unconscious biases
There is definitely a downside to my being back at the office again, and it is social.
That's an upside too, to be sure: I love seeing so many of the people I work with in person on a regular basis again. How often I see them remains very varied by the day, but it's still way more than when I was working from home. Now, though, Tracy and I find ourselves chatting quite a lot. And the net result is that I am getting less work done on a pretty consistent basis.
Of course, I have every power to shut it down and say to her that I need to get back to work. But there's also this: I've missed being around people! A catch-22, of sorts.
Then there's the monthly "All Team" Merchandising Department meeting we had yesterday. This was an interesting, unusual experience, because until it actually happened, I had no idea precisely how it would be approached. I would estimate maybe between a quarter and a third of Merchandising was in the office yesterday, which means there was no question Microsoft Teams would still be used. And indeed, people like Scott, Noah and Dave have often been seen for months calling into Teams from their office desks. Now I would be another one doing the same.
It did cause a few technical issues, though, with everyone on their own computers calling in but several people at the office quite near each other. Steven and Mackenzie had taken their laptops into the medium sized conference room (the table in there seats 10) right next to my desk to the right, and Tracy opted to go in and join them just so she could be part of an in-person group in the meeting. Steven mirrored his laptop to the huge screen mounted on the wall, and that alone kind of made me wish I had gone in there to join them, just so I could see everyone on the screen better. On my own computer screen, even onto my large external monitor rather than on my tiny laptop screen, with a maximum of about 20 people onscreen at one time, each little box made for very little people to look at. I could have switched it to speaker mode so whoever was speaking filled the screen, but I like to be able to see everyone, or at least as many as Teams will put onto one screen. (Side note: Zoom would allow you to page to the right when there were more people than would fit on the screen, and annoyingly, Teams won't do that.)
I was going to say "next time," except that we were told yesterday the Merchandising meetings as of next week are now being rescheduled for Tuesdays, and the request is that they be all in-person from now on. I'm one of the few in the department who only has to join for the first meeting of each month, so I don't have to worry about it until August 4. I will prefer the meetings to be in person anyway.
Anyway. The meeting yesterday was otherwise different because the entire hour was dedicated to the Unconscious Bias online training we were all recently asked to do. This, predictably, led to a whole lot of awkward silences, but also some food for thought when people spoke up. Tracy happens to be multiracial, with a Filipino father and a Panamanian mother, but in conversations with me she has freely acknowledged the colonialist histories of both countries, and particularly how white her mother looks—which, presumably, would give such a person more privilege than people with more native ethnic backgrounds anywhere in South America. Whether or not that makes Tracy "part white," I have no idea. I only just thought of that, maybe I should ask what she thinks.
In any event, she spoke up early on and brought up all sorts of issues she typically faces in her day to day life, from being "racially ambiguous" (the phrase she uses) leading to people being preoccupied with figuring out what her ethnicity is, to people making assumptions about her perceived youth (even though she's actually 39) and her "Valley Girl" talking voice. She also cried briefly, and not in any particularly specific or necessarily negative way, but maybe just because talking about these things in a large group setting can simply be emotionally taxing. Two other women also cried briefly when they spoke, both of them white, and although I hesitate to judge them for that particularly given Tracy kind of opened the door for that, it did make me think a lot about recent online discussions about the long history of weaponizing "white women's tears." In this specific context, the tears were not being weaponized in any way, but it was still impossible not to think about when watching white women cry while discussing issues of race.
Much more significantly, though, there was one guy on the call, who I won't name for obvious reasons, who spoke up soon after Tracy had made the point that we need to stop having decisions made about PCC's approach to race issues by "a room full of white people." At no point was this guy personally attacked or even addressed, and yet he felt compelled to speak up, and even say "When people say that I think they're probably including me, but"—and then he proceeded to talk about how his dad was born in Mexico; his maternal grandmother was Cuban; and that qualified him as a person of "mixed race." The problem here, which Tracy and I have since discussed at length and are still pondering how it can be brought up constructively in a future meeting, is that this guy is ironically not seeing his own unconscious bias about the fact that he clearly presents as a white guy, everyone around him treats him as such, and thus he enjoys all the same privilege as any other cis, straight, white man. Instead, he's being what comes across as preemptively defensive.
I mean, shit. When I got to work this morning there was an email from him, sent out to the Merchandising alias, with old family photos detailing his family history. He presented is "as promised," as though he was just giving us all what we asked for, totally unaware of how much this came across as just another defensive move. And the kicker? He revealed in that email that he didn't even meet his Mexican father until he was 28 years old! He's really intent on proving to us his "person of color bona fides," while ignoring his functional, if not inherent, whiteness.
This is all falling right back into what the meeting was for, though: to open up discussions about these things. It's interesting how specific a challenge popped up almost immediately. As in: when having a group discussion about these things again, should this specifically be addressed? Would singling out this guy as an individual be unconstructive? Would talking about it without singling him out, but it would still be clear we were talking about him, be passive-aggressive? Would the best approach be to bring up how we all have privileges we are often unable to see, such as how long it took me to realize my privilege as a white person far outweigh any so-called "disadvantages" I have as a gender-non-conforming, queer person? In Seattle, on an average day to day basis, I have literally no such disadvantages. That's less likely to be the case in other regions, but here nobody cares, and race is a far bigger issue.
When the meeting yesterday ended, I learned later, Steven had asked Mackenzie and Tracy if they wanted to spend some time talking about what they had all just experienced in the meeting. They spent even longer in there with their post-meeting discussion than the meeting itself had lasted. I found myself wishing even more that I had joined them; I would have liked to have been part of their conversation. I never spoke up in yesterday's meeting, not so much because I was afraid to, but because nothing occurred to me to say that would not qualify as me just talking to hear myself speak. If and when I have something I feel is of true value to contribute to the conversation then I will share it. Like, say, the point about recognizing we all have privileges we don't think about because we aren't challenged to—such as, and Steven brought this up as a key thing missing from the unconscious bias training, able bodied privilege. In fact a Black woman creator I follow on TikTok brought this up not long ago, demonstrating how even she as a Black woman has privilege of certain types. (Another creator I follow is a disabled queer Black woman with a Masters in Communications, so you can imagine how valuable her content is. What kinds of privilege might she have, I wonder? Education, maybe.)
As you can see, I had an unusual and interesting afternoon at work yesterday. The rest of my evening, after riding my bike home from work, was a little more average. Not bad, though. Shobhit made a lentil dish with rice for dinner, which was very tasty—he was openly impressed with it himself, and justifiably so. Then, while he watched his nightly MSNBC news programs that I just find increasingly exasperating, I caught up on TV in the bedroom: first this week's episode of Loki, which I am still enjoying but am not finding it to live up to the promise of its first couple of episodes; and then the final episode of Sweet Tooth, which ends on such a cliffhanger it's clear we should expect more seasons to be made. Also: are we to believe Dr. Singh just goes ahead and slices up the lizard boy?
Shobhit later asked if I wanted to watch some Larry Sanders Show, so I came back out to the living room and we watched three episodes. Most of those episodes are half an hour long, and now all that's left for us to watch is the series finale from 1998, which apparently was an hour-long episode. We'll get that watched sometime before the week is over, I'm sure. Maybe not tonight, though: Shobhit has his Project Management Class, and I have Happy Hour with Laney.
Some plans are circling around the point of firming up for the weekend, when Shobhit has an extraordinarily rare three days off in a row. He had been thinking about going camping but decided he needs to save the money and decided against it. Looks like we're going down to Federal Way Saturday afternoon and we'll finally get to see the interior of Gabriel and Lea's house, thirteen months after they moved into it. Shobhit has been there once and I have been twice before, but in all cases it was only to hang out outside. But, now Gabriel is allowing vaccinated visitors.
All this stuff in the news lately about the Delta variant is giving me the heebie jeebies, but as long as Gabriel is okay with this, then I am too. The variants are precisely the reason Gabriel refuses to have unvaccinated visitors, after all. And, for now at least, it makes a huge difference that King County is one of the most highly vaccinated in the country, and in a far better position to take steps toward "normalcy" than the states with low vaccination rates now dealing with huge infection surges fueled by the Delta variant.
I also hope to see Black Widow in a theater sometime this weekend. Shobhit and I need to go to Costco. Exciting! And now it doesn't matter when he arrives, if Ivan does indeed arrive for his visit on Sunday. He may not arrive until Monday though, as he has yet to tell me anything has been booked.
[posted 12:28 pm]