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cover of episode How to become a better ally (with Dwinita Mosby Tyler)

How to become a better ally (with Dwinita Mosby Tyler)

2021/2/15
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Dr. Nita Mosby Tyler defines what it means to be an ally, emphasizing the use of personal resources and privileges to support marginalized groups.

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Welcome to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the show, we're going to be talking with Dr. Nita Mosby-Tyler. Dr. Tyler calls herself a facilitator of all things diversity, inclusion, and equity. She gave a talk in November 2019 at TEDx Mile High about how to be an ally. Now, an ally is something that a lot of people, myself included, want to be.

But it can sometimes get a little blurry as to what exactly we mean by that and what concrete steps we're actually taking. Dr. Tyler told me that for her, being an ally means being a person that uses their own resources and privileges to stand beside people who are marginalized or have a particular need in a particular moment. That's certainly something that I want to do and that I try to do, but it is really hard. It's hard because it requires me looking at myself and asking myself what privileges I have, which is uncomfortable.

And then it also requires listening and following other people's leads rather than running in and taking over and making it all about me, which again, to be honest, I like for it to be all about me. I mean, I host a podcast. That's a thing that I really enjoy. So this whole thing, this takes work for me. But if you want the world to be a fairer, a more just, a more equitable place, then

If you want to support and stand with people who have a different race or gender or sexual orientation or a different economic or legal status, Dr. Tyler has practical, actionable advice on how to do that. And I have to say, on a topic that for me can sometimes feel really awkward or like I'm tiptoeing through a minefield so sure that I'm going to say the wrong thing.

Dr. Teller makes it really accessible and she even makes it fun. I think she is just great. And I am so excited for you to hear from her right after this.

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Find World Gone Wrong in all the regular places you find podcasts. I love you so much. I mean, you could like up the energy a little bit. You could up the energy. I actually don't take notes. That was good. I'm just kidding. You sounded great. So did you. We are back and I am here with Dr. Nita Mosby-Tyler.

Hi, I'm Dr. Nita Mosby-Tyler, chief catalyst of the Equity Project, TEDx speaker and author of White People Really Love Salad. So you have written a book, which I think has one of the all-time great book titles of all literature. So funny and so hilarious and great. Well...

Listen, I can't deny it. I love salad. It's a true statement. I didn't expect to be put on the spot, but you know what? I do love a good salad. There you go. So can you tell us the story that inspired that title? Yeah. There's 30 little stories in the book, but that particular story is about the first time I ever had dinner at a white family's house. We were just coming out of segregation in the South.

And a white family invited me over for dinner. And when I got there, there's this big salad bowl on the table and everybody was getting a whole bunch of salad. And I thought, good grief, these white people really love salad because they were filling up their whole plates with salad. I was leaving a lot of room on my plate for the entree only to find out the salad was the entree. Yeah.

Who knew salad was an entree? Well, I learned that in that moment. I went home. My parents said, how was it? And I said, it was terrible. They're poor.

And my family said, what do you mean they're poor? And I said, they didn't have any food. And my family said, but they invited you to dinner. What did you have? And I said, salad. And my mom said, what else? And I said, that was it. And she said, oh my gosh. And I said, well, we got to do something to help them. And my dad said,

Of course, we'll do something to help them. We'll do the reverse welcome wagon. We'll make a bunch of dinner for them and we won't tell them why we're doing it. We'll just say it's the new neighbors supporting the older neighbors. And that's what we did. My mom laid out a dinner like nobody's business because I said they were poor because they had salad. And so they ended up getting this Thanksgiving feast, basically, and they didn't even know that it was all because you thought that they only could eat salad. That's exactly right. I likened salad

sell it as an entree to poverty. But it just, the lesson there is that's how quickly we can set up a bias about things when we don't know anything about it. And that's what happened in that story. That was the point and the moral of the story. I mean, this is what you're so, you have such a unique talent at doing is, you know, it's, it's really funny, but it also really does strike at like this deeper, um,

societal issue that we don't really talk about, which is how we can just jump to these conclusions. And then they stick for a lot of people for the rest of their lives even. So it seems to me like one of the barriers to being an actual ally to people of a different group than you are is

that sometimes we come in with these assumptions that we already have that we don't even know our assumptions. And so we don't really see people for where they are or listen to them saying what they need. And we come in with these ideas about what they want or what they need rather than really hearing the idea that a family needs a ton of food.

When, in fact, they serve salad because that's just what they wanted to eat for dinner. I feel like that can get amplified across a lot of different groups in ways in which it's counterproductive. Is that a barrier to being an ally? Absolutely. It's one of the steps. It's a concrete step that is necessary to be a good ally. And that is mitigating your own biases.

both the kinds that are conscious and the kinds that are unconscious. You got to figure out a way to mitigate both. If you come to the table with your own ideology about how things are, it gets in the way of you actually listening to what those that, to those that you're serving, what they really need. So you've got to mitigate those biases. Absolutely. What are some other concrete steps that we can use to, to be an actual ally? Well,

One of the things, and this is a hard one, one of the things that we have to do to be good allies is to be selfless, meaning we have to amplify the voices of people that are oppressed instead of amplifying our own. Yeah, sometimes that's hard because we want to tell our own stories.

This has nothing to do with you. You have to amplify the voices of others. And so being able to do that and disrupting

Any scenario where you're talking about you in the process would be another really key step. One other thing that's important to be a good ally is not leaning so heavily on those that are marginalized or oppressed for your education. Again, it's about being selfless. So you have to understand that your education in this process is really up to you.

And it isn't the burden of those that you're trying to support to educate you. And so being selfless in that area would be really important too. Yeah, it's interesting because I think that

Coming at this as a white person, I think often when I think about allyship, I do think about it from the lens of like white people being better allies to people of color. And that obviously is a way of centering white people. And I think what's interesting is when you talk about it, you talk about it not just as like white allies to people of color, but to that anyone can be an ally to a different marginalized group. Bingo. I think it's really important.

You know, we're in a racial reckoning in the U.S. anyway right now. And so we're centered on race a lot. And I totally understand that. But allyship really can be broader than that. I think about allies that I've had in my life.

Sometimes it was an older person that just gave me a lot of support around what I was doing to grow as a professional. So you can see allyship happening in all different directions, but the criteria, some of the concrete things that we need to do remain the same. I guess another one of those concrete things would be standing up even when you feel scared. I find in the

subject of allyship, the thing that gets in the way of people being great allies, honestly, is that they're scared. They're scared they're going to screw up. They're scared they might say the wrong thing or not know what to say. And so standing up while

scared is an important concrete thing to know to be real in the world of allyship. You will be scared. You might be doing something you've never done before. I think that also kind of ties into this idea that sometimes the people who were afraid of offending aren't necessarily the members of the group that we're trying to help, right? Like sometimes we're afraid of offending other people

members of a privileged group, right? Like I think sometimes the people who white people are most afraid of offending are other liberal white people. And that like, if you don't perform well,

your support the right way, then other liberal white people are going to say, you're actually bad. You're a racist when it's like sometimes the communities that you're trying to help are like, hey, we don't feel that way. And I think that kind of leads to that can sometimes lead to a very performative sense of allyship rather than like an actual tangible allyship. That's so true. I call it you're just woke gone wild. I mean, we got woke gone wild all over the place right now. Everybody's judging and critiquing the degree to which you're woke.

So, you know, it comes in stages too. There's some people that are sort of at that awake stage. They're just beginning to understand what we're talking about here. They're early on in determining what allyship looks like for them. And then you've got a woke group that knows how to be an ally. The risk factor is to start judging others.

And then there are people that are just working. They are actively doing equity work and they're not in those other two categories at all. They're operationalizing the things that we're talking about. So people will fall in those categories all the time. I would say to you, world according to Nita, we've got to stop judging and critiquing each other in this work or the work won't work.

We are going to hear much more about the world according to Nita right after this. Don't go anywhere.

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Today, I have Dr. Nita Mosby-Tyler here with us. But first, let's actually hear another anecdote from Dr. Tyler's book. This is one that she shared on stage at TEDx Mile High in 2019. I grew up in the middle of the civil rights movement in the segregated South. As a five-year-old girl, I was very interested in ballet. It seemed to be the five-year-old girl thing to do in the 1960s.

My mother took me to a ballet school. You know, the kind of school that had teachers that talked about your gifts and talents, knowing that you'd never be a ballerina. When we arrived, they said nicely that they did not accept Negroes. We got back in the car as if we were just leaving a grocery store that was out of orange juice. We said nothing, just drove to the next ballet school. They said,

"We don't accept Negroes." Well, I was confused, and I asked my mother why they didn't want me. And she said, "Well, they're just not smart enough to accept you right now, and they don't know how excellent you are." Well, I didn't know what that meant. But I was sure it wasn't good, because I could see it in my mother's eyes. She was angry.

and it looked like she was on the verge of tears. Well, I decided right then and right there that ballet was dumb. You know, I had lots of experiences like that along the way, but as I got older, I started to get angry. And not just angry at the outright racism and injustice. I was angry at people that stood by and didn't say anything.

Like, why didn't the white parents in that ballet school say, "Uh, that's wrong. Let that little girl dance"? Or why didn't the white patrons in the segregated restaurant say, "Hey, that's not right. Let that family eat"? Well, it didn't take me long to realize that racial injustice wasn't the only place that people in the majority were staying quiet.

When I'd sit in church and hear some homophobic comment being disguised as something scriptural, I'd say, "I'm sorry, why aren't the heterosexual churchgoers disrupting this nonsense?" Or --

In a room filled with boomers and Gen Xers who started degrading their millennial colleagues as being spoiled, lazy and overconfident, I'd say, "I'm sorry. Why isn't someone my age saying, 'Stop stereotyping?'" I was used to standing up on issues like this. But why wasn't everyone else?

So thinking about one of the places that you can probably have the most impact as a person who's trying to help support other people is often it's in our workplaces. What are ways that in the workplace we can support other people better? So one of the most important things that can happen in a workplace today is for people to evolve from being a bystander to being an upstander. Being an upstander means that you will shape up

some guidance or some strategy for what you will do if you see something that's harmful. And organizations across the globe are starting to create guidance documents that help employees understand what they can do to be an upstander in that work environment. So I think that is critical in this moment in particular. So we don't

make ourselves complicit in just standing by and watching things happen that are not just. You know, it seems like one of the ways that

it often takes place, a subtle way in which it takes place in workplaces is people in meetings expressing an idea and certain people's ideas being heard and certain people's ideas not being heard. I just know from my own experience in like a television writer's room, sometimes someone will say an idea and it'll be a great idea. And for some reason, it just doesn't really get heard in the room, right? Maybe it's just that they said it quietly or maybe it's who it came from. And I have noticed that

Yeah.

Yeah, I love that too. Yeah. And that always, I think, giving people credit for the idea rather than just saying it again. That's something I've had to learn, right? Because I used to be like, well, what about this? And then people were like, you have a great idea. And I'm like, oh, it wasn't my idea. But now having to assertively be like, no, no, no, that was not my idea. That is Nita's idea. But it's great. Yeah, you're absolutely right. What a great example of being an upstander, though. Yeah.

If you were a bystander, you just would have noticed that Nita's idea didn't get acknowledged. That's what a bystander would do, just notice it. You just described what an upstander would be doing, which is standing on behalf of Nita in an allyship position to illuminate the voice that we didn't hear. That's perfect.

So you get an A. Oh, thank you so much. Well, there have been so many times where I have not gotten an A. So I want to talk, rather than make it sound like I'm an A student all the time, you know, what about in those situations where I notice the thing and I don't do it, right? So I noticed that something, either someone gets overlooked or someone gets excluded or someone says something kind of weird. My personal default can sometimes be to apologize afterwards, to say to them, like, I'm so sorry that that happened. I have...

In reading your work and in listening to your talk, it occurs to me that that kind of apology doesn't really move the needle. I'm saying, I'm so sorry that that happened, but I'm not changing the effect at all. Right. It makes you complicit. I know that's a painful thing to hear, but it makes you complicit in the process when you apologize for your inaction. Right.

So the reality is in equity work, in allyship work, in action is unacceptable. It is not a passive process.

So it is an evolution for each and every one of us because, again, we're very accustomed to being bystanders. We're very accustomed to saying that doesn't really have anything to do with me or I don't have the power to do anything about that. So it keeps us in the bystander position. We are evolving now in this system that we call equity into everybody moves in a cadence towards being an upstander.

It's really important and you can't apologize your way out of it. So I feel like there's a

There seems like there's a challenging needle to thread here for people who want to be an ally, which is you want to do better. You want to actually make change and help support communities, whether they be LGBTQIA communities, whether they be people of color, whether they be whatever the community may be, whether they be people who are differently abled. But sometimes the things that we need to do to support and actually be an ally are things that are at

at the time invisible to us. So how do we figure out how to be actual allies without putting the burden on those communities to educate us? So here's the one piece of allyship that I think is about you. The rest of it really isn't about you, but this part is. And that is really exploring

what your privileges are and what the benefits of your privileges are. You really have to think about that. Each one of us, we talk about white privilege a lot, but there are other kinds of privileges that each of us also hold. We got to think about that. I have to think about that every day. What are the privileges that I hold?

That could benefit another group. And how do I use that? So I think that reflective work is really important to do so that you know what you're leveraging. Otherwise, this really turns into a scary proposition.

If you think you've got four or five privileges that could be of service to other people, other groups, even if it doesn't benefit you to use them, but it benefits others to transfer them, that's it. So I'll just use myself as an example. I have a privilege in my work of knowing that.

about the hiring processes of a lot of major organizations across the country. I know how the process works. I know what they're looking for. In some cases, I may have even helped draft the job description. That's a privilege that I have. So when I think about people that are trying to be employed, especially during a time like COVID-19,

That is a benefit that I have in my privileges that I can transfer to others. I can direct them to where I know some opportunity areas are, and I can be of service by talking to the employer about how great that potential employee is. Those are privileges that I don't take for granted. That's just an example of leveraging a privilege that you have and transferring that benefit to someone else.

So it seems to me like one of the big things that we first have to do is like, think about like, what are our actual abilities and what are our privileges and where do we come from? And then being humble about not being like, now I'm going to use those and get a pat on the back. But instead thinking like, how do I shift that off of me so that it's actually not about me? Yeah. I, you know, I'll go back to the fact that all of this is a lesson around being selfless.

I think that is an opportunity area for all of us because this is always going to be about bettering and we're advancing someone else. And what a beautiful part of humanity for us to be focused on right now is how do we

Take what we've been given, sometimes been given, sometimes unearned, transfer it to someone else so that life might be better for them. That's what this whole conversation is about. So we can't pigeonhole our thinking that to be an ally means I just need to give money to this group that's marginalized or oppressed and then I'm done.

It actually is more broad than that even. And it can involve all of us, not just some of us. I also want to acknowledge as we're having this conversation, there's kind of an interesting meta level of us talking about how it's not other people's responsibility to teach you how to be an ally. And yet, because I have a podcast, I can be like, can you teach me to be an ally though? Yeah.

You have my permission, though. OK, good. You know, you didn't make an assumption that I should be teaching you. That's the key. Don't make an assumption that your education comes from the very people that are marginalized or oppressed. I remember when George Floyd was murdered. How many people skipped right over? How are you feeling in this moment, Nita? And went straight to what do we what should we do?

And it was offensive to me that my pain and the heaviness of that moment wasn't even acknowledged. And at the same time, we were asking for the lesson plan. I'm like, what am I supposed to do right now? I hadn't even figured out what I was supposed to do. And I had, in particular, white people asking me what they were supposed to do. So one of the difficult things about what we're talking about

or anything that's really associated with the topic of equity is we've never had a system of equity before. And we don't have a playbook for how you're supposed to create one. And so what's happening is we're all trying to architect what a system of equity would look like through our allyship and through other sort of structural things that we're doing. And we have to come to terms with that reality that there is no blueprint,

or checklist. No one has exactly the right answer. It is through this collective work that we call allyship

that will come up with the master plan for this. I think that if you were to make like a checklist of what is, and I'm putting this very much in quotes, right? If you were to make a checklist for what is a quote, good white person, that the checklist would include like has a black friend. And a lot of people have that, right? But then like actually listens to and emotionally cares for a person who's not the same race as them is not necessarily always on that list for people. And so I think

Sometimes there's this performative element to friendships even where it's like you have to be my friend because that means that I'm not a racist as opposed to like, how can I undo racism and how can I actually like hear what's happening in the world to you? Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, it's like I call it the Noah's Ark syndrome. It's where you've got two of everything in your life and then you think you're complete, right? I got my two black friends and I got my two gay friends. I'm good.

We're not actually talking about counting people here. We're actually talking about interrogating our systems, dismantling things that don't work, pulling whole systems of racism out of systems or residual parts of racism out of systems. We're talking about construction work now. And that is difficult for people to wrap their heads around because there's not the master plan for that.

So I think we've got much work to do, but I got to be honest with you. This is really the first time in my life that I have felt like equity is in our sight line. I've never felt like that before. The difference between this moment and moments that I've lived through in the past is that I'm beginning to see organization systems say out loud,

Black Lives Matter and or racial equity work matters and putting things in place to get it done. Now, if we just sort of move the performative ones out of the way, the ones that are really serious about this work are truly interrogating their systems and starting to collapse the things in their systems that don't work well for everyone. I've never seen that before.

I think sometimes we see the signs of people being awake and then that you see woke and then you see work. It's the same categories of how people move through a continuum. When you go in a wealthy neighborhood and you see Black Lives Matter signs or other signs about who's welcome there,

I try not to critique it. I try to think about where they might be on a continuum, maybe even for the first time in their lives. They are acknowledging difference. They are acknowledging inequity. And they are acknowledging that in some way, even if it's at the beginning stages, they might be allies. I'm okay with that.

What I'm not okay with is staying in one part of this evolutionary process or not moving in the continuum.

This is, I always say, we need less nouns and more verbs. To say you're an ally is the beginning. That's a noun. We need verbs, meaning you got to do something. If you say you're an ally, now you have to do something. And so getting people to move in that continuum would be really important.

So a lot of the ways in which people kind of engage with these issues right now, or a lot of the most contentious places where they're engaging with them are on social media. I think that's a place where you see a lot of the performative allyship, right? Like people tweeting things, but not actually doing the work. So can you unpack a little bit about what performative allyship is and then talk a little bit about how we can avoid doing that?

So performative allyship is rampant. It is, it's a noun without a verb. It is professing to stand for something without doing something. So we have a lot of that. You remember Black Lives Matter was everybody's profile picture. Performative is if you just stop right there. I just make that my profile picture and now I'm,

Somehow I'm in this equity work. That's performative. It's a lovely first statement on your journey to do something. The issue or the definition around performative work is that you never really do something or that you believe what you just did was enough.

So a lot of performative work. I call it, I actually call it fake equity, fake equity. That's my favorite word, fake equity. So I'm not a part of a big call out culture. But the one thing that I will hold people accountable for is if I see fake equity present, I'll just say, I think that's fake equity.

And sometimes it's a jarring comment to get people to think about whether or not what they're doing is action oriented or if it's passive and simply performative. So if you're just generating things so people can see you doing something or see you making a stand, but you're not actually doing active work, you run the risk of fake equity.

The flip side of that is the real change that can happen when there's active work on equity. You highlighted that in your talk. Let's actually listen to another clip. I mean, imagine if heterosexual and gay people had not come together under the banner of marriage equality. Or what if President Kennedy just wasn't interested in the civil rights movement? Most of our major movements in this country might have been delayed or even dead because

if it weren't for the presence of unlikely allies. When the same people speak up in the same ways they've always spoken up, the most we'll ever get are the same results over and over again. You know, allies often stand on the sidelines waiting to be called up. But what if unlikely allies led out in front of issues? Like,

What if black and Native American people stood in front of immigration issues? Or what if white people led the charge to end racism? Or what if men led the charge on pay equity for women? Or what if heterosexual people stood in front of LGBTQ issues?

And what if able-bodied people advocated for people living with disabilities? You got some serious applause there. Obviously, people were connecting with what you were saying. I absolutely felt like that. I felt like I was speaking from my heart and my experiences.

And I was very disconnected from how they would be landing on other people. I was really focused on the experiences themselves. And any applause that I got was stunning for me. Absolutely stunning for me that it landed with people in a way that they could receive. And it's just a moment that I will never forget.

I know you know this, that when you have grown up in the way that I grew up in segregation in the South and you fast forward from that moment where you weren't even allowed in a building because you were Black to a moment on a TEDx stage where you're getting applause for telling those very stories.

It's surreal and stunning and life-changing. And I think I am forever changed because of that moment. So your talk focused on unlikely allies, and you have actually done inclusiveness training work with a lot of unlikely places and a lot of unlikely partners. What are your strategies on how to forge those unlikely alliances when you're talking with people who maybe come off initially like the opposition?

I work with all kinds of communities and organizations across the globe and

And one of the things that is important to me is to always remember that I might be the unlikely ally. And that oftentimes, if you just open your heart and your mind, you might find that you're influencing the very people that you have had biases around. I have shown up in scenarios in rural communities where nobody looks like me.

Where if I listen to my bias, I might say they won't listen to me. But a part of why we've got to tackle and mitigate bias to even be an ally is for that very reason. You could be shutting yourself out of life-changing work if you stay in those biases. Only because I have one agenda. I want justice for everyone. I don't actually care who it is.

I want justice for everyone. I want everyone to at least have a reasonable chance at living in a system of equity where they can thrive and get what they need to thrive. That's my agenda. And so it helps me to peel back the who it is in a way that allows me to be in unlikely places and unlikely spaces all the time.

If we pick and choose who we should be working with, we actually will never be in a position in a collective to design a system of equity. You've got to have all hands in on the building of a system of equity. Even systems that we are dismantling require the people that are in the system to be participants in the process. So we can't rule people out of equity work.

or we don't actually build complete systems. So there are times when I've worked with police departments and then on the other side of the justice system too. And there is a voice and there are strategies that need to be in place on all of those sides in order for us to get to the right system. We will lose...

in this equity work if we don't have the literal intelligence to know how the systems are working. If we continue to stay in a position where we're judging and critiquing and being defensive about what we're hearing and what we're saying, I believe we won't actually advance equity.

So hearing with grace and speaking with grace doesn't mean you're not being direct and telling the truth. It means that at the core of what you're doing, humanity will matter. Because if it doesn't matter, there's no sticking power in what we're doing here. Know that that word unlikely is important.

You might end up being an ally on something that you never considered before or something that has nothing to do with you directly or something that you're not all that educated about. And that is beautiful, too. You might just be the unlikely one.

that changes the life course of someone else. And wow, what a way to have said you lived in the world. Dr. Nita Mosby-Tyler, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. The pleasure is all mine. Thank you for all you're doing. Keep being a verb.

That is it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. And of course, thank you to our illustrious guest, Dr. Nita Mosby-Tyler. I am your host, Chris Duffy. This show is produced by Abiman Yudas, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov, and Cara Newman of TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions. Thank you so much for listening, and please remember to rate and tell your friends.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.