I realized as I mixed together onion, fresh cranberries, sour cream, sugar and horseradish tonight that is is not the actual cranberry relish I love, but the tradition of Susan Stamberg slipping her recipe for Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish into on-air conversation, every year since 1972. I’ve heard her suggest it to foreign heads of state, Hilary Clinton…she even got Martha Stewart to make it one year.

In fact, I’ve served it at least five year’s now, and I don’t even think anyone else has noticed it’s a regular yet.

But this year is extra fun…Stamberg connected with rapper Coolio, host of an on-line cooking show and author of a book with the same name, “Cookin with Coolio.”

If I honestly assessed my unconscious biases as relates to rappers, I would have to say it would be that they don’t spend the day in the kitchen or even know how to cook, although perhaps I should have known better after Snoop Dog did his laundry on a T-Mobile sidekick ad a few years ago.   I stand corrected, and the show below is worth the watch.

Coolio ads his own multicultural touch, making “blasian” eggrolls (his term for food that is Black mixed with anythin Asian): traditional eggroll wrappers and asian spices with ground beef and cheese, among other things. For Mama Stamberg’s Cranberry Relish, he added Thai Hot Sauce.

You’re at a black tie event.  You’re looking for the restroom.  Who do you ask?

“Me,” joked our new friend who spontaneously joined us at our table at a recent black-tie-event, jovially laughing at the third time in the last 10 minutes he’d been asked for directions.  “It’s hard to be a black man in a tuxedo at a formal event—everyone assumes I work here!”

Which is absolutely ridiculous, when you look around and realize that ALL THE MEN at the event are wearing tuxedos.

Our friend made light of the situation, playfully making fun, but it does belie unconscious bias/prejudice that may accompany first, immediate reactions to others.

So how do you combat your own biases?  How do you ‘humanize’ others around you?  Just for fun, listen to your gut, and then do or say the exact opposite.  Such as…

1.  At a very fine event, ask the older woman who’s dressed the best where to find the bathroom (or step out of your comfort zone…ask the person who’s least like you.)

2.  At restaurants, events, etc., ask your server’s name—he/she too is a person, and actually has a big influence on your enjoyment of your evening.

3. If you meet someone from Brazil (or fill in country name or neighborhood in City, etc.) don’t say “I would never go Rio, I’ve heard the crime is terrible.” (Yes, it has happened enough that it warrants mentioning.)

4.  When speaking with someone with an accent, listen for content.  “And treat them like a person, not an accent,” adds my husband, a native Portuguese speaker.  And never say “don’t you speak American?” (Yes, I’ve overheard that, too)

What other things have you seen others do (or fess up, what have you done?) that reveal an underlying bias?  What was the reaction?

I was struck by author Malcolm Gladwell’s desicription of “Rapid Cognition” in the book blink, and how he used the example of the car salesman to show how ignoring sub-conscious ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to people can negatively impact the bottom line.  (e.g. assuming someone won’t be buying  a car strictly from their appearance/first impression.)

 When we (social justice?  race studies?) talk about recognizing unconscious bias, I’ve heard some say “that’s interesting for those people who need it.” 

I’ve also hosted workshops where we look at the identity of people in our circles–our dentist, doctor, hair stylist, mailman.  When some have noticed that most in their cirlce  are caucasian, participants have said, “but that’s who is near me” or “I don’t choose my mailman.” 

Gladwell makes a good point as to how purposely enriching our circle of contacts can expand our implicit associations with people of different race and ethnicitiy, and ultimately change our unconscious bias. 

Gladwell sites an example of someone who took the Project Implicit test daily, hoping to simply ‘better their score’ on the black/bad white/good unconscious association.  It doesn’t work.  But what does work is creating new associations to create new unconscious associations.

Here’s what he has to say:

“Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions–we can alter the way we thin-slice–by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.  If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way – who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites – it requires more than a simple commitment ot equality.  I t requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.  Taking rapid cognition seriously – acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first imressions play in our lives – requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.

 

Who’s in your circle?

Photo credit:  bookofjoe

Nancy Olson as Betsy Carlisle in 1961’s The Absent Minded Professor vs. Anna Faris as Sam Sparks in 2009’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs…We’ve come a long way, right?  Not really.

One of the joys of having kids (or borrowing other people’s kids) is for the excuse to indulge nostalgic yearnings by re-watching favorite childhood films.  My dad said I nearly fell off of my seat with laughter when the kids attacked the adults in  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Bednobs and Broomsticks was an amazing early example of combining ‘real’ and animated characters. 

For Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the Absent Minded Professor, however I felt like I was suddenly looking through the special seeing stone from the Spiderwick Chronicles, where invisible lurking dangers that were always there suddenly became visible.  For example, there are NO scientists of color in Close Encounters, and the only women are there at the end, as they prepare to board the spaceship to the unknown, presumably as breeders (my hair stylist, who is the same demographic in terms of age-middle- and race-white, but who ran with a more racially mixed crowd as a teen said ”I know, my black friends never wanted to go the movies back then because of the lack of representation.”) 

In the Absent Minded Professor, the Professor (Fred MacMurray) is really a benign but inexcusable potato-head who is cared for alternately by the ’spinster’ until he finally gets married and is turned over to the ‘wife.’  The new wife literally gets up from taking stenography for the boss at her job and walks out to take on her role as wife.  She is always subservient to and/or caring for the male characters.

Swhooh, well, at least movies TODAY don’t teach such superficial, subliminal messages, right?

Wrong!

While Sam Sparks, the main female character in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, is given independence and a career, she is still subject to a two-dimensional dilemma:  Shall she be Pretty and Dumb, or Ugly and Smart?  While the film supposedly is trying to say “hey girls, it’s okay to be smart” it does it through a lens that equates appearance with ability. 

She starts by giggling self-consciously after saying anything remotely intelligent.  When hero Flint Lockwood asks why, she explains no one liked her when she was smart/ugly (as defined by wearing glasses and a scrunchy ponytail holder.)  Ultimately she chooses to go with smart and ‘ugly’, but one should have nothing to do with the other, and it never does for men!   (In this review by Todd Gilchrist on Cinematical, he says “Cloudy again teaches a valuable lesson to young girls about valuing themselves as intelligent people rather than just beautiful ones”–it’s a great review for it’s thoroughness, but why should a woman have to choose between intelligence and beauty?)

This probably would not surprise Doctor Maya Götz of the International Central Institute for Youth and Educational Television, whose 2008 study measured the representation of male and female characters in nearly twenty thousand children’s programs in 24 different countries.  According to Jocelyn Christie in her 1st installment of Kids TV Gender on kidscreen.com, the study showed that “in general, girls and women are often:

     * conventionally beautiful, underweight and sexualized

     * motivated by a romantic interest

     * shown as dependent on boys”

Does this mean we should go out and ban all movies until our children are 18?  Of course not.  But it does offer an opportunity to have a conversation with your child after the movie.  As in “did you like the movie? I liked the movie but I didn’t like that Sam had to choose between being smart or pretty–someone’s looks shouldn’t determine how smart they are.  What do you think?” 

What are your kids watching?  Are you talking about it? 

Photo credits Absent Minded Professor from movieposter.com, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs from slashfilm.

“You’re kind of a racist,” he said.  “You do that all the time,” he added, referring to my knack of typecasting by gender.  He’s only 8, so his exposure and use of ‘intercultural’ terms is budding.  

“In this case you probably mean more sexist,” I explained, “when it’s gender, like men vs women, as opposed to race, that’s the issue.  In fact, when I was growing up,” I said, with an image of Jane, Dolly and Lily in 9 to 5 clearly in mind, ”men who always thought men were superior and that women couldn’t do anything were called male chauvanists.” 

“You’re a female chauvanist,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a female chauvanist,” I answered, admittedly knowing the meaning of the whole phrase but not sure enough of the individual words to know if a simple gender switch would mean what he was trying to say.  “I guess a female chauvanist would be called an…I don’t know,” I said out loud.

“I guess a female chauvanist would be called a…lesbian” my mind spontaneously filled in.

“Are you kidding me?” I thought, aghast and shocked.  That is like every awful stereotype of strong, professional women that exists, and yet that’s what was floating just below the surface.  But I’m a feminist!  How has my own unconscious bias (and parallel to internalized racism, where one believes what the “other group” says about them) held me back?  Has my unconscious belief led me to defer too often to the male leader in the room, or backed down when presenting ideas in gender mixed audiences?

 Moments of transformational self-realization can happen anywhere, anytime, but sometimes it takes practice.  Here are three tips for getting in ‘intercultural’ shape:

1.  Listen to the spontaneous words that come to mind when you look at different people.  If they’re not what you expected, rather than fear and squash them, try to figure out where they came from.

2.  Stick with discomfort, and the moment you start to feel defensive about your beliefs surrounding race or difference, take it as a clue to stop and listen more carefully to what is going on.

3.  Create opportunities to be ‘the other,’ and learn from the self-consciousness that may come from being different from everyone else in the room.

Have you made any shocking discoveries lately?  What did you learn from them?

I’m nervous about the “Beer Summit” tonight.  It actually could be a great opportunity to have a meaningful conversation about how stereotypes and bias play out in the media, and how that, in turn, influences perception and even behavior.

But I’m afraid the framework for tonight’s meeting isn’t right.  With the focus on “who’s drinking what” the power of the moment is turning into simply a photo op-probably of Gates and Crowley reluctantly shaking hands, with Obama smiling in between.

It feels like a train wreck waiting to happen.   Why?

1. There should be other people involved for a real discussion.  With just President Obama, Gates, and Crowley…if/when they don’t agree on what happened, will they just glare at each other coldly in uncomfortable silence?  Certainly the President should not be taking sides in a he said/she said (okay, he said/he said).

2. I’d love to see Lucia Whalen there, too.  Why does it feel like, once again, the woman is marginalized, off in the corner having to defend herself, and not brought to the table for discussion?  After all, it was the misrepresentation of her as privileged white woman reporting break-in by black men (she’s Portuguese-American, and did not identify the race, saying only ‘maybe Hispanic’ when pushed) that initially fueled the cut-and-dried view of the story.

3. Needs some balanced, comic relief, to help the conversation move forward, and hopefully get to a deeper level of understanding.  Perhaps now that Jon Stewart is the “most trusted man in news” he could be involved, and bring with him Larry Wilmore, the Senior Black Correspondent on The Daily Show.

I really do think a mature conversation about institutional racism (e.g. racial profiling in the justice system) and how it affects people’s lives, how media reports perpetuate stereotypes, and perhaps even how technology (e.g. the ability to play tapes and record actual events) can ultimately help would be really interesting.

Finally, as long as I’m making this up, I’m going to suggest that my colleague Tracie Hall, Founder of GoodSeed Consulting, and I head over to facilitate the conversation, and I’m sure Tracie also would have a couple of thought leaders to involve.

“Dear Mr. President, You’re on the right track, but you’re making a grave mistake.  I think we can help…”

 Who do you think should be there?

Photo Credit:  defekto on flickr

When the police arrived I said something coy like “I have absolutely nothing in this house with my name and this address on it because we just moved here.”  And they said, “okay”. 

The underlying assumption (aka privilege) of the interaction was that I was innocent, unless there was reason to believe otherwise.

But I’m still thinking about the Valley Swim Club.  After hearing John Duesler’s defense/apology, I’m convinced that diversity training or cultural sensitivity training or intercultural communications training or whatever you want to call it, would have yielded an entirely different outcome.

I believe that he believes he is not racist.  The problem was that unconscious bias/white privilege was built into how he set up the program.  He said “we wanted to do this.  We wanted to bring these ‘underprivileged’ (sic) kids into our pool, so that the poor children could have a place to swim (my interpretation).”  He approached it from the ‘overprivileged’ giving to the ‘underprivileged.’  There’s ‘us’ and then there’s everybody else.

Intercultural communications would have approached it more from an equal partnership point of view.  What’s the common ground where we are meeting?  A dialogue might have exposed things, like the kids don’t know how to swim (very common in summer day camps).  Or, just basic good event planning, intercultural or otherwise, would have dictated looking into additional lifeguards, bathrooms, etc. to accommodate larger than usual numbers of swimmers. 

From a public relations point of view, perhaps welcome signs for the visiting groups, a Public Service Announcement to members:  Valley Swim Club celebrates community by opening it’s doors, etc. could have been done in advance, a press/photo release to the local paper…all of this would have made sense, would have deepened the relationship, and ensured a smooth event.

While there is no excuse for the white parents who removed their children from the pool or made racist comments (shame on them), the club, as an institution, could have made this a successful program by being more engaged in what they said they wanted to accomplish.

In intercultural interaction, it’s a given that mistakes will happen.  In trainings, we teach tools for anticipating others’ feelings, but mostly for how to own one’s own identity and behavior, and how to respond when mistakes do happen. 

I would love to see a ‘do over’ between the organizations because I think both wanted the program to work.  Unfortunately, as it stands, there are raw feelings, public animosity, and really bad lessons being taught to the children.  This is a fantastic opportunity for a very public demonstration as to how to resolve issues of difference to arrive at deeper undertsanding.  In both this case and in the Gates case, I hope the key players are not fired, but rather forced to analyze what went wrong, given the right tools and training and required to publicly make it right.

Maybe Mr. Duesler could visit the day camp, admit that he has ‘egg on his face,’ and let the kids throw eggs at his face.

A few years ago I was with a group of women socializing after work, and we were talking about experiences of going camping growing up.  Each shared her memories, and then turned to me for ‘my turn.’  All I could think of was “We’re Jewish.  We don’t camp.”

Such was the reaction today during a workshop I led on Networking and Diversity for the Jewish Executive Network in Chicago.  We were doing an exercise on Dimensions of Diversity, to help get out of the ‘black/white’ paradigm and embrace multiple dimensions of diversity to help illuminate opportunities for connection to people who,  on the ’surface,’ might appear different.

Birth order, time management styles, dominant learning styles…and daring.  Go to this corner of the room if you’ve ever been skydiving, this corner if you haven’t but would like to, and this corner if you couldn’t be paid enough money to go sky diving!  And thus within our ‘homogenous’ group of Jewish professionals, we discovered the one brave soul, Steve, who indeed, had been sky diving.

The point, as relates to intercultural communciations, is that we never know what we might have in common with others to serve as the basis for communication and networking.  For this group, the objective was to network to find a new career opportunity.  The point of the workshop was to make sure that individuals were not inadvertantly closing off contacts with preconceived ideas of who might or might not help them (based on racial/cultural identity, position, or other superficial indicators).

The outcome was a fun way to explode the idea of diversity into multiple dimensions, creating exponential opportunities to connect.

Have you ever found something unusual in common with someone very different, that surprised you?   What was it?  How did you discover your connection?

photo by Darren Johnson