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STEP 1: LEARN, UNLEARN, RELEARN

Our work as allies often begins with unlearning what we know about success and opportunity. Like many people, I grew up being told that if you work hard that hard work pays off, you get what you deserve, you live your dream. But for many people that’s not true: they have to work 10 times as hard to get to the same places, while working against many barriers put in front of them.

Our gender, race, ethnicity, disability, religion, age, sexual orientation, class, caste, geography, country of origin—all can give us more or fewer opportunities for success. Barriers to success and opportunity can come from:

   Historical oppression. While history is in our past, the effects of colonization, enslavement, human rights violations, and systematic discrimination continue to shape the present for many people. For some people, this oppression never ended.

   Systemic inequities. Because most of our systems were built during times of oppression, uncorrected inequities continue to persist in education, policy, justice, finance, healthcare, workplaces, and more. Historical oppression and systemic inequities also caused intergenerational trauma and a significant wealth and health gap.

   Cultural marginalization. People are marginalized by systems as well as culture, from the stories we tell and who tells them—through film, media, toys, games, books, advertisements, word of mouth, and other ways culture is replicated. This can shape how we see each other and how we see ourselves.

   Personal biases. Biases are often a thread from our past, learned instincts passed down through families, friends, and culture. When they emerge in our words and actions, they can be harmful, affecting someone’s work, career, and ability to thrive. We explore biases more in “Step 2: Do No Harm.”

The first step of becoming a good ally in the workplace is to become aware of oppression, inequities, and marginalization that our colleagues experience, understand our unique histories and cultures, and acknowledge them. By building deeper empathy for each other, we become more effective allies and can create stronger and healthier workplaces and communities together.

From a global and historical perspective, the number of groups that have suffered oppression and discrimination is staggering. In this chapter, we discuss Indigenous peoples across several continents, Black Africans and Black people in the United States, women across the globe, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, and people with disabilities. But this is only a partial list of the many people who experience oppression and discrimination.

Similarly, while this chapter includes a few examples of oppression, inequity, and marginalization, the extent of these abuses is far greater than we have space to explore here. I encourage you to keep learning about the experiences of people whose identities are different from your own, unlearning what you know about history, and relearning by opening yourself to new ideas and viewpoints.

Special note and trigger warning. We’ll be diving into subjects that can be difficult and uncomfortable, and for some this may surface anger, shame, or trauma. You’re not alone, many people experience these at one point or another. If these feelings come up as you are reading, please make sure you work through them. Take a moment to breathe, meditate, go for a walk, exercise, and/or talk these feelings through with someone you trust.

A New Chapter in Awareness

On May 25, 2020, George Perry Floyd Jr. was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis police officer. Darnella Frazier, a 17-year-old girl, filmed the murder that lasted more than nine minutes—and the video was shared around the world. This was not the first murder of a Black person by a police officer (a Black person is killed by a police officer in the United States at a rate of more than one person every other day), but this time something changed.¹ Just a few weeks earlier we learned that Ahmaud Arbery was jogging in his own neighborhood and was murdered by three White men, Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan. Before that, Breonna Taylor, an essential worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, was shot and killed in her own home by police when she had committed no crime.

Many people across the world were sequestered at home feeling anxiety and anger about a pandemic, with lives being lost each day and disproportionately, the lives of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people in the United States. Almost one in four people in the United States were out of work. We were uniquely tuned in while sports teams stopped playing, and film and TV studios stopped releasing new content. George Floyd said the same words Eric Garner had said when he was killed by police in 2014: “I can’t breathe.”

There was a collective awakening like I have never seen. Despite the risks of COVID-19, people of all races and ethnicities protested in the streets for days, weeks, months, globally. On social media, many people became newly engaged with diversity, equity, inclusion, allyship, and social justice. My Black colleagues became overwhelmed with people who are not Black reaching out to them, asking if they were OK and how they could take action. My consulting colleagues and I were suddenly overwhelmed with inbound requests from companies seeking antiracism and allyship training, and other work addressing DEI—many companies for the first time were looking to address these issues. Just days before, most consultants like us were struggling to stay afloat with the disintegration of corporate DEI budgets during COVID-19 and the resulting economic downturn.

If you are new to this, welcome! I’m glad you’re here, you give me hope and strength that we can create much-needed change together. Now that you are here, it’s time to do the work of learning, unlearning, relearning, and then—above all—taking consistent action. I ask you to keep an open mind as you read these pages, and as you continue throughout your allyship journey—allyship requires some internal investigation as well as external activation.

We all have something new to learn; I’m still continuing to learn and grow as an ally. The journey truly never ends. Together, let’s continue to unlearn, relearn, and create the change we wish to see.

History Has a Point of View

As a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York some time ago, I was required to take a couple of art history classes as part of my degree. I resisted it, I wanted to learn from contemporary artists and theorists, rather than linger on a history of art that was mostly focused on White men (what people at the time called the “White male canon”). The women I saw in typical art history classes were mostly on canvases, often nude, painted by men. I didn’t want to spend another three months of my life learning about them.

Then I found a course on the history of women artists, which was all at once fascinating, validating, and completely angering. I learned about women who were painting at the same time as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Wassili Kandinsky, and others who had influenced my early interest in art (before my work moved into installation art and video). I had never heard of Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Clara Peeters, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Hilma af Klint, Augusta Savage, and so many others. Women weren’t written about in history books or theory articles during their lifetimes—even as they were written about in diaries and letters as influencers—because usually art historians and theorists were men who didn’t value their work. Art created by women was rarely purchased and shown by museums because usually curators were White men—and because women artists hadn’t been canonized as leaders in their field by historians.

Women artists were quite literally written out of history. In fact, even at my school, women were written out of other art history classes and relegated to just this one course. Even in this course, we learned mostly about White women artists—the course did not explore the many Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian, and Middle Eastern artists that were also written out of art history. (Plus, it most certainly did not discuss the structural barriers that historically kept more women with diverse identities from even studying and becoming artists in the first place.)

Fairly recently, museums have started to diversify their curatorial staff and rewrite art history to include women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and other artists who were left out. It’s an early and ongoing correction that has been decades in the making, due to the hard work of many people and organizations pushing for change.

How we tell stories, who tells those stories, who is the subject of those stories, and how they are portrayed—all of this matters. Stories sculpt our collective worldview, how we see ourselves and each other, how we understand success and opportunity, how we build our systems and processes, how we make decisions, and why we make them.

When our stories and histories are told from one point of view, key people and their stories are written out of history. Generally, we tell stories about what we know and whom we know, with a worldview we developed from people with similar identities to our own, passed on from generation to generation. We have to actively seek out new perspectives, new voices, and new experiences to change our worldview.

Our History of Oppression

We have as a society done some very cruel things to each other historically, which can have a long-term effect lasting through generations into the present. When we learn more deeply about what our colleagues and neighbors might be going through and the barriers to opportunity that some people face, we can support each other to succeed in spite of those barriers. And we can help dismantle those barriers and work to heal from their impact.

Stolen Lands, Stolen Treaties, and Stolen Resources

In the 1400s, European people began to colonize lands and people at a global scale, in search for wealth and conquest. Colonialism told from the point of view of Indigenous people is a very different story than what I learned in our history books. From a Euro-centric perspective, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue to “discover” new lands, Diogo Cão “discovered” and explored the Congo, Vasco De Gama “opened” new trade routes to India, Hernán Cortés “conquered” the Aztecs, James Cook mapped lands from Hawaii to Australia and “claimed” them, and so the story goes. These men set out to explore and chart unknown territory, find gold and spices, and claim new lands for their kings, and later groups like the Pilgrims fled to freedom from persecution.

That’s what my history books told me. Now I imagine my Indigenous and Black classmates reading these stories, and how they must have felt—where were their ancestors in this history?

What was left out of my history books was that Indigenous people lived here in North America for at least 15,000 years, developing rich, innovative cultures and traditions, and a deep relationship with the lands. Colonizers and conquistadores who arrived to “discover” this “new world” enslaved Indigenous people and claimed and exploited land that was not theirs to claim. In the Caribbean, the Taíno were the first Indigenous people colonized by Christopher Columbus. On the island now called Hispaniola (half of the island is now Haiti, the other half is the Dominican Republic), almost all Taíno people were killed by disease, war, and enslavement—the Taíno population went from 250,000 to 500 in less than 100 years.⁵

During the first 100 years of colonialism in the Americas, an estimated 56 million people died—more than 90 percent of Indigenous people in the Americas—due to disease, displacement, and war brought by colonizers and conquistadores. This was about 10 percent of the entire global population at the time.⁶ My high school history textbooks definitely did not teach me about this genocide called “The Great Dying.”

For those who survived, colonialism brought forced relocation and assimilation, which destroyed families, livelihoods, languages, and cultures. Colonizers made empty promises, most treaties were broken, and sacred Indigenous land to this day continues to be destroyed for resource extraction. It is a failure of how history is told that most Americans remember the names and stories of the few men who conquered the Americas, but not the names of whole cultures lost during this period of colonization.⁷

My home in San Francisco is on the traditional lands of the Ramaytush peoples in Yelamu. The Ramaytush Ohlone were colonized by the Spanish in 1769, forced to convert to Catholicism and live in overcrowded missions. By 1842, most Ramaytush Ohlone were killed, including all Yelamu. From 15,000 people in 11 tribelets, just 15 people survived.⁸ Only one Ramaytush family lineage continues today.

If you live on traditional lands of Indigenous people, please consider learning about them and acknowledging them in meetings, events, even websites. An acknowledgment can be as simple as: I acknowledge we are on the traditional land of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples in Yelamu. I honor and respect their Elders past, present, and emerging. You can always go further toward a public commitment. Here is my own: I recognize I benefit from living and working on their unceded ancestral homeland, and commit to working to redress the legacies of colonialism.⁹ Either way, don’t stop at acknowledgment, support Indigenous people in working, speaking, and leading with you. We live on their traditional land, and Indigenous people deserve recognition, health, wealth, and power here.

Indigenous people continue to experience the effects of colonialism today. In the United States, home to 574 federally recognized Indian Nations, many people were forced onto reservations in geographically isolated areas far from their traditional lands, where the government built their homes (as part of the treaty agreements) with no running water or electricity, in areas where they cannot grow their own food, and where even now their land is still taken, burned, or mined. Unemployment rates on reservations are often very high, and access to healthcare and mental health services can be limited. And whether living on reservations, in suburbs, or in inner cities, one in three Indigenous people in the United States lives in poverty.

Deep institutional inequities exist in education, healthcare, and justice. Indigenous people in the United States are the most likely racial group to be killed by law enforcement, followed by Black people.¹⁰ Indigenous youth are 30 percent more likely than White youth to be referred to juvenile court rather than charges being dropped.¹¹ Indigenous people are more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested, and if convicted serve longer and more severe sentences.¹² Indigenous women are incarcerated at six times the rate of White women, Indigenous men at four times the rate of White men. Yet Indigenous people are twice as likely to be victims of violent crime, mostly committed by non-Indigenous perpetrators.¹³

Indigenous people experience similar patterns of historical oppression and systemic inequities globally. First Nations people in Canada experienced disease, war, relocation, Christianization, and forced assimilation. For over 100 years, children were forcibly taken from their homes and enrolled in boarding schools, often facing physical and sexual abuse, poor sanitation, disease, and lasting trauma. The last residential school closed in 1996. For 630 First Nations communities, many still don’t have access to safe drinking water, experience significant health disparities and lower life expectancy, are more likely to be victims of crime, and make up over 30 percent of all people who are incarcerated (while they are only 5 percent of the total population). First Nations women in Canada are 42 percent of all incarcerated Canadian women.¹⁴

Throughout Latin America, home to 50 million Indigenous people from between 500 and 800 different cultures, Indigenous people faced similar oppression and today experience significant disparities in health, wealth, and opportunity, as well as land destruction and exploitation.

Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples lived on their lands for at least 65,000 years before British James Cook landed in 1770, called it “New South Wales,” and claimed it as property of King George III. An estimated 750,000 Indigenous people lived in the region, speaking over 250 languages.¹⁵ Though many fought the colonizers, the Indigenous population declined to less than 74,000 by 1933. Similar to the United States and Canada, children from the Stolen Generations were taken from their homes and forced to assimilate.

In these few pages, there is no way to address 65,000 years of history, thousands of cultures, and millions of experiences of Indigenous people across many continents. Please continue your learning journey—there are many books and articles that can fill in the gaps in our knowledge about our history and the rich cultures of our neighbors, colleagues, and friends.

And then remember that awareness and acknowledgment are only the beginning: allies take action. Due to the results of colonization, there may not be many Indigenous people in your workplace, so your allyship for Indigenous people may start outside your workplace. There is a lot of room for allies to support Indigenous communities in their fight for rights, access, and opportunities—and repair hundreds of years of historical oppression across the globe.

Enslavement to Segregation to Redlining

While people had lived in Africa for at least 250,000 years,¹⁸ after a heightened period of invasion from the early 1880s to 1914, Europeans occupied and claimed almost 90 percent of the entire content.¹⁹ Colonialism stripped African people from their Indigenous languages and ways of life, stole and enslaved people and took them to a new land, divided the continent, destroyed resources, and caused widespread deforestation and desertification.

Within Africa, millions of Indigenous African people were displaced to undesirable lands, forced into brutal labor and enslavement, imprisoned, and killed; many died of disease brought by colonizers. In the Congo alone, an estimated 10 million people (about 50 percent of the population) were killed during the occupation of Belgian’s King Leopold II.²⁰

Over 100 years, African people fought and regained their independence, starting with Egypt in 1922, until Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia in 1990. Yet colonialism had built artificial borders between people, destroyed economies and governing structures, and upended lives and cultures. After gaining independence, the effects of colonization lingered in the form of wars, authoritarian rule, and systematic segregation and discrimination like apartheid in South Africa, which lasted until 1994. African economies had become reliant upon export to Europe, resulting in cash crops, resource extraction, and environmental depletion.

For more than 400 years, millions of African adults and children were taken from their homes by Europeans and forced into enslavement across North, South, and Central Americas; the Caribbean; Europe; and Asia. The first enslaved Africans sent to North America arrived in Hispaniola at the turn of the sixteenth century (the same island in the Caribbean where the Indigenous Taíno people had been colonized and enslaved, and faced genocide). Between 1501 and 1866, at least 12.5 million African people were forced into crowded ships and taken to the Americas. Nearly 2 million people died in captivity during the many months of forced overseas migration called the Middle Passage, where overheating, thirst, starvation, disease, violence, and suicide were common.²² The absolute horror of being stripped of freedom, family, and home and shipped across the ocean in cruel bondage is suggested by the small sign displayed in Figure 3.1, which Africans passed through on their way to slave ships: “Door of No Return.”

FIGURE 3.1  Photo of Cape Coast Castle’s “Door of No Return” That People Passed Through Before They Were Put on Slave Ships¹⁶

[Photo credit: user Sixthofdecember on Wikipedia]

More than 472,000 African people were taken directly to North America, though hundreds of thousands of people were traded between North, Central, and South American and Caribbean colonies.²³ Through several generations, many millions of people were born and died enslaved by other people, experiencing severe cruelty on many levels.

From the time people were captured in Africa, Black people resisted, rose, and rebelled. Many people played key roles in the abolition of slavery in the United States, including Black writers like Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (aka James Albert), Phillis Wheatley, and Frederick Douglass; people who started rebellions like Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and the captive Mende people on board the Amistad; people who fought in courts like Dred and Harriet Scott, Elizabeth Freeman (aka Mum Bett), Mary Ellen Pleasant, and Sojourner Truth; many along the Underground Railroad like Harriet Tubman and William Still; and the many people who fought in the Civil War.

Allies also played an important role: Quakers adopted the first antislavery resolution in 1688 forbidding members from owning slaves or taking part in the slave trade, and helped in the Underground Railroad. Indigenous Seminole communities in Florida, a diverse group of Indigenous people who were themselves refugees, offered a safe refuge for Black people who were free or escaped from enslavement. Several allies helped along the Underground Railroad like Laura Smith Haviland, Elizabeth Rous Comstock, and Levi and Catharine Coffin whose home was called “Grand Central Station.” Writers and activists spoke out against slavery, like William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony.

On June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, the Union Army finally freed people enslaved across the United States—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. This is the day we honor and celebrate as Juneteenth.²⁴ Yet life remained very difficult for freed Black people in the South who often worked as sharecroppers indebted to landlords, experiencing extreme poverty, severe racism, and black code laws that restricted their civil rights to compensation, voting, and owning property. Later Jim Crow laws legalized segregation across almost every area of society for almost 100 years: schools, transportation, restaurants, restrooms, public spaces, and other institutions were separate and unequal. Black people were systematically denied access to housing, healthcare, and insurance. Through a practice called “redlining,” into the 1970s, governments and banks made mortgage decisions based on a person’s address rather than qualifications and creditworthiness, a practice that continued with insurance, credit cards, and even the building and resourcing of hospitals, schools, lending institutions, and grocery stores.

Many decades since Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, schools are highly segregated in the United States, where low-income Black and Latinx communities experience disparities in quality of curriculum and teachers, larger classroom sizes, and inadequate facilities and materials. Globally school segregation hurts us all, preventing opportunities to build understanding and empathy for each other, as well as forming barriers to learning, growth, wealth generation, and other opportunities.²⁵

The Long Road to Women’s Rights

Women around the world have faced inequity and oppression throughout history and into the present day. Globally, women have fought and continue to fight for rights to own property, work and earn a living, divorce, get an education, and run for office, as well as for sexual and reproductive rights, freedom from violence and harassment, and more.

Women with intersectional identities often experience compounding barriers to opportunity. As an example: in the United States, while women earned voting rights in 1920, Asian American women weren’t fully able to vote until 1952, and Indigenous women until 1962. Black women and Latinas—who were instrumental in the suffrage movement—couldn’t fully vote until 1965 and 1975 respectively, decades after White women. One-third of people with disabilities still report difficulty voting, and voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods face continued disenfranchisement.²⁷ Around the world, women have slowly gained voting rights, though in some areas it can still be difficult or unsafe.

We still do not have a federal Equal Rights Amendment for women in the United States, after almost a century of activism since it was originally introduced. Over many years, states have been individually ratifying the amendment to their own state constitutions. And while the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, there is still significant pay disparity in many companies. Globally, women earn 31 percent less than men.²⁸ In the United States, women make 18 percent less than men, where Latinas, Indigenous, and Black women make significantly less.²⁹

Gender equality is one of the United Nations Global Development Goals due to severe inequities: systemic discrimination, gender-based violence, sexual violence and harassment, intimate partner violence, lack of reproductive rights, forced marriage, kidnapping, trafficking, constraints on movement and travel, lack of financial freedom, disproportionate domestic work, and workplace inequities. Much has been written about gender inequality, I encourage you to learn more and become aware of the disparity women experience in your region and globally.

The LGBTQIA+ Fight to Live, Love, and Lead

The global LGBTQIA+ community is still fighting for basic rights to live, love, and lead—facing persecution, arrest, torture, domestic violence, hate crimes, medical abuse, bullying, harassment, unjust laws, cultural marginalization, and systemic inequities. In many countries, discrimination and persecution against LGBTQIA+ people are still legal.

In the United States until very recently people of the same gender were not able to marry, change their name, adopt children, own property together, or be out at work. More than one-third of the US LGBTQIA+ community experiences discrimination—a number considerably higher for people who are transgender (62 percent) and nonbinary (69 percent). This discrimination is experienced in public spaces, workplaces, schools, apartment communities, law enforcement, ability to rent or buy a home, travel, accessing and receiving medical care and other services, and more.³¹ Transgender people are three times more likely to be unemployed, often don’t have safe access to restrooms, experience anti-trans bias in healthcare, are more likely to experience physical violence from law enforcement, and experience physical and mental health disparities.³² Transgender and nonbinary people often cover their identity from family, friends, and coworkers—for fear of basic safety, discrimination, and microaggressions.

Awareness and public acceptance are beginning to change, with consistent activism, progress in legislation, and public figures coming out and speaking out—like Renée Richards, Harvey Milk, Ellen DeGeneres, George Takei, Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner, Pedro Zamora, Jason Collins, Elliot Page, Michelle Rodriguez, and Lana Wachowski. Allies have been cultivated in the LGBTQIA+ community for decades, with Jeanne Manford founding Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in 1973. Allies like the nuns and doctors at St. Vincent’s Medical Center worked as HIV/AIDS activists, researchers, and caregivers. Allies work together with the LGBTQIA+ community through public protest, raising funding and awareness, passing human rights legislation, fighting anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation, and winning key court battles.

Basic Disability Rights Are Still Unmet

People with disabilities—about 15 percent of the global population—have experienced laws legalizing lower wages, forced sterilization (up until very recently in many countries), lack of access to education, domestic abuse, physical and sexual violence, high rates of police violence (one-third to one-half of all people killed by law enforcement in the United States are disabled), forced detention, torture, bullying, harassment, abuse and experimentation in mental health facilities, denial of medical services, denial of the right to marry and have families, and denial of rights to housing and divorce. People with intersectional identities often face compounding barriers and discrimination, for example, women with disabilities are more likely to experience violence, abuse, and discrimination.

Workplace discrimination is one of the top human rights violations for people with disabilities, who experience major barriers in hiring. When landing work, people with disabilities are often offered positions below their level of expertise with inequitable compensation and benefits, and they are overworked and undervalued. These inequities contribute to a higher likelihood of poverty, affecting access to basics like medical care, as well as wellness, quality of life, and career opportunities.³⁴

As we learned in “What Allyship Is and Why It Matters,” people with disabilities earned basic rights in the United States through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) just in 1990. Even those basic rights have not been given to people with disabilities in many countries—only 45 countries have antidiscrimination and other disability-specific laws.³⁵ In other words, discrimination is still legal. Marginalization and inequity for people with disabilities is common even with those laws in place, including mobility barriers for wheelchair, walker, and cane users in buildings and sidewalks; lack of accessibility in websites, apps, social media, images, videos, and other products for people who are Blind, Low Vision, Deaf, and/or Hard of Hearing; and lack of accommodation in education and workplaces for people with physical, mental, and intellectual disabilities.

When I started doing DEI activist work in 2014, people with disabilities were often left out of DEI conversations and solutions. Changing this has been incredibly important in my work, yet we still have a long road ahead. While the basic right to move and interact freely is slowly being met with accommodation laws, accessibility is still often an afterthought if a thought at all, and it is a long road yet to inclusion for people with disabilities.

There are many other communities around the world who have experienced historical oppression and systemic inequities.

Intergenerational Impact of Oppression and Systemic Inequity

Around the world, hatred and discrimination have taken the form of racism, sexism, ableism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, classism, ageism, colorism, sizeism, religious discrimination (e.g., anti-Muslim discrimination, anti-Semitism), caste discrimination, bigotry, and more.³⁷ The generational ramifications can be severe.

Our history books and films often stop the story when people gain their independence, as if when colonialism or slavery ends, the oppression lifts. But systemic racism didn’t end; Black and Indigenous people didn’t suddenly have access to the equal housing, jobs, education, and wealth that were stolen from them for generations. People were still kept from these opportunities through Jim Crow laws, segregation, redlining, forced relocation and assimilation, lack of legal protection from discrimination, unfair and unjust law enforcement practices, and much more.

At the same time Black and Indigenous people didn’t just heal from generations of extreme cruelty and enslavement and being stolen from their homeland. There is deep trauma in that, which does not just heal overnight; in fact, it can be passed on from generation to generation. And there is consequential impact from intergenerational positions of power—where decisions still have been and continue to be made without diverse people in the room, without taking into account diverse experiences and ideas.

When I was growing up, I saw what happened to Indigenous and Black people as history—it was a problem of my ancestors perhaps (though not really “my” ancestors, as mine came from the “north,” I’d tell myself), but not my problem now. I did not recognize the repercussions of racism today, but racism is a present-day experience for many people. And it is a piece of all our experience, whether we are actively aware or not. My great grandfather was alive before slavery was abolished; my grandfather and father were alive during Jim Crow and redlining, and when Indigenous children were still being taken from their homes to be assimilated. During my lifetime, Black and Indigenous adults and children continue to be incarcerated at severely unequal rates, without equal access to education and high-paying jobs, disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and economic crises. We did not move from abolishment to equality in our four generations.

I am sure that some of the biases my grandparents and parents learned have seeped into how I think. And I am absolutely clear now that in four generations we did not fix all the inequities in our institutions. It takes both the will and the work to unlearn our biases and to undo discriminatory systems. The effects of what happened a few generations ago will continue to have an impact on all our lives—through our institutions, and through the way we treat one another—until we actively work to correct them.

There are two important interrelated effects of historical oppression: intergenerational wealth and health gaps.

Intergenerational Wealth Gap

Generations of Black and Indigenous people, women, and other marginalized people have been restricted from earning capital by law—reducing opportunities to earn wealth, and access quality education and housing. While those laws have changed in the last generation, the intergenerational impact has not been corrected. This inequity takes an exponential toll.

Due to years and years of disparity and discrimination, the net worth of White families in the United States is about 10 times that of Black families.³⁸ Indigenous wealth has not even been measured since 2000, when it was significantly lower than Black families. Women’s net worth in the United States is just 32 percent of men’s, and women also hold two-thirds of student loan debt. The wealth and poverty gaps are widening as well as for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx families—and especially for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx women.³⁹ While it improved in the 1980s and 2000s, this wealth gap is now as wide as it was in the 1960s.⁴⁰ The same gaps are also widening for people with disabilities, who face additional barriers to wealth generation—for example, 67 percent of Black people with disabilities are unbanked or underbanked, unable to build wealth or good credit.⁴¹

Globally, our wealth gap is widening for many people. This reduces upward wealth and health mobility through the schools we can attend—and as a result, job opportunities—as well as housing we can purchase and our access to healthy food, insurance, and healthcare.

Intergenerational Health Gap

There are significant health disparities in historically oppressed communities due to lack of health access, lower rates of insurance, biases in healthcare, diseases of poverty, and intergenerational trauma. Additionally, stress from the impact of discrimination and biases can affect long-term health and well-being.

Adults with disabilities are twice as likely as adults without disabilities to say their life has been harder because of discrimination; people who are LGBTQIA+ also report higher stress levels from discrimination.⁴² By race and ethnicity, 40 percent Black, 36 percent Asian, 31 percent Indigenous, 27 percent Latinx, and 14 percent White Americans report discrimination as a major stress in their lives in the United States.⁴³

Weathering is a term originated by Arline Geronimus to describe how continued discrimination can lead to premature aging and poor health outcomes.⁴⁴ People who experience discrimination are more likely to experience depression, anxiety, and psychiatric disorders, which can accumulate over time as someone continues to experience discrimination. Accumulated experiences of discrimination are also associated with physical health outcomes like cardiovascular disease, obesity, hypertension, inflammation, and other health indicators. These can reduce our overall quality of life as well as life expectancy.⁴⁵

Discrimination can also affect self-esteem, life satisfaction, and feelings of control and well-being. As a result, there is also a link to engaging in higher-risk behaviors and coping behaviors like alcohol use and smoking, as well as participating in fewer health-promoting activities.⁴⁶

Biases from medical professionals can lead to disparities in care as well, where research shows medical professionals can have less empathy when interacting with patients of another race.⁴⁷ As a result, Black and Latinx people have their pain needs met less frequently than White people, Black women are more likely than White women to receive a C-section, and Black and Indigenous women are significantly more likely to die from pregnancy-related issues.⁴⁸ One-third of transgender people report discrimination, abuse, harassment, or microaggressions in healthcare settings.⁴⁹ People who experience regular discrimination are two to three times less likely to trust medical professionals, may delay seeking medical advice, and may be less likely to adhere to the advice.⁵⁰

For these reasons and more, COVID-19 disproportionately affected people from historically oppressed communities around the world. Navajo Nation was one of the areas hit hardest by COVID-19 in North America. Many Diné people in Navajo Nation live in poverty, where nearly one-third of homes are without electricity or running water (despite treaties that promised this infrastructure when Diné people were forcefully displaced), and people often have to travel for hundreds of miles to access a grocery store or hospital.⁵¹ Food deserts and lack of health services are a reality across reservations and in inner-city Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. On top of that, one in five Indigenous women, one in six Latinas, and one in ten Black women in the United States don’t have health insurance, making it more difficult to obtain and pay for needed care.⁵²

The health and wealth gap widened during the COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially devastating long-term effects. Black- and Latinx-owned businesses were hit harder, and women, Black, and Latinx workers were furloughed and laid off at disproportionate rates. This is not a trend in the United States alone; throughout the world COVID-19 exacerbated—and was exacerbated by—systemic inequities.

Intergenerational Trauma

The first time I heard the term intergenerational trauma was from a friend and DEI attorney, Michael Thomas. My company Change Catalyst co-developed an event called Inclusion 2.0 in 2016, about the intersection between wisdom, inclusion, and mindfulness. At that event, Michael spoke about “Intergenerational Trauma, Meditation and Inclusion.” In just 10 minutes he captivated us all, and I never saw my work the same again.

Trauma creates physiological changes in your brain and your body’s stress response, it can leave you emotionally distant from people you love, and it can reorganize your perceptions and imagination. “It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think,” according to Bessel van der Kolk, who studies trauma.⁵³

Groups of people can experience collective trauma when they are enslaved, colonized, forced to assimilate, interned, abused, bullied, systemically marginalized, and facing genocide. Groups can even experience a series of collective traumatic experiences over time. Eduardo Duran, who works with Indigenous cultures and the healing of trauma, describes the “soul wound” of trauma shared by a group of people as “historical trauma.”⁵⁴ Joy DeGruy describes the residual impacts of generations of slavery as “post traumatic slave syndrome.”⁵⁵ In her work in the 1980s and 1990s, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart showed that collective historical trauma can be accompanied by individual historical unresolved grief.⁵⁶

If our ancestors personally or collectively experienced significant physical and emotional trauma, that trauma can be passed from generation to generation physically through fetal cells, as well as emotionally and culturally through family and community. Research on historical trauma and intergenerational trauma (aka transgenerational trauma) in Jewish, Black, Japanese American, and Indigenous communities has shown that we can pass down a lower sense of self-worth, dissociation, numbing and emotional detachment, survivor guilt and internalization of ancestral suffering, anger, depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, fear, and distrust, as well as physical health outcomes.⁵⁷ These can be exacerbated by regular experiences of discrimination and microaggressions.

This impacts our lives in many ways. When you see people who look like you being shot and killed by police officers regularly, it can be traumatic. When stopped by police, which is more likely to happen to Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people in the United States, the trauma is experienced again. Many people live through a physically and emotionally traumatic experience, even without complications in the moment.

When you experience daily harassment, bullying, or a world that is hostile to your identity, it takes its toll. When you have to apply to three times more jobs because you’re more likely to be told “no” based on your identity, it takes its toll. When you’re unable to obtain an apartment, mortgage, insurance, or bank account because of your identity, it takes its toll. When you have to worry about your safety regularly when in public spaces, it takes its toll. All of these can retrigger trauma.⁵⁸

If we don’t work to heal this intergenerational trauma, we can continue to pass it on to the next generation and potentially cause harm to ourselves and each other. Some people navigate trauma through numbing—with alcohol, drugs, food, binge-watching, social media, and video games, for example. Other people navigate through masking: going through life wearing a mask that covers our true selves and experiences, or armor that protects us from further trauma. We can also internalize racism, sexism, and discrimination—believing the negative stereotypes, adapting our identity to fit the dominant culture, and marginalizing other people with underrepresented identities.

Our Work to Collectively Heal

We are still unraveling the cultural, political, and economic systems that once colonized and enslaved people and continue to create inequity and exclusion. The correction is ongoing and hard fought, and allies have a big role in this correction. There are many ways we can build resilience and healing, including:

Pass legislation. Support and press for basic human rights, land rights and protection, Indigenous self-governance, environmental equity and climate justice (environmental destruction and climate change are often most harmful to historically oppressed people), affordable healthcare, and services that reduce barriers to upward mobility. Also encourage and support funding for correcting institutional inequities, recommitting to failed treaties, and improving public health and community healing. Many have called for reparations for colonization and enslavement too.

Share your learning and growth with your community. Be public about your values around correcting systemic inequities and improving social justice. Acknowledge historical harm, and commit to correct it. Share with friends, family, and community that you are working to create change. Individuals, governments, corporations, and brands can make supportive public commitments and correct systems and messaging that cause harm. This can be very powerful.

Correct systemic inequities. We still have severe inequities across education, housing, banking, policing and incarceration, workplaces, and industries. Listen to what people need to heal and correct inequity, and take action with them. There are many opportunities to make a difference, like protesting, petitioning, policymaking, writing legislators, generating awareness, using your connections, and voting with your dollars. (If you protest as an ally, listen to the organizers and follow their lead. If you’re from a majority group, don’t instigate violence, and work to keep protestors with underrepresented identities safe—many allies put their bodies between protestors and police to keep protestors safe.) We’ll address workplace inequities throughout the remaining chapters.

Use your power as a consumer. Brands listen to consumers, so use this power to advocate for your values around inclusion. If a brand is not representing diverse people or messages in their ads, if they’re perpetuating biases and stereotypes, if they are exploiting people or the environment along their supply chain—let them know you expect better. Also support businesses owned by people with underrepresented identities.

Activate intergenerational allyship, advocacy, and activism. Raise children and grandchildren who actively work against inequity and for justice, diversity, inclusion, and equity. Talk with them about our history and current injustice, share your own exploration and learning as an ally, enroll them in working with you to create change. Buy books and toys that represent diverse experiences and cultures. Advocate for more inclusive learning (better history books!) in their schools. Travel so that children experience diverse cultures and perspectives. Provide opportunities to build interracial friendships at a young age—through schools, playgrounds, and programs with diverse children. These relationships have been shown to reduce prejudice in children.⁶¹

Build intergenerational resilience and healing. While oppression may shape our opportunities in life, it does not define us. If you have experienced trauma, know that you have the power to heal from within, and to break the intergenerational cycle of trauma with intergenerational healing.⁶² A growing body of research shows effective methods for healing individually and across communities. These include mindfulness; psychotherapy; connecting with community and cultural traditions; emotional support from family, friends, and colleagues; and reclaiming the body through yoga, Tai Chi, Quigong, massage, or other embodied practices.⁶³

There are many more ways to create change, including supporting and voting for diverse public officials, donating to and volunteering for organizations fighting voter suppression and other inequities, doing your jury duty (Black and Indigenous people need allies in the courtroom, as they are disproportionately incarcerated), and listening to and supporting initiatives generated from the community.

Collectively, we can work to heal and repair our global society so that it is fair and just for everyone, breaking the cycle of discrimination and intergenerational trauma. While inequities continue to permeate our institutions and our culture, we have the power to change them.

Cultural Marginalization

People are marginalized in many ways by society, including at the cultural level, where our collective storytelling can either reinforce stereotypes or break them, and can actively include diverse voices and perspectives or continue to perpetuate one type of voice. We all have the power to reduce cultural marginalization.

Cultural marginalization can begin at birth, where we assign our babies a sex and gender, and give them toys, books, and experiences that help frame how they see the world and themselves. In the same way our history has a point of view—and can shape our worldview—so do journalism, education, entertainment, video games, television, films, novels, toys, magazines, fashion, and advertising. Each of these industries has a lack of diversity in their creators and in their stories.

My career began in the film and television industry, which is now starting to come to terms with its lack of diversity and a sexualized environment where harassment and abuse have been prevalent. From 2007 to 2019, just 5 percent of film directors were women, 13 percent were people of color, and less than 1 percent were women of color.⁶⁵ Large studios have very few women and people of color at decision-making levels like producers and executives, film critics are mostly White men, and many people have called attention to the significant lack of diversity in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This translates into who tells our stories, what stories are told, and which stories are recognized and amplified.

Overall cast diversity is better, but still has room for significant improvement: 34 percent women, 34 percent people of color, 2 percent disabled people, and 1 percent LGBTQIA+.⁶⁶ Representation is only a portion of inclusion, however—people with underrepresented identities often have fewer lines, are portrayed as stereotypes, and/or are one-dimensional characters lacking depth. This problem was so prevalent, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel wrote a comic strip about it in the 1980s, which has since turned into the “Bechdel test”: to pass the test, a film must feature at least two women, who talk to each other about something besides a man. It seems simple, yet only 58 percent of films have passed the test out of more than 8,000 films.⁶⁷ Other versions have been proposed, like the “Ava DuVernay test,” where “African-Americans and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than scenery in White stories.”⁶⁸ On top of the lack of opportunities for actors who are trans and disabled: characters who are disabled and trans are often portrayed by actors who are not disabled or trans.

The video game industry has similar issues, where women characters are fewer and often sexualized. When women characters or avatars are available in games, they are often “premium” characters and more expensive to purchase. There is low diversity among creators (81 percent White, 71 percent men), and the gamer community in general can be an unsafe environment for women. In 2014, #Gamergate called attention to the industry’s culture of harassment and general mistreatment of women, yet it has been slow to change. At the same time 61 percent of gamers believe more diversity in game content is important for the future of gaming.⁶⁹

The publishing industry is very slowly coming to terms with its lack of diversity. In 2015, Corinne Duyvis started the hashtag #ownvoices to highlight the importance of books written by a person from a marginalized or underrepresented identity, about a protagonist with the same identity.⁷⁰ Between 2015 and 2019, race and ethnic diversity in the publishing industry did not markedly change, with 76 percent of people identifying as White—even higher in editorial staff (85 percent). The industry is predominantly women (about 75 percent), yet the number of women decreases in executive roles (about 60 percent), showing that even in an industry dominated by women, men rise to positions of power at higher rates.⁷¹

In 2019, just 13 percent of books released in the United States were written by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous authors combined, despite being 32 percent of the population. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous character portrayal was higher at 18 percent. Just 3 percent of characters were LGBTQIA+ and 3 percent disabled. For contrast, significantly more characters (29 percent) were animals or other characters like trucks, monsters, etc.⁷² Children’s books can also perpetuate stereotypes of many types, from girls being princesses, to boys hiding emotions, and Black and Latinx kids living in poverty. One study of Australian, Singaporean, and Turkish math textbooks found just 9 percent of textbooks did not include gender bias.⁷³ Children’s toys and the toy industry have similar issues.

Journalism has been notorious for severely overrepresenting Black people as violent and criminal, and White people as victims. Black people are disproportionately portrayed as living in poverty and reliant on government programs, with Black men as absent fathers.⁷⁴ White police officers are overrepresented, Latinx people are overrepresented in pieces addressing immigration and social problems, Muslims overrepresented when reporting on terrorism, where Asians are often portrayed as the model minority.⁷⁵ Historically, Asians have been positioned as model minorities in the West, creating a hierarchy and subsequent division among groups with underrepresented identities, while simultaneously erasing the diversity of Asian identities and experiences.

The stories we consume shape how we see each other and ourselves. And when they erase some people’s stories entirely, and perpetuate stereotypes and other biases, they can shape our own biases and worldview. For marginalized people, these stories can deepen feelings of being on the margins of society, excluded, and isolated. When we don’t see role models who look like us, this can affect decisions in our careers, how we show or cover our identities, as well as our confidence and self-esteem. Each of us takes these biases with us into our homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces—shaping how we interact with one another.

Take a critical look at the films, television, games, magazines, and books you come across over the next few weeks—ask yourself if they are lacking diverse voices and storytellers, perpetuating stereotypes, and/or leaving out perspectives.

Actions You Can Take to Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn

In addition to the ways we can all contribute to intergenerational healing discussed earlier, here are a few ways that you can be a better ally by continuing to learn, unlearn, and relearn:

Read a book that gives you a new perspective of history from a different point of view. Wherever you grew up, chances are good that your history books left out a piece of your local and global history. What’s missing?

Become more aware of who is creating your entertainment and how people are portrayed. Pay attention to who is authoring the articles you’re reading, directing that film or TV show you’re watching, creating the video game you’re playing. Perhaps try something new, a story told from someone with an identity that is different from your own. Recognize when systemic inequities, cultural marginalization, and personal biases appear in stories. And if you notice that stories are perpetuating stereotypes or lacking diversity in general, consider advocating for more diverse voices by sending a letter to the editor, studio, or publisher. It can make a difference if we all do this.

Go outside your comfort zone and network to learn more. New learning can be uncomfortable, especially if you were socialized to not talk about race or other identities. We have to unlearn that. It’s time to talk about race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, religion, sexual orientation, and other aspects of identity. We become more comfortable by getting to know people who are different from us. Three-quarters of White people in the United States don’t have friends who are not White.⁷⁷ If this is you, you’re not alone, but it’s time to change that—attend events created for diverse people, follow new people on social media (this has helped me a great deal), listen to new podcasts, talk to people at events who you might not normally talk to (not about their identity, about their work or life), get to know your colleagues.

Consider how you can help colleagues, friends, neighbors, children, or grandchildren to learn, unlearn, and relearn. Share what you’re learning and your path of allyship, share this book and other resources you find. Have conversations about inequity and inclusion, about race, ethnicity, gender, disability, age, religion, sexual orientation. These are often stigmatized conversations, but the more we discuss them, the more we can shed light on the issues and focus on solutions together.

Don’t expect people with underrepresented identities to educate you about them—be mindful that while it’s your job to learn, it’s not their job to teach. Generally, people with underrepresented identities are already facing extra burdens of microaggressions and inequities, and have to work harder to succeed. My big rule of thumb is that if you can learn it on the internet or in a book, don’t ask someone to explain it to you—it’s an unfair and unnecessary burden. Always ask someone if it’s OK to inquire about their identity—some people are very happy to share, where other people may decline.

Remember that many people want to be asked about and respected for their skills and expertise, rather than their identity alone. There are tons of books, websites, magazines, documentaries, and articles. Go to a good website and find a list of great books written by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, disabled, or LGBTQIA+ authors and start reading.

Keep Moving Forward

These may be difficult pages to read through. I admit they were also difficult to research and write. I encourage you to take a moment here to reflect on what you’ve learned, how it makes you feel, what comes up for you.

But then please don’t get stuck here in this awareness—awareness is only the beginning of allyship. Take time if you need to, to breathe a deep breath, go for a walk, meditate, exercise. And then come back, and let’s get to work. We each have the power to create change. That’s what this book is about.

For all of the reasons in this chapter and more: where talent is universal, opportunity is not. Not yet. It’s our job as allies to learn, unlearn, relearn our collective history and its effects, ensure we are not perpetuating harm ourselves, advocate and work to repair and correct inequitable systems, and lead the change to a better future for everyone. Small steps are fine to begin. The world changes when you and I take one step at a time to make our communities and workplaces better for us all.

EXERCISE