I have been threatening for a while to start digging into topics surrounding Diversity and Inclusion.  I “grew up” in my professional career during the time that D&I became recognized as an issue.  In the ‘90s and ‘00s, companies were casting about for ways to effectively address needs in their staffing and culture.  So, as a woman in a senior position in industrial (read: male dominated) corporations, as well as an increasingly out lesbian during a time of rocketing change in prevailing attitudes toward the gay community in the US, I was caught up in the middle of all this angst.  The topic of Diversity and Inclusion (I’ve determined that it is really one topic since you can’t have one without the other) is personal to me and I’ve been called upon by the companies I’ve worked for to participate in a range of activities surrounding it. I have a lot to say on this subject.

At this point you are probably thinking, “OK, I clicked on this essay because I was curious about the meaning of the title.  What does D&I have to do with water?”  Well, to start in on this topic of D&I, I wanted to present a bit of a primer on unintentional bias.  Bias is a tricky topic. It has gotten more so in recent years thanks to the amplification of social media as well as the divisions politically in this country that seem to cause people to jump on others in a heartbeat if they perceive bias of any sort.  My thesis is that most bias (not all, but most) is unintentional.  So, when I first started drafting this essay, that’s what I thought I was writing about.  As the paragraphs below starting coming out, though, I realized that before I could tackle unintentional bias, I had to first address its angry cousin:  unearned privilege.  Talk about a third rail topic!  We MUST go there.  But what does this have to do with water?

I was asked many times to speak to employee groups about D&I, ostensibly from the perspective of a gay person working in the company.  Here is the story I would tell to frame my experience:  Imagine that you are a fish in the ocean.  The environment is perfect for you.  You were designed for it.  You move freely and extract oxygen effortlessly to live.  The temperature is comfortable.  You don’t have to think about or worry about any of those “environment” issues.  You are free to put all your energies into finding food, ensuring your survival and growth, and perpetuating your species.  Now imagine you are a scuba diver.  You are also capable of swimming around in the ocean.  But for you to survive, you must wear a wet suit, fins, and carry around an oxygen tank and breathing system.  Yes, you can look for food and protect yourself from danger and do all the other things the fish can do, but you have to put a ton of energy into just surviving in the ocean!  And maybe there are one or two other divers with you, but in the vastness of the ocean, you feel pretty alone and VERY different and vulnerable.  The environment is not built for you.  YOU must adapt to the environment, not the other way around.  You can be successful, but it’s exhausting.  You tend not to stay there for long.  As a diver, you are acutely aware of your difference and your struggle to survive.  The fish?  They don’t even realize that the environment is suited just to them.  It’s just “the environment”.  It’s not so much that they recognize that water is the perfect environment for them.  They don’t even know what water IS.  That, in a nutshell, is unearned privilege.

This story reached a lot of people.  I could see the consternation on faces and had a lot of “I just didn’t realize” conversations.  I do believe there was a lot of sincerity on all sides and I choose to believe that most people really do want a world in which everyone has access to opportunity.  I also firmly believe that most people do not recognize their unearned privilege, at least not consciously.  The “fish” were seeing “water” through my eyes, not their own.  They were still trying to figure out what water is and they tripped all over themselves trying to articulate new rules of behavior.  There was a lot of walking on egg shells.  So, we never got very far.

I get a little twitchy trying to talk about this topic because it makes people so defensive.  Remember: those who enjoy privilege don’t see it as “privilege” because it’s all they’ve known.  The don’t see the water; they don’t even know what water is.  But when they see efforts to level the playing field, to give people who don’t have their advantages an opportunity to equally compete, what they see is unfair advantage given to others.  They see something taken away from them.  And they get angry.  Just because someone has privilege doesn’t mean their journey has been easy!  And those who see unearned privilege in others get very self-righteous and judgy about it.  I will admit to moments of looking in my rear view mirror at some middle aged white guy in his Ray Bans, top down on the BMW convertible, hair slicked back looking like he owns the world and muttering to myself, “unearned white male privilege”.  Why do I do that?  Because the years of built-up frustration that I have lived through are always just under the surface.  I still feel like that person on the outside looking in and wishing someone would give me the secret decoder ring to understand how to be successful in this environment that seemed so natural to the guys I worked with.  I react because it feels good to blame someone else for my struggles.  But I know nothing about that guy.  I look at the outer trappings and judge the whole person.  I don’t know what struggles he may have faced.  Nor do I, in those moments, embrace my own privilege.

So here is what I want to emphasize:  we are all a mixture of unearned privilege and disadvantaged outsider.  We are all both fish and scuba divers.  I would present myself in those D&I discussions as a “gay, female, lefthanded, Jewish chemist trying to survive in a straight, male, righthanded Christian engineering world.”  Oh, woe is me.  Yes, I am all of those things.  But I am also white; a native born American living in America; a native English speaker; and I grew up in a stable, middle class home.  I never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from or having a roof over my head or being subjected to physical or emotional danger or abuse.  I am dripping with privilege.  So, yes, I’ve had some tough times and some hard climbs.  I have also enjoyed a lot of advantage along the way. There’s that “holding two opposing truths” things again.

Once you understand and embrace unearned privilege within yourself, the challenge is to turn that gaze outward and work to treat others with the grace and compassion you want for yourself.  Having unearned privilege is not evil.  It’s what you do with it that matters.  As you work to build the awareness of those aspects of your life in which you didn’t even know you were a fish in water, you become more aware of the scuba divers around you.  Don’t apologize for your privilege nor discount it as unimportant.  Look to see how you can reach out to those who didn’t enjoy your advantage and help bring them along.  This is why the concept of assumptions is so important to me.  If you don’t even realize there are privileges you’ve enjoyed, then you assume that everyone has had those privileges. If someone was never taught basic life skills like you were, that doesn’t mean they are lazy or stupid if they don’t manage money well or make poor choices.  It means they need to be taught those skills.  Lack of awareness of your own unearned privilege, coupled with acute awareness of the privileges others enjoy leads to incorrect assumptions and judgements.  THAT is what leads to unintentional bias.  And that’s where we’ll go next time.