ABOUT THE AUTHORS

TIFFANY AND MICHAEL hit it off right away when they met for the first time in 2015. Michael had developed a gamified learning tool around race and ethnicity, and Tiffany was interested in learning more. Michael said goodbye to his family and chickens for the day and drove down from his small iris flower farm in Maryland to Tiffany’s office in Richmond, Virginia. They had a deep connection around the passion for DEI work; the drive to do the work differently and better, using the best platforms; and the need for a strong evidence base to understand how things really work and the best practices to make them better. Tiffany included Michael’s race education program in their first book, Overcoming Bias, in 2016. They kept in touch and presented together in a panel on pushing the boundaries of tech in D&I work at the Forum on Workplace Inclusion in 2018. It was at that conference, talking about Tiffany’s second and third books, that they began to explicitly talk about the idea of writing a book together.

The idea for rethinking the concept of microaggressions came during their first conversations with Steve Piersanti at Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Both Tiffany and Michael had independently held deep frustrations with the term and the way it was being used in popular culture and in D&I work. Michael even had a running document of possible alternatives. He sent that to Tiffany, who put their own spin on it, and the concept of SAE started to take shape.

This book brings together the different personal experiences and professional backgrounds of Tiffany and Michael. Tiffany identifies with multiple marginalized identities and walks through the world experiencing SAE around those identities on a daily basis. They bring that sensibility and depth of understanding to the way they approach these issues. Michael, on the other hand, walks through life with privilege in that regard, perceived as the straight white cisgender man that he is. As such, he researches and listens attentively to the stories that others tell him about their experiences. And he notices the way that people with normative identities are unguarded around him, allowing him to deeply understand bias and to meet people where they are to communicate effectively to them and maybe even change the way they think.

The book also benefits from the range of professional experiences that Tiffany and Michael cover. Tiffany, a doctor of management in organizational leadership, founded TMI Consulting, Inc., in 2003 and has more recently founded TMI Portfolio and Loom Technologies, Inc., specializing in diversity and inclusion, leadership, using metrics to gauge organizational equity, and unconscious bias. Michael got his doctorate in cultural anthropology with a certificate in cognitive psychology, researching how culture and cognition interact in the way that people learn about categories of difference and bias, and how to most effectively communicate to change patterns of thinking. He spent some time in academia, teaching at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. He also spent several years doing applied cultural research for the FrameWorks Institute and the American Institutes for Research. While working at these institutions, he also started consulting for organizations around diversity and inclusion issues and now does that work full time as a senior partner and digital solutions lead at inQUEST Consulting. Both authors and their respective companies are constantly pushing themselves to do this DEI work with innovative ideas, state of the art technologies and platforms, and a true spirit of collaboration that they hope comes through in this book.