorder, and it’s my superpower, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I need a workplace that prepared for that, not like your neurotypical person,” it’s hard to imagine that stuff is going to go back. As millennials, and we now are seeing older millennials start to come into the workforce as leaders and supervisors, I think that’s going to start to change. That does give me hope.

I saw some recent research that was very interesting that both older women and younger women are skewing more liberal, more radical in some ways. That’s been a surprise for some people, especially the older piece. Even if we think about the discussion of childless cat ladies, we’re having this whole conversation in our country about what it means to be someone, a woman in particular, who doesn’t have children. Are you still valuable? It seems a bit absurd that we’re having that conversation, but that’s what we’re grappling with. What is the role of women in society?

What does it mean if something we took as a fundamental right for 50 years suddenly doesn’t exist for us anymore? I think you’re seeing more and more people saying, “This is foundational, and we’re not going to fall back on that.” Doesn’t mean there’s not going to be that pushback. In some ways, the work is always there. The pushback is there. We have to be smarter and look around the corner and figure out how they’re coming to push back and say, “We don’t want these efforts,” but the demographic shift is a hard thing to do away with.

You’re not just going to automatically have more White people in this country at this rate. I don’t know why we would want that, but some people might. We have to have conversations. Even what we’re seeing with the immigrants, let’s have a conversation about how we have always been a nation, of course, with Native people who were original people, but also then a tremendous number of immigrants. Of course, some people who were brought here against their will as enslaved Africans, but that we’ve had this deep history of immigration that suddenly doesn’t stop because we’ve thrown in a mix of racism.

Nobody is freaking out about the people coming from Europe, but suddenly the Haitians and the people from Central America and Mexico are freaking people out. We have to have those conversations and talk about whole areas of our rural state that have been revitalized because of Somali immigrants, our Hmong population, which is one of the largest in the country, or people coming from Mexico and Central America, and revitalizing schools, and tax bases, and workplaces. We have to have those conversations.

Bob: How do you think some of those changes regarding the pushback have changed things for people who have been involved or care about moving the DEI needle in their communities or their organizations?

Anne: I think it has made some people very exhausted. I know people, and I’ve heard stories about people who leave DEI work or leave that kind of equity work because they’re sick of the ways that people will say one thing and then not resource it, not support people. There’s been also a big conversation about how do we sustain ourselves. I think this is particularly true for people of color and women of color, many of whom are leading efforts. When we think about who gets hired into DEI positions, it’s often women of color, some men of color, some White women.

The traumatizing effects sometimes of working in a primarily White organization takes its toll. There’s been some discussion around some high profile, really powerful, amazing Black women who didn’t make it, who either through health issues or other means decided they couldn’t handle things anymore, or their bodies gave out, or whatever it was. There was some discussion about, “This is real. It affects our bodies, it affects our health.” To me, it’s a strong argument for why it’s crucial that every person in an organization steps up and that it never works to just say, “We’ve got this really crackerjack DEI person. We’re just going to make sure that we give her a good budget and she can hire some staff, and then she’ll turn everything around.”

A, she will always face pushback and challenges, but B, no one person or even one unit or one group of people are going to turn around an organization. There’s been some discussion about that too as we’ve seen DEI become institutionalized. We didn’t have these positions in the same way 20 years ago. Now that we’ve had them, we’ve seen that sometimes they’re stable and sometimes they’re not. We see that people often put people in there and expect them to perform miracles, which they can’t do. We see that the burnout is quick and intense. Then some people are like, “I can’t do this.” It’s like anything we’re learning, we’re learning the challenges, but again, it comes back to over and over and over again, everybody has got to see this as central to how they do their work. It just does not work to say, “We’ll just have this group that has this set knowledge, and then everyone else can just zoom along like they’ve always been doing.” It doesn’t work that way. That’s where some of the pushback comes in because they’re the people who are like, “Hey, I’ve been doing my job for 20 years. I get great reviews. Now you want me to talk about race?” This is a White person, “Or gender identity? You want me to use a different they/them pronouns? It doesn’t even make sense to me.”

Yes, actually, that’s what it means now. This idea that the workplace should stay static and be exactly like it was when I entered it 23 years ago is absurd, but that’s what we hear. Here’s where I want to weave in one of the frames that I use a lot, which is emotional intelligence because what’s underneath that is often fear. Like, “Oh, so now I’m a White man and people have always liked me. Now who am I in this DEI work? I don’t have a place.”

Jessica: “What if I say the wrong thing?”

Anne: Exactly. “I’m going to say the wrong thing. I can never win because I don’t have the right social identities. Either I hide or I try to say the right thing, but I don’t put myself out there and be vulnerable and be part of the solution.” We need everybody to step up. I know that one thing you had asked me to think about, it’s okay to bring this up, is you asked me to think about what gives me hope. One of the things that does give me hope is that, in my work, I always run into people who are the people who I wouldn’t know would be the big champions.

They might be White men. They might be people with not a lot of positional power. They might be people who are just trying in whatever way they can to show up and do the right thing, but they exist out there. They’re not trying to get all the glory, and they’re not trying to say they have all the right answers because they know they don’t, but they want to be a part of the solution, which gives me a lot of hope to run into those people. I do all the time.

Jessica: Is there a difference between what’s happening in rural areas versus what’s happening in larger communities? The reason I think of this is I’ve worked a lot in rural areas, and I’ve seen a lot of people talk about belonging.

Anne: Yes, it’s a great question. Part of what we need to do is push back on some of the, we have stereotypes about everything. We have stereotypes about the rural-urban divide. One of the strong stereotypes is A, that– I’ll put it this way. I had a woman, I was working with a state agency that works across the state of Minnesota. This woman lives in a rural community, and she said, “Boy, everybody I know thinks that people who live in the country, who are rural are not very smart, and we’re all Republicans.” She said, “Those things are not true for me.” She goes, “There’s plenty of rural people who are very, very bright, and a lot of different reasons why people want to live away from urban centers.”

Then I think about another story where I was working with a school district that was the exurbs, like past the suburbs, and they were seeing an increase in students of color. They went to this, there was a school board meeting, and some of the stuff that got said to the school board was, “This is why we moved here because we didn’t want this diversity. That diversity is the cities. It’s the twin cities. It’s not us.” We have to push on that and say, “There’ve been people of color, and of course, Native people across the entire part of the United States.”

I’ve done some work with the USDA and some of their work around really talking about the history of Black farmers and that there’s a deep history of Black farmers in this country. If you say farmer, very few people are going to imagine someone who’s Black. When we think of rural, we think of a certain political ideology. We think that they’re not as sophisticated. We think that they’re not going to be LGBTQ because if they are, they would have gone to a city by now. Even if some of those things are true, for example, there are a number of queer folks who do gravitate to cities from the country, but there’s also, it goes the other way.

People who live in small communities who are queer because that’s what they want. Part of it is pushing past those stereotypes we have, even as we recognize it might play out differently, it might look differently. One of the words and letters that people are adding that my company actually has added to diversity, equity, inclusion is the A for access. I think about the issue of broadband access. For most of us, and I myself live in Minneapolis, it’s not an issue. We don’t, typically in the urban centers, think a lot about broadband access in the same way that you think about, I’m talking to some people in rural America, in rural Minnesota, and they’re like, “Yes, I got to do my homework, so I have to drive over here to try to get access.”

What counts as access? How do we recognize that access might look different? To recognize that there are equity issues for people living in rural America and that we have to push past those stereotypes in order to understand them and have them play out.

Jessica: Why do you think DEI is important and have those reasons changed recently?

Anne: Boy, why is it important? People often talk about the moral case and the business case. I’m trained as a philosopher, and I’m not going to lie. For me personally, it’s the moral case that I have quite a bit of privilege. I’m White, I’m middle class, I grew up speaking English. Also as a queer kid and as a woman, I know what it’s like to not be considered. I was in a relationship for 25 years that produced two children where I could not legally be married, even though my twin sister could. She had two kids. I’m like, “I don’t quite see how denying me marriage is really helping anybody else.”

Now I am legally married, which I never thought I’d say in my lifetime. On some level, I know personally what it’s like to grow up thinking, “I’m not okay and I’m different. I wonder if people will be okay with me.” I don’t want anyone to grow up that way because they’re a kid of color, because their parents are immigrants, because they’re neurodiverse, whatever it is, or they have a disability. It’s also just completely unnecessary. There’s no reason whatsoever. There are reasons psychologically as humans, that we sometimes tend to group and keep out outsiders, but we’re developed enough to know that it’s really a bad idea. It’s hurtful.

Reducing harm and hurt and injustice is the moral argument. That will always appeal to me, but there is a very, very strong business argument. If anything, I don’t think the business argument has changed, but I think there’s a lot more data around it now. Can I read something that I pulled that I thought was interesting? This is from an article in January in 2024. It’s a couple of professors from the Harvard Business School. They are talking about this guy, Eric Larson, who has a firm that helps companies make and learn from decisions. He did some research.

He found that all-male teams outperformed individuals nearly 60% of the time, but gender-diverse teams outperformed individuals in decision-making almost 75% of the time. Teams that were gender and geographically-diverse and had at least one age gap of 20 years or more made better decisions than individuals 87% of the time. There is a lot of organizational psychology data that shows that diverse teams function better. We know that companies that have especially racial and gender diversity in senior leadership are better. They innovate more and they make more money, quite honestly, if that’s the goal of the company, which most of the time it is.

The idea that we’ve also seen a really strong increase in this notion of psychological safety, the idea that can I push back on my team and not fear that something is going to happen to me? I think a lot of that about how can we work together and recognize that difference actually is a real plus. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but let me tell you the title of this article. The title of the article I just referenced is Critics of DEI Forget That It Works, which is a great title because actually, it does. Psychological safety, making decisions, innovation, creativity, decision-making connects to the bottom line.

There’s a very strong business case. Again, we go back to that demographic shift. If there’s more people of color and Native people coming into the workplace, if there’s more neurodiverse, more queer, more women coming in who are skewing more, not necessarily super family-focused, if those people are coming in the workplace, what do they see on your website about, are they welcome, are there DEI efforts? What we know from the research is they’re looking for that. Unlike me, who’ve spent 11 years at one place and 11 years at another, don’t know why, what was magical about 11 years, but I look on Facebook now or LinkedIn and one year, two year, people move now.

That is a huge difference. Whatever you think of it doesn’t really matter. It’s just the way it is. If you want to get the best and the brightest, you want them to look on your website or talk to someone, or find out there’s an employee resource group that they could join or efforts that they could be involved in. Then they’re much more likely to feel connected to what they do there. All of it seems so basic. It’s so basic to say if you feel like you matter and people don’t bully you, and you can feel included, and you can show up whoever you are and be okay, this just feels like such common sense, but we have to say it over and over and over again to remind people.

Bob: I love, Anne, that you brought up the research that you mentioned about the efficacy of diverse teams. It speaks to one of the core principles of why Practicing Connection exists and where it came from. We came out of a lot of network principles when we were asking the question, how do we solve complex issues or address complex issues? The network principles answer is diversity of thought, right?

Anne: Right.

Bob: That’s why networks, in our view, can be, in certain situations, more powerful than hierarchies, or other kinds of ways of organizing. Right?

Anne: Yes, absolutely.

Bob: That really touches the heartstrings. It raises a question for me as like, so that’s one of our foundational principles, I’m wondering, in the work that you do and the immense experience that you have training and guiding organizations, what are those foundational principles of the work that you do with organizations?

Anne: Great question. One of the foundational approaches, one is intersectionality, that we are all a mix of personal identities, but also different social identities. Race, gender, disability, nationality, social class, religion, and that those things never just impact us by themselves. I’m a queer person, but I’m also White, and those things interact in certain ways. That is a focus. The legal theorist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, was the one who put this forward. I don’t know if you know where it comes from, but it’s very interesting case where there was, I think it was a rail yard or something, and there were Black women.

All the people who did the clerical work were White women, and all the people who did the manual work were primarily men of color. I don’t know if it was women of color, I think it was Black women, and these were Black men. The Black women sued and said, “We face not just gender discrimination or race discrimination, we face this mix because we’re this mix.” Actually, the lawsuit was thrown out because they said you can’t face both, which is like, yes, that’s wrong. Kimberlé Crenshaw has a great TED Talk that you can hear her tell that story.

She does a great job of talking about, especially for women of color, how you cannot pull apart our gender identity from our racial identity and other identities as well. That’s a central feature. Also, the idea, another keyframe that we use, one, as I mentioned, is emotional intelligence, that it’s never just going to be about the right public policy or having the best analysis or being smart, that we do this work in relationship. I always say, judge your allyship by just three things. Did I speak my truth? Did I stay in relationship? Was I respectful? That’s how we show up as allies.

We’re going to build this within our organizations, this ability to hold each other accountable. It’s the core of the work because what we know about implicit bias is all of us are going to make mistakes. No one gets a pass. No one is so oppressed that they will never say anything biased. If instead we can shift that frame and go, “Of course we’re biased. It’s part of being human. I have millions and millions of pieces of information in my head, some of which came from 1967 when I was five years old. It’s going to affect my decision-making and my thinking.”

If people can bring me into conversations when it shows up, we can make better decisions, and no shame, no blame, not disciplinary, punitively focused, but relationally focused. The other piece is sustainability, which gets a little at what we talked about before, this idea that you’re not going to be able to maybe maintain everything with the same group of people for the next 20 years. How are we always building leadership? How are we always looking at, who did I learn from, and what can I pass on? I’m one piece in this work. One of the biggest pet peeves I have in DEI work is the people who make DEI work all about them when they say, “I’m the best,” or, “I’m a superstar.”

I’m like, even the word expert, “I’m never going to be an expert on the lived experience of people who face racism, so don’t call me an expert.” Am I someone who can help people along because I have quite a bit of experience? I think so, but I’m no better than anyone else. What can I learn from others? Now as I get older, what can I pass on to other people? How can I see everyone has the potential to lead on this issue, no matter what their social identity, no matter their lived experience? Somebody who says, “Oh, I grew up on a farm and I never was around people of color. Now I’m in this organization, and I just–”

I’m like, “Yes, so you could lead. You have stuff to learn. You have to have a lot of self-awareness, but nothing keeps you from leading around equity if that’s what you care about.” I always say it’s about our social identities and it’s about our values. Because of that, everybody can show up as leaders, but that sustainability, that helps with that. There might be times you need to just back off and say, “I can’t do this anymore. I need a break.” Then there are other people to step in.

Jessica: Something that gives me hope is that you can always act on your values.

Anne: Right.

Jessica: Earlier you mentioned something that’s giving you hope right now. I’m wondering if you had anything you wanted to add to that.

Anne: The power of young people to push absolutely gives me hope. People willing to just live their truth and say, “This is who I am.” The activists like Greta Thunberg who are pushing against with climate change. That is always hopeful to me. Also, I think about a White colleague I have who’s a little bit older than me, who has really come into her own as a racial justice advocate who isn’t trying to take anything over. She’s just trying to roll up her sleeves and do the work. Or all sorts of people I know who have started often because they know someone who’s non-binary or queer or someone in their family–

I had this guy, he was on a training. It was interesting because of your focus. He said, these are his words, “I’m a regular guy. I was in the military.” He said, “See these tattoos?” on his arms. He goes, “Yes, this is from my time in the military.” He said, “People look at me and they never think I have a non-binary kid, but I do.” That’s the kind of thing that really gets me when somebody is willing to say, “Yes, you think I don’t care about this, but you don’t actually know me. You have this stereotype.” We do that certainly with people in rural America, we do with the military, don’t we?

Oh, well, if you’re in the military, all I know about you is you’re in the military. I don’t know anything about what you believe or how you live your life. When he said, “I have a non-binary kid and this issue really matters to me,” it was very moving. That gives me hope too, that people are just starting to say, “Hey, I can find my voice.”

Bob: One thing we know I think this work can be is challenging. Do you have a personal practice that you find helpful to keep you energized, keep you resilient?

Anne: Yes. You leave the hardest question for last. This is the one where I’m supposed to say that I center myself through yoga. [laughs] I have two really good friends. I have a PhD in philosophy, so I know how to read, but I’m someone who, if I get a book and I lay in bed, I’m asleep, but I love television, and I love movies. Now with streaming services, there is so much good television. I have these two friends, and it was the middle of COVID, it was four years ago. I thought, I don’t want to have a book group because I don’t read, but I could have a group of people who watch TV shows, and we’ve been meeting for four years.

One of the things that really helps me, both of these people in my life are very deeply committed to social justice. I run things by them, and we talk about things, but we also laugh a lot. It’s in that, I do sometimes when I’m training, remind people that you have to do this work in community. That’s the only way to survive it because sometimes things are just so painful or so challenging, or you work hard for something and it doesn’t pan out, or you know that you’ve been treated poorly or whatever, or you just hear one more story that just, you can’t even imagine this is happening.

To be able to have people who are there for you and support you, and for me, I just love being able to really have a really good laugh. That just helps me feel happy about the world. When I find a show and my friends and I are talking about it, and we were just doing this about a particular show that we’d all seen at different times. We did the, “Do you remember this episode and do you remember this episode?” We’re all just laughing again. That’s my practice, I would say.

Bob: Thanks so much, Anne. You have us smiling, and I can feel it being energizing just as we’re talking here. Thanks so much for joining us. I so look forward to our conversations to come as we can dig into some of the stuff that we talked about today. Dr. Anne Phibbs is the Founder and President of Strategic Diversity Initiatives. You can find out more about her work at strategicdi.com.

Jessica: That’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed today’s episode, click the Share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We’d love to hear what you’ve been thinking about and what’s inspiring you. You can share that with us by clicking the Send Us a Text Message at the top of the description of this episode. If you’re listening on a computer, you can email us at [email protected]. We can’t wait to hear from you.

Bob: Be sure to listen to us next week when we talk to Anne about social identities, privilege, and allyship, and what those mean for us. Thanks again to Anne. Thanks to our co-producer Coral Owen, our announcer Kalin Goble, Maggie Lucas for help with marketing, and Nathan Grimm, who composed and performed all the music you hear on the podcast. We hope you’ll listen again soon. Until then, keep practicing.

Kalin: 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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