I recently signed up to teach an allies skills workshop, and I was thinking to myself, why do I find allies skills workshops valuable? I am passionate about DE&I but I don’t find all DE&I workshops to be as consistently valuable. For example, there is some controversy as to the effectiveness of unconscious bias training.
I participate in the DE&I initiatives at my work as a way to be a good ally, and support the employees around me; as with most training, I often find the communal elements to be the most valuable. Hearing the diverse experiences of my co-workers helps to better understand the unique challenges in a given workplace, but I’ve found the format of the allies skills training I attend to be uniquely valuable.
There is a reasonable question to ask: “How can you teach or impart knowledge into someone about how to be an ally”. How can you teach empathy in a classroom out of a book?
But this belies the reality that a good allies skills training isn’t about attaining knowledge, it’s about building skills.
Behaviors that occur in the workplace, and leave people to feel unwelcome or even threatened can often be quite shocking. How many of us have been in a situation where we silently think to ourselves “Oh my god, I can’t believe they just said that!.” Being an ally means we have to quickly get beyond our own shock to act in the moment.
We need practice at pattern identification. And that practice should be ongoing. The allies skills training I’m taking is a series, starting with an initial class, and following up with a set of scenarios to discuss with other members of the class every few months.
I have a story about this. Recently, I read between the world and me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I’ve read it before, but for some reason, it affected me differently this time. In preparation for a discussion group, I listened to several podcast-interviews of Ta-Nehisi Coates and have to say I’ve become a real fanboy. — The reason being is that he’s a deep intellectual and though he’s passionate about the issues, in the way he communicates he is able to balance his intellectual rigor with his emotional fortitude. He has strong evidence for everything he believes. And for a nerd like me, this approach is very convincing.
But being steeped in his views and worldview, I noticed a greater openness to unfamiliar experiences, particularly the black experience — since that is what he writes about.
During this time, I watched the documentary “All or Nothing” Season 4, which follows the Carolina Panthers through their 2018 football season. About 12 minutes into the first episode the white tight-end Greg Olsen, explains the premise of the musical “Hamilton” to his mostly black teammates. A few sentences into the description, Cam Newton, the quarterback asks:
“Are there any black people in there?”
My initial reaction as a lover of the arts might be to ask, why is that the most important thing to know about a musical? But at that moment I was able to see a bigger context, about what it’s like to grow up in a different world from your teammates, and grow up in a world where all of the most popular stories don’t represent your worldview.
You may think to yourself “Well that’s obvious, of course, people of color want to see themselves in art.”
But there is more than one type of knowing, and engaging in a series of allies skills training can be a way to immerse yourself in the learning experience.
There is complete ignorance — I could sit in an advanced math class, have a teacher explain a concept in detail and leave the class as ignorant as I came in. I just don’t have the framework necessary to understand the material.
There’s a sort of background or prepared knowing — When I hear something in the right context, I can understand it.
And then there’s the level of knowing required to act — I can identify a pattern in an otherwise out of context life. I can understand without having it explained to me.
In this blog post, you were prepared to hear a story about having empathy for people with color. Will you be in the same mindset in the middle of a meeting, or when your mouth is full during lunchtime?
This is the goal of an allies skills training, not just to inform you about the experiences of people who are different from you, but to immerse you in their world, and the types of experiences during which you might have to intervene.
This way, when you are in a position where something uncomfortable or even harmful happens around you, you can identify it, understand it, and act.
