Read the article in Korean (translated by Jackie Park)
Read the article in Japanese (translated by Michi Yoshikawa and Sumire)

In recent weeks, there have been over 20 attacks on Asian businesses and people, mostly elders, with little to no coverage from the mainstream news outlets. Videos documenting such attacks have been circulating, mostly through individual social media accounts of Asian activists, celebrities, and journalists. They show a 91-year-old Chinese man being shoved to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown on Sunday, January 31st, just two days before an 84-year-old Thai man, Vicha Ratanapakdee, was pushed and killed in San Francisco, and multiple accounts of robberies targeting Asian-owned businesses in Chinatowns. In New York, a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed across the face from ear to ear on Feb 3rd, and on the same day, a 70-year-old Asian woman was assaulted and robbed in Oakland.

Between March and August of 2020, Stop AAPI Hate received over 2,583 reports of anti-Asian hate crimes nationwide, and these incidents go grossly underreported. The alarming jobless rate of Asian Americans and the high Covid-19 mortality rate among Pacific Islanders, that is double that of white and other Asian people, continue to be left out of mainstream narratives when discussing the disproportionate economic and health impacts of the pandemic on people of color.

The Model Minority Myth running deep in the American psyche is the problematic portrayal of Asians as a monolithic group of quiet, hard-working, politically silent, and therefore “well-behaved” immigrants, which was created in the 60s to position Asians in opposition to the Black community, whose social justice activism was seen as a national threat to the status quo of white supremacy. Over the years, this politically motivated and fundamentally anti-Black myth has successfully achieved its purpose of driving a wedge between Asians and other people of color groups in America, while simultaneously erasing, making invisible, and even delegitimizing Asian communities’ real-life struggles by using the economic success of the few to defend the centuries-old unjust systems rooted in white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism.

This wedge continues to be driven even deeper today, where, to my dismay, many of the recent attacks against Asian elders were perpetrated by Black individuals, and the myriad intra- and inter-community reactions have once again exposed the historical and ongoing tension between the Asian and Black American communities.

Today in reaction to the series of attacks on our elders, many enraged Asians are calling for the immediate arrest of the perpetrators of violence while demanding the most punitive charges be made. “Send a message,” they say. And I have to wonder, “Weren’t we just demanding we defund the police in solidarity with Black Lives Matter?”

When asked to support the amplification effort and denounce the heinous attacks on Asians, some Black people criticize the anti-Blackness still prevalent in the Asian community. “Asians are anti-Black.” “Asians never show up for us.” “It’s Black History Month.” And to that I wonder, “So will you watch us die?”

And the cycle continues. We fight anti-Asian racism with anti-Black rhetoric and tactics, and anti-Asian racism goes unnoticed, or worse justified, in part due to the deep-seated and understandable resentment towards our community, which undeniably has more work to do to eradicate anti-Blackness, and whose perceived proximity to whiteness is aided through the perpetual and blatant erasure of our historical and present-day solidarity work with other marginalized communities.

Some might say the 1992 Los Angeles uprising marked the pinnacle of the tension between the two communities, where the two groups found themselves facing each other in physical opposition in Koreatown, each fighting for justice, dignity, and survival of their kin. The site of the protest was no coincidence, given it marked the place where Soon Ja Du, a Korean American liquor store owner, shot and killed Latasha Harlins just a year prior, a 15-year-old Black girl who Du believed attempted to steal a bottle of orange juice. There was a righteous public outrage when Du was sentenced to merely five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine, and again when the sentencing decision was unanimously upheld in an appeal about a week before the uprising began. When all four white police officers who brutalized Rodney King were acquitted, the Black community and its allies rose up and swarmed the streets to express their grief and fury, and Koreatown was one of its righteous battlegrounds. University of Southern California estimates that more than 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed during the uprising, which stretched for nearly a week from April 29 to May 4, 1992, and more than 60 people died, with more than 2,000 injured. About half of the estimated $1 billion in damage was sustained by over 2,300 Korean-owned mom-and-pop shops, leaving enduring economic and emotional trauma that many are yet to fully recover from. While the LAPD stationed themselves to protect richer white suburbs, Korean business owners, panicked by the reality of having been abandoned by the government, screamed for help while watching their American dreams burn to the ground, while others armed themselves to defend their only means for survival, pointing their guns at Black and brown faces. “Nothing in my life indicated I was a secondary citizen until the LA riots. The LAPD powers that be decided to protect the ‘haves’ and the Korean community did not have any political voice or power. They left us to burn,” Chang Lee, a Korean American business owner recalled in an interview with CNN. Despite both communities being victims of unjust and racist systems, many believed their opponent to be the traumatized faces in front of them, not the systems of white supremacy that had failed both communities.

Today, white supremacy is in action again, pitting our communities against each other and banking on our collective amnesia about the conditions that have birthed the violence — the government’s utter failure to create any semblance of financial safety for the most marginalized in the midst of a pandemic; systemic racism permeating every nook and cranny of our medical system that bar access to adequate care for the most vulnerable frontline workers, most of whom are Black and brown (don’t forget, brown includes some AAPI folks, too); and the institutional robbery committed against the public while corporate billionaires became multi-billionaires off a game only they are allowed to play. All of these unjust and exploitative conditions have led to such scarcity among the already marginalized, and our two traumatized communities, once again, find ourselves with our fists up ready to battle for survival, this time in Chinatown.

White supremacy wants us to remember the unhealed wounds we inflicted on each other, historical and ongoing anti-Blackness in the Asian community and anti-Asian incidents perpetrated by Black individuals, but not the stories of solidarity that have existed in equal measure, but are somehow left out of our history books and media coverage. In the aftermath of the LA uprising, volunteers from all racial groups showed up to rebuild Koreatown: “One by one,” said Lee, “neighbors came out to help. They were Black, Korean, and Latino. 30 people. They gave me hope. They are my community. And it’s time again to stay bound together these next four years.” Despite our “mutual ignorance,” as activist Helen Zia once described, we have been showing up for each other. And I’m not talking about the performative gestures of posting black squares and BLM hashtags; I’m talking about the work of our ancestors like Yuri Kochiyama, Grace Lee Boggs, and Larry Itliong who worked alongside the Black Panthers in the 60s, to the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of Black, Latinx, and Asian student organizations that sustained one of the longest student strikes in the U.S. that resulted in the creation of Ethnic Studies, to the present-day coalitionary organizing to mobilize voters in Georgia, push for prison reform and abolishment, and defund and demilitarize the police… the work has been ongoing, with or without the mainstream consciousness or participation, and it is our duty to remember and uplift these stories to seed healing and change.

And truthfully, I am exhausted. I am exhausted by the continued violence against my people and especially our elders, who remind me of my 92 year old grandpa who passed away after fighting for Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonization and then against U.S. imperialism in our homeland, who cannot seem to find refuge anywhere in their lifetime. I am exhausted by the continued silence and delayed motions from the mainstream media outlets committed to upholding white supremacy through erasing our struggles while magnifying the myth of the model minority that puts a target on our backs. I am exhausted trying to hold both the trauma and pain of my community and steering us all away from the trap of anti-Blackness as the weapon of choice to fight our oppression. I am exhausted by the blatant dismissal and erasure of Asian and Black solidarity work that’s been ongoing for decades, and having to justify our ask for the bare minimum acknowledgement of our crisis without being asked to show receipts. I’m exhausted by the internalized oppression of some Asian people who would rather have us die in silence than be confronted by the truth of our positionality as still being oppressed and not-yet-quite-white despite some’s economic success, who would rather appeal to those who want to see us behaving politely rather than politically. And finally, I am torn inside by the incredible difficulty of asking our traumatized families to imagine solutions beyond policing, to redefine accountability and justice beyond the confines of the American legal system that criminalize Black and brown bodies for profit, while also advocating for their healing and immediate relief.

The only way out of the vicious cycle of violence we continue to find ourselves in is through deep, unrelenting, and principled inter-community solidarity. As Asians, we must interrogate the conditions and narratives we find ourselves in and remember in our core that white supremacy is not our savior. We have an opportunity to reclaim our narratives — and our identity — by being loud, angry, political, defiant, and in lock-step with the Black community to keep our communities safe while denouncing systems that have never protected us.

In light of these complexities, here is how everyone can help:

1. Acknowledge, amplify, and denounce the ongoing anti-Asian hate crimes. Say it in your own words. Say this is not okay. Say you condemn it. Say you believe it is wrong. Say it personally and organizationally. Make space for our pain because there is always enough space for all of us — all of our pain, healing, and liberation can coexist without diminishing the other.
2. Interrupt anti-Asian racism and anti-Black racism. Neither is okay, in any context. When you see Asians being called “chinks” “dog eaters” “disease spreaders” “dirty” or otherwise blamed for the violence we are experiencing — please shut it down. And when non-Black folks, even if they are Asians who are hurting right now, engage in anti-Blackness by saying “Black people are criminals,” “Black people are dangerous” — please call that out, too. We must be principled in our anger and channel it to dismantling the real enemy: white supremacy culture that creates the either/or binary and scarcity mindset that has left us fighting each other for the scraps.
3. Interrupt generalizations: If someone says, “Asians are anti-Black,” say “Anti-Blackness is a pervasive issue within the Asian community and many Asians have been working within their own community to address and challenge this. Have you been following their work?” If someone says, “Black people hate Asians,” say, “Your generalization of an entire community based on a few examples is harmful. There are plenty of Black people fighting in solidarity with Asian people right now. Do you know them?”
4. Interrupt the active and persistent erasure of Black and Asian solidarity work. When Black people say “Asians never show up for us,” or when Asian people say, “Black people don’t care about us,” talk about how throughout history, our solidarity work has been erased deliberately and intentionally by our education system and the media to worsen the divide. We need to amplify these examples of solidarity to heal and build trust together.
5. Invest in community-based interventions. Contrary to what some may believe, enhancing our contact with the police is not a long-term solution that will keep our community safe. Despite its 2-block proximity to the Oakland Police Department, Oakland Chinatown is not “safe”as evidenced by the increased attacks against its residents and businesses. Just in December, Christian Hall, a 19-year old Asian teen in Pennsylvania, was shot by the state police while having a mental health crisis. Asians are among the fastest growing undocumented populations in the U.S., and those who fear deportation and criminalization will not be safe in the presence of more police. Even when the police are called, our incidents rarely get documented correctly or acted upon with a sense of urgency. Neighborhoods with heavy police presence are not safer. Neighborhoods with access to quality medical and mental health care, financial support, food and shelter, education, are. Rather than calling for more policing, FBI surveillance, and funneling money towards the deeply racist criminalization system that seeks to uphold white supremacy, invest time, money, and energy into creating and supporting community-based interventions that seek to keep all of us safe.

I know many within my community disagree with me on my approach to justice and accountability that do away with government sanctioned law enforcement. I’ve received plenty of messages of dissent and anger that mistake my message as yet another way to make our pain small, rolling over and turning the other cheek to continue to be abused. But I’m reeling with anger, too. I’m in pain, and I want justice, too.

A few years ago, my Korean mom, who only knows to smile when someone looks at her, was held at gunpoint, robbed, and punched in the head by a Black man in San Francisco. She did not want me to worry, so before calling me, she called the police. Beyond filing a routine report, they did not offer any material support that could help her heal from the trauma. She was left to her own devices to figure out how to process her physical and emotional trauma, earn back the rent money she had lost, and protect herself against identity theft. Thinking about that night, and seeing the ongoing violent attacks on other Asian elders, I wake up wailing from the pain, even desiring to inflict physical harm on these perpetrators who remind me of what happened to my sweet mother. But what I’m trying to tend to is the undeniable, fierce, and aggressive love I have for my people that is stronger than my desire for punishment for those who harmed us. That more than I want to hurt them back, I want to keep our people safe. Not just now, but for good.

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez recently remarked, “Accountability is not about revenge. It’s about safety.” These different community interventions are not a “weaker” form of accountability and justice — they are part of the most sustainable and holistic solutions to transforming the root causes that continue the cycle of violence among marginalized communities. And countless local organizations and activists on the ground have been modeling for us to follow their lead: Oakland Chinatown Coalition, a coalition of 20 different Chinatown nonprofits, associations, and individuals, swiftly brought together a diverse group of volunteers to engage in dialogue and actions to keep Oakland Chinatown safe, creating community-powered and survivor-centered programs like the Senior Survivor Program and collaborating with individuals like Jacob Azevedo to organize volunteers to stroll the neighborhood and accompany elders. Stop AAPI Hate has been gathering hate incident reports independent of law enforcement, using online forms accessible in 10+ different Asian languages to encourage more diverse participation and ensure we have disaggregated data that does not flatten our different lived experiences under the Asian American umbrella. There is a coalition of organizations helping to fundraise to rebuild the Vietnamese American Community Center of the East Bay which suffered a devastating fire, preventing it from providing its usual 40,000 meals a month to its most vulnerable populations, and other organizations are fundraising and distributing funds to provide care for Asian elders who were assaulted. I am seeing many Bay Area based, Black-led organizations publicly denouncing anti-Asian hate crimes while supporting community-based solutions that will keep all local communities safer.

I’m still a student of Transformative Justice, a different approach to justice that seeks to address violence without causing more violence, and one that does not rely on punitive and carceral consequences that white supremacy has taught us to associate accountability with. I hope many more will join me in learning and practicing it, and amplify and direct resources to community leaders like Mia Mingus, adrienne marie brown, Shira Hassan, Mariame Kaba, and more, who have been teaching and spreading critical knowledge for years in different social justice spaces.

The collective and intergenerational trauma Asians hold is vast and painfully deep. The erasure and silence around our struggles, from both our own community and our allies, only deepen the wound while widening the gap between us and other marginalized communities. At a time when multiple traumas are converging and so much suffering simultaneously witnessed, we need cross-community solidarity more than ever to fight for our collective healing and liberation from all forms of violence.

Read more in The Wake Up: Closing the Gap Between Good Intentions and Real Change.

Michelle MiJung Kim is a queer Korean American writer, entrepreneur, and activist based in Oakland, California. She is the author of The Wake Up, and CEO of Awaken. Follow Michelle on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter and subscribe to Awaken’s Newsletter for more.

Personal thank you to my fellow AAPI change agents for your wisdom, support, and activism during this trying time.

Thank you for your expert edits, Kimberley Lim.

On Anti-Asian Hate Crimes: Who Is Our Real Enemy? was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the U.S. Presidential Election less than a week away, I am sure many of you are feeling anxious and nervous about what’s to come. I know many of our clients are anticipating both the election results as well as how the event will impact their teams and the company’s overall culture, morale, and path forward.

Some have asked me for guidance on whether or not to address the election in the workplace and if yes, how to do so in a way that won’t further fracture the workplace. It is tough to give a one-size-fits-all answer, as each organization’s context (and frankly, values) is different, but you’ll find below high-level tips on how you might consider approaching the situation.

8 Tips on How to Address the Election in the Workplace as a Leader

1. Prepare: Prepare your communications and action plans in advance

In preparing your communication and action plan, clarify your own (and if you’re an executive, your company’s) priorities and goals. What are you trying to prioritize with the communication? Is it your team’s well being? The team’s productivity? What is your ultimate goal with the plan? Is it to bring a sense of calm and groundedness? Or is it to fuel people into action? Or is it to quell any political discourse?

2. Acknowledge: Proactively anticipate and acknowledge the election’s impact on people’s morale, emotional and psychological well being, and livelihoods

To deny this election’s emotional impact on people would be to deny the material and irreparable consequences the current administration has had on so many marginalized people, along with the fear and anxiety people have about what’s to come. Instead of trying to diminish the election’s emotional nature (people are emotional about it because it matters!), address its very real impact head on by acknowledging and anticipating the rollercoaster we’re going to be on not only on the election day but days following. Acknowledge before the election and do it again after.

3. Create Spaciousness: Plan for a lighter week next week and the week after the election — give explicit permission for people to reprioritize their work to create more spaciousness

Let’s be real. We’re all distracted and we’re going to be distracted (for good reasons) for the next few weeks. Proactively give people permission to create spaciousness so they can take care of themselves. Many companies are giving people a paid day off on election day to ensure everyone has an opportunity to vote, and some organizations are instructing employees to have a more lenient week (this all depends on how the manager handles it) — even if your company hasn’t designated a lighter week, if you’re in a managerial position, proactively work with your team to redistribute priorities so everyone can feel more spacious going into the election week.

4. Encourage Care Plan: Encourage folks to have a post-election care plan (e.g., forming a support group, scheduling therapy in advance, reprioritizing personal and professional tasks, etc.)

If your company’s health insurance plan covers mental health care, remind people to take advantage of it. If not, consider encouraging people to form support groups of values-aligned people so people have a plan on how to care for themselves and each other. Having a dedicated space to process different emotions will be vital to everyone’s well being. Even if you’re not hosting a company-wide formal discussion session, having a guided conversation with your peers and team may help release pent up tension. Some questions you can use:

• What feelings are coming up for you and how are you moving through them?
• What does support from your team/manager look like for you this week?
• What actions can we commit to to prioritize our self-care and team-care this week?

Self-care in times of distress: Create your own “self-care toolbox” (here’s a list of 51 self-care…

5. Don’t Dismiss: Refrain from discouraging “political conversations.” Remember what is “political” is personal and therefore professional.

Being able to disengage from “politics” is a privilege that marginalized people and people impacted by oppressive policies cannot afford. I’m seeing lots of articles advising company leaders to “not let the election roil your workplace.” Newsflash: it is very likely it’s going to roil your workplace. The truth is, what’s “political” to some people is deeply personal for many. I often ask executives: “tell me one issue you consider political that is not also personal.” I’ve done a lot of work with executives and not one has been able to provide a satisfying answer. Immigration? It’s personal. Abortion? It’s personal. Racism? It’s personal. All of the political issues have deeply personal impacts on people’s lives. And because we’re human beings inside workplaces, they will also impact the way people show up in the workplace. What is political is personal and therefore professional. Don’t end up putting your foot in your mouth by trying to quell “political” conversations.

6. Go Beyond Partisanship: Remind everyone ideals of anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion are not and should not be partisan issues — people of all political parties should care about fighting against systemic oppression

Everyone should fight against racism. This should not be a controversial statement. Everyone should care about creating an equitable and inclusive work environment. There should not be a party-line divide on this statement (the reality is, there is, because yes, the current administration is racist. I said what I said and I won’t apologize for it!). If your organization actually cares about DEI, remind people fighting for equality and justice for all is a human rights issue that we will continue to focus on regardless of the election result. Anyone who disagrees with that— kindly show them the door.

7. Recommit to Action: Regardless of the outcome, recommit to your values of equity, inclusion, diversity and focus on clarifying your commitments and action plans to the team

This election is an important milestone but it is not an end point. Our work towards social justice will continue long after this moment. Review your company values and hold yourself and your team accountable for living your values through action.

• What will continuing your commitment to DEI look like after the election?
• How does the election change your action plans, if at all?
• What does accountability look like?
• What are you willing to sacrifice to hold true to your proclaimed values?

8. Self-Care: Have a care plan for yourself

We are not machines. We all deserve care, rest, and support. Apply all of the above to yourself and practice self-care so that you can sustain yourself and show up continuously for justice. The movement needs you. It needs all of us to stay nourished, grounded, and cared for.

How to Manage Your Team in Times of Political Trauma

Remember the work of social justice must and will continue well beyond this milestone. We cannot afford to get complacent now, or ever, regardless of who wins the election. Let’s hold each other close and continue journeying together while centering the needs of the most marginalized communities.

If you want more real-time posts and resources on all things DEI, social justice, and leadership, follow Michelle on LinkedIn and Twitter. Michelle is CEO of Awaken.

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We exist to create compassionate space for uncomfortable conversations to develop inclusive leaders and teams. We’re tired of surface level conversations around diversity and inclusion — let’s go deeper. It’s time for real conversations with real people. Check out our programs (in-person and virtual interactive workshops) at www.visionawaken.com!

How to Address the Election in the Workplace: 8 Tips was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are members of the Asian and Asian American tech community who stand in solidarity with the Black community. We acknowledge white supremacy and anti-Black racism in tech, and we call on our Asian and Asian American colleagues to use our relative privilege to demand change.

Our community has faced heightened anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic, including slurs and violent attacks rooted in white supremacy. We cannot fight the force of white supremacy without also fighting against anti-Black racism. We have benefited greatly from Black community activism for decades, from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that opened the doors for many of us to come to the United States, to the Voting Rights Act that granted Asian Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities, the right to vote. Our foundational rights have come from the labor of Black leaders like activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who said,

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

History has also shown how white supremacy has co-opted Asians and Asian Americans, driving a racial wedge between us and other people of color, especially Black Americans. Many Asians have internalized and perpetuated white supremacy, as evidenced by the adoption of the Model Minority Myth and the ubiquity of colorism and anti-Black racism. Simultaneously, white supremacy holds us back, including through the bamboo ceiling, the Model Minority Myth, and the erasure of the diverse diaspora within our community, especially Southeast Asians, Native Hawaiians, and Filippinx. We call on our community to denounce the irreparable harm and trauma Tou Thao and Soon Ja Du caused to the Black community by killing George Floyd and Latasha Harlins, and to take stock of the daily instances of anti-Blackness in our community. Let us follow instead the legacy of Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama who fought for Black liberation by showing up for Black Lives Matter.

It’s our turn to show up for the Black community and to demand justice for all Black lives.

We, especially overrepresented East and South Asians in tech, continue to enjoy relative privilege that gives us access to spaces and resources that exclude our Black colleagues. The numbers show just how widespread and insidious systemic racism in tech is for Black people, from venture capitalists to founders to employees, and especially for Black women, and Black trans and non-binary people.

We need to do better by investing in Black tech and Black talent, and demanding equitable treatment and workplaces for Black employees.

If you are an investor, commit to hiring Black investing partners and to funding Black founders and innovators of all genders. Support them by providing equal access to resources, including later stage funding and relationships. Make room for Black board members, even if that means taking risks to ask White board members to step down. Invite Black coinvestors to your deals.

If you are a founder, commit to hiring Black executives and to bringing on Black board members and investors. Make your startup inclusive, equitable, and diverse at all levels, for all functions, without exceptions. Learn about Kimberlé Crenshaw and her work to name and define intersectionality. Publicly denounce anti-Black racism. Hold employees, partners, and clients accountable for anti-Blackness and behaviors that harm marginalized people. Reward and pay employees for diversity work. Treat diversity and inclusion as a core business imperative, hire experienced leaders to drive, and use metrics and budgets to support and measure progress.

If you are an employee, speak up when you witness harm. Make sure your Black coworkers are included in meetings, in conversations, in all opportunities. Call out your company if your Black coworkers are shouldering a disproportionate amount of emotional and educational labor burden without their explicit consent and additional compensation. Understand that systemic bias permeates hiring, promotions, compensation, and other interactions, and that you can speak up and help demand change. Understand and support worker-led movements like Black Tech for Black Lives,TechEquity Collaborative, Mijente, and Solidarity Onboarding. Understand how HR policies and labor law have allowed the tech industry to create a second-class of low-paid, less protected workers who are mostly Black and Brown.

We call on all Asians in tech to be anti-racist and actively fight anti-Black racism.

Start by educating yourself and by making a long-term financial commitment to racial justice organizations through recurring donations proportionate to your ability to give. Commit to a lifetime of progress, one step at a time; it’s important and hard, requiring self-awareness and a willingness to learn, grow, change, and take action. Let’s do the work to create a more just world for everyone.

We invite you to be a part of our anti-racist journey. On July 16th, 2020 we are hosting an educational discussion for our community to learn, to process, and to show up for the Black community. We will do the necessary work of mobilizing our community through education, accountability, and anti-racism. We hope you join us.

Ellen K. Pao and Michelle Kim

>> Sign the pledge here <<

Thank you to Aniyia Williams, Y-Vonne Hutchinson, Christine Wang, Katrina Jones for your valuable feedback and perspectives.

Asians in Tech: It’s Time to Show Up for Black Lives Matter was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Authors Note: This article is dedicated to Nina Pop, Tony McDade, Dominque Fells, Riah Milton, and all the other transgender siblings we have lost to racist, transphobic violence and hate crimes. This article is also dedicated to Aimee Stephens — the longtime transgender advocate, and one of the lead plaintiffs in the U.S. Supreme Court LGBTQ employment discrimination cases — Aimee passed away in May 2020 at the age of 59. We owe today’s Supreme Court victory, and our fight for collective liberation to these heroes.

June is Pride Month for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) people all across the United States. Typically this is a celebratory time filled with Pride parades, remembering the pioneers that paved the way for us at the Stonewall (1969) and Compton Cafeteria Riots (1966), swanky parties and banquets, and corporations everywhere “Rainbow Washing” their branding to show their support for our community which has been historically marginalized, ostracized and violently oppressed. However, this Pride Month feels very different in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic — which has forced typical Pride festivities to be canceled — and in the wake of the movement for Black lives erupting as a response to police brutality and murders. In 2020 there are no glittery parades with oversized, bloated corporate floats, no Pride receptions, no pomp, and circumstance.

Instead, this Pride month has been marred by a series of tragedies for the LGBTQ community, particularly for Black transgender people like myself. Just last Friday (June 12, 2020) the Trump administration announced their decision to roll back Obama-era transgender healthcare protections; abruptly ending policies that were previously put in place to protect transgender people from facing discrimination in accessing healthcare. Additionally, the Black transgender community has faced an intense wave of death and hate-motivated violence in 2020. In May and June alone, four Black transgender people (that we know of) have been murdered -

• Nina Pop, a 28-year-old, Black transgender woman, was stabbed to death in Missouri in early May.
• Tony McDade, a 38-year-old, Black transgender man, was murdered by police in Tallahassee Florida on May 27th.
• Dominique “Rem’Mie” Fells, a 27-year-old, Black transgender woman, was murdered in Philadelphia on June 8th during unknown circumstances which are still under investigation.
• Riah Milton, a 25-year-old, Black transgender woman, was shot and killed in Ohio during a robbery on June 9th.

In addition to these four murders, Iyana Dior, a Black transgender woman in Minneapolis was brutality beaten by a group of 20–30 cisgender men on June 1st; Luckily, Dior survived her attack. (Cisgender means “Same-gender” and is a term used to identify anyone who is not transgender; cisgender people are people whose gender identity aligns with their birth-sex). Fells and Milton are believed to be the 13th and 14th transgender or gender non-conforming murder victims in the U.S. this year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (although it is possible that this number is low due to underreporting and misgendering of victims of hate crimes). The wave of attacks against Black transgender people, specifically women or femme identified people, is nothing new. Instead, it is the continuation of a bonafide pattern of violence that Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) who are transgender face at disproportionate rates. Transgender people are 7x more likely to experience police violence and physical violence from law enforcement than their cisgender peers (as we saw in the Tony McDade case) and the majority of victims of hate violence homicides in the United States are transgender women of color.

In the middle of this wave of violence, death, and detrimental blows to essential policy protections that LGBTQ Americans have faced in recent weeks, today there was a glimmer of hope for the LGBTQ community. This morning, the United States Supreme Court released a landmark 6–3 decision ruling that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin — applies to LGBTQ people. This ruling firmly establishes that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer people are protected from workplace discrimination across the entirety of the United States. Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative appointed by President Trump, wrote in the majority opinion:

“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

Make no mistake, the Supreme Court decision today is a win. It is something to be lauded and celebrated, especially in light of the long struggle for federal employment protections for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer and Transgender Americans. The fight to get codified federal employment protections for LGBTQ workers has been a long, and daunting journey. Prior to the Supreme Court taking up employment protections, activists and organizations had been advocating for a comprehensive, federal law protecting LGBTQ workers known as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (colloquially known as ENDA) for more than twenty-five years. ENDA had been introduced in every Congress since 1994 (with the exception of the 109th Congress from 2005–2007). Yet, despite ENDA’s long history in Congress, the idea of closing the patchwork of employment protection policies that varied state-by-state and creating a federal Civil Rights law protecting LGBTQ workers was highly controversial. The most controversial sticking point of all was whether or not transgender people should be included in the legislation.

The dire need for federal protections for LGBTQ people in the workplace, particularly for transgender people, is blatantly apparent when you look at the statistics. A groundbreaking study published in 2013 by leading advocacy organizations shows that transgender people report unemployment at twice the rate of the population as a whole (14% vs. 7% at the time the workers were surveyed). When you look at the statistics by race an even more harrowing tale is painted: 28% of transgender Black adults are unemployed — double the rate of general transgender unemployment, and four times the rate of unemployment for cisgender people — while Native American transgender people face similarly disproportionate numbers with an unemployment rate of 24%. High unemployment rates, also mean that transgender people are more likely to live in poverty than their cisgender counterparts. While only 4% of the general population has an annual household income of $10,000 or less, 15% of transgender people are forced to survive on $10,000 a year or less.

The story for transgender people who are fortunate enough to be employed is not much better, as trans people who are working still face acute challenges to professional success due to underemployment — meaning their skills, qualifications, and experience actually exceed the title and salary of their current role. Underemployment is a reality faced by more than 4 in 10 transgender people (44% to be exact). As a Black, queer, transgender person I have experienced all of these circumstances myself. I have faced employment discrimination due to my gender identity, I have been pushed out of jobs because I have spoken up about issues facing the Black trans community, and I have been underemployed in several circumstances — being passed up for promotions and other opportunities despite having three college degrees (including a Masters degree from an Ivy Leauge institution). This story is not a story about me though, I am including snippets of my own personal story because I want you to think about this: if an Ivy League-educated Black transgender person has faced these hardships in employment, then what about those transgender people who do not have the privilege of formal education? Many transgender people do not have the typical formal education or job experience sought after by employers. Not because transgender people are incapable of achieving this level of education or professional success, quite the contrary — because higher education and professional systems systemically lockout transgender people, particularly BIPOC transgender people from reaching their full potential.

While the statistics of transgender people in employment are deflating, the narrative I want to craft is one that speaks to the intersectionality of this moment in history. I want to humanize the experience of transgender people, as transgender people are so often dehumanized in our life, our work, and ultimately in our often untimely deaths.

The epidemic of violence being faced by transgender people- at the hands of civilians and law enforcement alike — cannot be uncoupled from the employment and economic barriers that transgender people are forced to overcome simply to survive.

That being said, today’s Supreme Court decision is not enough. Just like achieving full federal marriage-equality in 2015 was not the pinnacle of LGBTQ Civil Rights, the employment non-discrimination protections put in place today by the Supreme Court is not the end-all of the struggle for transgender Americans. Deeper systemic changes must be enacted by society, policymakers, and employers to ensure the social, mental, physical, and financial safety of transgender Americans, particularly BIPOC transgender people. So what do those deeper systemic changes look like in action? While I do not have all the answers for solving the crisis of premature death, violence, underemployment, unemployment, and poverty facing the transgender community, I do have some ideas that employers can implement immediately to begin adoption of the legal promise made by the Court today.

1. HIRE TRANSGENDER PEOPLE: First and foremost employers need to hire transgender people (I cannot emphasize this enough) — especially transgender women of color, transgender people who have been system involved, undocumented transgender people, and transgender people who do not fit into, neat “formal education requirements.” I want to be clear that when I say “Hire transgender people” I do not mean that simply hiring one or two transgender people makes your team or company inclusive, it doesn’t mean your company gets a gold star, it doesn’t mean you are done with the work of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Hiring transgender people is the most basic step employers can take to support the humanity and livelihood of transgender people.
2. CREATE COMPREHENSIVE SUPPORTS FOR TRANSGENDER PEOPLE TO THRIVE PROFESSIONALLY: Hiring transgender people means nothing if you set them up to fail when they arrive at your company by not building in the proper support necessary to ensure that transgender people can flourish. Accomplishing this requires organizations and companies to take steps to actively change their company culture in order to create inclusive environments that foster learning, growth, and professional development for their LGBTQ employees, particularly for their transgender employees. Your transgender employees should not only be in low-paying entry-level roles with little room for advancement. Transgender employees need to be prioritized when it comes to accessing professional development and mentoring opportunities and employers must be willing to ingrain intersectional values and policies that uplift all aspects of a transgender person’s identity (including their race) into the workplace.
3. INTERROGATE AND RESTRUCTURE HR + RECRUITMENT PRACTICES: Doing this work in a real way will likely require companies and organizations to interrogate and restructure their HR and Recruitment Practices. As I mentioned above transgender people oftentimes do not have the formal education that many companies require for employment and advancement. This does not mean transgender people do not have the knowledge, or expertise to thrive in the workplace. Often times transgender people have unique insights and powerful ideas born from their lived experiences of perseverance, survival, and being forced to be creative to simply live. Quite frankly transgender people are some of the most innovative people on the planet and companies need to take a deep look at themselves and ask “are our job requirements creating systemic barriers to entry for transgender people?” — the answer is likely yes.
4. FUND TRANSGENDER ORGANIZATIONS, PROJECTS, INITIATIVES, AND COMMUNITY LEADERS: Grassroots, transgender, and BIPOC led organizations have been historically woefully underfunded by the philanthropy community and individual donors. There are a myriad of organizations out there doing incredible work on trans inclusion, trans advocacy, and protecting trans lives who simply do not get the funding or the recognition required to build and sustain long term wins. The philanthropy community, along with individual donors, must do a better job of funding these organizations, and must also commit to loosening the barriers of entry for funding. If you are a funder, or an individual just interested in where you can be giving your money right now to make the largest impact here is a great list of organizations to start with:

• The Trans Justice Funding Project
• T LDEF — Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund
• The Marsha P. Johnson Institute
• The Okra Project
• The Black Visions Collective
• The Starfruit Project
• Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement
• The NYC Anti-Violence Project
• The LGBTQ+ Freedom Fund
• The TGI Justice Project
• Trans Lifeline
• The Audre Lorde Project
• The Sylvia Rivera Law Project
• Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition
• Southerners on New Ground

Supporting transgender people in the workplace goes beyond a Supreme Court decision, and goes beyond your company including people’s gender pronouns in your email signatures. Holistically supporting transgender people in, and out of the workplace, requires people to reckon with the reality that today’s Supreme Court decision means nothing for transgender people if we cannot breathe. You have to be alive to be able to contribute to the workplace and benefit economically from our Capitalist system which values productivity and profit over people’s humanity. You have to be alive to grow. You have to be alive to rise up the ranks in an organization. Let’s take a moment today to celebrate this undeniably historic win, but let us also shift into the next gear of asking each other “What can we do more of?”, “What can we do better?”, “How can we listen to trans community leaders to truly uplift all Trans lives?”

Black Trans Lives Matter. Latinx Trans Lives Matter. Indigenous Trans Lives Matter. Undocumented Trans Lives Matter. Disabled Trans Lives Matter. System-Involved Trans Lives Matter. Unhoused Trans Folx Lives Matter.

Let us live.

About the Author

Bryce J. Celotto is the Founder and Head of Strategy at Swarm Strategy — a comprehensive DEI and social media consulting business based in Oakland, CA (www.swarmstrategy.us). Bryce has almost a decade of experience taking on challenging social issues such as racial justice, youth leadership development, student success, and LGBTQ rights. Throughout his work, he has trained hundreds of teachers on equitable education practices, advocated at the U.S. Department of Education for Title IX protections for transgender students, created leadership programming for historically disenfranchised youth, and worked on DEI initiatives at Brown University. Bryce is a graduate of the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts at Boston where he earned his B.A. in History — Magna Cum Laude. He is also a graduate of Brown University where he earned his Masters’s degree in Education. When he is not working he enjoys reading, cooking, rooting on the Oakland A’s, and spending time at Lake Merritt.

If you would like to learn more about Bryce and his work, or you’d like to contact him directly you can go to www.swarmstrategy.us

What Todays Historic Supreme Court Ruling Means for Transgender People and Employers (And Why It’s… was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So your company has been interested in doing more DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) work for some time now, but the leadership team never got around to really committing to it.

Your company website’s career page has an upbeat vibe, stock photos of diverse teams, a non-controversial statement about diversity, perhaps a few quotes from your token employees of color, and some photos of office pets.

With the pandemic, you’ve had to switch gears to thinking about remote work, budget cuts, and supporting your employees adjust to the new ways of engaging.

And then a series of traumatic and devastating news hit.

First it was Ahmaud Arbery. Then Breonna Taylor. Then Dreasjon Reed. Then Nina Pop. Then George Floyd. Then Tony McDade. You see videos of police brutality circulating and angry tweets about Karens and Amy Coopers. #BlackLivesMatter hashtag is back everywhere and people are taking to the streets. Now it feels wrong to ignore and to remain silent. The leadership feels the pressure but they need guidance. We need to do something. Something tangible. Something fast. You see other companies releasing statements. Your company just released one and now you definitely have to do SOMETHING. Training? Yes, training sounds good. People need to learn how to talk about this stuff, you need to learn how to talk about this stuff. So let’s find a vendor who can do it. So you start Googling and you land here.

Well, welcome. I’ve been waiting for you. Alongside those who have been doing this work with companies for decades.

We’ve been waiting for you.

My company received a record number of contact requests in the past week. Other DEI educators and consultancies are experiencing a similar surge. We experienced a similar rush in 2017, when a series of traumatic political events occurred that shook and further divided the nation.

I have contacts reaching out rushing me to close that deal they had been dragging their feet around for over a year. I have over a hundred unanswered emails requesting anti-racism and unconscious bias workshops.

I am balancing both a sense of hope for this renewed display of commitment and a sense of cynicism, and frankly sadness, watching companies rush to care when just a couple of weeks ago, DEI was on the “low priority” list with budget cuts looming. Some companies had just laid off their DEI team. Oh, the irony.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion has always been important and it always will be.

Black people getting murdered by police is not new. This has always been urgent. The issue of racism and systemic oppression have always been urgent. The need for DEI education in the workplace has always been urgent and necessary, as was the need for leaders to acknowledge the daily marginalization of their Black employees inside their companies.

It guts me to know that for some, a series of high profile, excruciatingly painful and violent murders of Black people, accompanied by haunting videos, is the necessary wakeup call for change.

Despite this and my cynicism about the influx of outreach being a temporary bandwagon knee-jerk reaction, I believe the current surge of “courageous conversations” taking place at work is a good thing. I believe we have a time-bound moment of opportunity to assist organizations to get on the right, long-term track for sustainable, meaningful change.

Now that I’ve gotten my bitterness (I’m a person with feelings!) out the way, let’s all take a breath and think about how to turn this moment into a movement.

5 Questions to ask before responding to the current crisis with a workshop:

1. Why now?

What changed in the past week that your company is now willing to spend money, time, and effort to make DEI matter? Was it not as important before? Why? Was your team not suffering before? Are you sure?

What will anchor you to keep going when this “moment” is over? Will you keep going when the world is no longer paying attention to #BlackLivesMatter?

Knowing your why and why now will help guide your short- and long-term strategy. More importantly, knowing the “why now” will help you think through how and why you will continue this work beyond this moment.

2. What do you want to accomplish?

Here are common answers to this question:

• “We want to create a safe and honest space for people to have a conversation about what’s going on”
• “We want to understand what we can do to support our Black employees”
• “We want this to be the starting place for a longer DEI education journey”

Note the three answers above can be met with three different workshops approaches:

• A processing space (dialogue heavy)
• A learning space (information heavy)
• A practice space (interaction heavy)

The more specific your goals are, the more you’re going to get out of a training or workshop session. You want the team to understand how to show up for their Black colleagues? Don’t ask for an Unconscious Bias workshop, get an Anti-Black Racism workshop. You want the managers to know how to hold space for their employees of color without gaslighting or tone-policing them? Don’t ask for an empathy workshop, get an Allyship workshop! Get specific and you shall be rewarded!

Allyship (vs. Accomplice): The What, Why, and How

3. Whose needs are you centering?

Is the workshop about showing you care? To whom? Is your current workshop goal about making white people feel more comfortable talking about uncomfortable issues around anti-Black racism? Or is your goal about creating a more inclusive and equitable space for your Black employees? You might think they achieve similar things, but the framing matters.

If you’re prioritizing the education of white people, you might pay less attention to the harm Black folks might feel in the process of that education.

If you’re prioritizing the needs of the most marginalized folks (and right now, we have to center the needs of Black people), then you might pay less attention to the discomfort of white people in the process of meeting Black people’s needs.

You see the subtle but important difference? Whom is it really for?

Too often, DEI workshops end up centering the needs of white people and their comfort, which end up causing further harm to the marginalized people in the room. You can avoid this by paying attention to how you’re thinking about the people you wish to serve and measure success by. DEI work’s success is determined by marginalized people, not those in positions of power. Always center the needs of the most marginalized people.

4. Whom are you learning from?

If you are engaging an external vendor, be critical about whom you engage. Look at the make up of the team. Does it make sense for you to pay and learn from a non-Black person right now? Why or why not? What does critical allyship look like in this moment when you’re making a key decision about whose voice you center, whose labor you compensate, and whose guidance you’re asking your team to follow.

Awaken is prioritizing referring businesses to Black-owned DEI firms and Black independent consultants right now. We believe it is important to center the voices and work of Black people, always but particularly now, as they are leading the movement and are most qualified to do this work.

You can leverage this spreadsheet to find Black DEI consultants who are currently accepting new clients and are eager to work with you. There are also so many Black educators and leaders you can learn from who are sharing so much online: Rachel Cargle, Ericka Hart, Myisha t. Hill, Rachel Ricketts, just to name a few. Be grateful they are willing to do the hard work right now, and don’t make your urgency their urgency! Lastly, pay well. Pay more than you are comfortable paying.

If you’re engaging internal folks, be careful not to assume every Black employee would want to talk about what’s going on, let alone educate the company. Don’t put additional educational and emotional labor burden on Black people without consent and additional compensation — not now, not ever.

5. What happens after?

The most common question we get from workshop participants towards the end of our workshop session is “This was amazing. What happens next?”

Do you know what will happen after this emergency response? Figure this out before you rollout a workshop.

If you don’t have a holistic, multi-year DEI strategy right now, that’s okay. Creating space for dialogue and education is urgent right now. However, a one-time conversation won’t get your organization anywhere it hasn’t been before. In order to create real change, you need to work on creating change at multiple levels: Personal, Interpersonal, Organizational.

Have a light weight after-workshop plan in place, whether it is engaging an external consultant to map out your DEI strategy or doing a holistic audit of your internal policies for inclusion gaps. Review your manager competencies and ensure DEI and racial equity awareness is part of the competency you require of all leaders. Map out different learning and development milestones and ensure DEI is embedded throughout, not just as an extracurricular activity. Ensure there is alignment at the executive level on the DEI priorities and how they will show up authentically to support this ongoing work.

If any of these long term commitments feels scary or “too much” for you, or you feel agitated that I’m not just selling you the workshop you want, please go back to #1 and ask yourself — “Why are we doing this now?”

Despite the initial cynicism, I wouldn’t be doing this work if I didn’t believe in the possibility of change. I have been more hopeful than ever, being in deep conversations with my own Asian American community to name and dismantle anti-Blackness. I am witnessing people I never thought would engage in this conversation finally show up, ready to learn. I am inspired by all of the incredible grassroots activism, many led by young people, fueling systemic change. I am encouraged, humbled, and I am hopeful.

I hope that everyone who feels compelled to do more than they’ve ever done before continues to feed their curiosity, concern, sadness, and anger and move them towards real action and change.

I am hopeful that this moment will further propel your organization’s commitment to the long-term journey of achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion. Let’s remember this work has always been important, and that it must remain important and urgent for months and years to come.

The journey towards social justice is not an easy one, but I welcome all folks willing to take a step forward, mistakes and all.

**Please don’t forget to keep contributing to #BlackLivesMatter. Here are so many different ways you can!!**

If you want more real-time posts and resources on all things DEI, social justice, and leadership, follow Michelle on LinkedIn and Twitter. Michelle is CEO of Awaken.

About Awaken — Subscribe to our Newsletter!

We exist to create compassionate space for uncomfortable conversations to develop inclusive leaders and teams. We’re tired of surface level conversations around diversity and inclusion — let’s go deeper. It’s time for real conversations with real people. Check out our programs (in-person and virtual interactive workshops) at www.visionawaken.com!

Urgently Looking For Anti-Racism Training for Your Company? Start Here. was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read this article in Japanese (translation by Michi Yoshikawa).

It would be a massive missed opportunity if we fail to make the connection between the stories of Amy Cooper and Tou Thao and our daily behaviors. It’s easy to dismiss these as isolated incidents perpetuated by “racists” — but none of this is just one person’s racism coming to light and none of us is innocent.

We all perpetuate anti-Black racism in our daily lives. We can’t fight anti-Black racism unless we can notice its manifestation in ourselves and others on a daily basis in our workplace, social interactions, and online engagement.

In doing DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) work, I’ve found it useful to actually name the detailed and insidious ways we all participate in oppressing each other.

This one is for my people. Reminder: I don’t speak for all Asians.

1. Calling the police on Black people — doing this *escalates* everything and is very possibly life threatening for Black folks, yet I see Asians using this tool of oppression too quickly whenever they perceive (a lot of times not even real) threat. I challenge everyone to reflect on the time you’ve called the cops — did they actually help? What did they do that was helpful? We mistake calling the cops with safety — they don’t keep us safe.
2. Asian store owners following Black people around, profiling, and over surveilling. Being “afraid” of Black people the moment they are in sight.
3. Not believing Black people’s stories and struggles: “are you sure they meant it that way?” “it’s not always about race” aka gaslighting the fuck out of them. This is especially harmful because gaslighting that comes from other marginalized groups is EVEN MORE gaslighty.
4. Preferring lighter skin color over dark; using and promoting skin “whitening” products. Colorism has long been a part of Asian cultures globally and the damning effects are seen within and across different Asian communities. While in Asian countries, the preference for lighter skin might come from the disparity in socioeconomic class (e.g., farm workers being darker vs. wealthier or upper caste people being fairer), we must question how this prevalent association (wealthy and educated=lighter skin and poor and uneducated = darker skin) manifests in our behaviors and narratives today.

5. Using AAVE, Blaccent, language/terms created by and for the Black community — I know, this one is sometimes confusing. And I’m still a little mad at Akwafina. Sometimes we also do this via “digital Blackface” — using giphys that use stereotypical images of Black people.

6. Cultural appropriation in the form of art, music, fashion, hair, make-up, etc. Google “Asian Rappers” — I’m screaming. Now I’m getting the wrath of Asian hip hop fans, so I’ll say this to clarify. I don’t mean non-Black people shouldn’t rap or adopt the art ever (although, some people may believe this and I won’t fight you). Rather, there are too many Asian folks taking the music form without paying proper respect to its history and origin. Cultural appropriation happens when we take parts of other communities’ culture and use them for our own enjoyment and benefit, without paying proper respect or also acting in solidarity in our daily lives. If you’re contemplating getting dreadlocks as a non-Black person, consider this response from Michael Harriot: “I’d tell him that it means something. Dreads are a subtle protest and a personal bit of empowerment in a culture that strips away every part of your heritage, down to your hair follicles. I’d tell him that — for some — it is a religious experience. I’d explain that it is the height of privilege and disrespect to appropriate all of that just because he thinks it looks cute.” Also check out this article to learn more about the history of the term — thanks Jenny Kim for sending it to me.

7. Respectability politics based on false narratives and model minority myth: “They bring this upon themselves” “They should not commit crimes” “Asians worked hard to earn our place.”

8. Believing we can fit in if we act more like white people. Don’t be like Andrew Yang. He is wrong.

9. Using and co-opting social justice language created to achieve equity for Black people and other marginalized communities in a way that *only* benefits us. “Affirmative Action is racist against Asians” ← it’s not and we need to call our people in.

10. Forgetting that we benefited from various social justice movements led by and with the Black community.

11. Consciously or subconsciously only referring friends who look like us to job opportunities.

12. Staying silent when Black people experience violence (which is.. everyday) and never posting anything publicly due to fear of being othered — silence = tacit approval, no matter how you want to explain it.

13. Not understanding why some Black people are mad at us. Yes, mistrust, cynicism, and anti-Asian prejudice towards Asians exist in the Black community and they hurt. Heck, sometimes we experience violence, too. Learn about the complex relationship and histories between the Black/Asian communities to understand the anger and frustration, and model allyship to build solidarity. Don’t get defensive. Trust, there are so many Black folks who have had our backs and who continue to fight for us.

14. “I don’t date Black people” ← “but we all have preferences” is just another way of saying you have racist beliefs about Black people.

15. “I only date Black people” ← fetishization of Black people requires deep self-reflection.

16. Saying the N-word. Just don’t. “But I have Black friends.” “My Black friend said I can…” I don’t care. And no one person can speak on behalf of an entire community — that’s tokenizing and we should do better.

17. Dancing to music by Black artists but never engaging in social justice conversations.

18. Avoiding Black neighborhoods and calling the areas “sketchy” “ghetto” “shady.” Looking for “good school districts” and meaning where there are mostly rich White / East Asians who get into elite colleges.

19. Not understanding the systemic reasons why there are so few Black people in leadership positions and using false narratives to justify (“pipeline problem” “we don’t lower the bar” “hire the best”).

20. Not understanding how we use the same tools white supremacy uses to oppress us to oppress Black folks. Being the oppressor’s favorite tool to create a racial divide among people of color.

21. Caring about our families immigrating so we can be together but not giving a shit about mass incarceration of Black people that separate families daily.

22. Not valuing Black customers, clients, users, the same way we salivate over white customers, clients, users, etc.

23. “I don’t see color.” omg can you just stfu. (Read this if you’re still confused why this is harmful.)

24. Valuing the approval of white people more than forming solidarity with Black people. Not calling white people out when they make racist comments or perpetuate microaggressions. Call that shit out whether Black people are in your presence.

25. Not participating in protests and riots when bodies are needed to show solidarity and power.

26. Believing our individual economic and financial success will free us and negating the systemic disparities that continue to plague *our* communities, too.

27. Letting our parents, families, friends get away with anti-Black racist remarks and behaviors. I know it can be challenging to risk your family dynamics, especially if you’re super family oriented like many Asian families. Use this guide by Kim Tran to try.

28. Only reading, learning from, and quoting non-Black scholars, speakers, writers. Only using research from predominantly white institutions.

29. Performing allyship using hashtags #BlackLivesMatter but not actually doing anything different to fuel change.

30. Policing Black people in our daily lives via over scrutinizing (Black people are disproportionately scrutinized in the workplace), over punishing (hello, school-to-prison pipeline), and tone-policing (e.g., “don’t be so aggressive”).

31. Believing in and holding onto the notion of “proper” English while dismissing people who deviate from the white/white-European centered ways of speaking and writing as less educated. You see how that hurts us, too, right?

32. Forgetting Black Asians exist.

More examples you’d like to share? Comment so we can all learn from each other!

Need ideas on how to take ACTION? Check out 20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now.

20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now

If you want more real-time posts and resources on how to practice allyship, follow Michelle on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Michelle is Co-Founder & CEO of Awaken.

About Awaken

We exist to create compassionate space for uncomfortable conversations to develop inclusive leaders and teams. We’re tired of surface level conversations around diversity and inclusion — let’s go deeper. For Diversity, Equity, Inclusion workshops that don’t suck, check us out at www.visionawaken.com!

30+ Ways Asians Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism Everyday was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Read this article in Korean, Chinese (simplified), Tamil, Malayalam (by The Social Understanding Initiative) or Japanese (by Michi Yoshikawa). Other Asian languages coming soon!

As I observe collective trauma, pain, sadness, exhaustion set in, I’m also witnessing so many Asian folks at a loss for how to show up for the Black community in solidarity right now.

Maybe you feel awkward posting about anti-Blackness. Maybe you feel like it’s not your place. Maybe you feel like you’re going to say the wrong thing, so it’s better to not say anything at all. Maybe you’re worried that talking about “politics” will damage your professional reputation — after all, no one at your workplace has said anything, so why should you be the first one? Maybe you’re anxious about your friends thinking you’re all of a sudden some radical social justice warrior and somehow that makes you feel like an outsider.

Whatever your reason may be, I want you to know there are so many options on how you can show up and practice thoughtful allyship in solidarity right now. Wherever you are on your social justice and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) journey, no matter your awareness level, if there is an inkling that something is terribly wrong and off, listen to that voice and do something.

Allyship (vs. Accomplice): The What, Why, and How

There are deep historical wounds we need to heal that exist between Asians and Black people, and there are fresh wounds being created everyday as we perpetuate anti-Blackness inside our communities. The oppression against Black people is perpetuated not only by White people, but us Asians, too: in Chinatowns all over the U.S., in Asian countries, in our workplaces, online on social media, in our daily lives.

In our quest to survive, some of us may have been striving to become White-adjacent— as successful as White people, as fitting in and assimilated as White people, as deserving as White people of dignity and respect — and along the journey, consciously or subconsciously, have adopted the language and beliefs of White Supremacy and anti-Blackness.

And deep down, many of us know in our bones that we never were, and never will be, as free as White people, because that is the wrong goal. In order for us to truly be free, we need all of us — ALL OF US — Black, Brown, Asian, Native, LGBTQ+, disabled, poor, undocumented people to be free.

I know so many of us are hurting. Not just aching for Black and Brown people, but also because of the vicious attacks on our people, too. I believe we can hold all of this complexity with gentleness and courage to show up for each other and our Black siblings, who have been hurting and mourning for a long, long time.

Michelle Kim (she/her) on Twitter

1. Don't call the cops 2. Unearth your internalized anti-Blackness 3. Challenge model minority myth, which is rooted in #2 4. Educate your family and friends on the injustice Black ppl face globally 5. Donate to orgs serving Black communities 6. Demand justice for #AhmaudArbery https://t.co/ZmLiBbZeCp

So here is a hastily put together list of 20+ things you can do to show up for the Black community (I’ll continue to add more context and resources for each):

1. Don’t call the cops. You may need to ruminate on this one, especially if your first reaction is “but they keep us safe!” “who do we call instead?” There is a ton of research on why the police doesn’t actually keep us safe. Read this article and check out this resource mapping out police violence.
2. Unearth your internalized anti-Blackness and reflect on how they show up in your daily life
3. Challenge model minority myth, which is rooted in #2. Map out how you may have internalized the messages of model minority myth and exceptionalism
4. Educate your family and friends on the injustice Black people face globally. You can start by sharing this article, or this one by Kim Tran
5. Donate to organizations serving Black communities, like TGI Justice Project, Black Girls Code, NAACP, and more. Research your local organizations and find out who you can support them!
6. Demand justice for #AhmaudArbery; Text JUSTICE to 55156 to sign the petition.
7. Demand justice for #DreasjonReed (Reed’s parents have requested the use of correct name, not Sean). Read about what happened and share what you learn.
8. Demand justice for #BreonnaTaylor who was shot 8 times by the cops who were at the wrong house while the actual suspect was already in police custody. No one has been held to account as of my writing this on May 12th. Take action.
9. Learn about so many innocent lives taken without justice: Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Stephon Clark, Botham Jean…and remember their stories. Understand how police violence against Black people is a systemic issue, not isolated incidents, and rooted in historical and ongoing oppression.
10. Learn about the continuing murders of Black transwomen whose deaths often aren’t even reported by the media. In 2020, there has been at least 11 trans people killed. Share their stories and donate to trans advocacy orgs like TGI Justice Project.
11. (for non-Brown documented Asians) Stay closer to the cops at protests to shield those vulnerable
12. Organize individual fundraisers for nonprofits, individual activists, reparation, victims of police violence, etc.
13. Send your Black friends and colleagues a text reminding them you’re there for them. Offer to hold space or to order them food
14. Follow their lead. Listen. Listen. Listen
15. Make conscious effort to follow more Black leaders on social media. Share articles, posts, calls to actions on your social media, written by Black activists and leaders. I learn so much from Ijeoma Oluo, Rachel E. Cargle, Kimberly Bryant, Ericka Hart, Brittany Packnett, Kimberle Crenshaw, Minda Harts, Katrina Jones, among many others.
16. Follow, amplify, and learn from Asian racial justice activists and thought leaders you can model after. I love learning from Mia Mingus, Kalaya’an Mendoza, Ellen Pao, Kim Tran, and following organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Asian American Feminist Collective, 18 Million Rising, and more.
17. Stop using AAVE and don’t share digital blackface giphys
18. Don’t ask Black people to educate you. Don’t put additional burden on them, not now, not ever. There is so much free content and thought leadership out there
19. Call out systemic and interpersonal racism whenever you see it
20. Call out store owners following Black customers around
21. Call out doctors who minimize Black people’s pain
22. Learn about Asian American activism in the U.S. It’s empowering and solidarity building. Check out the Zinn Education Project and follow Liz Kleinrock @teachandtransform on Instagram for more lessons!
23. Build coalition rooted in solidarity and trust. Organize.
24. Demand justice for #NinaPop
25. Demand justice for #GeorgeFloyd
26. Support and join the protests, riots, and bail out protesters who have been arrested — see below for where to donate.

Updated May 28th, 2020 with Donation Links (Thank you LeslieMac):

• (MFF IS OVERFLOWING AND ASKED TO REDIRECT FUNDS TO OTHER ORGS) Minnesota Freedom Fund will help bail out protesters being arrested. This is really important — so many people end up staying in jail because they cannot afford bail even without a conviction. Donate to be in solidarity with the protesters fighting for justice for #GeorgeFloyd
• Louisville Community Bail Fund “exists to not only bail out folks, but provide post-release support to get them from jail, fed, and to a situation of safety.” People are protesting to demand justice for #BreonnaTaylor.
• Reclaim the Block is fighting to defund the police. “Reclaim the Block is calling on our city to invest in violence prevention, housing, resources for youth, emergency mental health response teams, and solutions to the opioid crisis — not more police.”

This is just a handful of things we can do. The most important is that you don’t remain silent or idle while Black people get murdered senselessly. You can do this. We can do this.

30+ Ways Asians Perpetuate Anti-Black Racism Everyday

If you want more real-time posts and resources on how to practice allyship, follow Michelle on LinkedIn. Michelle is Co-Founder & CEO of Awaken.

About Awaken

We exist to create compassionate space for uncomfortable conversations to develop inclusive leaders and teams. We’re tired of surface level conversations around diversity and inclusion — let’s go deeper. It’s time for real conversations with real people. Check out our programs (in-person and virtual interactive workshops) at www.visionawaken.com!

20+ Allyship Actions for Asians to Show Up for the Black Community Right Now was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Imagine you come across an ad for your dream job. The day-to-day is exactly what you’ve been looking for, in the industry that you’ve wanted to break into for a while. On top of that, the gig would come with a significant pay raise and even reduce your daily commute. You submit your resume, wondering if it’s too good to be true.

Unfortunately, when you come in to interview, you realize it is. The recruiter proudly tells you, the company happens to be entirely left-handed, and it’s a huge part of the culture. You notice a theme of pro-left-handedness on the posters decorating the walls, and feel pangs of anxiety. When you mention to the recruiter that you’re right handed, she’s taken aback. “Are you sure?” she asks. “Um, pretty sure,” you reply, and she looks visibly worried. From there, it gets weirder. Some interviewers seem vaguely confrontational, one remarking, “We haven’t had a right-hander work here in years.” Another seems determined to not make eye contact with you. Another interviewer actually chokes on his coffee when you start taking notes… with your right hand.

You did meet some genuinely nice people, but you it just didn’t feel good being in the office. No one was outwardly cruel, but you realize you still felt like an outsider. So, when the recruiter calls back and invites you to the final round interview, you decline.

What if we told you that this happens all the time? In your company, right now? Sure, the above is an exaggerated example, but you can imagine something similar playing out when a candidate who is different in any way walks into your office.

In this post, we’ll cover: how biases show up in hiring, why biases are unavoidable, and tactics and tips for curtailing their influence, so the above scenario doesn’t happen at your organization.

The point of no return

First, we need to cover the basics: A common concern we hear about diversity recruiting is around quality. “But we shouldn’t lower the hiring bar.”

And we won’t! Let me assure you, no reasonable person is going around arguing that we should only hire unqualified women or People of Color (POC) automatically in favor of white male candidates. Diversity and inclusion supporters like you and me share a common goal: building inclusive workplaces to better support more groups of people, which leads to better outcomes for all.

Here’s the thing: it’s not possible for any one *individual* to be diverse. Diversity is not a fixed trait, but a factor that only becomes relevant when you’re talking about *groups* of people. Individuals are still ultimately responsible for the skills, experience, and team contributions . There shouldn’t be any free passes, no matter what demographic.

But when we examine groups in aggregate, it’s hard to deny the problematic patterns and all the ways we could collectively improve. Some groups are unfairly disadvantaged based on factors they cannot control. This can result in entire industries dominated by men, for example, or entirely-white management.

Despite our best intentions, our organizations are riddled with biases, both conscious and unconscious. This is especially the case for recruiting, the very beginning of the employee lifecycle. Thoughtful, inclusive hiring is not only the right thing to do, it’s a huge competitive advantage for your organization.

Inclusive hiring allows you to find “hidden gem” talent that other companies don’t recognize. And, you’ll make fewer mistakes, or mis-hires: candidates who look a certain part and fit a certain pattern, but ultimately fail to deliver results. So let’s get started.

You’re biased and I am too

Before diving into the tactics, it’s important to acknowledge that all of us have unconscious biases. Let’s me say it again: we ALL have unconscious biases. Period. The trouble is, when left unchecked, they lead us to make snap judgments and fall prey to stereotypes in decision-making.

Having biases doesn’t make us bad people, it’s simply an evolutionary trait. For thousands of years, we’ve been wired to make snap judgments that increase our chances of survival.

• Why do we make snap judgments?: Humans are social creatures, extremely attuned to other people and whether one “belongs” or not — it used to be critical to our survival. Our ancestors evolved to figure out quickly who was a member of our tribe (“in-group”) vs. not (“out-group”). Choosing wrong and not reacting quickly enough to a potential threat could jeopardize our survival.
• What does this mean? We’ve been wired to quickly judge and categorize others: friend vs. foe. Thousands of years later, most of us aren’t walking around constantly on the alert for a tiger or a surprise attack from an enemy tribe. Our evolutionary wiring helped us survive in the past, but today — when we evaluate people for our mundane office jobs and the fight for survival is purely metaphorical — it can manifest itself in more negative ways, like implicit stereotyping.
• We’re predisposed to look for homogeneity and feel safe when surrounded by people who look and feel similar. But as research shows over and over again, it’s diversity that leads to smarter, more creative teams and better performance for businesses.

That was the biology lesson. Now back to hiring!

With greater awareness of biases, hiring teams can become less reliant on ‘shortcuts’ that limit better judgment. It won’t be easy though; educating hiring decision-makers that their reliance on “gut feeling” needs to go is not simple. However, tackling that feeling of initial discomfort is a necessary step in creating better results for the entire team.

Bonus Tip: Harvard has developed a free online tool called the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to help the unconscious become more conscious. Check out the website and try out a few of their tests — it’s a window into self-awareness, and you may be surprised by the results.

There is no checklist, “follow these steps for success” guarantee when it comes to inclusive hiring. Each area (Hiring + Diversity & Inclusion) is complicated enough. Just starting is often the hardest step. So below are some recommendations for focus areas for high impact — the tablestakes of your journey.

Below are four actions you can take for immediate, yet meaningful impact in reducing biases in recruiting:

1. Write better job descriptions

2. Spark a dialogue about biases

3. Focus and inform interviewers

4. Track and measure your progress

1. Write better job descriptions

Job descriptions are often the first tangible touch point between you and your prospective candidates. How great of an impression is it — do people get fired up about submitting a resume? Or do subtle cues discourage would-be-candidates to close the browser tab and apply elsewhere?

Too often, traditional job descriptions are cursory documents — checklists of requirements and pedigree that may or may not actually match the job. A common complaint about job descriptions in HR circles is that they’re descriptive of what the person should *look* like, instead of what needs to be *done* on the job. But great candidates can come from various backgrounds.

My team at Lever invented a new type of job description, and it’s called the Impact Description. They’re made up of two key parts:

1. The outcomes a new hire would be expected to achieve at specific milestones (months 1, 3, 6, then 12)
2. Clearly articulation on what the new hire would be expected to know already and help others with (labeled as “Teach”) versus would they would have to develop on the job (labeled as “Learn”).

The feedback from applicants on Impact Descriptions has been overwhelmingly positive. Candidates appreciate the clarity of expectations and the signal it sends — that companies that employ these type of job descriptions care a lot about candidates as people.

Impact Descriptions also have turned out to provide an unexpected benefit in saving significant time in the overall hiring process. When job descriptions are written much more concretely, they can be deliberately folded into your interviews to actively guide your interviewers on what to look for. In contrast, the job description usually gets forgotten as soon as resumes start coming in. (For more specific steps on how to make-over your job descriptions, here’s a step-by-step guide.)

Revamping job descriptions benefits everyone, but can be especially helpful for diversity and inclusion efforts. As one often-cited Hewlett Packard study showed, men apply for a job when they meet only 60 percent of the outlined qualifications, but women don’t feel confident to apply unless they meet 100 percent. Rethinking the “requirements” section and remove the checklists that impede women and minorities from applying, and you’ll have access to a larger talent pool.

There are some exceptions, as in the case of specific technical skills that are absolutely required for a job. But ask yourself: is it something that must already be possessed by the candidate? Or can it be learned / are you willing to teach someone who is otherwise excellent? Does that job *really* need a 4-year college degree? If not, why would we want to discourage those who may be qualified from applying? All questions worth asking with your own team.

Bonus Tip: If you’re not ready to switch over to Impact Descriptions, start small: Textio is a fantastic tool helping companies analyze the language of your job descriptions. Their studies have found that bias embedded in job descriptions can favor/discourage certain candidates. Language is a reflection to candidates of your culture, and a signal whether your workplace is what they’re looking for. If your postings are laden with words like “hacker,” “shark,” “dominate,” etc., they might inadvertently signal to women and minorities to look elsewhere.

2. Spark a dialogue about biases

A study found that resumes with a “white” sounding name (Emily and Greg) received 50% more callbacks than “black” names (Lakisha and Jamal) — even though the resumes were identical. We can extrapolate the results of this study to imagine what the impact could be, and the impact on the potential missed opportunities for talent in companies everywhere. Yes, hiring is hard. But maybe we aren’t examining our blind spots enough.

The tricky thing about unconscious bias is that we’re usually not aware of them. Still, they sneak into the hiring process in all kinds of ways. Have you heard anything like the following in hiring huddles before?

• “She was fairly quiet and low-energy, I don’t know if she’s confident enough.”
• “I have a hard time imagining that he’d be commanding enough. Did he feel like a ‘leader’ to you?”
• “She just didn’t seem very technical to me.”

These are examples of implicit associations that can get in the way of smart hiring decisions. Being quiet, or more introverted, is often confused with lack of confidence. There are many ways to advance as a leader or technical expert in a field, but sometimes, we equate stereotypical images as the real deal. Being a white male MIT Computer Science grad is just *one* stereotype of technical ability, and sometimes it is actually true! The problem is when we reject someone just as capable from a technical bootcamp because she just doesn’t quite feel like a *real* engineer.

There are also statements like below, where you end up hiring for prestige and adopting whatever institutional biases exist at your organization and in your industry.

•“We should get some Google engineers in here.”
•“If they’re from Facebook, they must be good.”
•“If Twitter is giving them an offer, we probably should too.”

Then of course, there’s the bias that occurs when culture fit is conflated with meaning people who are similar to the existing team, and not being open to differences that may actually help the group:

• “I’m not sure I can see myself getting a beer with him…”
• “I don’t think she’d be a culture fit, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.”
• “I don’t think they’d gel very well with the team, since we’re all the type of people who like to do X on weekends.”

A conversation about unconscious biases with your team is a great place to start, as it’s something that affects everyone. Hopefully from the conversation, what people should take away is that nobody is perfect, and growth is incremental.

Aim to reach a collective agreement on what to look out for and be aware of, and decide on safe ways to call each other out from a place of good intentions. You’ll know you’re making progress when team members start pointing out, “Hey, that sounds like it might be an unconscious bias. What are some other possible interpretations of this candidate’s answer?”

Bonus Tip: We recommend the unconscious bias training from Facebook, which covers several types of biases in easily-digestible 5–15 minute modules. They’re a great conversation starter.

See also: Materials from Google and Paradigm, one of our favorite leading consultancies offering Unconscious Bias Trainings.

3. Focus and inform interviewers

Now that we’ve covered better job descriptions and a discussion on unconscious biases, the foundation has been laid. Here are three critical areas to set your interviewers up for success in effectively screening candidates:

1. Ensure hiring panel alignment on how candidates should be evaluated
2. Establish basic guidelines for resume reviewing
3. Structure and plan your interviews

The greater number of people involved in a hiring process, the more complex it gets; there’s a greater likelihood of someone not being familiar with the nuances of the role. And that lends itself to relying on mental shortcuts or poor interviewing techniques, which could preventing you from finding and closing the right candidate.

1. Ensure hiring panel alignment on how candidates should be evaluated

At the beginning of every search, gather the hiring panel for a short meeting. Walk through the job description and make sure everyone’s on the same page about the evaluation criteria. If you hear your sales hiring manager ask for former athletes, or an engineer demonstrating a strong preference for a certain type of technologies that’s not critical to the job, ask thoughtful questions to help people talk out what is Required versus Desired. It’s much better to test these assumptions early in the process, before conversations become about real people! (Read more about the Candidate Re-Calibration Exercise here.)

2. Establish basic guidelines for resume reviewing guidelines

Walk through the basics of resume-reviewing with your hiring team. Explain that just relying on schools and past organizations only tells a small part of the story. Instead, use the resume to understand the whole story behind a person, with questions like these:

• Does this person demonstrably show growth in their environment? Do they have a consistent pattern of promotions? Or if the organization was relatively flat, of increased responsibilities?
• Does this person’s language indicate a healthy view of their contribution (not too exaggerated, overblown, egotistical), including specific details on what they were proud of?
• Does the organization of the resume indicate a conscientious ability to communicate with others? (e.g. minimal typos, careful to explain jargon and make it accessible for the reader)

When it comes to evaluating people, there is no one silver bullet or indicator — the best we can do is to gather as much relevant details as possible to consider the whole person. It’s how *we* would want to be considered, if the tables were flipped.

3. Structure and plan your interviews

You’d be surprised how much of an impact some basic structure can have. Structured interviews (planned questions, asked across multiple candidates) are more likely to get you the information you need for a sound hiring decision. Divvy up the main competencies of the role and task each interviewer to go deep on it. This leads to much more productive outcomes than each person trying to go broad, e.g. “Will this person make a good Director of Marketing?” Have them instead “own” sub-sections of the hiring decision, e.g. “How creative is this person in coming up with marketing initiatives?” or “Have they been previously successful in hiring and developing a team under them?”

Focus on behavioral questions that are focused on the candidate’s past experiences, as opposed to hypotheticals. Focus on the “why” and “how” to learn about the candidate — what their strengths/weaknesses are, as well as how they learn and problem-solve. Ask open-ended questions to gather stories:

• “Tell me about a time when a customer was upset or displeased.”
• “When’s the last time you had to do something in your job you had no idea how to do?”
• “Can you tell me about the last piece of constructive feedback your manager gave you?”

This is as opposed to oddball questions like “Why is a manhole round?” or “How many golf balls would fit inside a 747 airplane?” Brain teasers and off-the-cuff questions have been found to be not that helpful in predicting great hires vs. those who need to be rejected. Lastly, studies have shown that biographical data measures (such as years of experience and education) are largely unhelpful in separating out great talent.

Remember that much stronger predictors of success in a potential employee are found in the tapestry of work samples, structured investigation of past patterns of success, comparison against the required competencies of the job, peer/manager ratings, and motivation fit. Focus on these areas to make sure you can identify top talent, no matter their background or privileges.

Bonus Tip: Google has taken their learnings from thousands of interviews over many years to publish a guide for Structured Interviewing.Check it out for a further deep-dive into the why’s and the mechanics of structured interviewing, along with specific examples and sample tools you can copy and adopt.

4. Track and measure your progress

It’s not possible to fully measure the impact of unconscious bias. There are too many signals that are too subtle to possibly identify, let alone track.

At the same time, “what gets measured gets managed,” as the saying goes. Establishing benchmarks and making incremental goals is key in more inclusive hiring. Here are some starting-point suggestions.

• Company demographics. Determine the makeup of your team and compare against local census data. Start a discussion about the trends and discrepancies you see. If diversity and inclusion efforts are just taking off in your organization, we recommend using this step as a current snapshot and to be able to compare against it in the future. This is as opposed to using the demographic data to set explicit recruiting goals (e.g. hire 2x more women this year). This is because 1) explicit goals around hiring numbers can send the wrong message to your team, who may wonder what’s being sacrificed in the pursuit of diversity and 2) diversity and inclusion work takes time, and moving too quickly on setting aggressive goals in recruiting may result in short-term results and long-term failure. Even if diversity is prioritized in recruiting, if the work environment and company culture still have problems, your unsatisfied new hires will rightly leave.
• Candidate experience. Send a survey to candidates with both quantitative (such as “How likely are you to re-apply for one of our positions in the future?”) and qualitative fields (“What was the highlight of your interview experience? What about a low point?”). Have every single response read by a human. You never know how much impact one comment could have in making you aware of your blind spots. And if you end up hearing about an inappropriate joke from an interviewer or a hiring manager who repeatedly failed to follow up, treat it as the feedback as a gift to help you improve in a way that you would have not known otherwise. Ensuring the same mistake doesn’t get repeated means you’re getting better at your game and less likely to lose top candidates in the future.
• Conversion rates vs EEO data. A caveat, you’ll need larger sets of data to be able to run this analysis. Take your conversion rates (e.g. What percentage of resumes submitted are moved to phone screen?) and intersect them with demographic data collected by Equal Employment Opportunity, an optional set of questions that can be enabled in your ATS like Lever. For example, you might find that underrepresented candidates are passing phone screens but falling off after on-site panels at a disproportionately high rate. This tells you there is likely some sort of bias in a particular stage. With this information, you can identify the problem like a detective: maybe it’s an untrained interviewer turning people off. Maybe it’s the type of questions asked that’s unfair to a certain group. In addition to conversion rates, you can run the same analysis with interview scores. If underrepresented groups are consistently ranking lower in certain stages and questions, maybe there’s underlying bias at play. More opportunities for detective work! (If you aren’t yet confident about how to employ recruiting metrics, I’ve written a beginner’s guide on Linkedin’s Talent Blog here.)

Bonus Tip: Not every company is set up or resourced for substantial metrics and data analyses in diversity recruiting. In that case, we recommend starting with some low-hanging fruit and building up momentum from there. Here are 50+ ideas for advancing D&I that you can start today.

Conclusion

Almost everything that makes teams better interviewers makes them less biased as well.

Hopefully, you now have a better of idea of how to start, by establishing robust criteria and results expected in the job description, working closely with your hiring stakeholders to ensure they’re educated on common biases, and knowing how to correct for it.

But it’s still a lot. When it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, I hope you won’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. Even if you can’t start on the above ideas immediately, pick just one thing and move forward. Many teams I’ve talked to can tell me off the bat at least one thing they wish was better in their recruiting process, but they aren’t yet doing it! That’s because while everyone knows that writing great job descriptions is important, when the moment comes to open a new posting, you don’t “have the time” and tell yourself you’ll start with the next opening, resorting to copy-pasting the one today from a previous one.

Combating bias isn’t glorious — it’s can be quite tedious. It’s taking the additional time to do what’s right even when doing it the same way as you always have comes easier. But when you take it step-by-step, one low-hanging fruit at a time, you’ll start seeing a difference. And by then, you’ll be empowered to tackle bigger and bigger challenges, to make a real dent in building inclusive organizations.

If you liked this post, you may also find helpful this post from my Diversity & Inclusion advice column for startups:

The point of no return

Special thanks to Kiran Dhillon for significant contributions to the post. This post is a part of a 10-part series, Lever’s Diversity & Inclusion handbook.

Inclusive Hiring: Why it’s hard, why it’s important, and how you can start making a difference. was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When people click on a website, it takes them approximately 17 to 50 milliseconds to come to a conclusion on whether the visual appeal, or overall aesthetic, of the site is to their liking. To put that time frame into perspective: it takes the human eye about 200 to 400 milliseconds to blink.

This means that someone is judging your platform in less than a blink of an eye.

See, the brain is predisposed to work with 2 different systems: the reactive (fast and intuitive) & the analytical (focused and deliberate). Naturally, the brain doesn’t want to make deliberate, slow decisions all the time, so sometimes it defaults itself into making those fast ones that happen at first glance.

Hm…Okay, but, what even is accessibility?

Accessibility is the level to which a service, tool, or technological product is made user friendly to the greatest number of demographics possible. The overarching goal is for an individual to have a sense of comfortability, ease, and governance over their overall experience.

Accessible design is a process where people with disabilities (impaired vision, hard of hearing, difficulty with motor skills, etc.) are specifically taken into account during the design process. It concerns itself with making sure a variety of services are able to be used by a multitude of people with different abilities.

This term is rooted in removing all exclusionary factors in order to develop technological principles that help with accessibility factors; for example, supplying added visual aid such as Closed Captioning and transcripts for those individuals who are hearing impaired. It’s extremely important for this type of design to remove those boundaries as well as the inherent inclinations that designer’s may have, and produce creations that are more accommodating to diversity.

We should aim to curb exclusion from these levels of design.

Why design for it? Why care?

Without accessibility, a lot of information is in danger of not being understood.

For instance, people who are color blind may not understand that they haven’t filled out a form correctly because the incorrect fields are outlined in a thin, “aesthetic” red. Like the woman above, there may be a difficulty trying to discern colors….

…however, by adding extra identifiers such as exclamation marks, yield signs, or simple polk-a-dots, a designer can produce a much more accessible field!

By providing a design that she can understand, she is more likely to continue to use whatever product has catered in what she feels is specific to her. If a visitor can’t rely on the accessibility of the site, they don’t spend time admiring the innovative transitions or animations, they’re most likely focused on how the site isn’t behaving how they’d like it to. This isn’t the mindset you want a potential user, or customer, to be in. But by developing a site promoting cognitive fluency, these users are able to process other site factors that make it even easier for them to say “This is great!”

However, there have been cases where people have sued corporations for their inability to accommodate different abilities to those who may be using their service (here and here for numbers and Target, Dominos, Fedex for some reads). This is a failure in following Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Section 508 and WCAG

Section 508 was introduced to rid barriers that were in place for those with different abilities when it came to navigating websites. It was an act that required federal agencies to make all of their electronic platforms and information technology available and usable for people with varying capabilities. Similarly, WCAG are guidelines that websites need to follow in improving web accessibility. It’s broken down into 3 levels:

Legally, most sites need to meet Level AA (essentially, a passable accessibility website). Furthermore, WCAG is organized into four principles that a website must meet (POUR):

Perceivable — > Information needs to be presented in a way users can perceive (braille, large print, symbols…)

Operable — > Interface features and navigations need to be operable (up and down arrows to scroll, awareness of seizure triggers, giving substantial time to read on automated scroll…)

Understandable — > The user needs to understand the sites content. The content and usability can’t be beyond the users understanding or working memory.

Robust — > The website needs to be able to adapt to other technologies. This includes assistive technology and maximized capabilities with current and evolving tech.

WCAG has so far been the most reliable means to assure a website meets accessibility criteria. It’s a big and necessary factor that should make a website, if possible, achieve that triple A!

Great! So, what can we as designers do?

To design for accessibility, all of these visual, auditory, cognitive, and motor difficulties need to be taken into consideration. There needs to be an understanding among UX/UI professionals that accessibility (dealing with both issues and construction) falls onto us. By thinking and designing for these users, it’s a small way that everyone’s daily life is made easier.

To give an instance, Closed Captioning. This feature may help someone who is hard of hearing, but it can also help someone who is not hearing impaired by giving them the ability to watch something in an environment where they cannot play a video out loud.

Designing for accessibility is where you push your creative designs even further.

There seems to be the misconception that designing with these abilities in mind will hinder a designers creative process, when in fact, taking the time to produce around these guidelines is what pushes that designer to become even better. It forces designers to take a step back and build visually pleasing platforms that attract and support many other demographics; it encourages a new way of thinking!

“Designing for accessibility is what needs to happen first.”

Not circling back to fix what was missed.

I’m definitely still someone who is improving on my accessibility skills. Even when writing this I had a few “oops…”’s come into mind. But I think what is important is that I’m realizing its gravity and taking steps to go back and iterate on some of my designs as well as implement new discoveries in my future ones. As designers, we really are at the forefront of how people experience a multitude of technological applications and with that we need to be conscious of the accessibility levels released.

Here are some “Best Practices”:

1. Don’t use color as the only visual means of conveying information.
2. Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background.
3. Provide visual indication for focus.
4. Be careful with forms.
5. Avoid component identity crises.
6. Don’t make people hover to find things.

To wrap up, I urge everyone to incorporate both WCAG and Section 508 into your future designs. Or at least read up on them! It’s an important process that shouldn’t be overstepped.

Please check out Annie Jean-Baptiste, Michelle Kim, Pia Zaragoza, and Christopher Patnoe if you want to hear more about inclusion & accessibility. I’ve been following all of them and they have a lot of intelligent, insightful things they touch on!

Interesting fact: 26% of Americans (1 in 4) have some type of disability and 15% of the world’s population live with a disability. That’s over 1 billion people!

Some extra references for accessibility:

Contrast Text Checker

W3 Guidelines

WCAG 2.1

WCAG Accessibility Check

Google Accessibility

Why it’s time to design for accessibility — and not “the average user”. was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey you.

Remember the day you finally quit that soul crushing job because you knew you could do so much better? I mean, that was some brave ass shit if you really think about it.

Remember those days and nights, the weekends, the dawns you felt like working didn’t feel like working because you had dreams to build? My other founder friend says, it’s like you’re “lit on purpose.” Yeah, I remember those days. I would be up until 4am building my vision, anxious and excited all at the same time, pouring my heart onto the world for everyone to see hoping they’d respond.

Do you remember your firsts? The first person who contacted you through your website? The first person who said yes to you after a series of nos? The first payment you ever received, not a paycheck but a receipt of your own charted path?

What about that big dream of yours? One day having a full team of people who believe in your vision and their potential? Or having that life of freedom and abundance where you don’t need to answer to anyone else but only your spirit and purpose?

Are you still listening to that dream?

It’s a scary time for all of us.

I knew most new businesses fail (because it’s fucking hard to run a business) but I never could have imagined a freaking pandemic taking down even those most innovative and resilient among us.

I don’t know where my business will be in 3, 6, 12 months. I have my guesses — the best and worst case scenarios — but there is just a lot that is out of my control. I’m doing my best to stay calm but my entire body feels like a wave crashing into pieces every hour in full force. The adrenaline, anxiety, worry, overwhelm, excitement… they’re all there, in those little droplets, and I’m holding them all at the same time, over and over.

Whenever I feel like I’m getting sucked into the waves and drowning in rough waters, I remember to breathe and relax my body and say: “I am doing the best I can.”

You are doing the best you can.

If you’re holding on right now, no matter how barely, I am cheering for you. There are so many of us cheering for you, even as we’re shaking and crying all at the same time. You are brave, courageous, resilient, savvy, and deserving of the fighting chance. Know that you’re not alone in this and I am cheering for your upswing.

I’m rolling the dice and going full out — giving all I’ve got so I have no regrets. As my favorite poet and activist once said, I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor.

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” — Audre Lorde

If you’re letting go or having to let go, my heart aches for you and I’m in awe of you. I recently read about a founder who closed his company — he tried to hold on and fight through this tanking economy, but ultimately decided the best thing he could do is to let go and send his employees off with a bit of what’s still left.

I hope you give yourself permission to let go without naming yourself a failure.

I hope you can hold yourself with gentleness and care that you deserve. I hope you can gift yourself so much love and compassion and forgiveness. I hope you can shake off the self-blame, shame, and guilt. I hope you allow yourself to feel all the feels and truly grieve. I hope you hold your head up high, even when you find yourself applying for that job you thought you left for good.

Most importantly, I hope you can continue to dream. I hope you will. And I hope you will write that sequel.

Being a founder is an experience of a lifetime.

It’s taught me my heart can take so much beating (in both good and terrifying ways) and my potential is expansive beyond my wildest imagination. I wouldn’t trade it with anything.

We’re all still writing our stories. We’re in that chapter right now that’s throwing in all the villains, plot twists, and obstacles for us to overcome. Your story doesn’t end here. We’re all on the edges of our seats. You get to write what comes next, in your own words, and no one can take that away from you.

Take a few deep breaths.

Now go write your story.

Dear Entrepreneur in a Pandemic, was originally published in Awaken Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.