How Microaggressions can have significant negative impacts (with Dr. Kecia Thomas )

0:00So there, I think there is like this invisible culture that as faculty we are navigating. And I have certainly been in the seminar room where, you know, the majority of people around the table talked about how their dads, and it's almost always their dad, or faculty.

0:22Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. I'm Kim Scott, and while the rest of the Radical Candor team is off, I am talking to the authors of books that I admire. And I'm thrilled to have with me today Dr. Keisha Thomas, an organizational psychologist who has spent the last 30 years researching how to make organizations get the best out of all their employees and to make sure that they're fair in the way they hire and promote people. Keisha, welcome. Thank you so much, Kim. I appreciate that. I am thrilled to be speaking with you. You have done so much great research and sort of like me with radical candor, that's all people want to hear about from me.

1:09A lot of people really love your pet to threat research. Can you explain this theory and why it has stood the test of time, why it has resonated with so many different people? Sure. I'm happy to, Kim. So I would say Pet to Threat is a framework. The title came about through just an informal conversation among, you know, my collaborators and colleagues. It was something that we noticed. We were at HERS, which is that higher ed boot camp for women. And we started to notice that a lot of the younger women who are kind of first women in their departments or units are talking about how they're kind of minimized by their older male colleagues.

2:08One woman talked about literally being pet on the back and her colleague saying, oh, you remind me of my daughter. whereas many of the more senior women were addressing you know issues of you know still isolated in my unit and even though I've jumped all the hurdles done all the things I don't have the same reward and recognition as my peers yes my support systems are eroding both family as well as mentors. And they're really, you know, somewhat disoriented. You know, I worked hard, did all these things. And even in my leadership position, people are treating me as though I'm a threat. Yeah, yeah.

3:01And so in talking it through, we're like, oh, it's like you go from pet to threat. And that's how that came about. Yes. And subsequently, we developed a study using a snowball sample and what's a what's a snowball oh that's when you know I send you a survey and I ask you like are there people in your network okay you should also be in our kind of responses so you know that study gave us confirmation that yes this is a thing but it also gave us many narratives of what that looked like and how it showed up in these women's careers. And they were primarily faculty, but other people who work in higher ed.

3:48But we certainly saw some of the strongest responses from women of color. Yes. But now, you know, 15 years almost later, we've discovered that it's not simply the experience of women or even women of color. It's often what Dory Turnstall talks about as kind of super tokens. You know, people who find themselves, I think, severely underrepresented and working in environments where regardless of their performance, their difference matters. It matters across their careers. Yeah. Yeah. So what are some examples of what are some of the stories that you heard from from this research that really stand out to you?

4:40so um a few narratives really focused on um for the the pets um individuals saying that it feels as though you know their identity was more important than the work they thought they were hired to perform yes yeah and that you know they were put being put on committees or given responsibilities for things that, you know, they were interested in, but really did not see as the majority of their jobs. Yeah. And so, you know, not only was there a sense of kind of being exploited, but also being underutilized for the very knowledge, skills and abilities and experiences that they had built up throughout, you know, their, you know, undergraduate, graduate training, internships, You know, these are largely early career folks.

5:41Yeah. Whereas the more senior responses, you know, there was one for me that was really striking. This was someone who had been elected as the first female president of her professional society. And as president, you get to decide your platform. Yes. And she found out quickly that she did not. Oh, my gosh. Because her platform was one that centered gender. She wanted to talk about the lack of diversity in this membership of this science organization. She wanted to talk about sexual harassment as a part of the platform and, you know, really received a lot of resistance in wanting to do that. and clearly the membership was threatened by her desire to do that.

6:38Yeah, and it wasn't just her desire. It was her job to set the agenda, actually. It wasn't just her desire. That was what she had been elected to do. I want to share a story from early in my career, and I think this is my pet story, and then I have another threat story, and you can analyze whether I got this right. But at one point early in my career, I had been the, I was living in New York City and the Council on Foreign Relations, which is this very kind of hoity-toity organization, decided they needed more young members. Well, they needed more women and they couldn't, they wouldn't hire women who were at the same level as the men.

7:20So they brought in a bunch of - More vulnerable women. Yes, term members, right? and so I you know and I was so excited it was this incredible networking opportunity and and I had I had started a company started a software company and the company hadn't worked out so I had I was winding it down so I was not employed and when you asked a question in this organization you had to stand up and state your name and affiliation but I was not affiliated that was just me at this point, but some older guy stood up and said, I'm so-and-so, and I'm unaffiliated, meaning he was a retired billionaire. And I was like, okay, well, I'll borrow that term.

8:06And I stood up, and I said, I'm Kim, I was Kim Malone then, I'm Kim Malone, and I'm unaffiliated. And somebody in the back of the room yelled out, unaffiliated or unattached. And I just, I was so humiliated. So is that pet, is that like a way to kind of belittle me, to pet me, to threaten me? Or like, what was that? Yeah, I think that's just bad behavior. Yes, yes, it was rude. I don't really see it as falling into pets a threat, although the desire, right, to add greater gender diversity to their organization and strategically make the decision to go after more junior women and put them in these term roles really speaks to them, you know, treating those women as, you know, transactional, temporary.

9:07and the motivation being for the identity rather than the unique perspectives and backgrounds that they could offer. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So can I tell you my threat story and you can analyze that? Yes, please do. So here's when I suddenly realized I was a threat. Again, I had spent most of my career feeling like I wasn't being taken seriously. And then one day when I was working at Google, my HR person came to me and said, that everyone was intimidated by me. And I was like, I've been spending my whole career trying to be taken seriously. And this week I became intimidating. Like, how did how did that happen?

9:50Yeah, yeah. What happened? And and she explained to me, well, now you have a big job. And so now you're in, you know, it's nothing you've done, but your role. But I don't think that a man who had been hired into that would be told he was intimidating just because he had the job. No, he would be, you know, discussed as a leader. Yeah. Yes. Again, I think it's the novelty, perhaps, of having a woman in that leadership role, which I think disrupts. And, you know, we talked about Melinda Jones uses this term, the cultural default. of you know who leaders are in that organization and that discomfort leads people to act in very unproductive and yes highest ways yes from my perspective yeah yeah yeah discomfort in organizations is really you know I've come to the conclusion is the killer yeah it's the thing that really holds us back.

10:58Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think if we can learn to embrace the discomfort, we can move forward as organizations. But the only way out is through. If we reject the feelings of discomfort, we're just going to make the problem worse, I think. Yes. And I do want to go back to Pet to Thread a little bit because people talk about it so much. especially in social media I've had young Gen Zers contact me and say oh I talked about pet to threat on TikTok and I went viral and I'm like you did why and so I think most people have come away with you know pet to threat as something that occurs relatively quickly within the course of your career and I hear people saying oh well I outperformed someone's expectations and then I became a threat.

11:58And that I think is, you know, probable. Yeah. But again, when we were doing this research and published the original data, that was 2013. And we were really focused on how the larger societal environment was so focused on diversity and inclusion that those motivations often placed marginalized, especially more junior professionals in that pet role. You know, organizations, I think many sincerely wanted to diversify their companies or their institutions, but they just really didn't know how to do it. Yeah. And didn't know how to really treat those individuals with the respect that, you know, they had earned because of their knowledge, skills, and abilities, and not simply their identities.

12:59Yeah, yeah. And then the assumption was, oh, you just got hired because you are X, which was... Right. If it's not one thing, it's the other yeah yeah or the presumption is that there was some sort of um you know favoritism or i can't think of the unfair process or something yeah that led to your being in that position and so other thoughts on misinterpretations of pet to threat for me one of the things that's most painful is that people will use radical candor as an excuse to act like a jerk, which is the opposite of what I meant. Are there other misinterpretations of pet to threat that are out there that you'd like to clear up for folks?

13:45Yeah, sure. And, you know, one of the things I come away with is that not all bad behavior directed towards women, women of color, black women is pet the threat. Sometimes it truly is bias, discrimination, harassment, bullying, without the context of what the motivations are for you being in that role to begin with. Now, given the amount of time that has passed since we did the original research and reading the hundreds, maybe thousands of comments over the years, I do think there are other conditions that could promote pet to threat. I think having a new leadership may change, you know, your positionality in your department or role, whereas, you know, one leader saw you as prized and the other might see you as a problem.

14:47Yes. I think, you know, the first pet to threat iteration focused on kind of societal climate and culture. And I think we're in a very different position now that is opposite. Yes. So I think that creates dynamics and that people who two years ago, again, would have been prized are now being perceived as problematic. Thank you so much for naming this, for giving this. If something is happening to people over and over and over again, it's really useful to have a label for what this behavior is so that you can recognize it and realize that you're not alone. I think it builds solidarity between black women and also between black and white women because we all experience it in different ways.

15:46Absolutely. And, you know, I have had colleagues reach out to me at events where I wasn't talking about Pet to Threat, who made the connection. I was speaking in front of one group of former chief diversity officers and a man spoke up and said you know I saw your Forbes article and I sent it to my three daughters because they needed to know what the landscape was going to look like after college and grad school. I've heard men who are gay and say, you know, this was my experience. I was feeling very alone and isolated in it. And when I described it to a coworker, she gave me your eyes and it helped to explain, you know, what was going on.

16:39So, you know, as much as, you know, we kind of resist being tied to one thing, I realized that it does help break that isolation and give people a different framework for how to kind of understand their experience and not internalize it. Well, thank you for giving it a name that we can all remember and that helps us feel less isolated in the moment. A whole wide range of people. Can we also talk about some of your other research though now? I would love that. Okay. Okay, so you would think if you were a company trying to hire people, you would want to maximize the size of your hiring pool, right?

17:25And you would think that if you were going to promote people, you'd want to make sure that you promoted the people who were going to do the best job at that next level. And yet, that doesn't seem to be what's happening. There's resistance. So what's going on? Why is there this resistance to opening the aperture and saying there's a lot of talented people in the world? Let's make sure we're looking at all of them. Yeah. So, you know, I have two editions of a book on diversity resistance and organizations hoping to start working on a third. Oh, good. But, you know, the initial edition really presented a taxonomy of what diversity resistance looks like.

18:12And the taxonomy, kind of like your radical candor, we're looking at the level of analysis. Is resistance an interpersonal experience or is it an experience driven by the organization, which ultimately, right, is always going to be leadership? And then on the other axis, are we talking about hostile, overt, in-your-face racial slurs, violence, threat of violence? Or are we talking about the more subtle covert ways in which being different in that environment creates exclusion, being diminished, avoided, dismissed? And I thought it was important for that first book, and I think that came out in like 2007, 2008, to elevate that, yes, we still have really egregiously bad behavior in organizations.

19:15And what drove me to even thinking about diversity resistance was the rise of hangman's nooses in the workplace. Oh my gosh. I did not know that. So in the early 2000s, my graduate students and I were tracking nooses, workplace nooses. There was a very big case in Atlanta that earned kind of national media attention. And I think they tried to pursue class action status. It's a very large organization. That did not work. But what we uncovered was that there were noose incidents in every state in the country. And that, you know, our qualitative review of those cases is that they were almost always targeted towards people of color, usually black individuals.

20:13And for two different reasons. The first was that this person had been promoted into a supervisory leadership position. They were a threat. Wow. Or they had made a complaint about discrimination, harassment, or bullying that they had faced. So retaliation. Oh, my gosh. And this occurred in office environments. It occurred in blue collar environments in front of like someone's locker. And it got so bad. I think once people understood that we were collecting these cases, people would send it to us in the mail. And I was like, I can't write about this anymore. Like, oh, my gosh. So upsetting. Yeah.

21:00Damaging. And so I shifted to like, yes, this is important. This is important. But a lot of managers, leaders, because those nooses aren't showing up in their organizations, believe that everything is fine when we know it isn't. And there is the social exclusion, what social psychologists pre-2020 would call social distancing that occurred that excluded people from developmental opportunities, mentoring, networks, coaching, sponsorship that had really significant limitations on their careers. and that we needed to really dive into those kind of covert ways in which we as workers interpersonally engage in that exclusion or dismissal, but also the ways in which organizations, I think, promote a value system or ideals that help to reinforce that.

22:07So again, the 2000s, thinking about organizations that promoted colorblind language we're all the same we don't see differences um who you know you know walmart for example you recall the big gender discrimination suit and pregnancy discrimination you know there was one legal brief where they said well we can't standardize what happens in each of our stores. And it's like, really? What? You have someone at the door saying, welcome to Walmart. You can't standardize the HR practices. So it's a societal issue. It's out of my hands. It's also a way that we, you know, I think in organizations have kind of turned our back to dealing with the real world experiences of people who are different from that cultural default yeah yeah um you know it's i feel like the the nooses is something i should have been aware of like because it wouldn't happen to me uh and i wouldn't do it to someone else doesn't mean it's not happening all the time and it's so egregious and horrible that it's hard it's like people a few times when i spoke people thought i was speaking like metaphorically i was like no yeah yeah these are ropes tied into nooses being used to intimidate people and i get a little defensive when people put nooses in the same kind of grouping as slurs or symbols because nooses are actual instruments right they're they're more than it feels more like a death it's not an it's not an insult it's a death threat i mean it's and there's there's both are bad but one is worse than the other you know um emotionally to come come into work and and see something like that i don't know how you get through the day right no you don't yeah yeah you call your lawyer you call your family you know people yeah it um you know fortunately we have you know there have been some very brave people to bring these cases to the forefront and to the media so that people like me could better understand the vulnerabilities that exist when you are promoted or when you do make a legitimate complaint of this yeah and i think it's really it's important for people to whom this sort of stuff doesn't happen, to understand that it does happen.

24:54It happens with some frequency. And in gathering these stories, one of the things about this kind of really horrible behavior that happens is that it's hard to talk about it without seeming unhinged. Like, it's so awful, and it happens all the time. And I think it's important that people know that. So thank you for doing the research. And I mean, it must have been horrible for you to like getting these stories. I think shifting to the, you know, subtle covert forms of resistance that undermine people's performance and careers, because I feel like that is, you know, much more pervasive. You know, I think even if there is one news case in the state per year, it's too much.

25:45It's too many. Yeah. But I think most people, reasonable people, will understand that if you're in an organization and you are experiencing benign neglect. Yes. And you see your coworkers being mentored and socialized into that organization, you know, over time it does have some significant performance and career development limitations. Yeah, huge sometimes. What are some other, you've also got incredible research on how good intentions and well-meaning behaviors derail an organization's ability to attract and retain and promote the people who are best at the job. So what are some of the examples from your research of that?

26:36I love, love talking about that research because I typically, if I'm doing a presentation, will show a series of images from large, you know, Fortune 500 companies that have gone awry. Because again, there's been such a desire to present as being diversity oriented and inclusive. but as my daughter would say apparently these people never took a humanities course because didn't study art completely clueless about some of the historical context of the images that they are pushing forth and i think you know there was one within the last month but a number of the you know young clothing companies cosmetic companies you know will diversify the range of colors that are presented but then reinforce the message that white is the goal oh my gosh like like what are some examples so there was um multiple ads by um dove the soap company oh yeah Which, of course, is celebrated, you know, for racial diversity, size inclusivity.

27:56Yeah. And there was one ad for lotion, right, that the before is someone with dark skin, but the after is, you know, she literally takes off her dark skin to reveal white, moisturized skin. Oh, gosh. um nivia has or had an ad targeting men for their male lotions i didn't you know not that lotion has a gender yeah we all have skin it was like civilize you and it was a young african-american man with you know what many people would say a professional haircut close shaved neat no beard holding the head of an African-American male with a huge Afro. It's hard to understand how that happens. How did that happen?

28:49It's the wrong people, Kim. Yeah, I guess. It literally is the wrong people. And, you know, in this climate, when we see so many individuals losing their roles, layoffs, feeling pushed out, One of my colleagues said, you know, we're returning to the snowcap of leadership. Like, who's going to bring that up? Who's going to say, you know, I think that might be inappropriate or this community might be harmed by this image or it makes us look bad? Well, speak truth to power without blowing up your career is something I advocate. people you know going back to the um good intentions um work so you know presenting those ads i think help to kind of set the stage but i also talk about you know the well-meaning microaggressions you know you're so articulate yes i can't even tell you the number of times that people have said that to me.

29:57For our listeners who are not familiar with the you're so articulate problem, I mean, let me try to explain it and you can tell me where I get it right and where I get it wrong. If you and I are both on stage together, the odds that someone comes up to me afterwards and says, Kim, you're so articulate are quite low. I don't think anybody has ever said that to me. So what my assumption of why someone would say that to you went about to me is that they expected me to be articulate as a white woman, but they didn't expect you to be articulate as a black woman. Is that basically the, the absolutely how I would frame it.

30:35And I have to tell you, um, I use this story in my classes quite a bit. I was, um, and I, I mentioned hers to you earlier. Um, hers stands for higher education resource services. It's kind of a boot camp for women in higher ed who might be considered presidential candidates. I was doing this year-long program at Wellesley, flying up to Boston every month. And so the group becomes pretty cohesive in a year, and I recall being at a break. And I should say there were three black women from my institution in that particular cohort so that's that's risky right there a senior white female leader came up to me and she said Juanita Juanita I was like I think I must have made a face and she said oh you're not Juanita I'm like nope I'm one of the other ones but then she went on and said you know I just so appreciate the contributions you make to our conversation.

31:46You know, you are just so articulate. I wonder if you've had some particular training or workshop. Okay, mind you, I have a PhD. I stopped and I said, oh, I went to the Condoleezza Rice School of Public Speaking. And she stopped and she thought I was serious. Oh my gosh. I'm kidding. I am. And I think she got that maybe she spoke a bit. Yeah. She had stepped in it twice. And these kinds of unintended offenses, I mean, I'm sure she didn't intend to do it, but she, it's impact, not intentions that matter in these moments. And that's why I'm so grateful to you for telling these stories because now when people hear they're not going to make that mistake hopefully.

32:41I hope not. Yeah. And so you know those are the micro aggressions are certainly like interpersonal right forms of diversity resistance that show up in these well-intended behaviors but organizations also fall back on strategies that they believe will help them net a greater diversity of candidates in a pool or you know attract diverse candidates but actually they do the opposite so one area I've worked in is again around colorblindness with Vicki Plout who's at Berkeley we were doing a climate study for a large healthcare organization. And, you know, like good researchers, we throw in a couple of research items.

33:35And, you know, what we expected and discovered was that at the department level, departments that had more colorblind messaging from leaders ended up, and co-workers ended up having minority employees who are less engaged compared to departments where the messaging around diversity was more multicultural. Like we see everyone, we value everyone, everyone can make a difference versus the colorblind message that we're all the same. We're in this together. We're one thing. And what we discovered, you know, further in that data is that colorblind messages signal identity threat to members of groups who have been historically disadvantaged.

34:30Yes. It says, you know, like, if you can't see me in my totality, am I really safe in this environment? am I at risk for discrimination am I at risk for harassment so when organizations send out their recruitment messaging and fall back on colorblindness the same thing is occurring yeah I think another kind of organizational slip that's made and this isn't my research but several others actually that has come out since 2020 is messaging around the role of diversity. So are we pursuing diversity for its instrumentality because we believe it's going to give us a greater return on investment, help us reach new markets, help us think more with more complexity?

35:29Or do we think we're pursuing diversity because of our justice orientation or simply because of who we are. Now, you might imagine that depending on the audience, you might value one of those messages more than the other. Yes. And typically, white leaders, workers like that instrumentality argument. That is less appealing if you are the target audience attempting to be recruited or onboarded. And in fact, there was a study, Sinclair, Stark, et al., that looked at those messaging messages in higher ed institutions. And that instrumentality argument, when it's made by universities and colleges really turns off minority families.

36:25And it's a signal to guidance counselors, to people who are supporting students to apply to universities, that those kids are not going to be in a diverse environment and there might be some level of pet-ness. Yes, yes. Yes. So again, we have organizations engaging in what they believe to be, you know, good, well-intentioned behaviors that I guess appear logical, but not understanding how they are received by the audience that they're trying to connect with. Yes, yeah. No, that's really important. I think, I wonder if this is an example of my good intentions gone awry. So I want to, I'm going to solicit some feedback here.

37:14So in radical respect, I wrote about bias, prejudice, and bullying, which are the commonplace terms for these behaviors. And I tried to sort of differentiate between them. And I have found in today's environment, it sometimes works better to talk about unintended offenses instead of bias because it's a little more specific about what's going on. And instead of talking about prejudice, to talk about intolerant beliefs, to use those. So am I falling into the instrumentality? What do you think about that strategy for today's environment? Yeah, I don't think you're falling into like the instrumentality trap or the colorblindness trap.

38:04But I think the demand on people like us who do this work to engage in this linguistic gymnastic and creates more, I think, invisible and emotional labor for us. Yeah. And I think subsequently, again, if I think about the audience, if you're speaking to a group where you are trying to support and elevate workers who have been disadvantaged and historically excluded, it may also appear that you're being overly inclusive. Yes. And you're not understanding the extent or appreciating the extent to which their identity that they have no control over. Right. Creates a unique experience for them. Yeah.

39:02So, yeah, it's a hard challenge to to overcome. Yeah. So the third edition of Diversity Resistance, Knockwood, trying to really focus on, you know, these sorts of issues. Yeah. You know, the new forms of invisible labor and emotional labor, the grief that if we were to talk about diversity inclusion work as a sector. Yeah. The grief that professionals in that area are experiencing, the anxiety around, am I next? The survivor guilt of perhaps maintaining your job when others have been released. And then last, the moral injury of participating and protecting a system that one, you know, two years ago, you were working hard to protect and elevate.

40:02but now you're a participant in it and you might even be hurting your own community. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, how do we as professionals protect ourselves, our wellbeing, um, and then continue to do the work that we know is needed? Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, I think you are lighting the way by continue by right, coming out with the third edition. So thank you for continuing to do the work. Fingers crossed. Yes, fingers crossed, knocking on wood. Can we talk for a minute? You also have really good research on what it feels like to be a leader and come from a historically marginalized group or underrepresented group.

40:53So what are some of your words of wisdom for people who have achieved those leadership roles and now they're having to deal with the threat part of the pet to threat? Yes. Right before I began my big leadership role, I published an article, Leading Us the Other. And it was really driven by just reflections of getting to this point. And I think historically throughout my entire career, you know, I had been the token or I had been the pioneer. And when other members of marginalized group came into my organization, they left. And often I was a survivor. And I think staying in those places at least gave the organization a sense of comfort that, well, Keisha's still here.

41:54Yeah. So it can't be too bad. But I think, you know, there's going back to Pet to Threat, you know, the isolation that extends beyond, you know, your career level. there is the labor of prioritizing others comfort with your you know just physically being in that space yeah you just walk in the room as yourself and right and the constant i think justification for why you deserve to be there and in fact hbr had an article recently i talked about it on LinkedIn, you know, the prove it again bias. Yes. When you are, and this is my next book beyond this diversity resistance will be on being unexpected.

42:47When you are unexpected, you are always having to prove you belong. And so you're asked to prove it again and again and again. Again. Yes. And that is exhausting and it's exhausting and because of the isolation i think is particularly critical that you build your own cafeteria table so you know beverly tatum has that book why are all the black kids sitting together at the cafeteria right and that table provides a source of not only support but it's a vehicle for reality testing yes for validation for mentoring um and so if you are a leader from one of those groups and maybe it's a group that isn't even visible to your co-workers but it's a part of your identity that you're having to navigate daily you absolutely need to form that community and that table that is going to help sustain you throughout your career.

43:55Yeah, yeah. The building solidarity is so important so that you can talk about these things that happen and not have to explain all the content. Like, people get it. Right. Improve it again. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the industrial organizational psychology literature really falls heavily on building a constellation of mentors from various groups that help provide an insight into kind of the hidden curriculum of your organization that you may have never had access to, that your parents didn't experience or perhaps anyone in your family had experienced. So it's really critical.

44:44And, you know, there is even some compensation literature that talks about having a white male mentor comes with an economic premium. Yes. And, you know, if you're a woman or a person of color, you're less likely to, one, have a mentor, but certainly have a white male mentor. But unfortunately, having that type of mentor provides, in a very racist way, credibility and validation that perhaps may create opportunities for you and help you kind of leverage your experience to greater compensation. Yes. And it's going to be harder for you to attract that mentor than someone who looks like that mentor, which is yet another bit of labor.

45:32Similar to me, bias. Yes. Yeah. There was an engineering leader at Google who talked about this very wisely, a black man. And he posted to people, he said, if you, you know, hey, underrepresented folks, if you want to get promoted, this is not fair, but this is good advice. He said, you need to find a difficulty anchor. If you're working on something that's hard, you need to find someone who's senior to you at the organization and go to them and say, I want to get your help on this project. Because the problem is, if you succeed on the project, everybody's going to say, oh, you know, so-and-so did it.

46:11It must have been easy. It wasn't that hard. Yes. And so you need this difficulty anchor who's going to help you, you know, overcome some of the difficulties and then help you explain to people that it was, in fact, incredible what you just achieved, which is unfair, but I thought it was useful advice. And it can be a slippery slope. So I've published with a former student, Changya, who on proactive socialization. So, you know, organizations, you know, that literature pretty much does a blanket recommendation that you engage in proactive socialization as a newcomer. You seek feedback, you seek information, you try to develop friendships and mentoring relationships.

46:59But there is there is a balance there. You know, if you're a person of color doing that in a largely white organization, you might also trigger implicit beliefs that you are needy. Yes. That you got in by preferential treatment, that you don't belong. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's important, you know, to take those recommendations, you know, with a grain of salt and understand the context that you're working in. Yes. And then so, you know, to add on to that engineer's recommendation, I would say, yes, you know, ask for help, but also center what you already know. Yes. And reinforce, unfortunately, your competence in asking for help.

47:51Yes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's such tricky waters to navigate. I get tired talking about it. I know. I know. I do too. But I think the more we talk about it and the more we share, the better people will know, will be able to navigate. We're charting uncharted waters here for a lot of people. And I think it's what your research is really helpful for folks. Before, I know we're just about time, but before we go, can we talk a little bit about class? I think you and I both read the article in the New York Times about the class ceiling. And much as our society pretends that, you know, not to see color, we also pretend not to see class.

48:40So can we talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So, you know, that article describes a study conducted by economists that demonstrates that in higher ed in particular, There is a strong class bias and that people like myself who earn tenure and get promoted are more likely to come from families where parents went to graduate school and probably also earned a PhD. I don't think this is all that different from any other kind of early life socialization. Lawyers produce lawyers. Yes. Medical doctors produce medical doctors. Now, the problem, of course, is that not every family had access to higher ed and to entry into those professions.

49:34Exactly. I think the write-up seems to suggest that class can be even more influential in whether or not you end up at an R1 institution as a tenured faculty member than race or gender. And that is what I will dive into more in the future because I do feel as though it's kind of a social distance thing. Yes. And by talking about these identities one by one, it's almost as though you can be one or the other when the reality is we are all existing on multiple dimensions of all of these identities at once. We are intersectional. Yes. And so, you know, I'm first generation. I come from a blue collar family.

50:26My dad worked a second shift job, a job after that job. And sometimes when I was really young, cut hair on Saturdays. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I am also a product of private schools, K through 16, if I think about my undergraduate institution. So I had access to all those environments. Yes. But my race will always signal me as somewhat of an outsider as well as my gender. And although I understand the language, I understand how my cohorts spent their time, their hobbies, it wasn't my culture as a blue collar student, even when I had access to those spaces. Yes. So there, I think there is like this invisible culture that as faculty we are navigating.

51:23And I have certainly been in the seminar room where, you know, the majority of people around the table talked about how their dads, and it's almost always their dad. Right. Or faculty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the thing that interested me and maybe made me a little hopeful, I mean, there were some questions about the article, but is that the more identities we can include in underrepresented identities, the better we'll be able to build solidarity across different kinds of groups. And I think that's going to be what helps move us forward. Hopefully the more connection people will make to the movement.

52:07if you want to call it that. Yes, exactly. And the more empathy, hopefully, they will have for each other. Yeah, and the more awareness that people will have of their respective advantages and disadvantages. I walk into a room and I have several unfair advantages and one unfair disadvantage, you know. And it's been helpful for me to be aware of that. and I think one of the kind of strange things about that article to me was it kind of implied the majority of people who are not in the quote unquote upper class are white men but I would say that a lot of different groups are represented by not being rich and white men are overly represented in the top 1 % and the piece kind of lost sight of that obvious fact I thought I don't know sometimes you just have to tell people look around yeah yeah use your eyes um yeah yeah um well Keisha thank you so much for joining me for doing the research you're doing for sharing stories that are painful to share but I think important for people to know about uh really enjoyed the conversation How can the Radical Candor listeners follow you?

53:35What's the best way to keep in touch with you? Great. Well, thank you so much, Kim, for your interest in my work and doing what you do. So your listeners can find me, of course, on LinkedIn. Keisha is K-E-C-I-A. And I have a website. That's Dr. Keisha Thomas. All right. We'll put that in the show notes. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. I did too. Thank you, Kim.