Jennie Brooks, host of the Unstoppable Together podcasts, chats with Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson, an organizational development and equity strategist. In this conversation, originally recorded during the 2022 Unstoppable Together Summit, they discuss the four “i”s of oppression, the three layers of accountability, and the difference between intent and impact when it comes to bias.
The four "I"s of oppression: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/170LHE-9Ulwbgxh4oK3VhRHGB2kn_KmegCbdARF7zJ_8/edit#slide=id.gcde56bbba5_0_74
Jennie Brooks:
Welcome to Booz Allen Hamilton's Unstoppable Together podcast, a series of stories that unite us and empower each of us to change the world. I'm Jennie Brooks with Booz Allen Hamilton, and I'm passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion. Please join me in conversation with the diverse group of thought leaders to explore what makes them and all of us unstoppable.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Unstoppable Together podcast. I'm your host, Jennie Brooks, and I'm thrilled today to be joined by Dr. Darnisa Amante-Jackson, a racial equity strategist and educator extraordinaire. Booz Allen has been privileged to have Dr. Jackson share her thought leadership with us over the past few years. So we knew there'd be no one better to help us open this year's Unstoppable Together Summit. Dr. Jackson, welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Darnisa:
Thank you so much, Jennie. I mean, how long do we have? We could be here forever. I'm super excited for our conversation.
Jennie Brooks:
So am I. Thank you so much for being here. This year, our Unstoppable Together theme is creating a more equitable future. And the way we're trying to break this big conversation down is by thinking about a more equitable future in social and systemic terms. When we consider the social element, we're really talking about our personal interactions and our relationships. When we talk about systems, we're talking about the processes and the institutions that we're a part of. So we really want to take the time to examine inequity from both of these vantage points. And something you said before that's really struck with me was we should be soft on people and hard on systems. Love that. Tell us what you mean by that and how we can use it in our philosophy to help guide our conversations and our actions as we move forward.
Dr. Darnisa:
Well, I think one of the best ways to start is to kick off, which is by talking about the future. Sometimes I think a lot of us are taught that if you can't change the entire world in one lifetime, that you haven't done great work. And I think the most important framing for DEI work is it lives well beyond one generation. There are always new people, new young ones who need to be acculturated into learning like this. So think about the work that we're doing right now can have impact generation after generation, after generation. And I start there because one of the biggest things that's happened in these last couple of years is we've almost lost the grace to do this multi-generational. So being harder on systems and softer on people does not mean that you're coddling people, or making excuses. We often blame people for things that systems create.
We'll talk about it a little bit more. I've got an image for us, for those of us who are visual learners, but see, systemic oppression is really focusing on policy. It's naming something really important, which is there's so many forms of oppression and they often live in rules and in decision making. And the goal of being harder on systems is naming that if you don't change the laws, the laws that are creating all these different types of inequity and ceilings on multiple groups of people, we're never actually all going to achieve the outcomes we want. And the grace to be softer on people is because oppression functions in silence.
So many of us live segregated, we don't actually know how different people experience the world. There's a ton of things that people don't know and it's not because they're not ignorant. It's because systemic oppression has created the condition for us to not know each other. That means that I can understand that you may be uninformed, but I'm not going to blame a person for their uniformness. I want to partner with them to build learning, and together, we can ask questions about how the systems are impacting both of us. Oppression doesn't want us to know that we have more in common as people than we have indifference. And when you're softer on people, you actually have the time to build the empathy and the relationship to hear how systems impact people versus us trying to counsel people or to engage in the oppression Olympics.
There is no oppression that is greater than the other. They are all to terrible. So just wanted to kind of describe that Jennie, because I think the generational work outside of systemic change is can we sustain this grace generation over generation and remember just exactly how misinformed we all are?
Jennie Brooks:
Wow. The work never ends, gets past generation to generation, to generation, but we need to be harder on the systems because people participating in the systems, really the blame is not there for the systems that they've been embedded in as they've come through those generations. So when you talk about being soft on people, some people might say, "Well, you have to hold people accountable to enable the change we wish to seek." How do you think about accountability in terms of being soft on people?
Dr. Darnisa:
I think it's helpful to know there are three different levels of accountability that we have to create to do DEI work well. They are: vertical accountability, lateral accountability, and then reciprocal accountability. That's vertical, lateral, reciprocal.
Vertical accountability is the accountability that starts from the vision of our most formal leaders. So you can't actually hold staff or colleagues accountable if we don't know what we're walking towards. So the first way to be accountable with people is to hold our senior leadership accountable with love. It's not a toxic culture, but we need the vision from them. Only formal leaders, my C-suite, my managing directors, my principals, my VPs, these are the folks who are articulating to everyone where exactly we go. And I want to be thoughtful here folks, DEI is scary to people. They don't know if they're going to be canceled, if they're going to be blamed, if they're going to be shamed, or if they're going to be grown. People will never move forward if they do not know what vision they're being called to. Who do we want to be on the other side of DEI?
Lateral accountability is the whole belief that one person alone cannot change a whole world. It happens in team. So lateral accountability is peer-to-peer accountability. So in my role, I know exactly what that vision looks like for my work. Which means leaders, you actually have to articulate to people what you want DEI to look like in their work function. People who don't have culture on their job descriptions don't do it. So lateral accountability is peer to peer. We all know what we have to do for our teams, and we hold each other accountable in meetings. "Darnisa, how's that cultural building going? Darnisa, how are those icebreakers going?"
And the last level of accountability is reciprocal. This one is the grace accountability, because it says for everything that you expect people to do, they actually have to learn how to do it. Reciprocal accountability is about learning because urgency and creating urgency without providing people with skills to be urgent is harm. So here it is, right? It's harm if people don't learn how to engage in the DEI change. That's how you can hold people accountable while still focusing on systems.
Jennie Brooks:
And is that where the work is also done to help people who are intimidated by the DEI work? Is that reciprocal accountability? Is that where the training of how to dive into this work takes place?
Dr. Darnisa:
That's right. And there are a lot of organizations that have never had to do people culture before. You see, DEI is not an HR function. HR protects a company. You see, the people function protects the people within the culture. And so sometimes the capacity building is teaching managers how to do relationship building icebreakers with teams. It's helping managers understand how to communicate the DEI vision for an organization and then the DEI vision for your team. And it also looks like all those trainings around implicit bias, micro and macroaggressions, affinity space. Because if people don't have the tools to be in spaces like that, they don't understand why they're there and people make it hurt in there because we haven't learned enough to grapple with a bigger cultural change together.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay. This leads me to ask you about intent versus impact. How we think about social and systemic inequities relative to intent versus impact. Help us understand the difference between the two and how we can think about that in terms of addressing these inequities in our lives.
Dr. Darnisa:
A great, great question, Jennie, and I think this might be time for the infographic. For my visual learners, you've been waiting a mighty 10 minutes for it, but I want to put this up. I think this is a super helpful image for those of you who are not exactly sure the difference between systemic versus social. So these are the four forms of oppression. And I want us to know oppression is deeper than racism and it includes racism. We're having an inclusive conversation. So let's think about things like ageism, sexism, classism, racism. All the isms, ableism. These four forms of oppression are happening all the time. And this is a really helpful way to think about both, being harder on systems and softer on people, and it's a really great way to think about intention versus impact. So these four forms of oppression.
Ideological oppression is a form of systemic oppression. It's where it all originates from. So ideology are beliefs. It doesn't matter where in the world we live, we all are being messaged things, usually through television or through entertainment. It's messaging things like what's successful, who beautiful. So ideology are the big things that we get taught. We don't create it. We're being taught it.
Institutional oppression is the second form of systemic oppression. What it says is, if you leave that ideology and you never interrogate it, it actually shows up in policy. Institutional oppression is policy and job descriptions and onboarding, exit interviews, your HR function, your people function. The bottom is all social, is the people stuff.
So internalized in is what happens when all that ideology that you're being taught, you start to believe it, even if you don't know you believe it. So our big vocabulary word folks, that's what unconscious bias is. It's the stuff you don't know you believe that could show up and manifest in ways that hurt people. And you didn't even know it was hurtful to say. You never had anybody pop that bubble of non-knowing.
Interpersonal oppression as people to people. So this is the stuff that happens intentionally and not intentionally. So intentional interpersonal oppression is a macroaggression. That's when you knew it was hurtful and you say it, and you straight someone the bits. Microaggressions though, they're still hurtful, but you don't often know it's hurtful.
So think about it like this: ideological oppression creates an idea within you. We actually have all the agency, folks. You have all the agency to disrupt this one by asking yourselves, "What have I been taught?" And that's not to blame your family or to blame the world, but that's the only way you become aware of biases like that. So when things happen between people, intent versus impact, the intent is I might have wanted to build a relationship with you. I wanted to have a powerful conversation, and then I said something that has a negative impact on you. And now a person is gutted, but that was never your intention. So where does that live, folks? That lives in the magical L of ideology, internalized oppression, and interpersonal oppression. You see the L, right? We get taught something, you internalize it and you don't even know it.
Folks, bias is not a bad thing. To be human is to be biased. There's no such thing as being neutral. And then because we have bias, it interpersonally shows up on people and you didn't intend to hurt them. But the reason impact versus intent is so important is just because your intention was a good one, doesn't mean you can dismiss the impact of what you said.
You see, for some of us, your acknowledgement that you did harm even if you didn't mean it is a great way for people to have a powerful learning moment. So normally what happens is you say, "How could you say that?" And people say, "Said what?" And then what do we do? We dismiss it because maybe we're ashamed. We don't want to admit we didn't know. And then we are taught that truth is a binary. We're taught it's either black or white, up or down. No, inequities don't work like that. Everything that just happened in that interaction is true. At the same time you didn't mean it, is the same time you hurt me. Both of those things are true. They're not on a binary. So think about intent versus impact is our ability to acknowledge we may have done harm. And for those of us who have been harmed, our ability to acknowledge the impact of what was said. It's important for healing and it's important for learning.
Jennie Brooks:
Wow. Talk about a learning moment.
Dr. Darnisa:
We could be here all day. I know we didn't have a ton of time, but folks that was the powerful eyes of oppression talk through.
Jennie Brooks:
That graphic is the best graphic we've seen in some time. It's so powerful. And the line that I'm walking away with today is to be human, is to be bias. Thank you so much for breaking that down. I want to talk a little bit more about holding people accountable. And if we have time, we have some discussion in the chat around the role that the DE&I work plays in a company, in organization. Let's start with, when we think about holding people accountable, we think about setting boundaries. I might just negate everything you said. In our personal lives, when we want to set boundaries, sometimes we choose the degree to which we'll engage with someone. Sometimes we choose we're not going to engage with that person at all. We don't really talk about it in that way when we talk about it in the context of the workplace. Is it possible to set boundaries in the workplace? How do you think about that? How do you go about doing that with the backdrop of the graphic?
Dr. Darnisa:
Yeah. And so folks, you're about to figure out what kind of thinker Dr. Darnisa is. I ways start high level and funnel down. So I'm going to start big picture and then get more granular with the skills. I think the most important thing for us to start with is actually articulating what DEI means. All DEI is to an organization, folks, is organizational change management. It's now not just about racial diversification. A lot of people think DEI is being used as a recruiting strategy. And I want to start by lovingly telling us that DEI is a way to deepen humanity in relationships. It benefits the totality of an organization because when people feel in relationship to each other, when they feel connected and celebrated, when they feel belonged... Teams who feel belonged to each other show up the most impactfully in your work function and in the mission of this organization and the team.
DEI is a strategy to actually create internal structures that allow teams to manifest humanity. And in a season when everybody thinks it's about race, when everybody thinks it's about ability, it's about all of these things. And if organizations don't have a commitment to allow people to just be people, then we will never get to know each other. And in our non-knowing, we'll never be impactful together. I will start the boundary conversation right there, because sometimes people just think DEI is a new compliance-based thing, and this is a [inaudible 00:18:09] thing. And that's why it's all hands-on-deck thing.
Jennie Brooks:
Right. We do think of it that way, and we also think about... I think some of the discussion in the chat as people are listening is does the DE&I group sort of serve the organization or does it serve the employees or serve both? And so what you've said is just a total paradigm shift, I think in the way we traditionally think about DE&I.
Dr. Darnisa:
It's certainly the totality of it all. Let's start with what its function looks like, and then it'll help us get into boundaries.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay.
Dr. Darnisa:
You can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you can't take the teacher out of me. So I want to make sure everyone understands what I mean about humanity. I know for some of us you're like that is the most grandiose, high-level, beautiful thought about our future. Why not? Why shouldn't we be humane to each other? Why shouldn't we have connection? I started by telling us oppression functions in silence. It doesn't want us to be connected to each other. It wants us to think we're different. So DEI in an organization does two big things. For the company, it's actually creating a feedback loop. It's an ongoing process to understand what our employees need to feel seen in their advancement and to feel developed in goal. So DEI's role for a company, it's building the feedback structure to hear more about what people need so that we can provide it.
For employees, DEI is providing relational safety and a feedback process that is anonymous so people don't have to be worried about being vulnerable, about articulating what they need to feel belonged.
So the boundaries for DEI look like this. The very first thing goes back to that huge concept we learned about a vertical accountability. The first boundary setting is leaders actually putting boundaries on how far we're going to go. Are we truly going to change policy, or do we just want people to feel more connected? You see, some organizations just want connection, but they don't want to change the policy. So the first one is leaders managing your expectations on what the DEI end goal is. If you don't provide the end goal, we can't actually create boundaries. Boundaries are created by backwards planning from your end goal. So leaders, we need the, what first?
The second boundary comes when you establish DEI. DEI, because it is organizational change, it should be owned by everyone. And if you leave DEI to a DEI committee, they often get siloed and they never have the purview to embed that kind of cultural work. So the next thing you do is you update your job descriptions for your managers so that everybody knows they have to do culture. They have to support their team feeling cultured. Your DEI committee is just the team that provides the tools. You see?
Jennie Brooks:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Darnisa:
DEI provides the tools that all managers and leaders use to create microcultures of belonging in your team. So the first boundary to my DEI committee, folks, if you own it all, you will always own it all. The work has to be shared everywhere.
The next big boundary set is articulating what DEI means for culture now. Jennie, you mentioned this huge concept earlier about vulnerability. And if leaders don't set expectations on what DEI will feel like, it looks like assuming good intentions, but taking responsibility for impact. It looks like always talking about systems, and instead of saying, "Why is Darnisa doing that?" Asking questions, "How have our policies allowed or not allowed Darnisa to do that?"
And then lastly, setting really firm expectations and providing people space to be human. Affinity groups and creating these intentional affinity conversations, build relational safety. So relational safety is, "I feel safe enough to do the hard work with you, but I don't know if I feel totally safe." Jennie, I could be here for a day. I'm going to stop [inaudible 00:22:34]-
Jennie Brooks:
I could be here for a day. Maybe we'll just stop. We'll keep talking. The rest can go back to the summit. Relational safety, everyone. We love this. Relational safety. Just complete paradigm shift I think, in terms of how we have traditionally thought about the work DE&I. I thank you for that. You're tremendously inspiring. What is your vision for creating more equity this year, specifically as it relates to social equity? How are you personally thinking about 2022?
Dr. Darnisa:
Well, I know some of you are going to be like, "Darnisa, you really want to get this answer." I am. My vision for 2022 is on vertical accountability. So many of our most senior leaders have never, ever been asked to lead work like this. And I see myself deep in the trenches in supporting leaders and articulating some of us for the first time, the vision, where do we want to go? Because organizations that don't have a vision and can't create expectations, become dangerous, because we don't know how to set boundaries and we don't know where we're going. And so for me, the big one is continuing to work with C-suites as well as entire staffs to do training. So for me, it's building the capacity of leaders to actually tell us how we're going to get there, tell us what this looks like. Helping HR teams build out new job descriptions. And I've been doing a ton of training of managers on creating microcultures of belonging.
For me, I just want to keep making sure that when we all say DEI, we know what it is, we know what it's calling us to, and that people are not feeling blamed, shamed or hurt along the way. Too much hurt has happened in these years. I think with great power comes great responsibility. And I am happy to support the people who often don't get to say, "I don't know," because when they know, we have the kind of clarity that prevents harm at every level. So I'm excited for that, Jennie.
Jennie Brooks:
The four kinds of inequity, different levels of accountability, and DEI as relationship based, not compliance based. Dr. Darnisa, thank you for a very insightful, thoughtful, powerful and kind discussion, which includes and embraces everyone. Have a great day, everyone. We'll see you at the next podcast.
Thanks for listening. Visit careers.boozallen.com to learn how you can be unstoppable with Booz Allen. Be the future. Work with us. The world can't wait.