When I was 19 years old, I was hit by a car while crossing the street. I flipped over the hood of the car twice before landing on the asphalt, shattering my right side. I sustained my most serious fractures in my humerus, but I also fractured my hip, my fibula, and my ankle. It took me two years to fully recover and regain 90% of my mobility, along with some of — but not all of — my pre-accident strength.

I often explain my life story in terms of this event and emphasize how I went from nondisabled to disabled in this one moment. The truth is more complicated.

— — — —

I first learned the term “covering” as I entered my diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging career. I couldn’t quite differentiate what it meant from passing — which is physically representing yourself as a member of the dominant group — so I looked it up. I found Kenji Yoshino’s excellent 2006 New York Times article, “The Pressure to Cover,” and at the same time, found a word to describe myself.

Covering is downplaying a nondominant identity. Whether that means changing your last name to seem less like a marginalized racial or ethnic identity, keeping images of your partner of the same gender identity out of your office to downplay your sexual orientation, or powering through major medical issues to ensure others don’t see your disability as “getting in the way,” covering is not about hiding your identity, but instead, making it less obtrusive.

Since I was 15, I had been managing a seemingly ever-growing list of chronic illnesses from hypothyroidism to polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). In my twenties, after developing severe congestion, fatigue, migraines, and various stomach disorders, I learned after seeing multiple specialists that I had benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), severe mold allergies, a chronic stomach condition, and surprisingly, a heart murmur. I learned of the murmur just a few months after my paternal grandmother had a heart attack that revealed she had valve disease, to which I now know I am predisposed.

It was in reading Yoshino’s account of his own experiences that I learned that I had been covering for years.

— — — —

After my car accident, I never once described myself as disabled or having a mobility disability. In the hospital before my surgery, my doctor advised me to take a three-month leave of absence from college. I resisted, and I returned back to school one week after my surgery.

I went into extreme planning mode, contacting the university myself to arrange for shuttle services to and from campus knowing that I could not walk that distance under the best circumstances, let alone in the dead of an icy winter. I requested reasonable accommodations to bring my iPad and keyboard to class so I could type notes since I could not use my right arm. I contacted my professors and let them know I would be in their classes.

When one professor stated that she’d rather I not take her class and focus on my recovery because she worried I would not be able to “keep up,” I dropped her class and begged a human rights professor teaching a class at the same time to make an exception and let me join. I also vowed that I would perform better, be sharper, and just generally excel. That first professor’s rejection galvanized me; I would not “disappoint” anyone during my recovery.

Not once did I consider that I may live with mobility-related disability for the rest of my life. I couldn’t even consider it an option. Based on the cultural messages I had been learning my whole life, I believed that being disabled made you less than, invisible, pitiable, and weak. It’s part of why I became obsessed with diagnosing and systematically eliminating my chronic illnesses long before my accident, and truthfully, long after.

— — — —

I grew up with the term “invalid,” meaning a person who is sick, disabled, and bed-ridden. I also grew up with its homonym (two or more words with the same spelling and different meanings), “invalid” meaning being without, wrong, unrecognizable, and void. The two words came to mean one and the same to me.

I wanted to be strong, high-performing, and respected. The idea that a person could be all of those latter things and disabled seemed impossible, a contradiction.

So, from my teens on, any time I had chronic symptoms, I pleaded with my parents to take me to multiple doctors and specialists. I wanted a diagnosis, a treatment plan, and a pathway to full-scale eradication of any illness I may experience. For surface-level issues, this worked.

I’ve spent more money on eliminating visible symptoms of my polycystic ovarian syndrome than just about anything other than my house. Expensive dermatologists, skin treatments, and cosmetics to eliminate hormonal acne, personal trainers and extreme dieting to shed weight, and invasive treatments to eliminate the more noticeable effects of stomach cramps, back pain, and hormonally-driven changes in mood.

I was proud any time someone said they were “shocked” that I had PCOS and questioned whether I wasn’t borderline, someone who just had a few symptoms but had a mild case.

The fact that I would frequently pass out from stomach pain was something that only my inner circle knew. It may not be totally possible to pass — unexpected fainting spells, vomiting, temporary loss of vision, debilitating migraines, and even an inability to reach for or lift items — meant that people knew, abstractly, that I had some “health issues.” But they were issues, not a condition to them.

And that’s what I wanted. In some cases, I wore my discipline and resolve to act in spite of these issues as a badge of honor.

In my first truly high-pressure job, I found myself in a meeting about the organization’s future vision. Excitingly, I was asked my opinion on long-term strategy for the first time. I was also overcome with the need to vomit. I briefly excused myself, and knowing I couldn’t make it to the coworking space’s bathroom, found an oversized, bucket-like trash can to throw up in. I wiped my face with a wet wipe, swallowed some water, and reentered the meeting.

The one setback was that the entire office and conference room were encased in glass, meaning the other meeting members had seen the whole situation. My boss asked if everything was okay or if I needed to go home. I brushed off the incident and kept going.

At that same job, I started to feel the onset of a monster migraine. I developed almost immediate light sensitivity, colored spotting in my vision, and skull-wide pressure. Aware that in my short, three-year career I had not once taken a sick day, I panicked. There was no way I was going home early. That would be a sign that I couldn’t “handle” my job, and I would never concede that kind of defeat.

I asked a colleague for ibuprofen and was supplied with two tabs of extra-strength Excedrin. I didn’t think to check the ingredients before I swallowed them, not realizing that Excedrin contains caffeine, which is a high-risk substance for someone with vertigo. Within about half an hour, I found myself experiencing a massive vertigo attack, almost falling directly over. I crawled under the dark space below my standing desk, lowered the brightness on my computer, and kept typing. My two interns had prepared a presentation for me that day, and without questioning, printed out the presentation, sat on the floor next to me, and led it.

It took hours before I was able to stand, and I had to take a Lyft home because I couldn’t walk. The next morning, when I got out of bed and tried to stand, I fell directly over, face-first onto my wood floor. I made an appointment with a doctor to re-up my prescription of Meclizine and found a physical therapist in my office building to help manually by performing the Epley maneuver.

Years later, one of the interns who was there that day noted that he had never met anyone more hardworking than me. I took it as a compliment, the way he meant it, but I felt some ambivalence. I couldn’t even remember the work I did that day. I can’t really remember much of what that job was; but, I can easily relive the anguish of feeling trapped under my desk, not knowing if the dizziness, nausea, or inability to move would ever go away.

— — — —

Disability activist Alice Wong’s work on disability visibility set me on a fundamentally different trajectory when it comes to identifying my disability, not as something that should be covered, but something to be discussed and considered. Through reading her work and the myriad stories of disabled people she has platformed, I have come to realize that it is not my obligation to “power through,” but that workplaces should be making space and accommodations for the 26% of Americans that live with disabilities.

Paid sick time, generous and paid leave, healthcare coverage, flexible work schedules, accessible buildings, and access to necessary tools and equipment must be the baseline. Ingrained biases and negative attitudes towards disabled people, too, must be deprogrammed in our offices.

Some of this work begins with deprogramming the internal beliefs many disabled people hold about ourselves. But to focus only on personal responsibility is disingenuous, manipulative, and callous. These beliefs exist in many disabled people, myself included, because they are taught to us by the people around us.

I have had bosses, clients, and well-meaning colleagues tell me my “health comes first” and at the same time ask me for a favor or to work on something they need. Which is it? Does my health come first, or does the task you want me to do? These same people are often the first to say, “you just focus on getting better,” as if whatever I am managing is treatable or that I would even want to treat it. Perhaps most irksomely, I often hear them say that the reason I am ill is because I work too much, stress too much, do too much, and I don’t know how to relax.

The last one hurts the most because there is truth to it. Until the beginning of 2020, I put my mind and body through such extreme working hours that I stopped producing my own adrenaline and developed severe issues producing and regulating my cortisol levels, along with other stress hormones. Yet, I refuse to take the blame for that alone. I had my reasons.

Healthcare is extremely expensive, especially when you have chronic conditions and rarer illnesses that not every doctor has a playbook to address. I worked two full-time jobs for the first two years out of college in part because I couldn’t fully afford medical care otherwise.

Plus, covering is expensive. It meant having to freelance, work extra jobs, and scrimp and save in other parts of my life that might lead to more sustainable health practices. I made less than $50,000 a year when I was seeing dermatologists, personal trainers, nutritionists, and physical therapists, all to look less sick. I believed, and not wrongfully so, that if I didn’t maintain the appearance of a healthy working professional, I would never be successful.

This was reinforced by the colleague who reminded me when I turned 24 that I was lucky to be married because women were no longer viable after the age of 25. The thought that came to mind was simply, how many years of viability do I lose as a chronically ill person? And what do the keloid scars and moderate restricted right-side mobility subtract? Was I ever viable?

The answer is, of course. I was viable then, now, and for all time. Yet, that idea isn’t always front and center for me, even now after years of therapy and support from the disability justice community.

— — — —

Two weeks ago, I went to the emergency room for complications related to my pregnancy. The truth is, my pregnancy has been very difficult, and routine visits to the hospital (not just my obstetrician) are a big part of the experience. I am surrounded by people telling me something must be wrong, that my symptoms will go away, and that I must not be doing “all the right things” if I feel this sick all the time.

Well, I am in the “golden time” of my second trimester, and I feel worse than ever. Importantly, my doctor says that while unfortunate, this is normal. Many pregnant people have such severe pregnancy symptoms they are unable to work or function; still, others end up at the hospital for weeks at a time. Having preexisting chronic conditions doesn’t necessarily mean your pregnancy will be tougher on your body, but in my case, it has. Migraines that used to last 36 hours now last 6 days, nausea that came on with vertigo attacks now persists almost every day starting at 4:00 pm onward, and chronic muscle and joint pain has accelerated to some of the highest levels I have ever experienced.

And… I am running a growing business that has a payroll for ten employees to support. The pressure of that responsibility looms large every day of my life.

When I came home from my stay in the ER, I worked for two hours on a client project that team members were handling for me while I was away. I wanted to make sure no balls were dropped, but I also really, really, really didn’t want to ask them for more help than what I deemed “reasonable,” for fear they would feel I was taking advantage of them. The next day, I led three facilitated sessions, working about eleven hours, owing in part to the fact that we had no available substitutes. This did not square with the on-call doctor’s recommendation to take it easy, avoid stress, and rest.

The unlearning process is difficult. Perseverance, discipline, and effort have always been the characteristics most emphasized to me as a worker and an American. Unlearning is even harder when faced with everyday social pressures. Some of my clients are lovely and understanding, especially since I became pregnant, either owing to their personal experiences, their empathy, or their ongoing struggles around retention because of the great resignation of working parents. It’s worth noting that not all of them are.

Despite vulnerably and candidly naming that I was slow to respond to email because I was in the ER, one client told me I should have handled the situation by escalating any scheduling concerns to them before I went to the hospital. Another asked after my health and then affirmed that our contract had a very specific delivery date defined.

The easy answer would be to drop the clients who don’t understand. And arguably, in our current market, that is an option. But it won’t always be.

In 2021, the pressure to cover mental health issues is especially troubling. While employees are talking more about these issues, they are still working longer hours than they did pre-pandemic. According to Mental Health America’s 2021 State of Mental Health in America, 19% of people in the U.S. are living with a diagnosed mental health condition nationwide, 1.5 million more than in 2020. COVID-19 has killed many and infected many more, with the long-term effects still unknown. The infectiousness of the disease has limited social support for childcare, elder care, and community help, taxing caregivers.

In 2006, Yoshino wrote about covering and some of the groundbreaking civil cases that were helping address social stigma. Fifteen years later, and the picture doesn’t look so different. The question, then, is clear: How can we change social attitudes and biases around disability (and all other marginalized identity groups) before we dig ourselves deeper into this hole?

Significant policy changes, a stronger social safety net, reprioritization of workers over shareholders, and ongoing, social identity-specific education are all at the top of the list.

But how about we try this to start: before assuming or advising, seek to understand others first. My pregnancy may not be like the one you experienced, just like my ability to cover in the first place may be a privilege you have never had. Let’s focus on eliminating “should” from our vocabulary and instead consider asking people to share who they are with us.

It’s that time of year again. I am in 42 hours of meetings a week, and every other piece of digital media I consume says I need to “stop bragging” about being busy or admit that “being busy” is an excuse to shirk my responsibilities and not own up to the truth. Apparently, when I say I am “too busy,” I am trying to cover up the fact that I don’t want to talk to you.

As someone who worked six jobs in college to pay my bills, I have always felt ambivalent about the phenomenon of busy-shaming. I openly disavow the uniquely American hustle-based culture as a Trojan horse for exploiting workers. I also think the idea that “most of us are not too busy; we need to learn to take ownership” is actually the same concept in disguise.

This phrasing also reeks of a very particular kind of white-collar, highly educated privilege that I am especially sensitive to because I am now both white-collar and highly educated. We hate those things that remind us of parts of ourselves that we do not fully accept. I think it’s important to name this bias, as well as the fact that as a relatively even-tempered and unruffled person, this entire online conversation makes me angry. Really, really, really angry.

Every time I see an “inspirational” Instagram post, mini LinkedIn advice column, or new internet think piece stigmatizing those of who identify as “too busy,” I enter a shame spiral that ultimately leads to me overcommitting more. Which I think, at the end of the day, is the point. These posts are not simply meant to open our minds to a truth we haven’t yet swallowed; they exist to exclude and put down those who identify with the “bad behavior.”

This content works at making people feel very bad about their behavior. Across sixteen coaching sessions over the last two weeks, I have heard person after person explain it’s “their fault” things are “too busy,” and they know they should take better care of themselves. “Honestly, [they] feel really bad about it.”

The discourse around “the busy lie” may be effective at sowing the seeds of insecurity, but rhetorically and practically, I don’t believe it holds. Here’s why.

1. When we call being “too busy” an excuse, we invalidate issues of systemic inequality that must be addressed.*

Among hourly workers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that “392,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.2 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers.”

As journalists and researchers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Matthew Demond have shown, making ends meet at these wages is virtually impossible without working multiple jobs and navigating significant challenges, such as lack of access to transportation, housing, and childcare, as well as food insecurity. These people really are too busy; they aren’t making excuses.

Of course, thought leadership about “the busy lie” isn’t typically geared towards hourly workers or Americans living below the poverty line. Instead, these critiques are aimed at white-collar workers.

The problem is that many of these people really are “too busy,” too. Since COVID-19 started, that number of people has skyrocketed. People who really are “too busy” might now be most of us.

While company leaders joke about welcoming young kids into Zoom meetings and folding laundry during international calls, they benefit from an increase in average working hours since the pandemic began. A Harvard Business School study found that the average workday increased by 8.2% or about 48 minutes since the pandemic started.

Before the pandemic, reports estimated that women were responsible for twice as much unpaid care as their man-identified counterparts. The recent global health crisis has widened this gap, with some estimates suggesting that women have added three hours of caregiving to their days — or fifteen hours per week — on top of their full-time jobs. For this reason, recent projections suggest women’s employment may not reach pre-pandemic levels until 2024, which is two years later than men’s employment.

In fact, 275,000 women left the workforce in January of 2021, according to the Bureau of U.S Labor Statistics. Since the pandemic started, women’s labor force participation has fallen to historically low levels, and women have accounted for 56 percent of workforce exits despite making up just 48 percent of the labor market.

This very small subset of data focuses only on socioeconomic status and gender identity. The added layers of racial and ethnic identity, disability, nationality and caregiver status (to name a few) further complicate the idea that people are making excuses when they don’t keep their commitments. Discrimination, harassment, racism, lack of access to sufficient healthcare and treatment, struggles with citizenship status or the status of family members, and the constant closing and opening of schools paired with the exorbitant costs of childcare mean that those in marginalized groups are managing significant pressures. And, if you happen to experience all of these hardships — well, it would be an understatement to say you are extremely busy.

Last year, I was working with a client who identified as a woman of color on a work visa. She earned a relatively high income and was raising her children in a stable partnership. She found herself forced to use sick leave and paid time off simply to fill in for childcare responsibilities when daycares and schools closed. Her husband had a more insecure job situation with fewer chances at taking time off. They found themselves struggling to balance childcare payments and send money home to India, where the COVID-19 pandemic was, in her words, “wiping out” members of her extended family. The stress of balancing a demanding job, childcare responsibilities, the loss of family to COVID-19, and trying to find the money to send for PPE and oxygen caused her to develop an ulcer and severe insomnia. She also reported trying to work longer hours because she feared losing a rare job that took care of work sponsorship for her.

In our meetings, she apologized to me for being “bad at self-care” and “not making enough time to network and to be a good friend.”

2. Eliminating “too busy” from our vocabulary is positioned as a rejection of a productivity-obsessed culture, but actually reinforces it.

One of my life mottos is “you can have anything you want; you just can’t have everything.” There are too many pulls on our attention, goals we “should” be reaching, responsibilities we feel obligated to fulfill, and dreams we think we need to be going after every day to reasonably achieve. Unfortunately, we live in a productivity-obsessed culture that emphasizes that if we don’t have everything we want, it’s because we aren’t working hard enough.

In my old office, I used to have a framed picture of a quote from Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation: “There’s nothing we can’t do if we work hard, never sleep, and shirk all other responsibilities in our lives.” It spoke very much to the trap I felt myself living in as the breadwinner in my family starting a new company and managing unpredictable medical bills almost four years ago.

I have been taught to believe that if I simply never stop working, I can have everything I want. It’s why I secretly worked two full-time jobs when I first graduated from college, leading a double life to bat down financial insecurity. It’s why I developed insomnia that I ultimately had to seek treatment for in my last year of college when I was working six jobs, writing two theses, and competing for honors in both my majors. It’s why, ten years into my career, I experienced such acute physical burnout that I no longer produce adequate stress hormones and have to take, among other medications, adrenaline every day.

“You’re not too busy; you just don’t want to do it” actually hasn’t applied to me most of my life. And, because accepting something that isn’t true — that I don’t want to go to my friend’s baby’s baptism or offer career advice at a critical juncture — is too abhorrent, I’ve just done all of it. At great cost to me.

Just last week, my husband took the day off to make sure I could make it to the hospital on time for some very important tests. I led a 90-minute presentation before and then rushed home without eating lunch to lead a training for a team of nonprofits I really, really care about. The whole time, my friend was texting me about a work dilemma and asking if I could be a reference for them as they applied for jobs. I noticed that I developed shortness of breath and a bad headache, and it took me until 4:00 pm to eat my lunch.

But I texted my friend back, led all my presentations, and went to the hospital. I really wanted to do all of it. I like my job; it’s more work than I can do, and a seemingly endless stream of hiring hasn’t changed that fact. Still, the reality is that I want to be doing it and keeping my commitments to my employees (who I like) and clients (who I like). I want to be a good friend, so I make time for those urgent texts. I want to be healthy, so I go to the hospital. But here’s the thing — I also want to eat my lunch and be able to breathe normally.

Sometimes, there simply isn’t enough time. However, the logic that “if you really want something, you’ll make time for it” pathologizes us. The only thing standing in the way of you achieving what you want is you. Right?

This language is supposed to be empowering, but I see it as a covert mechanism for a hyper-accountable culture that seeks to write off all the social inequity and exploitation baked into our society and pin it on lazy, selfish, irresponsible individuals. The result is that people like me, who really value being reliable and trustworthy, see these messages and push harder and harder from a place of our sense of deficiency. It’s a means of social control that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, requires us to uphold the status quo of a labor-based system that devalues and deprioritizes the individual.

3. Privacy matters.

Much of the literature on “the busy lie” suggests that instead of saying you’re too busy, you should simply say why you can’t meet a commitment. The problem here is that for the most part, these articles demand you to tell the most unvarnished, vulnerable truth you have to offer.

For example, in a Mashable article on why being too busy isn’t a good excuse, the author Jess Joho emphasizes, “I’m not too busy. I just don’t want to hang out with you.” She uses herself as an example of someone who failed to make her commitments because of undiagnosed agoraphobia and social anxiety. Her argument is we have to own up to root causes so we can heal ourselves — a point on which she and I agree — and then tell the truth to others.

The problem is that this level of vulnerability can be dangerous for the sharer, especially when they share the truth with those who do not have the tools to respond appropriately. Ultimately, the word “vulnerable” is derived from “vulnus,” the Latin word for “wound.” When we are vulnerable, we give others the opportunity to wound us. While I do believe in taking responsibility in our relationships and behaving according to mutuality, I understand that healthy boundaries are meant to protect us from those who would wittingly or unwittingly hurt us.

Depending on your community, there is still a significant social stigma when it comes to mental health and receiving therapeutic care. In the Latinx community, only 20% of people with a mental health disorder talk openly about its effects with a health provider — a number significantly lower than other communities, according to 2017 research. The stigma of mental health issues as “weakness” remains very much a factor in why so many members of the Latinx community do not seek out necessary treatment.

Additionally, some of us might not feel ready to tell others what we were in fact busy with. I have several chronic illnesses, and in the last three weeks, I have had to go in and out of the hospital. I am still processing what I have learned, and every time I share that I didn’t get to that email or have to reschedule that appointment, I have to conduct an inner calculus of who matters more in the situation — them or me. With very few exceptions, when I tell people I’ve been in the hospital, they want to know why. And frankly, that’s not for them to know when I legitimately haven’t been able to work out my feelings about my situation.

Previously, I didn’t own my invisible disabilities because of social stigmas around whether I would be a productive worker, a reliable member of society, and even someone people would want to trust. So, I kept my illnesses to myself, worked on self-acceptance with a therapist, and gradually decided what I did and did not want to disclose. And, in all of this time, saying I was “really busy right now” was an almost foolproof way to protect my privacy during an especially stressful and frustrating time navigating the healthcare system.

I was busy because I was always on the phone with health insurance providers, scheduling bloodwork and doctor’s appointments, and trying new medications with a plethora of side effects. So, while I felt my excuse was vague, it gave me the peace of mind of being the truth. In Joho’s example, I would note that going to therapy twice a week to unpack agoraphobia and social anxiety is heavy emotional work and time-consuming, meaning she was busy too. It’s her right to tell her community why; not all of us feel that we can.

4. There are better ways to reach the same outcomes.

Kevin Farzad on Twitter: "Canceling plans is ok. Running your friends over with a car is ok. Poisoning the town's water supply is ok. It's called self-care. / Twitter"

Canceling plans is ok. Running your friends over with a car is ok. Poisoning the town's water supply is ok. It's called self-care.

Recently, I was reflecting on a former employee who genuinely believed their individual interests mattered more than the experience of the group. I heard them say a number of times that what was best for them took precedence over what was best for the group. However, the rest of the group wasn’t behaving that way. At some point, all of us had pitched in, sacrificed our time and energy, and done what we could to take additional work or responsibility on to support them. We even planned a team dinner for this person’s benefit, only to receive a same-day cancellation from them indicating that they were busy with something else.

The articles and arguments about “the busy lie” bring up people who fail to show up and meet their responsibilities to others; they just do it in a way that conflates individual relationships and systemic obstacles, which should be kept separate.

In our individual relationships, I believe in the power of promises. Namely, in order to continuously earn each other’s trust, we must make promises and keep them. If we break a promise, we must admit we have and accept the consequences. If I told you I would go to the Farmer’s Market with you, and then I don’t, I have to be prepared to apologize, hold space for your experience, and deal with the fact that you may not ask me to go out with you again. I could tell you I was too busy to go; it’s up to you to determine if that resonates with you or not. Our relationship is mutual, after all.

Simply put, the “busy lie” content focuses too much on the person who said they were busy and not enough on the impacted relationship. Depending on the relationship, “too busy” may not be enough information, and there will be consequences. Boundaries will be drawn, and in many cases, this will be the appropriate and healthy solution.

Take for example that employee: after feeling let down by them, many of us simply drew a boundary. We would not prioritize their work over ours. If we held an event, it would be for the benefit of many attendees, not just one.

Gradually, this person felt more socially disconnected from us; I reminded myself and the team that this was not our responsibility to take on. We would continue to support them on the systemic issues, which would also benefit a group made up of a majority of folks with underrepresented and underserved identities. Feeling overwhelmed because of mental health issues? Refer to our paid personal leave policy. Need to work through some personal issues? Use your flexible working hours to book care appointments whenever possible. But, don’t ask us to take care of your feelings. Or, if you fail to communicate about an issue with work until the last minute, don’t expect a teammate to work late to cover for you.

To reach the same outcome — encouraging people to meet their commitments or be honest about why they can’t — without shaming them, we can reaffirm our expectations in our relationships. We can also model behaviors that allow people to keep their sense of privacy and dignity.

Amanda Paul, my colleague in the diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging space, includes this note in her email signature line: “The world is a lot right now. I do not check my email everyday. Please know there’s no pressure or obligation to respond to this message on any perceived schedule.”

What I love about this message is that it establishes mutual boundaries. She is acknowledging a larger atmosphere of change, stress, violence, and so much more; and suggesting that both she and the people on the side of the email can take the space they need as a result.

For me, this avoids “excuses” all together and recognizes our shared humanity and boundaries.

Let’s stop stigmatizing each other and focus more on the external factors that deplete us. Only then can we make a change more meaningful than simply eliminating a phrase from our vocabulary.

*Portions of this section are based on my previous article, The Problem of “Too Much”: Women at Work.

M O R E → You Don’t Count

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If you’ve been to one of my introductory workshops in the last year, you’ve probably heard me say that my identity, especially at work, has been defined by the phrase, “You don’t count.” As a white-assumed Hispanic cisgender woman with an invisible disability, I don’t hold enough power and privilege to participate in the dominant group fully; yet, I hold too much power to be considered part of the collective “non-dominant” group.

The phrase “you don’t count” actually comes from an intersectional exchange with an employee at an organization who, rightfully, believed he had been facing microaggressions and hidden discrimination for being Black. When I tried to talk to him about his experiences at the company to see if I could help, he said, “What’s your right to do DEI anyway? And don’t say because you’re a woman. Because you don’t count…that isn’t enough.”

It was a difficult moment for a number of reasons. For one, as someone who has experienced repeated gender-based violence and workplace sexual harassment, I very much feel my womanhood as a vulnerability and a site of risk. In the exchange, the hijacked part of my brain went to thoughts like, “That’s right, it doesn’t matter if you’re assaulted because you’re a woman. It’s not enough. You’re being hysterical and neurotic.”

It was difficult, too, because it brought me back to the thought that a woman is all I am.

This tendency for members inside of a would-be social identity-based coalition to reproduce “in-groups” and “out-groups” they themselves are categorized in outside of their coalition has been showing up throughout my DEIB practice in the last several months in new ways.

And, the two places that it has most struck have been in broader discussions of “The Great Resignation” and Latinidad.

Unpacking the Worker Shortage

Since early this year, every major news source has been highlighting a seemingly puzzling disconnect between workers and the labor market. Now that more jobs are available than ever, fewer and fewer people are going back to work. Speculation, both research-based and conjecture-rooted, have abounded.

Cal Newport speculated in The New Yorker that the Labor Department’s report of four million workers quitting their jobs in April alone could be connected with knowledge workers waking up to the dissatisfaction of long hours and lots of stuff. While he couldn’t be sure that career downsizing — shifting to a lower pressure, lower-earning mode of work while simultaneously moving to a more affordable region — would become a movement, he was sure of what was causing the experimentation. As he puts it:

“The unceasing presence of video conferencing and e-mail enhanced the Kafkaesque superfluousness of many of the activities that dominated the pre-pandemic workday.”

In the meantime, The New York Times’s The Daily elected to go a different route, interviewing service and essential workers rather than ones entrenched in the knowledge sphere. What the journalist behind the episode found was a group of people who felt especially at risk of contracting the coronavirus, noted unlivable wages and lack of access to childcare, and saw other avenues to economic solvency beyond working extra-long hours for the minimum wage or less (for tip-based workers).

These reasons, among others that have surfaced in the seemingly unending national conversation around the “labor shortage,” ring true while also feeling hollow.

At least in the latter example, The Daily journalists go out of their way to factor in some social identity considerations, such as gender identity and caregiver responsibilities. And, of course, the data support that people from non-dominant groups are returning to work at lower rates. Women are leading the mass exodus for practical reasons tied to lack of work flexibility and increased domestic responsibilities. We also know that white women have more of a choice to leave the workforce, whether totally of their own volition or not, than women of color.

But no data has helped paint a clearer picture of the root cause of “The Great Resignation” for me than that of Project Include’s Remote Work Report. In the report’s survey of three thousand workers, they find evidence that remote work since COVID-19 is exacerbating harm in a number of concrete ways. Specifically:

• 85% percent of respondents reported increased anxiety since the start of COVID-19.
• 98% percent of people who experienced increased gender-based harassment were women and/or nonbinary people.
• 42% of people who identified as transgender reported increase gender-based harassment, compared with 25% of those who identified as cisgender.
• 45% percent of Black women experienced race-based hostility at work.

The report also noted that “Woman and/or Nonbinary people are much more likely to have experienced race-based hostility. Black people are most likely to have experienced increased hostility, regardless of gender.”

In other words, the unceasing video conferencing and email that Cal Newport names as a factor for the mass workplace exodus are a part of this story but not the whole story itself. What is happening in those interactions and to whom might have more to do with the job shortage than we are acknowledging as a society.

It’s worth calling out that the Project Include report is more focused on the workers in Cal Newport’s assessment of the labor market than The Daily’s, namely because service workers are not subject to the same levels of remote versus in-person work. Yet, these service workers are also experienced gender-based harassment and race-based hostility, sometimes in more visceral ways. When employers report that patrons opposed to the vaccine refuse to wear masks in their establishments and spit on the predominantly non-dominant group employees working for them, the social identity component to this phenomenon is undeniable.

Who Counts?

In the last two years, the rise in union popularity, collective organizing, and employee solidarity have been palpable. Galvanized by pandemic-fueled layoffs and the increases in unprotected gig-based work, workers are withholding their greatest asset, their labor. I have no desire to underscore these accomplishments; instead, I have an observation to share.

In A History of America in Ten Strikes, social historian Erik Loomis writes about the ways in which the labor movement positively shaped our current workplaces, including ending (at least in theory) 72-hour workweeks and instituting real laws around workplace safety. However, he also notes the ways in which bias, prejudice, racism, sexism, and elitism within the labor movement helped undermine some of its most promising potential gains.

What worries me is that in the last six months, I have seen tremendous increases in this same trend within grassroots employee groups. “Who counts?” was a question that started as almost a rallying cry — our employers don’t treat us like we count, and we deserve and demand to be paid a fair wage, given basic job protections, and treated with dignity. But, it’s also become a question of who can participate in the conversation about workplace safety, equity, and justice.

Candidly, one of the places I am noticing it most is in the conversation around Latinx or Hispanic identity. I want to name that I have a heightened awareness of this particular issue because I myself am Hispanic, and my relationship with Latinidad is often questioned because of my fair skin.

Latinx employees, especially ones volunteering with their internal DEI committees, have been reaching out to me and members of my team to ask: “Do we have a right to advocate for ourselves? Are we BIPOC enough? Are we BIPOC at all?” The controversy around Lin-Manuel Miranda’s casting of mostly white-passing or light-skinned Latinx actors for his recent film, In the Heights, wasn’t lost on these same employees. An email I received from a Bolivian-American employee at a tech startup early in August contained this phrase: “In the U.S., if I’m not Afro-Latina, am I Latina at all?”

I share these examples not to in any way diminish the Afro-Latinx experience; in fact, we know from the data (reported earlier in this article) that Afro-Latinx people are more likely to experience harassment and hostility. The calls to increase Afro-Latinx representation in media, in companies, and in public life are valid, necessary, and vital.

However, what sticks with me is the increasing tension along the spectrums of Latinidad, of color, of non-dominant status.

In my own experience, it’s not people from within the Latinx community who are calling out my “insufficiency” or “not-enoughness” as a white-assumed Hispanic person — it’s members of other nondominant groups, and that is socially isolating.

In a current world where we feel more alienated from our companies, our leaders, and even our peers in challenging remote and in-person environments, the lack of support from within our own communities is especially demoralizing.

I believe we can advocate for those most impacted by our unequal and inequitable power structures without having to deny our own identities or remove ourselves from the movement. As Audre Lorde famously said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” A scarcity mindset, identity-based competition, and extreme individualism at the expense of solidarity are all tools that maintain the current system. To change the system for good, we have to find another way.

In an interview with Columbia Law School, civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw brilliantly puts the conversation around identity into another kind of focus.

“Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there.”

We have to pay attention to the people who are subject to all of those power collisions, those most impacted, while recognizing that we do not exist as separate entities from this interlocking system. Saying that it is not enough to only foreground white-identifying or white-passing Latinx actors, for example, is not the same as saying those people do not belong to their group or experience their own discriminations.

To be better supporters, advocates, and coalition-builders, we must acknowledge that two things can be true at the same time. For collective emancipation to be possible, we must free ourselves from the limiting beliefs that keep us from truly challenging our existing power structures by banding together and organizing for the rights, respect, and dignity we all deserve.

M O R E → Social Identity Envy: How Our Attachment to “Fair” Gets in the Way of Coalition-Building and Change

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You Don’t Count was originally published in Curious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In my day-to-day work as a DEIB practitioner, I am routinely met with the “it’s not fair” problem.

Namely, groups advocating against one another within an organization because their path to success either was or is more arduous, their access to resources more difficult, or their opportunities are fewer and farther between. Noticing these disparities is essential to organizational change and the achievement of equity; focusing the discussions on what is and isn’t fair, though, can quickly turn unproductively divisive.

Perhaps the most hackneyed example of this phenomenon is the pop culture stereotype of a successful woman executive making her woman-identified direct report’s life harder because the executive had to “break the glass ceiling,” so everyone else should have to, as well. I have struggled to understand where opposition happens between non-dominant groups and how enforced scarcity leads them to fight over resources rather than coming together to demand more overall.

Through YouTube serendipity, I think I’ve found an answer: envy.

Differentiating Between Jealousy and Envy

In her long-form video essay, Envy, Natalie Wynn breaks down the differences between jealousy and envy.

According to Natalie Wynn, jealousy is a fundamentally defensive response. I am jealous because I have something I value, and I perceive you want to take it for yourself. Jealousy often occurs between three people. For example, the classic love triangle is often driven by jealousy — one member of a partnered pair experiences a threat from a third person who they believe (whether accurately or not) wants to break apart their partnership and replace them in the relationship.

Envy, in contrast, is offensive and tends to occur between two people. Envy involves wanting what someone else has and also wanting that they no longer have it. The act of wanting in of itself is not envious. In fact, that’s more aligned with greed. What differentiates envy from jealousy and greed is that being envious involves desiring another person to lose what they have.

In the beloved anime Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the concept of envy comes to life in the form of the agender character, Envy. Envy actively destroys human life out of feelings of disdain for humans rooted in a sense of inferiority, covetousness of their social relationships and status, and a need to prove their own dominance. Unlike their counterpart — the character Greed — Envy is not satisfied to have what humans have or accumulate the wealth, status, and power they believe humans possess; they must actively harm humans and take action to obliterate the human race altogether.

This scenario plays out inside of workplaces all of the time. A person in a position of power may be jealous of an employee with less power they perceive as “coming for” their job, their ability to make decisions, their pay, or their resources. The triangle is made up of the more powerful person, the power they hold, and the less powerful person. That same person may also be envious of the person with less power, perhaps because they believe they have it “easier” or don’t have to give up as much to ascend. In this situation, the powerful person might make comments like, “It’s not fair that you don’t have to work as hard as I did to get where you are,” with the implicit message amounting to “Because it wasn’t easy for me, it shouldn’t be easy for you. In fact, you don’t deserve it at all.”

Of course, the latter example is flawed for a number of reasons.

First of all, definitions of “easy” and “hard” are generally subjective. To call into question fairness on the basis of these terms is a recipe for misinterpretation and projection that doesn’t actually account for the reality of the envied person’s experience.

Second, this kind of statement is in line with a kind of logical fallacy known as false dichotomy fallacy or black-and-white fallacy, which involves limiting the available options to two when there are actually more options available. The dichotomy in the “it’s not fair” statement is that attaining power can only happen through an easy or hard way. The reality is that there are multiple avenues to power, multiple definitions of easy and hard, and even multiple experiences of the pathway to power.

Unpacking Social Identity Envy

The idea that something “isn’t fair” plagues the discourse around social identity. More often than not, I see it coming between different non-dominant groups fighting for attention and resources. The envy around one group’s perceived privileges or advantages obscures a common goal of changing the existing power structures altogether, dividing rather than unifying groups who share the same enemy: marginalization.

There is a term for this phenomenon which is known as “Oppression Olympics.” The term is thought to be coined by Chicana feminist scholar Betita Martínez in 1993 during a conversation with Angela Davis at the University of Santa Cruz.

In their conversation, Martínez and Davis explore how different groups of color can come together to overcome institutional barriers. Martínez emphasizes that the institution itself intentionally creates divides by withholding resources from one group while providing it to another. She frames this in the context of a university.

“I don’t mean that some communities or some groups on a campus or in any other community will not want to emphasize certain needs. That’s inevitable, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But we cannot be trapped in arguing about ‘My need is greater than yours,’ or ‘A women’s center is more important than a Latino cultural center,’ or whatever. We have to fight together because there is a common enemy. The general idea is no competition of hierarchies should prevail. No ‘Oppression Olympics’!”

That same argument applies to any organization or institution. During the early weeks of the national protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder, more than one of my clients came to me with troubling “Oppression Olympics” examples. The most common was between employee resource groups (ERGs) championing different racial identities. At one company, a representative from an Asian American and Pacific Islander ERG wrote an open letter to the company CEO stating, “When you say Black lives matter, you are saying AAPI lives don’t. Where was your statement in support of us when we were being targeted as carriers of the ‘china virus’ and openly enduring racial slurs? Where was the statement from our Black colleagues?” The Black ERG wrote a response letter that retorted, “How can we be expected to stand up for [the members of the AAPI group] when you’ve never shown up for us?”

The false dichotomy fallacy, once again, rears its ugly head. This exchange can be read as either the AAPI group receives attention or the Black group does. The reality, of course, is that the company could easily issue two statements — or even three or four or five — without one group or another having to silence themselves or face scarcity. Of course, as Martínez notes, at different times, each group can emphasize different needs based on who is most impacted. It’s just that the relationship between them does not need to be adversarial; in fact, banding together and pooling resources could help them achieve gains for all employees of color at the organization.

I hesitated in sharing this example because I have no desire as a white-passing person to reinforce the narrative that groups of color are divided against each other or perpetuate their own marginalization. Let me be clear — the common enemy in this situation is an institution that decides only one group’s trauma is worth naming and supporting, effectively pitting groups against each other to “win” the visibility they need to spark change. And, just because I used this real-life example does not mean that this situation hasn’t happened amongst other non-dominant groups or even between non-dominant groups and dominant ones! I myself have fallen prey to comparative grief and unproductive vying for resources.

The point I want to emphasize is one better stated by Martínez: “What kind of coming together do we need to win these demands? And if you know the administration will pick your groups off one by one, then the largest umbrella you can possibly get is probably the best one.”

Moving Towards a “Rainbow Coalition”

Because I believe that envy is a destructive (although human and often unavoidable) force and that it is weaponized against non-dominant groups to keep them down while dominant groups can continue with business as usual, I live in a state of trying to counter the “Oppression Olympics.”

It’s a standing joke in my household that my solution to everything is to form another “rainbow coalition.”

If the term rainbow coalition doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a lightning-fast recap. The first Rainbow Coalition was an anti-racist, anti-classist multicultural movement that developed in 1969 under the leadership of Fred Hampton, and since his assassination, it has evolved over time. Currently, Jesse Jackson has leveraged the original ideology and appropriate it and some of its language for his own movement through Rainbow/PUSH.

I am using the term more generally to refer to a movement rooted in solidarity rather than in competition. What a rainbow coalition as a counter to envy looks like starts with a few questions:

• When I feel envious of another person or group, where is that coming from? What is being threatened?
• Who, ultimately, is responsible for the imbalance between me and that person or group? How might this imbalance be corrected?
• Where do I experience a common cause with that person or group?
• How might I work together with that person or group to achieve that common cause?

With this framework, banding together rather than breaking apart seems more possible.

For example, those two ERGs could have identified that what was being threatened was the access to visibility, acknowledgment, and support from their peers and leaders in the face of major harm to their respective communities. The imbalance between the groups wasn’t the fault of either the AAPI or Black ERGS, but rather the organization that determined there was only room to advocate for one group (and in my opinion, only in a moment of national crisis that threatened its image). Therefore, the imbalance has to be corrected by changing the way the organization operates around issues of social identity. The common cause is the need to change the organization to offer all communities visibility, acknowledgment, and support. By working together to list out what actions need to be taken and resources accessed, the groups could come together and use their combined clout to get everyone what they needed.

Of course, the process would have been hard, and some conflict may have arisen; that’s the work of team-building. Regardless, both groups could have achieved a constructive, generative outcome that led to further change in the future.

Angela Davis says it best in her conversation with Martínez, “I think we need to be more reflective, more critical and more explicit about our concepts of community.”

Solidarity is our responsibility as human beings. After all, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

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M O R E → How Cultish Language Shuts Down Conversation in DEIB

I am obsessed with cults.

This is the part where you ask: Well, how obsessed are you, Alida?

I listened to two different podcasts about NXIVM while I watched both docuseries about it — The Vow on HBO and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult on STARZ. I feverishly read every news story about the ongoing trials and sentencing of various high-profile leaders and members. During the peak of my NXIVM phase, I spent anywhere from three to four hours a day immersing myself in every detail of NXIVM’s organizational structure, membership, funding, and more obscure or occult beliefs.

And NXIVM was just a new link in a long-existing chain for me. I have read dozens if not hundreds of exposés on Scientology, Bikram yoga, Shambhala Buddhism, and how multi-level marketing companies use the language of prosperity gospel to “convert” recruits.

I recognize this isn’t unique to me. Americans, in particular, love learning about, engaging with, and denouncing cults. Since the 1960s, when various counterculture movements sought out to reimagine a different way of life, cults have been part of our culture beyond the religious movements they were first associated with, encompassing everything from startups and fitness brands to doomsday communes.

The relationship between cults and culture is where my fascination stems from. Look at the etymologies of the words (as Amanda Motell does better than I will here in her excellent linguistic analysis of American cults, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism), and you can see that they are invariably connected.

Cults and Culture

“Cult,” in fact, is the root word of “culture.” Originally meaning a system of worship, the word “cult” evolved to mean devoted attention to a particular person or thing. When we talk about culture, especially organizational culture, we often mean devoted attention to the company we participate in.

It used to be my motto that I existed to make the world more beautiful by helping people be kinder, smarter, and better to each other on teams (pretty cultish, am I right?). This came from an intense interest in group dynamics. The extremes of belief, devotion, mores and expected behaviors in cults can help us understand everyday phenomena, which are happening in the same ways, just as smaller, perhaps less identifiable ways.

It’s worth noting that cults aren’t always sinister. Like most critical elements of human systems, they exist on a spectrum. The “cult following” behind movies like Office Space and Rocky Horror Picture Show can create a sense of community, support, and self-identification that benefits the “cult followers.” Soul Cycle can be the difference between feeling restless and movement-starved to energized and motivated to be in your physical body. Even the cultish behavior of some startups range from harmless (devotion to a cute animal mascot) to harmful (WeWork’s punishing hours and pressure to falsify numbers, Fyre Festival’s blind devotion to leaders with bad intentions, and even worse enactments of them).

In the world of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), the place I see the dark side of cultishness most starkly is how seemingly innocuous, “common sense” language can be used to silence even minor forms of dissent and disagreement. When I see hashtags like #NotAllMen and #AllLivesMatter, I do not see counterarguments, but instead, thought-terminating clichés.

Thought-Terminating Clichés

The term “thought-terminating cliché” gained popularity in the 1960s. The psychiatrist and psychohistorian Robert Jay Lifton referred to the term in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, which explored the psychology of mind control, especially in the political context of Communist China. The simple idea behind though-terminating clichés, sometimes called semantic stop-signs or thought-stoppers, is that they are a kind of language used to suppress dissent and end discussion.

In her framing of thought-terminating clichés, writer and linguistic theorist Amanda Montell likens them to verbal sedatives. They cause the person on the receiving end to slow or suspend their critical thinking, usually in a context where the consequence of continuing to push forward would lead to painful social rejection.

Common examples of thought-terminating clichés are: “Here we go again,” “It is what it is,” “Boys will be boys,” and “Maybe take that offline.” Context matters in these situations, of course, but ultimately, they all share traits in common. When used as thought-terminating clichés, they counter an argument with a block — whether it’s suggesting that engaging in the discussion will be part of a pointless cycle that you are initiating to implying that the situation cannot be changed and therefore cannot be discussed to stopping the conversation altogether under the bad faith auspices that you have to think on your own.

Let’s consider a thought-terminating cliché in a workplace DEIB context.

For example, say you are on a hiring team with a colleague, evaluating candidates. Your colleague suggests taking a qualified candidate out of the running, suggesting that she won’t be able to meet the role’s stringent travel requirements as a single mom. You know that this candidate has never brought up not being able to travel, and when you ask for an example, your colleague cannot provide one. Knowing that you are witnessing bias and potential discrimination based on caregiver status and potentially gender identity, you challenge your colleague and name the bias. Your colleague replies, “Here we go again.”

Now, you start using thought-terminating clichés on yourself. By using a broad cliché as their means of counterargument, they may stop your thought by suggesting that you are in a redundant or cyclical argument with no end that is pointless. Instead of questioning themselves, you are questioning yourself. Are you just making something out of nothing? Are you making mountains out of molehills? Being too negative?

The thing is, you weren’t. You wanted to engage in an honest discussion about hiring bias and discrimination in a situation that, by all accounts — minimizing hiring bias, giving a candidate a fair shot, not losing out on an opportunity to bring on a talented new team member, and even protecting the company legally — wasn’t pointless, cyclical, or necessarily in keeping with an implied suggestion that you “stir up trouble” with no purpose other than to do so.

How Cultish Language Shows Up in DEIB at Work

I am here to say this happens all the time.

Many of the participants in my “Unpacking Hidden Bias” workshops will recognize the following real-life example.

I shadowed a teamwide check-in where folks were prompted to share how they were feeling at the height of the COVID lockdown. A person on the team I hadn’t interacted with said that being a person with a disability during COVID-19 had carried a unique weight. Another person I also didn’t know responded by saying, “We’re all struggling. This is a human problem. We’re all affected by this.”

In the workshop, we break out into small groups and discuss how to respond. Before we do, I ask folks to take a moment to check in with themselves and ask how they would respond if they were on the receiving end of that comment and if they were in the room when it was happening. I encourage them to come up with their most honest answer, even if they think there is a “right” one. When I poll folks, about half tend to admit that they would feel stumped and not say anything.

That is what happens to many of us when faced with a verbal sedative.

While I generally don’t talk about thought-terminating clichés when we work through other options for showing up as an ally for the person being shut down in the situation, simply the steps of coming to action are part of training to spot and respond to them.

I genuinely believe there are multiple right answers in this situation. I also know what I said and did and how both relate to reopening a conversation shut down by cultish language.

1. I started by taking a breath and asking what was happening. We were just about to start a conversation about disability, and then suddenly, the topic was shut down. Why? What led to this shift?
2. As I collected my thoughts, I recognized the coded language of “This is a human problem,” which lives in my DEIB textbooks on microaggressions in multiple examples and also rings alarm bells for me as a thought-terminating cliché. It sounds right at face value, but it doesn’t address what the first speaker shared.
3. I stepped into the discussion, and I said: “If I might jump in for a moment. I heard [REDACTED] say that COVID-19 has been uniquely hard for folks with disabilities, and they noted their own experience. First, thank you for your vulnerability and candor. Also, I would love for us to dig into that a little more, especially because the word ‘unique’ resonates with me. I also want to validate the experience of [REDACTED] and ask if you might be open to sharing the specific impact COVID-19 has had on you.”
4. I facilitated a tense and quiet conversation, but a conversation on the subject at hand. In the process, I learned that the person who said “This is a human problem” both didn’t want to carry the weight of their colleagues’ experiences and felt at risk of being held accountable in some way as someone without a disability, but also was feeling neglected, underserved, and mistreated personally.

I don’t share this information because I want to justify their behavior. Instead, I want to call out that while there are mastermind cult leaders who use thought-terminating clichés intentionally to manipulate and control, many of us — myself included — can use them without noticing.

What to Do When Faced with Thought-Terminating Clichés

I believe the best way to respond to a thought-terminating cliché, whether your own or someone else’s, is to pause and ask whether your statement is a response to what they’ve said that invites dialogue or a stop sign indicating that the subject must be dropped. If the cliché has already come into use, you have options.

In the example above, my response was to reopen the conversation and positively advocate for the person who was shut down by affirming and validating the original thought. I tried to create a sense of mutuality by inviting the thought terminator to share a deeper perspective.

I want to clarify that part of being able to intervene in this way came from feeling safe in my position as a practitioner and authority figure in the room. I also have the implicit understanding that being a person with a disability during COVID-19 is a unique experience because it’s an experience I was having and still have today, so I was more sensitive to the thought-terminating cliché.

But what do you do if it’s you that’s shutting down the thought and conversation?

I caught myself in a thought-terminating cliché the other day. I was in a one-on-one meeting with my direct report. They were expressing frustration with a client. A note, dear reader — any negativity towards a client can bring out my cultish impulses. Specifically, we have a cultural dedication as a team to optimism. I find myself bristling at any perceived threat to that value if I am not careful and self-aware. My response to my direct report was, “Well, it is what it is.” This comment added nothing to the conversation and demonstrated my desire to disengage.

The good news is that my growing awareness of cultish language helped me realize about thirty seconds later what I had done. I said: “Hey, I know I’m the one who changed the subject, but I want to go back to what you were saying about the client. I want to apologize. ‘It is what it is’ is dismissive at best and disingenuous at worst because I can do something about it. Can we take a step back to why you’re frustrated so I can dig into potential solutions to the situation with you?”

Parting Words

You might not always be able to solve the situation. That might be why you shut the conversation down. But you can backtrack, apologize, acknowledge the other person’s point of view, and then let them finish their original thought.

We can stem the tide of negative cultishness in our workplaces, especially when it comes to DEIB, by remembering a few simple tenets — “start with why” and “always learn.”

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M O R E → Promising Young Woman

In the first three months of 2019, I was attacked three times.

The first time, I was mugged in a coffee shop. Two teenagers came up behind me, one restraining my arms and the other jamming and pulling my arm, wrenching free the phone in my hand. The barista chased them down the street and returned the phone to me.

The second time, I was walking home, and a man on the street started yelling at me. “Why are you looking at me? Why are you looking at me that way?” I hadn’t even seen him, and I jumped back when I heard his voice. He pushed me into the street.

The third time, I was also walking home, and a man came up behind me and started punching my backpack and pushing me down like he wanted me to lay prone on the ground. He was shouting, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

I stopped telling people about these instances because the same litany of questions always sprang forth, regardless of who I was talking to and what I thought their outlook on the world would be.

You may have the same questions. So, here’s what you need to know:

• In all three instances, I was accompanied. During the mugging, I was in a meeting with a man and woman — a founding team from a startup I was helping. It was 4:00 p.m. During the second and third attacks, both times, a man from my work was walking me home to “make sure I got there safely” because the sun had set.
• I was not wearing (a) flashy jewelry, (b) provocative clothing, or © politically charged slogans. I am still frustrated that any of these questions matter, that they determine whether I am allowed to be attacked or not.

Before COVID, I had a reputation in my friend group as “the one who gets attacked.” It’s supposed to be a joke. “Men don’t flirt with Alida at bars; they try to hurt her!” I was never the popular girl — just the one who drove men to violence. Which one of the Sex and the City gals does that make me?

In 2018, on the way to a client meeting in the middle of a weekday, a man followed me for several blocks, ultimately grabbing my ponytail and saying he wanted to “steal my hair.” I carried on with my client presentation, rattled, but I hoped, appearing professional.

While I was in college, two men in a white van started shouting out of their window and laughing before repeatedly trying to run me over on the sidewalk, laughing when I ducked or hid behind a tree. That was only a few months after I had been hit by a car while crossing the street, shattering my full right side.

While these examples happened in public places–coffee shops, sidewalks–I am no stranger to professional environments that make me feel unsafe. I have been kissed on the lips by a team member without my consent, kissed on the ear by a different team member, asked about my sex life, complimented on my “figure” when I removed a cardigan, and actually had my hands held firmly (so that I could not move) while being told “I love you” by a client I hardly knew.

Early on in my career, I learned that when I detailed professional experiences, I would be dismissed, ignored, or told I was lying to draw attention to myself. For example, when I reported an instance of sexual harassment at one workplace, my boss said, “I believe you believe that happened.” Just last year, during an anti-racism training for Ethos, I shared that while I can never know the Black experience, I do know what it’s like to be afraid of the police for reasons related to #MeToo and my own life. I was underscoring the intersectionality of Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and other movements, and this was my way of saying that we have to especially advocate for Black women. A participant in the training privately messaged me to say that I was being disrespectful of all BIPOC because my assault had nothing to do with race and that I only brought it up because I wanted the spotlight. He said I should be ashamed of myself, bringing assault into the conversation.

Unlike with professional experiences, when it comes to personal ones, people believe me. They just also believe I brought the violence on myself:

“This is on you for always insisting on walking everywhere.”

“You were out late at night, weren’t you?”

“You were alone; you were inviting trouble.”

“You just love ‘bad’ neighborhoods, don’t you?”

In many ways, I have lived my life avoiding being the type of woman who is attacked or harassed by men. I policed myself the way these questions and comments came to police me. I was an academic overachiever who didn’t drink or go to a college party until I was twenty-one and didn’t go to a club until I was twenty-seven. I married at twenty-two. I have always dressed in long sleeves and skirts. I let people know where I am at all times if I am alone; I text my mom, friends, and husband. Contrary to popular belief, I am often (if not always) accompanied. I am hypervigilant of my surroundings, and I am always very cautious. I emphasize my husband in work scenarios to avoid any confusion about my interests, not because I think I am so attractive and will be the object of romantic attention, but because I want to be unimpeachable. Since I was a teenager, I have been more afraid of being blamed for being harmed than being harmed. The latter kind of pain feels more manageable.

I have never put any of these experiences to paper before. When #MeToo exploded online, not once did I consider sharing anything I had been through. I was too used to people telling me it wasn’t enough. I hadn’t suffered enough violence. My trauma, if I could even call it that, didn’t count.

But now, during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I have heard multiple people say we are “post-Me Too.” I have also heard people talk about violence and assault as perpetrated by strangers, and while it’s true that strangers have attacked me, I have also been harmed in domestic settings and by people I know. Work has been a center of, rather than a haven away from, violence.

I am interested in a particular kind of violence against women, one Toni Jensen writes about in Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land, namely:

“[W]hen we police a woman’s affect, when we privilege it or equate it with her actions, with what she actually does, we’re engaging in our most pervasive and yet our most quiet form of sexism, our most quiet form of everyday violence. If a man sets a table, he is praised for the doing, for the action. Imagine telling a man to smile while he sets the table.”

I have been told to smile at the man who sexually harassed me to make him feel accommodated and supported so he didn’t cause trouble for my organization. To go high when others go low has always meant being pleasant, presentable, and even-tempered. I still struggle to express anger, and in the moment, it’s often impossible for me to experience anger when with folks not in my tightest, most inner circle.

In other words, I have been conditioned to be a promising young woman, much like what the main character of 2020’s Promising Young Woman is supposed to be. Cassie, despite on the surface appearing lost in a dead-end job and isolated existence, is actually a vigilante pursuing justice for the wrongful rape and death of her best friend. She is also, throughout, shown as polished, put together, and hyper-feminine. Before the personal tragedy, she was a brilliant pre-medical student who knew she wanted to be a doctor since childhood. She speaks softly. She’s a good listener. Even when she gets her “revenge” on unsuspecting men looking to violate her consent, she gives them a lecture, asks them questions.

Cassie became my hero this year. I have a poster of her technicolor pink pout hanging in my office, next to a portrait of Shirley Chisolm, activist art from The Guerilla Girls, and my diplomas. Because Cassie, in her own way, breaks free. She makes people believe her, confront what has happened to her and those around her, and forces them to accept their complicity, their violence. She makes them pay attention to her actions over her affect and holds them accountable for their actions.

Here’s what I know to be true, according to research from RAINN.

• Every 73 seconds, another American is sexually assaulted.
• 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime (14.8% completed, 2.8% attempted).
• About 3% of American men — or 1 in 33 — have experienced an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime.
• From 2009–2013, Child Protective Services agencies substantiated, or found strong evidence to indicate, that 63,000 children a year were victims of sexual abuse.

I believe that every workplace should offer paid leave for victims of sexual assault and violence. I also believe that every workplace should have policies–that they enforce–that protect against sexual harassment and violence, even though Women Employed reports that less than 30 percent of companies have these policies in place today.

I also believe that individuals should learn to ask broad, non-leading questions about how people have been impacted by violence and what would help them, rather than jumping to judgment or disbelief.

In some ways, I think that’s what I have been trying to do with my diversity, equity, and inclusion firm all this time. I want people to understand their capacity to do harm and make choices that minimize that harm. I want to heal people because I genuinely believe that healed people heal people. But more than anything, I want to believe them, validate them, and support them as they look to those around them and demand that wrongs be made right. And for this reason, I offer my story as a young woman who wishes promise upon all those made vulnerable by and to violence.

275,000 women left the workforce in January of 2021, according to the Bureau of U.S Labor Statistics.

Since the pandemic started, women’s labor force participation has fallen to historically low levels, and women have accounted for 56 percent of workforce exits despite making up just 48 percent of the labor market.

Before the pandemic, reports estimated that women were responsible for twice as much unpaid care as their man-identified counterparts. The recent global health crisis has widened this gap, with some estimates suggesting that women have added three additional hours of caregiving to their days — or fifteen hours per week — on top of their full-time jobs. For this reason, recent projections suggest women’s employment may not reach pre-pandemic levels until 2024, which is two years later than men’s employment.

The disparities only increase when you factor in intersectionality. A report from McKinsey found “women with less than high-school attainment had an unemployment rate that was ten percentage points higher than their male counterparts compared with pre-pandemic levels,” and “Black workers without a college degree had an unemployment rate of 12 to 14 percent, nearly double that of white workers with comparable educational attainment.”

As a White woman in the workforce with a college degree and no caregiving responsibilities, I acknowledge the position of privilege from which I view this trend. I also acknowledge that for me — a person with significant advantages — the COVID pandemic has forced me to consider at the very least downgrading my professional responsibilities. In response to the increase in my unpaid work, more than one person has encouraged me to put off having children “if I care about the success of my business” and to “hire domestic help” to allow me to sustain longer working hours.

But it’s not my own experiences that alerted me to this economically, socially, and politically dangerous situation. In the middle of the COVID pandemic, I was coaching fourteen different women-identified technologists. On top of their own specific goals, one theme emerged consistently across their one-on-one sessions: time management.

At first, I considered this request as natural — understanding how to work from home and navigate changing office dynamics in the midst of an unprecedented crisis would require more time. But then I started to notice something. My coachees weren’t asking me how to be more efficient; they were literally asking how to create more hours to juggle increasingly demanding responsibilities at home and at work.

To paraphrase a tweet that caught my eye during a doom-scroll around U.S. unemployment rates: we are not working from home; we are living at work.

Two different coachees admitted to using their vacation days and sick leave to accommodate online learning for their kids. Others reported working nights and weekends to ensure their colleagues didn’t think they were “slacking” on their responsibilities, as well as reducing their sleep down to as little as two to four hours per night just to keep up. When I asked if they could take paid time off for their own rest and recovery, I heard that if they did, they would “fall behind” at work or that they wouldn’t get to rest anyway because their partners were working full-time, leaving them to manage care regardless.

Over and over again, I asked why workplaces weren’t accommodating these more challenging schedules as part of just a baseline retention strategy, not to mention a general sense of shared humanity and struggle. What companies responded with was that they had an expansive policy of “as long as your work gets done, you can work whenever,” even as I heard my coachees saying they were being asked to take on more work, not less.

While company leaders joke about welcoming young kids into Zoom meetings and folding laundry during international calls, they benefit from an increase in working hours on average. A Harvard Business School study found that the average workday increased by 8.2%, or about 48 minutes since the pandemic started.

To paraphrase a tweet that caught my eye during a doom-scroll around U.S. unemployment rates: we are not working from home; we are living at work.

This idea of living at work is really sticking with me. Take a moment to imagine the kind of worker who keeps a cot in their office or a change of clothes in the file cabinet. Does the same image come to mind for you as it does for me? Because I see a White cisgender man in banking or tech, not a woman of color with three kids and limited childcare options.

Yet, women are adding up to four hours of additional labor to their workdays if they choose to continue participating in the workforce without the benefit of being viewed as ambitious upstarts or team players making an intentional investment in better career prospects.

What most strikes me is how little in the way of protest I see to a labor force crisis rooted in inequity. At the end of last year, women accounted for all of the net job losses, even as men experienced some job gains.

From a social identity theory perspective, covering — hiding aspects of a disfavored identity — drives part of this trend. As Rachel Vorona Cote explores at length in Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, women are punished for saying too much, being too much, having too much, and wanting too much. But the phrase “too much” is ambiguous, ill-defined, and mostly abstract, making it the perfect mechanism for silencing and stymying.

Like others before her, Cote draws the parallel between social identity and how much space a person is allowed to take up as their own.

“Systemic oppression relies on the careful partitioning of social space. Specifically, it requires that marginalized peoples — of which women are one broad example, and women of color and queer persons are more pointedly targeted ones — dwell within corners, that we shrink inside walls that loom and compress,” she writes.

This careful partitioning of social space is showing up in our workplace dynamics. With unpaid labor increasing at home, and the social expectation that we will not complain but try to “lean in” and “make it work,” we are left with few options but to overburden ourselves at significant cost to self (if the option even exists), to downgrade our work responsibilities, or to leave.

In our current era, women are being tasked with too much at the same time that their fear of being labeled as “too much” is keeping them from mobilizing against the social expectations of increased unpaid labor. And it’s driving them out of the workforce at historic highs.

While I can’t pretend to have “the answer” to the overarching problem, especially as someone not experiencing many of the challenges of my femme counterparts and occupying a decidedly white-collar space, I can propose some ideas that could help stem the tide of what’s projected to be as many as two million women leaving corporate jobs because of COVID.

Some quick shifts include:

• Scrapping 9 to 5 as the range of hours to be “on.”
• Making meetings optional.
• Working to set “maximum hours” for salaried employees (who won’t lose income if their hours are reduced).-
• Increasing the scope of paid leave, especially considering what family leave might mean, will also help women who won’t have to choose between working and their family’s essential needs.
• Finally, right-sizing jobs and eliminating “nice-to-have” and “extra” responsibilities as part of the criteria for, not just advancing, but being considered a solid performer.

Now is not the time to be asking your employees to work more, especially if the gains are marginal to nonexistent. The future of women’s participation in the workforce depends on our adaptability to their needs.

M O R E → Unlearning the Protestant Work Ethic

The Problem of “Too Much:” Women at Work was originally published in The Shadow on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I was not but a wee teen, my favorite Johnny Cash song was “Cocaine Blues.” At the time, the lyrics and premise seemed edgy, which, as an absolute goodie-two-shoes, made me feel a little more “alternative.”

Still, apart from that, the idea that addiction could drive bad decisions that would impact the course of your life interested me. Even though the narrator in the song seems to take personal responsibility for his actions by the end of the time, it struck that an external force was driving this internal crisis, and this impression has never left me.

I have been going back to this memory in the midst of relentless Chicago snowstorms hitting during what feels like the millionth week of our pandemic-necessitated lockdown. I’m feeling claustrophobic and sad, and my token tool for overcoming both feelings, sublimation, is just not enough. In no particular order, the past two weeks have looked like: emotional eating, binge-watching, mindless online shopping, and doomscrolling.

In other words, an external force bigger than me is starting to create an internal crisis that is spurring unhealthy decisions. Granted, cocaine and whiskey have nothing to do with this crisis. Instead, work addiction has taken the place of substance abuse in my narrative.

My complicated relationship with work aside, the reality is this: I feel cooped up, bored, and low energy all while feeling enormously pressured to seem interested, energetic, and grounded. This is one of the biggest challenges with being an emotional worker — I literally owe it to people to push down the bad vibes and put out good ones.

This brings me back to the idea of sublimation. As a coping mechanism, sublimation involves channeling negative urges (see the list of unhealthy decisions above) into more socially acceptable ones. Unfortunately, for me, “socially acceptable” has generally meant, “working a lot,” “staying busy,” and “being productive.”

Filling the empty spaces in my life with work has only accelerated my COVID blues.

Since I am working on approaching myself with curiosity rather than reproach, I looked at my so-called unhappy habits to understand what these impulses are telling me about my needs.

The answer turns out to be pretty simple: novelty.

Since many of us are spending more time in our workplaces than ever before, it stands to reason that in addition to figuring out how to work less, it’s also important we talk about how we can improve one another’s morale.

What’s missing in my life — at work, socially, creatively, and holistically — is novelty, which the pandemic has made nearly impossible to come by. Why not emotionally eat when the only thing to remind me of a simpler time is Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal? Why not watch an entire season of Outlander over a weekend when I can’t go back to my favorite place, Scotland — or anywhere, for that matter — for the foreseeable future? Why not look at every possible rug option on the Ruggable app when the promise of a colorful runner in my hallway helps deal with the unbearable monotony of being trapped in the same four walls?

It sounds cliché, but it turns out that what’s bringing me joy right now is all that I’ve got in my life that’s novel. “Try something new every day” goes from seeming like flat Insta-ready wisdom to ground-breaking revelation when two and a half feet of snow builds up around your front door. Of course, everyone seems to know this. It’s how bread baking and sea shanties became the emblems of our quarantine.

It turns out my teammates are going through the same thing, and I bet many of you reading this are, too.

Since many of us are spending more time in our workplaces than ever before, it stands to reason that in addition to figuring out how to work less, it’s also important we talk about how we can improve one another’s morale.

At Ethos, I tried a new opening activity in our team meeting that has helped at least some of us feel a little more energized in the midst of our COVID blues.

Here’s how it works:

1. Convene as a group at the top of an already scheduled meeting. (No more meetings for this; reduce the meeting fatigue!)
2. For two minutes on a countdown clock, have everyone list out the things in the last week that were new or novel that brought them joy
3. Instruct them to come up with as many as possible — experiences, ideas, objects, etc.
4. After two minutes, give them one more minute to circle the 1 to 3 they found the most energizing.
5. Ask each person to share what they chose.
6. End the activity by asking the group to either try one of the things they heard or do it together.

Here’s how this exercise worked for me. I recommended trying a Lush face mask (Beauty Sleep, in case you’re interested), and I talked about how taking a bath and putting on the mask helped me reset and restore and how it noticeably combatted dry skin. Not only did talking about this conjure up some gratitude, but sharing this example reminded me I can take more baths, which I did this week, to positive effect.

I also listened intently to other recommendations in the group, and I decided to try one from our intern, who is finding novelty in cooking and baking. At her suggestion, my husband and I went out and bought the ingredients for the now-famous TikTok pasta (also a suggestion from our intern, who is tasked with keeping a largely non-Zoomer team current). We made it on a Saturday, and it was not only delicious — it was a fun, novel thing to do that didn’t involve screens or mindlessness.

And right now, when so much is in flux and stasis at the same time, going to work and talking about simple things to look forward to feels like an act of self-care. I hope it might for you, too.

M O R E → Unlearning the Protestant Work Ethic

An Activity for Treating the Workplace COVID Blues was originally published in Curious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I coach and teach a lot of woman-identified People of Color. When I do, I often observe that their successes are bigger, brighter, and more worthy of appreciation than they give themselves credit for, especially given the myriad way systems are stacked against them. Their success is valuable and worthy of celebration in itself, struggles or not. But, their success is also radical because it challenges an existing social structure while also reminding those who identify with them that they do, in fact, have agency, choice, and even power. In other words, they are “doing the most” even when they think they’re not doing much of anything at all.

But, I’m a hypocrite.

I go from one meeting urging a client to take a moment to really appreciate their wins and embrace the word “enough” to consistently telling myself that I am not doing enough. It’s to the point where during a recent session with my mindfulness and meditation coach, I articulated something I’ve known for a while: my least boundaried and most exploitative relationship is the one I have with myself. If my inner voice were an external person, I would have left them behind a long time ago.

I started to notice how extreme the disconnect between how I show up for others and how I show up for myself at the end of 2020. Struggling with the need to be “productive” and engage in “impactful activity” has been an ongoing theme throughout my life (and one I’ve explored the psychology behind here), but last year, the struggle became more intense. I literally forgot I landed a book deal, something I had been trying to do for almost two years and represented a lifelong goal of becoming a published author. I erased the circumstances that led me to my daily writing sessions. And it didn’t just happen there. I graduated from an intense program at Georgetown that involved months of commuting to DC from Chicago and large-scale personal sacrifices, and I didn’t remember my graduation. I was erasing my own victories.

At first, I theorized that part of this had to do with how I measure activity: in planes, trains, and walks from one place to the next. Working from home makes everything I do feel small-scale and banal. How is landing a major deal at Ethos any different from folding the laundry if they happen in the same room?

While I think there’s truth to this theory, I have to acknowledge that I was never very good at being “happy” or “proud” of a major win anyway. It’s part of why I instituted “wins” in my one-on-one meetings with teammates at Ethos. I know how hard it is to celebrate good things when there’s so much in the way of bad things to ruminate over. (Of course, I don’t celebrate my wins. I just celebrate the ones my teammates make).

It wasn’t until I read Sarah Jaffe’s excellent and vexing Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone that I came to a different theory of my struggle with “enoughness.” As she points out in a meticulously researched exploration of how work shifted from being about earning a paycheck to subbing in for love, connection, care, and art, one of the realities of late capitalism is that in order to maximize productivity, the structures have to reinforce that we need to be doing more and that none of our actions are ever enough. To be “done” would be to move on from our work and choose leisure time, which doesn’t serve an engine powered by constant and increasing production.

I am a worker bee. I grew up on idealized notions of the protestant work ethic and learned that nothing worthwhile comes without earning it through hard work. I believed that windfalls, lucky breaks, and positive developments outside of my control were somehow cursed. If I didn’t work for it, I didn’t want it. It’s the same mentality that led me to take on six jobs at the same time while fully enrolled in college. Let me be clear: I needed the money. But I also fetishized the work and the volume of it I could take on. But then, much like Eula Biss in On Having and Being Had, I learned the truth behind the protestant work ethic.

As she writes:

“The protestant ethic describes the moralizing of work and the privileging of property, not, as I used to think, the belief that work is, in and of itself, good. All this time, I’ve been using that term to describe my faith in work” (35).

My late twenties have been a period of unlearning my social conditioning around work and really struggling to find new models. For years, working hard was synonymous with being a good person. When I saw myself as “good” and “whole,” I used words like “hardworking,” “industrious,” and “productive.” If being aligned with industry and the means of production made me worthy, how could I accept a life where I would just call it a day and watch a movie? Or worse, fight for a shorter workweek or more sick leave?

Of course, advocating for workers’ rights then became part of my “life’s work” at Ethos, and all of these ideas started to come together meaningfully. I started shifting from valorizing “industriousness” to watching for “extraction” and “exploitation.” I paid close attention to employees at client companies and Ethos naming burnout, emotional work, and the psychological strain of discrimination, and I tried to design solutions. For them. Always for them.

That’s because, as Jaffe points out, my line of work is decidedly in the “care work” camp. The kind that is supposed to be done as “an essential job nevertheless to be done out of sheer love” (88). To not answer the late-night phone calls or a barrage of emails from clients in need would be selfish. To take days off or monitor “emergencies” would be irresponsible. Imagining a world where this isn’t true is hard for me, and it’s Jaffe’s vision of what it might be that is helping me come to terms with my disordered relationship to work.

“Society will always make demands of us, and a world that we built to value the relationships we have with others would perhaps make even more of them. But it would be a world where we shouldered those burdens equitably, distributed the work — pleasant and less so — better, and had much, much more leisure time to spend as we like. It would be a world where taking care of one another was not a responsibility sloughed off on one part of the population or one gender, and it would be a world where we had plenty of time to take care of ourselves” (331).

While I may not know what the kind of leisure time I am looking forward to is today, I can use her vision of a better future to try to settle into a more balanced present. And the first, a very small one, is to reconceive my “wins” altogether.

For years, feeling a sense of accomplishment came from the sheer number of things I achieved, not what they were or what they meant to me. Now, I am trying something new. Each day, I am writing down one thing I was proud of doing regardless of prestige, scale, or recognition. On Thursday, I had my State ID renewed. I took time off from work to do it, I was very prepared, and I felt satisfaction at doing something I wanted to do that felt kind of hard but also necessary. Anybody could do it — what mattered was that I made the time and space, and of course, that it mattered to me.

We are outraged by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. We grieve for them and the many, many others before them who lost their lives to police brutality and racial injustice.

We know these are not isolated incidents; they are part of a larger system of institutionalized racism, structural violence, and dominant groups abusing and misusing power to hold onto their own status.

White supremacy has brought us to this current moment, where Black people are 2.5x more likely to be killed by police (Statista), with a Black person killed every two to three days — a number significantly larger than during the height of the Jim Crow period (Isabel Wilkerson).

It is time for change. We must dismantle our current White Supremacist system. For those calling for healing and reconciliation, we stand with you, but warn against using these words as a means of erasing and forgetting.

At Ethos, we commit to advocating for and donating to organizations that help us achieve true healing and reconciliation through:

1. Supporting protestors who are demanding justice and protections for Black lives by backing bail funds and calling legislators to end private security forces, military intervention, and police violence against them
2. Seeking widespread police reforms including requiring police officers to live in the communities they serve and be subject to outside investigations of misconduct
3. Demanding an end to the carceral state that prioritizes mass incarceration over providing basic human services to the communities who need it most and an investment in restorative justice-based approaches
4. Calling on Congress to pass H.R. 40 to address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the U.S. and establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations

At the same time, we make these calls, we acknowledge there is more we can do within our own organization to make a change. That is why we have created our Response Plan, which is included below, to show how we will be accountable to the Black community now and in the future.

– Alida Miranda-Wolff, Jackie Perez, and Tedd Hawks

Our Response to the Ongoing Violence Against Black Communities

How has Ethos supported the Black community in response to the recent cases of police brutality?

On Thursday, May 28th, we began donating to organizations to support change and reform. These include:

• The George Floyd Memorial Fund
• National Bail Fund Network
• The Center for Popular Democracy
• Poor People’s Campaign
• Movement for Black People’s Lives
• Minnesota Freedom Fund
• Reclaim the Block
• Black Visions Collective
• For My Block

Separately, we created resource kits and guides, including a compilation of educational antiracism tools for our client community. We reached out to 64 of our clients and partners to implore them to take a stand, not just in issuing statements, but in giving their employees tools for protesting, donating, and most importantly, supporting and checking in on their Black teammates within their organizations.

We have publicly taken this stance in the news, imploring startups to be honest and speak out against police brutality and violence.

Our team members have protested, starting on June 1st, and engaged in cleaning up neighborhoods after protesting. We have also made phone calls and written to legislators about police reforms.

We want to do more than what we have done; this work can feel like drops in a leaky bucket. We are reaching out to our communities to find more ways to put Black voices front and center and advocate for the Black community.

How does Ethos support Black team members?

“In business we set targets on everything,” Ms. Hobson said. “Only in the area of diversity have I seen C.E.O.s chronically say, ‘We’re working on it.”

– From “Corporate America Has Failed Black America”

When it comes to our own Black community, saying “we’re working on it” is not enough.First things first, we have to be honest about race and color on our team.

• Full-Time Employees: 2 White, 2 Latinx
• Part-Time Employees: 1 White, 1 Black
• Contract Consultants and Facilitators: 3 Black, 1 Asian, and 1 White

While COVID-19 impacted us financially, we are using the capital we do have to create more full-time opportunities, and we have already redesigned our interview process to widen our funnel and eliminate bias. In our Marketing Associate hiring process, we saw a dramatic increase in self-identified Black applicants through our partnerships with community organizations, shift from taking referrals to only reviewing applications, and changing our application process as a whole to prioritize project-based interviews. We will continue designing and redesigning our interview process to ensure we are radically inclusive and reaching Black communities we may not without thoughtful attention and care.

We are also making demands of our clients that ensure any work we do on antiracism benefits the Black community. Specifically, we are not making a profit on any antiracism work in the wake of the national protests but instead are paying our Black facilitators and consultants a premium and donating the rest to organizations investing in Black communities.

In the event that our Black facilitators and consultants do not want to do this work, we have compiled a list of Black-owned businesses to refer our clients to in the future.

Finally, we have had deep conversations with our Black teammates to understand what they need to feel supported, advocated for, and cared for on the team. We have taken these recommendations to heart, and we will be ensuring that we continue paying above market, offering flexible leave and mental health days, and offering 80% coverage of health insurance for both full-time and part-time employees. We will also plan to look for ways to grow the business so there are more full-time opportunities for our contractors.