Celeste Headlee: Having Conversations We’d Rather Avoid
Celeste Headlee is an award-winning radio journalist and author of many incredible books, including Do Nothing, We Need to Talk, and Speaking of Race. Celeste, a self-described “light-skinned Black Jew,” has been having hard conversations about race since she was a little kid. Already an astute observer of culture, she has notated throughout her life how unproductive these conversations tend to be, how we shut down and get defensive, or try to reinforce our own sense of righteousness.
In this conversation, we explore the reasons we’ve become culturally calcified as well as antidotes for taking on tough and essential topics. In Celeste’s experience, the more reserved we become about leaning into potential conflict the more fear enters the equation: And right now, one of the worst labels you can hear is that you are racist.
I loved Do Nothing and I also loved Speaking of Race, because at its heart it is also just about the art of conversation--and active listening. And Celeste has a lot of experience: She is a regular guest host on NPR and American Public Media, and her Tedx Talk on having better conversations has been viewed over 23 million times.
While I’ve got your attention on Celeste, you need to listen to her season with John Biewen on Scene on Radio: They did an incredible series of episodes about misogyny, and his season on race, called “Seeing White,” which he co-hosted with Chenjerai Kumanyika is incredible.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
So thank you for your latest book.
CELESTE HEADLEE:
My pleasure.
ELISE:
I know it's one of those books. I'm sure, you're like, do we really need this book? And yes we do.
CELESTE:
I mean, yeah. Yes.
ELISE:
But I think it's a masterclass on, obviously it has race in its title, and that's the primary subtext of what you're talking about is our lack of fluency in those conversations still, despite some progress, but it feels so relevant to every hard discourse that we're having collectively about COVID and politics in general. It’s a really helpful, not overwhelming guide, and you're a really fun writer. I really like reading you. No, but I can hear you. It's nice when you can actually sort of, it feels like you're reading it to us, too.
CELESTE:
Yeah. I feel like that's my years as a broadcast journalist. I mean, you spend all those years trying to write the way you speak. That's what helps me there.
ELISE:
It works because it feels conversational and illuminating and at times hard, and really well-researched. And so I wanna start with the beginning, I had never heardthis research, but you talk about the studies and I think that there are several over time. Maybe the first one was in 2009 about people who profess to support Obama and then how that actually shows up in their lives in other ways as implicit bias. So people use that as: I can't possibly be racist or be biased because I support Obama, and then it informs their behavior in a negative way. And I'm curious about, I'd love for you to take us through that research. And then I'm curious about your thoughts on how performative we've become with our language, particularly in the last couple of years. And what you think the impact of that will be on our behavior.
CELESTE:
I got to this research because I wanted to figure out why diversity training doesn't work. All this diversity training that we've been doing for decades not only doesn't work, but in many cases backfires. It actually increases the likelihood of discriminatory behavior within an organization. And that led me to these multiple studies of people, the main task of the study will be something like hiring somebody. Like you're gonna make this choice on who to hire. And it'll often be the choice between a Black candidate and a white candidate, or it'll be like here's the amount of money that you get to play with as the leader of a city. And you decide where this money goes. So these were the main tasks, but before the studies, they give them their little questionnaire and half of the people are allowed to say, I voted for Obama and half of them didn't have that question on their questionnaire.
And it turns out that those who said, yes, I voted for Obama were much more likely to hire the white person instead of the Black person, for example, or to give money to organize that benefit for white people instead of Black people. And these tests being repeated and repeated, it turns out there's this Obama effect, which is that when you're allowed to get a credential, when you feel as though you've checked that box, I've checked the “I'm not a racist” box. And therefore every decision I make could not possibly be racist. If I wanna hire this white person or the Black person, it's not because I'm racist, but because that's the smartest choice. If I wanna give to this white organization,then because that's the logical choice, right? We hear this all the time in hiring of, you know, no, I hired the white candidate because they were more qualified.
We find all these reasons, but it's that crucial, ID card, the I'm-not-racist ID card that allows people to, I, you know, it's the Black friend card. And, and so, you know, this prevents all of us from being honest about the fact that bias influences the decisions that we make. We all need to understand that even I, who am Black, and Jewish, and very slightly Native American—I check a lot of boxes on that census form. And I still am biased, and I still make choices that are based in that bias. And if I don't see that, then I can't fix it. And that's where we are now.
ELISE:
No, it makes so much sense. I mean, you open the book by saying we're all biased. And the more that we fight against that, the less likelihood of us actually addressing it, or identifying it within ourselves. You know, the Obama effect, I think it's true of women too, as well. I was just part of a consulting team, and on another consulting team a man said something so sexist. We were stunned. And his response when confronted about it was, well, no, I have daughters. It's the same, you know, we have the same reactive response of there's no way that this could possibly apply to me. I thought that that was staggering, too, because as we get more collectively, more defensive and more entrenched about claiming our goodness, or claiming, you know, that we're anti-racist, etcetera. I wonder if it actually has, as you suggest, maybe the opposite effect that we feel like we've cleared some sort of visual bar of allyship, and then we let ourselves off the hook in our lives as we're evaluating what we're actually doing. And so what we say has become more important in a way than our behavior, but we know that our behavior is what has the greatest impact.
CELESTE:
And part of that performance is absolutely coming down hard on someone else when they make a racist mistake, right? The idea that racist is the worst thing you can say about somebody is not helping. Because we're all a little racist, not to quote Avenue Q, that musical, but everyone is a little bit racist. And so therefore to me, it's like that that word is useful, but it has a limited use. Because racist is not the worst thing you can say about a person. It’s not catastrophic. It's not like they're irredeemable. And by going extreme in that case, and punishing people, when they've said something racist, it allows us to feel like we are more virtuous. We didn't make that mistake. We didn't use the N word in any context and therefore we can’t possibly be racist. Look over here, don't watch what this hand is doing. But look over here. All of it, this whole performance is just preventing us from being authentic with one another, which is the only way we are gonna solve this.
ELISE:
I was thinking about that too, in the context I'm writing a book, and I feel like I'm curious if you think that this is true. I feel like I see this. When I, as a reader, I see this more with women than I do with men. Men do not seem particularly concerned about declaring all of their privilege. But as woman, constantly being concerned that people will think that I think that I can speak for all women, etcetera, in a way that just trips is very trippy, as in not psychedelic in a good way, but very hard to sort of get through without fear of offending someone. Or in a way that I'm like, I am a woman, and I feel like a lot of these things that we experience are shared within the gender. And yet I find women continually…it's like, we're making the column from which we can speak even smaller, rather than looking for all of the things that we have in common.
CELESTE:
A couple things. Number one, I just finished writing a digital e-short, a short thing for Skim on how to talk about sexism. And I found myself having the same thoughts. One of the first things I did when I began to write that book was I took the implicit association test. There's two of them that Harvard offers that are related to gender and I who have been a feminist my entire life. I failed miserably. I am horribly sexist.
So that's number one, is understanding how, despite my conscious beliefs, how effective the mind manipulation has been on my subconscious. That's number one against my own gender. And the other one is something that I found as I was writing, Speaking of Race, which, and I think I even comment on it in the book is like, “Here I am, I'm talking to you about how you should keep your conversation simple. And I'm tying myself into knots, trying to make sure I don't offend anybody.” That I articulate this in exactly the right way, you know? And sometimes that really gets in the way. And I'm not saying it's okay to be spouting microaggressions here and there and everywhere. I'm just saying it's also okay to, to like point out those mistakes people make without halting conversation because of them.
It's funny, when I lead DEI conversations, and you'll start talking about issues of diversity, and I'll say, you know, Black people, or, you know, Asian Americans or Latinx, and someone will say, what about Pacific Islanders? And I'll be like, Yes. You know, and that also. Then what about Indigenous people? Yes. Also that. And then you'll almost always have, and well, so far in my experience has always been a white woman who said, you know, you're saying all this and women are also an underrepresented minority. I'm like, yes, but we're not talking…you're changing the subject. So it's like, no matter what you say, it's not gonna be comprehensive. It's not gonna check every single box for every single person. And that's part of the beauty of it. The beauty of it is that we're all individually and uniquely complex and we cannot possibly understand everybody's experience. And that should inform your conversation. That should give you something to talk about rather than halting conversation.
ELISE:
I think women and perfectionism, and I think perfectionism, I'll just generalize again and just say, I feel like most of the perfectionists I know also happen to be women. I think that particularly sensitive women, too, right. This idea of doing it accurately, perfectly, is making too many people, too many women, refrain from saying anything at all. At a moment when we really need complex and sensitive discourse. And instead you have the people who are sort of flagrantly not interested in being even remotely perfect in what they're saying, and then this sort of silent majority who are full of fear about messing up and making mistakes. Because as you said to do something or say something racist in this current political climate is the worst thing that you can do. And I don't know how we get away from that.
CELESTE:
I mean, I think the long years of research, in fact, one of the seminal researchers in this area is Derald Wing Sue, I think still alive Eminent scholar wrote a book called Race Talk, which is an academic book, but still good. Part of what research has shown to be just avoidance maneuvers. In other words, these narrow scopes of what's allowed to be said, and what isn't is part of avoidance. It turns out that white people especially do not want to talk about race. And so they are quite resourceful at coming up with ways to avoid it. There's the more blatant ways, like, why is everything about race? You know, it's like the Black Lives Matter, no, All Lives Matter. That's an avoidance tactic, right. You're changing the subject.
Don't women's issues matter? Also again, avoiding. And this whole thing of like, you didn't say this exactly the way it's supposed to be, it's policing your tone, rather than the content, right? You're changing the topic. I think one of the things I talk about in the book is wrong-spotting, or changing tactics, switch-tracking. That's a switch-tracking tactic. I come in and I say, Hey, what you just said was racist. And you say, you know, Celeste Headlee, said you shouldn't use racist, that it's become devoid of meaning. And then we're talking about debating the use of the term racist instead of what you said, right. That's switch-tracking. And I think that's part of this right now. I don't have any tolerance for it. I mean, in that I will constantly pull somebody back to whatever the main topic of conversation was.
ELISE:
And as you said, that's an avoidance track, or we feel suddenly afloat, or we don't actually even know what we're talking about. Certainly there's also that happening, a lot. Is people finding themselves, or putting themselves into conversations, having an opinion when they don't really know what they're talking about. And I feel like some of it's exterior pressure, like you're supposed to somehow know everything about everything. I'm thinking about even the Joe Rogan controversy of the day. I haven't listened to those episodes. I know he's said problematic things in the past. I don't know enough to have an opinion. But there certainly is pressure to not only have an opinion, but to take a stance. And we're moving in that direction.
CELESTE:
Let me put it to you this way. How many people, when you tell them what you do, how many people go, oh, I've always wanted to host. I think I would be good as a podcast host. Right? Like everyone, everyone says that, and you know, I've hosted talk shows and, and people will tell me, oh, I think I I've always wanted to host a talk show. I think I'd be really good at it. Like literally everybody says that. And it's the same thing with us needing to take a stance. It's like, everyone is, is a pundit now.
Everyone feels like their social standing depends on how pithy they are when they give their opinion on Joe Rogan and Spotify. We don't allow people to be experts in their field. And again, just as a conversational expert, that's a crappy way to get to know somebody. I mean think of the times when you're talking to a friend or somebody at a party or at a dinner table and they mention something you've never heard of, and you're really quickly, surreptitiously looking it up on your phone. So you can say something in response rather than just saying, wow, I've never heard about that. Tell me what that is. I mean, we need to stop thinking that two Google clicks can make us an expert on everything and let other people educate us. I mean, this isn't just conversation about race. This is a conversation about everything. I mean, you literally know everything that's gonna come out of your mouth already. If it's gonna come outta your mouth, you already know it. So the only way you're gonna learn is by listening to other people, and that's what we're not doing. You know, I get this response all the time of like, oh my God, you're telling us to have more conversations. And I feel like I talk enough and I'm like, you do talk enough. But you're probably not listening. And that's half of a conversation.
ELISE:
I love that moment in the book when you're talking, I think it's a, a woman that you're talking to and she's like, I feel like I, um, <laugh> like, don't say any and no one listen, or I don't say anything.
CELESTE:
Like, oh my God, people talk on and on and on. And I never get a word in edgewise that I was sitting there going, wow, uh you have a hard time…you do not see yourself.
ELISE:
Well, none of see ourselves accurately. But I liked this series of questions in that context that you posit, you say, “1. Is every opinion you hold based on research and experience? 2. Is at least one of your opinions on food, lifestyle, religion, politics, morals, race, based on hearsay, what someone else has told you either personally,or through blog or social media posts? Or on insufficient information, one article in a newspaper, one documentary, one book? And then 3. Is it possible that one of your opinions could change if you received new information?” Those feel like critical by, and then I think as you said, we come at each other sort of armed rather than listening with a willingness to have our minds changed and to actually hear.
CELESTE:
Yeah. I don't know what makes us up the stakes so quickly on stuff that we don't actually care about. I mean, this happens all the time in married couples, right. Where you'll get into a huge fight and you'll be like, why was I fighting about the kind of green beans he bought? Right. Like why on earth did I care? But I mean, this seems to be happening with everything we talk about, like we're ready to throw down and take off the earrings over everything. Stuff we didn't give a shit about last week. These are critical questions for me personally, but for other people too, is like, how confident are you that you are absolutely right. You know that in conversational circles, they give this example all the time of imagine that you have a really painful condition. You need to go see the doctor who is gonna, you know, give you the treatment that you need.
You had to wait like two and a half, three months in order to finally get an appointment. And the week before your appointment, that you've been waiting for all this time, the doctor's off this calls and cancels. And you’re irate, right? They just say, you know, the doctor can't make it. I'm sorry. We'll need to reschedule. And the next time that you go, and you finally get your appointment and you go, and you see the doctor and you are ready to give that doctor a piece of your mind. She says to you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for your patience. You know, when the earthquake happened in Haiti, I rushed over to help some of the people who'd been injured. And this is an example of how quickly your interpretation of a situation changes when you get new information, like something where you absolutely feel justifiably and virtuously right. And then just one tiny bit of information and it completely changes your perception. And we don't often allow that kind of grace in our conversations, right?
ELISE:
No, and it's this sort of moral exclusion or jumping down people's throats, or assuming that they are bad, not evaluating anything as a snapshot, but as a testament, it is really culturally difficult, you know, particularly as we relitigate history and hold people to the standards of today. I thought it was interesting how you talk about Frederick Douglass and your reverence for him, but how some of the things that he believed have had long teeth in being problematic today, right? Like the fact that he ultimately believed in a meritocracy or that hard work solves all social ills, or how do you think about that? Like within this context of being racist or saying something wrong being the worst thing that people can do, and how we're also seeing people's Twitter lives sort of revealed. How do you make those evaluations or do you even feel like that's our job or our role?
CELESTE:
I don't think it's our job.Like I don't wanna be evaluated based on what I do every day. Because I blunder through my days. Like I feel like I just kind of stumble through my day doing the best I possibly can. Can you imagine if somebody was evaluating me based on whether or not I always used a biodegradable poop bag for my dog or, I think back to the very problematic views I had of the trans community when I was in high school, based on the movies I'd seen, like Ace Ventura. It was just completely ill-informed and I was never hateful. I just wasn't accepting, I had no comprehension or understanding. And how different that is from now. And I would hope that somebody, if I had expressed those views on Twitter, that somebody would have the grace to be like, this person is redeemable.
This isn't the waste of a human life. I'm not in any way, shape or form excusing, racist, sexist, ageist, ableist, any of that behavior or any of those comments, I'm not excusing microaggressions. They always need to be called out. They just don't have to be the end of that conversation. They can be the beginning of the conversation. You know, a really good example is what happened with Whoopi Goldberg this week because she made a very bad mistake. I mean, I'm Black and Jewish. And she said, the Holocaust was not about race. That's incorrect, right? I mean, we're talking about people who are white supremacists and literally thought of themselves as the master race. nd she brought somebody on from the ADL, the Anti Defamation League, she educated herself and she came out with really an object lesson in what an apology should look like. That's a great example.
ELISE:
Let's talk about your steps to an apology beause I think that those are important,, which are: “Expression of regret, explanation of what went wrong, acknowledgement of responsibility, declaration of repentance, offer a repair request, for forgiveness.” And as you mentioned, we typically like just kind of cherry pick a few, and avoid again the things that are difficult, or that we don't know how to address. So let's let's role play for a second. So I say something racist or ignorant and you call me out on it. What does it look like? Like what, for example, does the offer of repair look like? What does the, how would you, how would you want to see someone respond to that graciously?
CELESTE:
So an offer of repair has to be some form of, here's what I'm gonna do to make sure it doesn't happen again, or here's wha I'm gonna do to amend the damage. In this particular case, Whoopi Goldberg, the first thing she did was bring somebody on from the Anti Defamation League to give that voice a chance to be heard, and give them a platform that was basically equal to her own. And in her own apology said, I know better. I'm not going to make this mistake again. That's an offer of repair. I'll give you another example. When I was working at one radio station, the male VP kept referring to me as a diva. And in this meeting, there were, there were two women, in like eight or nine men. And of course, because the VP was saying it, then all the other guys at the table started calling me a diva. And when he was approached about this, he said, I'm never gonna do that again. And at the next meeting, I'm gonna say that I was wrong to do it. That's an offer of repair.
ELISE:
So it's not necessarily grand, but it is equivalent to your status or power or your ability to correct things. So most of these things are just between two people. And it's even just saying, I learned, thank you for telling me that. I will never do that again. I'm sorry.
CELESTE:
Yeah, exactly right. I'll do my homework. You know, I had no idea. I'm gonna research this. Thank you for pointing it out.
ELISE:
I love that you brought up Carl Rogers, one of the fathers of modern psychology, who has just seemed like a pretty excellent human. And you recommend reading the following paragraph to yourself before you engage in a fraught discussion: “I'm interested in you as a person. And I think that what you feel is important. I respect your thoughts. And even if I don't agree with them, I know that they are valid for you. I feel sure that you have a contribution to make. I'm not trying to change you or evaluate you. I just want to understand you.” I love that because I think so often we also think it's our role to change people, educate them, inform them, wrong-spot, ridicule them, punish them. Going back to earlier in the conversation, rather than seeing each other as like generally the same right. Or probably having a lot of similar values. And then we think too, that we can deny that person's reality, that what they feel is not true for them somehow, or that we should point that out to them.
CELESTE:
Yeah. And this comes out in the case of, “I was only kidding,” meaning you shouldn't be offended because that was just a joke, you're denying their experience of it, or you're oversensitive, or why does everything have to be about race, which is denying that this person, who has been thinking about race their whole life detected the presence. You know, the idea that we have, it's so weird to me that we do this, but almost no one has an experience where they have had a conversation with someone and that person has ended up by going, oh my God, you're 100%, right. I am wrong. You have changed my mind. Like nobody has a real life experience of that. And yet that's what we go into every conversation actually, that's our goal every time. And I'm like, this has never happened for you.
Why do you keep trying to achieve it? So if we take that off the table, if we take off this goal of changing somebody's mind, then what are you left with? What's your purpose in the conversation? And I feel like not only is that more attainable to have a conversation in which you are exchanging ideas, just exchanging ideas, exchanging information, that's attainable every time, but also it relieves some pressure, right? I mean, sometimes I feel like people see conversations as frustrating because they keep trying to do something that's impossible. Maybe it would be more enjoyable for you if you weren't trying to beat your head against the wall. I feel like that that paragraph from Carl Rogers is not just something that is useful to tell the other person. I think it's mostly for you. Yeah. Like for you to tell yourself, I'm not here to change you. I'm just here to listen and understand.
ELISE:
And to come from a place of curiosity and exactly, you know, really wanting to get to know each other, rather than speaking at each other. Why, why do we do that? You know that as you mentioned, like the Googling under the table, the armoring up with facts and information. Is it because we're egomaniacs? Is it because we're scared? Is it because we ourselves want to be confirmed in our own rightness? What do you think that bias?
CELESTE:
I mean, I think that some of it is, is perfectly natural, understandable. For human beings, belonging is the first need, and you and I talked about this when we talked about my other book, Do Nothing. The number one need for a human being after they've satisfied food, shelter, and water is belonging. What that means is that your ability to be accepted in a community is the difference between life and death for homo sapiens, like making friends and establishing community ties has always been a survival skill for us, which means that impression management is the most important thing in the back of people's minds. Making this impression on other people so that they will be likable. So that can be so that they can prove they are useful. And valuable.
So to that extent, it's understandable to me and forgivable. I'm always trying to get people to have a little bit of compassion for our very human foibles. And this is one of those places in which of course we want to impress other people. Of course we do. But take a breath, right. Slow down just a second and ask yourself, what am I doing? Like, I feel like if more people would go, wait, what am I doing? We would just be happier as a species. You know, just that one little moment to interrogate very briefly. Why am I doing this? What am I doing? And why am I doing this? Might make us a little happier, because I do think it's about proving how smart you are, and proving that you're valuable, or that you're a great conversationalist or whatever it may be.
We don't wanna admit we're wrong. We don't wanna admit that we have missed something. You don't wanna admit what you admitted earlier, which is that you hadn't listened to that Joe Rogan podcast. I don't listen to Joe Rogan either. I haven't heard it and I don't wanna hear it, frankly. I mean I have an opinion in general on vaccine misinformation, but on that part, I don't know. It's difficult. We see it as a vulnerability rather than as an opportunity, and again, this is part of that. Not letting other people be experts in things. We think that we're making ourselves appear weaker.
ELISE:
Do you think that there's a gender component, that men wanna appear smart and strong, and that women want to appear good and moral, going back to that idea of belonging and sort of how we've been set up structurally, like in a patriarchal construct?
CELESTE:
Yes. I'm glad you put that context in, because of if that is what, how we want to appear it's because that's what society demands of us.
ELISE:
Yeah, not a natural inclination. Just a social inclination.
CELESTE:
Yeah. And I think it is true that. We know that men are like many times more likely to interrupt. So, despite this supposed stereotype that women talk more than men, whenever we evaluate that or research that within an organization, men are much more likely to dominate conversations and meetings and, and other organizational than women are. 'm sure that's part of society's demand on men. I mean, patriarchy hurts men too. But you know, the fact of the matter is, is that I'm sure that you and I could both name women who don't shut up, and who feel the need to be the smartest in the real room. I think that the need to appear smart is at this point non-binary. I think it's relatively universal.
ELISE:
Do you think that it's new sort of in, with the rise of social media? Or do you think it's as old as, as time?
CELESTE:
The second. I grew up with people who, you know, old people who were probably 40, who were blowhards and didn't stop talking and all those kind of things. That's always been around.
ELISE:
It's interesting too, not to make this about Joe Rogan, since neither of us actually have an opinion, but I do think it's interesting. And I'm curious about your perspective on, for example, misinformation or this idea now that we really…on some, on one level, I absolutely understand the quality of the information. And yet I think that we're fighting each other about this on a different level, it goes back to what you were saying about, we need to understand that some people are experts. Because there's part of it that I resist, which is this idea that people are incapable of making up their own minds, or making decisions for themselves. I'm not articulating this very well, but I don't like, there's something that feels very paternalistic about this idea that people are dumb and that they cannot assess information. And then at the same time, I also recognize that people can’t always assess information. Does that make sense? I know I'm contradicting myself.
CLESTE:
It does, but at the same time, I get it because I don't think people are dumb, but I know that all of us don't have time to do the research on our own. And so therefore, we have to rely on experts. And even the people who are falling for misinformation are relying on the opinions of others. They're just really sadly being manipulated, and people that they should have every reason to trust are lying to them, for their own separate reasons. But I think we underestimate the power of the manipulation that is going on in some areas of the country. You know, I have a friend of mine who works at a hospital in Tennessee, and he said that if you walk down the street in his town, and ask everyone, you meet how many people have died as a result of getting vaccinated, you'll get an answer between 3000 and 30,000.
And the answer's zero. But that's including surgeons who are telling people, you know, the research is still out. We don't know if it's safe and advising people to wait before they get the vaccine. These are people that they should be able to trust. And so, you know, I mean, there are bad actors and I absolutely feel like a Tucker Carlson should be held to account. And frankly, a Joe Rogan is as well. I think that controlling misinformation and disinformation on social media is one of the most awful things that we could do right now in our history, not only for climate change, and racism, but many, many other things. But I hold Joe Rogan to a much higher account than that person on the streets of Tennessee who has been lied to and misled and purposely manipulated by people that they should be able to trust.
ELISE:
That makes sense. It's just, it's like for whatever reason, it ties me in knots in the sense of how we begin to hold the line on these things and where …it's complicated as we know. I wanna switch gears slightly and go to step two in your process: Accept what you're told. And I feel like this is just a human need. And yet something that we steamroll in ourselves and each other, which is this idea that you need to accept what someone tells you about themselves, and to do otherwise is to imply that you know, their minds better than they do, and to create conflict over something that can't be settled. How do we do that in conversation?
CELESTE:
It's hard. And I wanna bring you back to the woman who was saying, oh, I never get a word in edgewise. And my initial reaction was to go, wow, you actually talk quite a lot. I was not accepting what she said about herself. And to a certain extent, I don't think she was seeing herself clearly, but she also was seeing herself more clearly than others. So it could be her behavior differed with me than with others. And there's a certain aspect in which, if she is not being able to speak in other avenues, then of course, when she finally is with someone who lets her talk, she probably will unload. Accepting what people tell you about themselves requires us to just give them the benefit of the doubt that they know themselves. And they know their own experience. When this comes to conversations about race, it means, if I tell you that I feel icky around somebody, like there may be a little bit sexist around somebody. We tend to discount that, especially in the white European tradition, we're like, let's keep this factual. Let's not let this get emotional, but the thing is, is that race doesn't exist. And so every conversation about race is emotional. It's all emotional.
ELISE:
That's so interesting. That's such a brilliant reframe.
CELESTE:
Yeah. I mean, you can't have a conversation about race without emotion. I mean, how can you? And so when you bring in this, let's keep the emotions down. That's another aversion tactic. That's another way to clamp down on conversations about race. And so accepting what people tell you about themselves is allowing them to tell you their experience with whats has happened to them, and how they see it, and how it felt to them. And that's important information. A., it's not possible for a human being to have a conversation. That's not emotional. We are not AI’s. Every conversation has emotion in it. And B., conversations about race, like I said, are entirely emotional and psychological. And they're about perception and experience.
ELISE:
I loved the conversation and I wanna close the loop on how we opened our chat today, with this idea that DEI initiatives don't work. And I love the conversation with Cindy Gallup that you have in the book where she say, she recommends companies stop talking about diversity altogether. And simply because it's fundamental human nature to believe that when you do good in one area, it's fine to be bad in another. And so again, it goes to this like, if we create this culture where we can check all these boxes and show all of these things that we're doing, then we can stop examining our daily practices or how we're showing up in the world. So what is your recommendation for companies or people who can inform the cultures around them? Is it just conversation day by day and being of the fact that we're all biased and then being extra vigilant about how that might be showing up?
CELESTE:
A couple things. Another thing that Cindy says, which I absolutely agree with, is that if you have a diversity department in your company, it means you're failing. If diversity is actually one of your skills, instead of just a stated value, if it's part of your policies and procedures, then you don't need a diversity department. That's just what you do. And that sort of gets to your question, which is that we can't have Black history month of diversity, right. It needs to be integrated into everything that we do, every conversation has that component in it, because guess what, it's everywhere. And so therefore I wanna encourage all of those conversations. I want people to have 90 second conversations in an elevator and five minute conversations at the dinner table, and all of them.
But as we move forward with organizations, it's also about recognizing what's not working. And most of the things we've been doing aren't working because we've been at this, since at least 1865, and here we still are, you know, let forget to close. Let me say this. We are now in Black history month. If you look back at the history of Black history month, it was always meant to be temporary. This was supposed to be a stop gap. It was supposed to just bridge the amount time that it took to integrate all of the accomplishments and achievements and contributions of Black Americans in our curriculum. And instead we have used February as another way to segregate Blacks out of our history, and not do the tough work of integrating that history into the curriculum. And this is the exact same answer that I will give to you about what organizations should be doing. And what everybody needs to be doing. Stop segregating this out as though there's conversations about race, and then there's conversations about everything else.
ELISE:
Totally.
CELESTE:
It's just conversations. About people.
ELISE:
It is actually really wild. And then, you know, we have women's history a month. It's all quite perverse when you think about it that way, but going back to what you were saying about taking your implicit gender bias. We are all, you know, as Ashley Monague says, he's that visionary anthropologist. We have our first nature, our biological nature. And then we have our second nature, which is the way that society and culture imposes upon who we are and shapes our beliefs. And we forget that. We forget that we are all products of this culture, and that it distorts us, and that there's that wedge or there's that chasm that's unavoidable. And so we live in a patriarchy, the way that we comport ourselves often as women is with internalized patriarchy against ourselves and each other.
CELESTE:
I think about all the times that I've talked about how important it is to have equal representation in culturet. In movies and in TV shows. And am I then supposed to claim that all those years of watching The Brady Bunch and Happy Days, and I Dream of Genie, for God's sakes, didn't have an impression on me? Of course they did, or I wouldn't be fighting so hard to break those cultural norms now. Like that's all living somewhere in my subconscious. And it's like, I say in the book, like we have to lift that rock and let all the creepy crawlies come out because otherwise it's what's the point?
ELISE:
And then we, until we can understand how it acts on us, and informs us, we can't address it. And then we're sort of being driven by this subconscious programming in a way that's not helpful.
CELESTE:
Yeah. Not only not helpful, but goes against the person. I mean, it literally is preventing us from being the person we wanna be.
ELISE:
I love talking to Celeste because she is, I’m sure, in part, thanks to her years of experience in radio, excellent at difficult conversations and finding paths through, and moving things along. And I think we’ve all either lost that ability, or haven’t been trained in that ability. We really aren’t thinking about it, taught how to have discourse. There’s the debate team, which I never did. But generally, we’re not put into situations with each other when we’re young where we can really learn how to listen. And that’s a critical skill that seems to be lacking. And I do think that there’s such a massive fear component, particularly now, both in this desire to appear good, well-informed, expert, smart. And then, a compulsion to express that, when really, most of us, I can count myself in this group, would do better to listen on most topics. I am not an expert in most things. But I am a good student, and I really do want to learn. So I thank Celeste for her book. It’s about race, but it’s really about conversation, including hard ones. And I go back to this list that she has where you can detect the strength of your resistance to being wrong, and really start to evaluate whether your opinions are based on research and experience, or whether you learned from one person on social and it’s informing your entire point-of-view. And then, again, having a willingness to listen without trying to change the other person. That’s a skill that we all need.