My ARDEI Growth
My Journey of embracing Anti-Racist, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
01
I’m a woman,
an Asian,
a daughter,
an international student,
a passionate content creator,
an aspiring digital marketer;
most importantly,
a lifelong learner,
and a strategic thinker.
Who am I
"Who am I ? To me is the scariest question in the world, but the practice in awareness sheets guided me to find a more clear picture of “ME” with different categories."
My fear of entering into the work of anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion is the process of careful self-reflection. I always get a feeling that the more I know about myself, about the world, I will get more anxious and painful. Therefore, I developed a coping strategy to avoid scrutinization to myself, which protected me from being too self-conscious about making mistakes and how others perceive me. But this fear may hold me back as I may not be aware when my ignorance hurts others or sub-consciously oppress others.
After I learned about the concept of ARDEI, I found that consciousness-raising is really helpful when facing the inequality and oppressions in the world. By understanding how my social identity is constructed, I can recall how these dimensions affect and when they get closer to my core. I’m able to recognize my privileges and my disadvantages and understand how the cycle of socialization affects me, which is my first step of relating the experience of others, becoming a stronger ally to others.
02
Understanding
Dynamics of Oppression & Cycle of Socialization
"What’s dangerous about “a single story” is not that it’s inaccurate, but it’s incomplete. It emphasizes one aspect of the group but ignores the rest of the information, which leads to stereotypes/biases to different social groups. The spread of “single story” can be one of the essential factors that causes many social issues like racism, discrimination, inequality in the world."
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Measurements of my racial attitudes and my takeaways:
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My race IAT result suggests that I have a moderate automatic preference for White people over Black people. I was a bit surprised as I perceived myself having no preferences between people who are in different races. After I learned about Dynamics of Oppression & Cycle of Socialization, I started to reflect on myself and the result became understandable.
According to “Cycle of Socialization”, I realized that we may not be aware that our beliefs are largely influenced by society where oppression is operated on multiple levels. We’re not born with racism but we’re exposed to racist values and beliefs and begin to internalize them through socialization.
Many of the questions in the test asked me about my impression towards black people/white people and I answered all based on my personal experiences or memories. It reminded me of the first time when I went to New York City, my friends told me not to go near Harlem. “It’s dangerous. It’s a poor neighborhood and a lot of black people are there.” That may influence me subconsciously to perceive black people as somewhat dangerous, chaotic. I may not realize it at that time but it’s where my impressions are coming from. While I recollected impressions on white people, all I had connections with are fabulous characters in the movie I watched since teenager, kind professors I had in college.
All these small things accumulated and affected my perspectives to different people, different social groups, therefore impacted my IAT results.
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validity vs critique
on IAT
Validitiy:
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The updated algorithm of IAT measures the responding speed differently based on individuals’ different circumstances like age or working memory capacity.
Critique:
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What if I’m just a person with slower reactivity, the responding speed may not correlate to the differentiation towards different social groups.
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There are still many factors IAT is not able to include and “failed to rule out the alternative explanations”,
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so I think the result can be used as a reference for unconscious bias and remind of people with prejudice and discrimination, but not necessarily adding a “racist” label to people.
November 4, 2018: Mapping County-level Geographical Variation in Implicit Racial Attitudes By Liz Redford
By mapping a sample of Project Implicit's publicly-available data for the Race Implicit Association Test, we can start to see how U.S. counties vary in their implicit racial attitudes:
Identifying my privileges
6 points each category
Sexual Orientation
Nationality
Gender
6 points
0 points
2 points
Race
2 points
Religion
Class
4 points
5 points
03
Managing Conflicts in Workplace
After joining the Workplace InterActors workshop, I learned how to manage conflicts according to different people’s perspectives. Showing your empathy is always the most important part of communication.
In the simulation, we take on the role as two characters’ manager to conduct trauma responses to both employees. For Jamal (from the target group), to repair the damage the conflict caused; for Lindsay (from the advantaged group), to comfort and promote heighted awareness.
What I found interesting is that initially I was more related to Lindsay as a female myself. But after listening to both sides, I realized that sometimes your subconscious actions (due to ignorance) will affect people. At that moment, I understood how the awareness of ARDEI is important to everyone. Only we know how to understand people from different social groups is experiencing, we can break the cycle of oppression.
TKI Conflict Management Scores
Avoiding: 9
Accommodating: 12
Competing: 11
Compromising: 11
Collaborating: 7
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04
Nurturing psychological safety in workplace
After reviewing my Dimensions of Character, I find I can capitalize the following strength in inclusive leadership at workplace: Humility, Judgement, Collaboration, Drive, Transcendence.
Firstly, being self-aware is the key component for me to actively reflect on mistakes and be willing to learn from them. This strength can help nurture psychological safety in workplace as when I recognizes mistakes/errors in work, I can inform my team members and invite them to discuss the root cause so that we can prevent it in the future.
Moreover, by applying the “Judgement “ strength, I can critically analyze the situation and identify the key issues, therefore further encourages an open, thoughtful, and inclusive debate when the error occurred.
“Collaboration” strength also plays a key role in value every voices, talents, skills in the team. That way, through constant sharing information, giving each other feedback and help, we can grow stronger as a team and create a trustable work environment.
Lastly, by possessing “Drive” and “Transcendence” character, I’m motivated to keep push for change and improvements in the future.
The three dimensions I need to work on the most are Temperance, Courage, and Accountability.
The reason I want to work on my “temperance” is that I find myself often getting overly frustrated after I failed in something and hard to get over with this feeling for a period of time. The over-achiever trait inherited in me can lead to my lack of patience and bad decision-making focused on the short-term satisfaction.
Identifying myself as lack of “courage” is because I’m too self-conscious sometimes. I will overthink certain issues and doubt myself, which may lead to my low confidence.
I want to improve my “accountability” as I have a problem with money management and planning. I’m not able to take responsibility or ownership for consequences like over expense as I’m still financially dependent on my parents.
My Dimensions of Character
Strengths:
Drive
Judgement
Humanity
Humility
Transcendence
Collaboration
Integrity
Need to work on:
Temperance
Accountability
Courage
Justice
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