Chapter Five
Scan to expand
Scan to expand means keeping your eyes open and looking for opportunities to broaden your cultural horizons. This is where building authentic relationships across differences comes into play. Chapter 3 was about in-groups and out-groups. Those often exist intact without any effort. Scanning to expand is about making a deliberate effort to notice individual differences and really pushing the limits of building bridges across them. This is not the time to be colorblind, gender neutral, or to experience the world as a melting pot with everything ending up a gooey, formless, grey blob.
When you enter an event, do you immediately look around for the people you already know and make a beeline for them? Most of us do. There is comfort in the familiar. What we are suggesting is that you deliberately and actively seek out opportunities that will expose you to new people, new ideas, and new places.
Remember contact theory? We designed “scan to expand” in response to the research that tells us we can reduce interpersonal bias by spending protracted amounts of time with people about whom we have known or unknown bias. If you chose to take the Implicit Association Test and identified one or more potential biases, then you should consider scanning your environment for opportunities to work or play in group settings with people who represent the categories you identified as a demographic where you could reduce your bias.
For instance, the organization Myra Smith is in charge of, Leadership Metro Richmond, offers exactly the type of opportunity for bias reduction that contact theory suggests. LMR participants work with each other for nine months, learning about leadership and their community and ultimately working in smaller teams on a sustainable community project. Though everyone who participates is some kind of leader, there are no hierarchies in the program. We helped fund a scholarship for a young man in his twenties to participate in 2015. He learned and worked alongside executive directors and CEOs. What matters most is the differences are used to improve the leaders’ service to the community. A wide variety of races, colors, religions, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic statuses is part of any given LMR class. It’s the diversity and the shared goals that enrich the experience for everyone.
Having authentic relationships with people who think differently is the key to overcoming your bias.
Privilege can blind you to the experiences of others, or cause you to misunderstand their experiences, choices, and opinions. The good news is that we can break down those walls through intentionally cultivating diverse friendships and experiences for ourselves. You just have to be intentional about it. The world is a naturally diverse place. Even if you live in a seemingly homogeneous community, diversity itself is bigger than the constrained definitions we often use. Yes, having friends and an in-group comprised of people who look different is a great first step. But differences are something you want in your in-groups in whatever form they take.
Don’t be afraid to expose your family and friends to new people and ideas.
The in-group concept works at any level of relationships. The nuclear family can be an in-group in relation to a neighborhood—think “stranger danger.” Street gangs, often formed by the block, can be the in-group relative to the gang on the next block. Cultural, racial, political, or national identity can all constitute in-groups or out-groups depending on whose perspective you consider. In-groups give us a sense of belonging, of identity, but as history has shown us again and again, they can also lead to exclusion and violence.
It can often be challenging to shake up the in-group in a family setting. How often do we stop and fret about the guest list at a family gathering or wonder whether one or more relatives will make a certain guest feel uncomfortable? Disrupting the status quo is hard. Unfortunately, it is simply not enough for us to be inclusive ourselves. We cannot sit around and lament the state of the world and expect someone else to fix it. Don’t be ashamed of your diverse relationships. Give your family and friends a chance to see what you see in people who are different from them. If each of us helps one other person expand their cultural horizons and rethink their bias, the impact on society would be tremendous.
Know your in-groups, then start including out-group members to reduce interpersonal bias.
Workplaces are fantastic learning labs for inclusive behavior. The good news is that there is no need to overthink it. The scan to expand solution will take you out of your comfort zone, but that is only temporary. Human beings are resilient. Once you adjust to the new status quo, it won’t be so uncomfortable anymore.
Anyone who has management or supervisory status has the opportunity to scan to expand. There are countless ways that a supervisor can create an inclusive workplace. Here are a few:
1. Create diverse teams by assigning people to them with diverse skills, strengths, and backgrounds. This means you must familiarize yourself with people’s strengths.
2. Seek input from everyone you supervise regardless of organizational level or title.
3. Find ways to implement all or part of concepts that your teams generate.
4. Recognize employees for their unique contributions.
If you are an individual contributor at your workplace, you can also make inclusive decisions that help you expand your network and cultural understanding and reduce any interpersonal bias you may have identified. Here are some possibilities:
1. Volunteer to join diverse teams and committees.
2. Out yourself as a cultural ally by standing up when biased comments are made.
3. Seek out the opinions of your colleagues from your out-group.
4. Make suggestions that are respectful of the opinions, experiences, and perspectives of your out-groups.
5. Expand the list of people you invite to work-related or after-work outings.
These activities will help you build workplace relationships that can help expand your cultural horizons. High emotional intelligence and cultural competency are leadership skills that can help you get recognized and promoted in the workplace. Inclusion really is a win-win practice.
You don’t have to be born into diversity and inclusion; you can choose it.
The key is to keep your eyes open and look for opportunities to expand your horizons. Once you start looking, you will see ways to expand your in-group everywhere you go.
The authors of this book experienced in-group expansion firsthand starting from an early age. Tiffany, for instance, grew up multilingual.
My friends and babysitters spoke Spanish, so I picked up the language before I learned English. I always felt a sense of home and belonging with Mexican people because I had close, personal relationships with them for as long as I could remember. As an army brat, I traveled the world with my parents and learned that people are both similar and different everywhere you go. I attended German elementary school, learned a third language, and expanded my “family” to include a whole European nation. My friends were Turkish, German, Czech, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Muslim, Catholic, and more. Befriending a diverse group of people changed the way I experience individuals and the world. Feeling like a member of a much broader community than my African American peers ultimately led me to diversity work.
My early experiences led me to seek out diverse friendships and uncomfortable situations. I learned to love being the only black person in a room, or the only English speaker. It was disconcerting in the beginning, but then it became an adventure. Gaining friends, hearing their stories, and becoming part of their adventures have created a mind-expanding, joy-filled journey.
Matthew’s in-group expansion was a more deliberate decision he made in his adult life.
I expanded my in-group through an employment opportunity. When I moved back home to Richmond, Virginia, after five years in Vancouver, I was looking for meaningful work opportunities that would allow me to use my skills and tap into my passion for social justice. In the process, I met Rev. Brian Brown, an African-American United Methodist pastor who was leading his church in a racial reconciliation ministry. He offered me the chance to be his assistant, working in a black church for racial reconciliation.
I respectfully declined. Although I passionately believed we needed to make progress on race relations, I had sworn I was not going to work in a church. I was a pastor’s kid. I had no illusions about what church work was like—lots of late-night committee meetings and hours of thankless toiling behind the scenes while many folks think you only work an hour on Sunday morning. No thank you. I wanted to have a bigger impact than working in a single church. Besides, I had questions about my own faith, so I wasn’t sure I should be a church leader if I didn’t have it all figured out.
Reverend Brown heard my objections, and he overruled them. In the most helpful way, he encouraged me to think about this as a part of a journey, not necessarily the destination. And most importantly, he encouraged me to see this as an invaluable opportunity to expand my in-group.
And so it was that I worked in an African American church, leading worship, sometimes preaching, occasionally playing the piano as, usually, the only white person in the room. It was a transformative experience. I cannot tell you how many times I felt uncomfortable, out of my element, lost for words, unsure of whether my experience was relevant and worth sharing. But I always felt accepted, loved, and welcomed. And though I’m no longer at that church, I still count many of its members as friends today. Whether it’s through in-person conversations, or Facebook posts, or just having attended the same church for four years, the richness of my interpersonal interactions has increased exponentially by taking the opportunity to expand my in-group, even when it was uncomfortable for me.
Our friend Doug Brown took a similar leap of faith and expanded his in-group in a unique and profound way.
The primary way I’m in contact with people different from me has been through my relationship with my children; I adopted my three girls from Perú in 2009. We are a family at this point, well attached and speaking English with little flecks of Spanish thrown in from time to time. We attended the Smithsonian Peruvian festival this past summer. During the day we wandered from booth to booth, taking in bits of culture and eating Peruvian food. I was glad that we stayed for an evening concert, because it was then that the daytime crowd of curious non-Peruvians made way for an evening crowd of almost exclusively Peruvian Americans.
There we were, surrounded by people of Peruvian descent, awash in Eva Ayllón’s Peruvian cross-rhythms, and my blue eyes must have been the only pair in the crowd. What I felt at the time was not my own sense of being out of place, but my children’s sense of relief in finding something of their birth country and their people—not just a Spanish class in school that mainly caters to Mexican Spanish, or a restaurant that serves one or two Peruvian dishes along with Tex-Mex food, or a dance class that teaches a Cuban dance that has made its way to Perú. I find that parenting children from a lightly represented culture in the US means we connect with their culture in lots of one-off, close-enough ways. On that evening we hit a kind of cultural bull’s-eye, and it felt really great.
The decision to adopt internationally was a complicated one, and I’m not sure exactly how I got there. There was a very practical part of me that couldn’t reconcile the presence of orphans in the world and a decision to give birth, and the race of a child or children is just one of the many decisions a potential adoptive parent must make. In many ways, one of the first forks in the adoption road is about race: “Do I want to adopt a Caucasian child or a non-Caucasian child?” Neither I, nor my girls’ mother, felt strongly about having children of our same race, so we didn’t feel the need to pursue Caucasian children. Perú’s program looked good to us; the pace was deliberate and logical, and their orphanages had a good reputation for care. We decided that a sibling group would be a sensible way of keeping cultural connections strong in a new country. Looking back, the injustice of international adoption was not as apparent to me then as it is now. It is a sort of emigration without consent, and understanding it as such helps to keep me focused on helping my girls to maintain contact and connection with their home culture.
Doug’s decision to scan for ongoing opportunities to keep his daughters exposed to their ethnic culture is a way of keeping the birthright of their ancestral in-group accessible to them. In the process, he has expanded his own in-group and reduced biases he didn’t realize he had.
In Perú, all of the necessary squeamishness about water, food, and gastrointestinal survival feels a little funny when your children don’t have to worry about those things at all. In the five weeks I spent with them in Perú at the time of their adoption, I realized that many of the things that seemed foreign to me about Peruvian culture were things that felt familiar to my children and how important it would be to remember that feeling of otherness when the children arrived in the US.
Another friend, Heather Crislip, chose a different way to expand her horizons rather than stay in her comfort zone. Heather made a life-changing career choice based on the idea of expanding her impact in the world and her understanding of cultural issues.
After college I had a choice to work in a bank or in New Haven’s Welfare Department. I chose to leave my comfort zone and enter a career of public service. I was tremendously attracted to the Welfare Department and the ability to make change for the city’s most disadvantaged. New Haven was home to some of the nation’s most venerable institutions, but I had never seen chronic poverty and racial segregation like I saw in the Hill neighborhood I worked in, which was nearly entirely African American and had poverty rates that topped 50 percent.
We often talked about A Tale of Two Cities to describe our work and to empower our clients in the shadow of the nation’s elite, which was both poignant and deeply disappointing. I loved the city and realized that just disagreeing or disapproving of the situation would not be enough to make the racism change. The perspective I gained working with those with no options and seeing my community through their eyes has always stayed with me.
My understanding of poor neighborhoods and the resulting limited choices of those residents was one of the reasons I had the great fortune to move up to serve the mayor of the majority-minority city. Our team was committed to social justice and creating opportunity for marginalized communities, with fair housing and fair rent often utilized as important tools. The year before I left New Haven I worked with the city to update its Fair Housing Analysis of Impediments, which took several months of work. We recommended improved education, outreach, and enforcement of fair housing laws; improved coordination and enforcement between the various departments and agencies involved with housing issues and fair housing choice, including both landlords and tenants; and expanding the availability of housing of all types to make housing available for persons regardless of need.
Doing that work helped me really focus on fair housing and housing choice as a key issue and solution to the cycle of poverty. The lesson I took away from my six years in New Haven was that communities are not what they appear from the outside, and that the cycle of poverty is firmly centered on housing and where you live. It impacts every other aspect of one’s life, framing your expectations and your opportunities.
Marianne Vermeer is an entrepreneurial executive who works internationally. Her work and her life involve interacting with people from around the world. She seeks out opportunities where she can do that—she scans to expand. Her family has made their home a place where people from literally anywhere can feel welcome. They have entertained and hosted people of many nationalities, religious persuasions, and political positions. They have “adopted” young adults coming to the US to study or do research and provided them with an American family. And they have legally adopted a son from China so their family life has involved bringing a culture different from the one they were raised in into their family traditions.
Marianne describes herself as follows:
I grew up in a very unidimensional family: we were Dutch. ALL Dutch. Spoke the language, ate the food, prided ourselves on being Dutch. In my young years, we lived in communities with lots of Dutch people. We moved to western Nebraska when I was in kindergarten and all of a sudden we were a bit different—there weren’t many Dutch people around. And though I thought I spoke perfect English, I quickly learned that my vocabulary was peppered with Dutch words and people didn’t understand me. This was my first experience of feeling different.
And I adapted. I quickly learned which words were only to be used at home and what the English word really was that I should use in other places. Still, it was a small town and I knew there was a bigger world to be found. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. For the most part, my childhood world was populated by white people, with a few Hispanics who lived on the other side of the railroad tracks. I applied for the Peace Corps when I was 16 and was told I really needed to finish high school first. My parents convinced me I was more valuable to the world with a college degree so I spent two summers in college working in cross-cultural environments to test my wings: a summer in southeastern Alaska in Native Alaskan villages and logging camps and a second summer in Appalachian southeastern Kentucky.
I did these summer experiences to make sure I could adapt and thrive in environments where I was the one who was different. I ignored my college graduation ceremony in favor of leaving immediately for Egypt for two years to teach English in an Egyptian girls’ school. Learned Arabic. Traveled all over Egypt. Took every chance I could to explore the lives of ordinary Egyptians. Spent a summer in a village in southern Egypt where no one spoke English (and I mean NO ONE). Joined friends teaching English to monks in a Coptic Orthodox monastery in the desert on their weekend jaunts out there. Taught English teachers for a month in the Sinai Peninsula on the border with Israel, where the tensions of the Middle East were readily apparent. And I LOVED it. Wasn’t sure I wanted to come back to the US, but family concerns brought me back. I retain a fondness for all things Egyptian. I learned I could work well in cross-cultural environments, make friends, learn a language, and retain my identity as an American of Dutch heritage.
How often do you stop and take stock of how diverse and inclusive your life is? Is cultural expansion part of the conversations you typically have with friends, family, and colleagues? Even if it is, try the next activity. It tends to be an eye-opener.
Some people find that activity challenging, while others think it’s easy. There is no correct set of responses. It is simply a tool you can use to raise your awareness about who we choose to have in our lives. There is no need to have a friend quota, but if you never stop to think about the composition of your networks, you will find yourself in the same circles you are in now. That may not be a bad thing at all, but if you want a more diverse network, the first thing you need to do is know your starting point.
Your in-group is about more than just people.
Maybe you don’t have opportunities to befriend new people. That’s cool. You’re still able to scan to expand in order to overcome bias. What you need is a cultural activity inventory:
Chimamanda Adichie, a Nigerian author, has a wonderful TED Talk called “The Danger of a Single Story.” We highly recommend it and sometimes screen it in our trainings. She talks about how the stories we hear, and those we don’t, profoundly shape the way in which we understand other people. As an African she relays her firsthand experience of people’s assumptions that she must be poor, and certainly different, and their surprise at her love of Mariah Carey. That surprise stems from the single story we have of the diverse continent of Africa—as she says, we hear only stories of beautiful landscapes and war-torn, impoverished, incomprehensible people. But we don’t hear stories of small business entrepreneurs, or authors, or dedicated social justice activists. Which leads us to think of Africans through a simplistic lens. She encourages us to expand the stories we encounter through scanning to expand your reading list, paying attention to who stars in the movies you watch, and who writes them. It is possible to expand your in-group without meeting a single new person.
If you want to make the jump from simply controlling your bias to conquering and eventually prevailing over it, it takes a lifetime of deliberate effort. Remember the appendix syndrome? You can’t simply read one Toni Morrison novel, check that off your list, and move on. Just like with hygiene, you must make ongoing, intentional choices to expand your in-group.
Marianne Vermeer shares the following insight on how intentional choices helped build relationships across differences.
When we went to Pakistan, we consciously told ourselves we were going to love the people of that country. And we set out to do just that. For the first year, we invited someone for dinner in our home every Friday evening and asked them to tell us about their families, their religion, their thoughts on the future of their country. It was a safe place to come—we promised that nothing would leave our living room and that we wanted to learn as much as we could. When someone invited us to his/her home, we made every effort to accept the invitation. We loved those folks—and still do. So my advice is to decide you want to build those relationships and make them work. Be authentic about it.
Regardless of education or language, people can read when someone is not sincere. Realize that your attempts may require more of you than of others in the relationship but that the friendship will become more of a two-way street when the others realize you are sincere and interested in their lives. That can take a while. Read newspapers or blogs from the other person’s culture, country, or community. Find books or websites that talk about the history of their community, culture, country, religion—whatever defines them. Be vulnerable. Realize it doesn’t always work—is there ever a perfect relationship among human beings? People don’t always “click”—that’s OK. Keep trying. . . . I promise you there are many people wanting to have engaged friendships and supportive relationships in the world. And your life will be richer for having them as friends.
A special note to parents: Your children will only be able to be culturally competent and unbiased if you have these conversations with them and teach them inclusive skills. Bias is the default human condition. We cannot tell you how often concerned parents reach out to us and ask how their children could have become so culturally insensitive when they are great parents who fight for social justice. It happens because their families don’t discuss things like racism, sexism, homophobia, and other biases. The fact that you traveled internationally and don’t have a xenophobic bone in your body does not mean that your children will inherit that from you. Marianne Vermeer made sure her kids understood the gravity of her international and inclusive perspective by taking her children overseas.
After 20 years of largely living and working in the US, I wanted to go back overseas at a time when my children could experience another culture, learn the language, and challenge their assumptions about how the world works. After some fits and starts, our family sold nearly everything we owned in 2005 and, with two suitcases each and a trombone, moved to Lahore, Pakistan, for three years. Our purpose was to help rebuild a Christian college there after 30 years of government control. The culture shock was deep and real, the challenges daunting. And we thrived! We consider Pakistan our second home and find ways to remain in touch with the many friends we made there. My work since that time has focused on bringing my business skills to organizations that want to grow and create impact. This has taken me back to South Asia, to East Africa, and to organizations around the US. I’ve been a staff member, a consultant, a CEO, and an entrepreneur.
Of course everyone can’t take their kids overseas to live, but we can make choices that help them see the world more comprehensively. Discuss what’s happening on the world stage. Ask your kids their opinions about challenging topics early while their minds are still flexible. If you don’t do the hard, often uncomfortable, work of molding your kids’ perspectives, the rest of the world will do it for you. That is precisely how people end up with teenagers they don’t know, understand, or recognize.
Just in case you question our perspective on parenting matters, know that we have raised three social justice–minded kids. So far they have all stayed out of trouble, stayed on the honor roll, and been the envy of their peers’ parents. We have failed plenty as parents, but we did not fail to teach them what we believe is important. They are free to form their own adult opinions in their own time, but when we release them into the wild, we know that they know what we value and believe. We know it’s sinking in because our college-aged kiddo spent many years volunteering his time and talents tutoring kids and teaching coding in urban environments. Our middle child developed her own “Self-Care and Global Awareness” curriculum that she teaches to kids at a homeless shelter, and she formed a school club whose members find homeless people on the street of our city and just sit and talk with them. The youngest is only eight, but she is aware of the inequity in the world and we hope she follows her siblings’ examples.
CALL TO ACTION
Get out and find new experiences, new challenges, and new friends.