hello welcome to focus on ally skills i'm valerie aurora my pronouns are she her and hers so in this talk we'll have about a five minute introduction including definitions about ally skills then we'll spend about 10 minutes talking about why we should focus on ally skills then i'll describe about a dozen ally skills give or take and then i'll give you some instructions on how to learn more about ally skills and if this were a live talk then you would have 20 minutes of q and a little bit more about me my name is valerie aurora my pronouns are she her and hers i'm the founder of frame shift consulting a diversity and inclusion and technology firm i've taught ally skills to over 4 000 people around the world including places like spain sweden mexico and across the us before that i was a software developer in linux and file systems for over 10 years so what are ally skills let's start out with some terminology so privilege is an unearned advantage given by society to some people but not all and the important point here is that it's unearned oppression is sort of what makes uh privilege possible it's the background uh it's widespread inequality it's present throughout society it helps people with more privilege and harms those with pure privileges so i notice that sometimes people say oh i wonder why people bother with the with oppressing other people and systems of oppression seems like so much work well the answer is it because it makes life better for a privileged group so a marginalized person then is a member of a group that is the main target of a system of oppression so systems of oppression hurt a lot of people uh but there's one group of people they hurt more than everyone else that's smart that's marginalized people then an ally is someone who that society gives privilege to that is doing two things they're working to end oppression and understand their own privilege so you notice these two things are actions let's talk a little bit more about actions and which of these things you are so allyship is an action not an identity being a marginalized person takes no action whatsoever you can just sit there doing nothing and people will oppress you nothing you have to do but being an ally is all about what you do if you sit there doing nothing you're not an ally you're not fighting oppression so that's why i prefer to talk about ally skills rather than allies so you might be wondering which of these things you are and the answer is depending on the situation you may switch back and forth between being a marginalized person and being able to take action as an ally so i'll use myself as an example as a white woman in the united states if racism is important to a situation then i'm more likely to be able to act as an ally if my gender is more important to a situation then i'm more likely to be a marginalized person who has relatively little power so here's a practical example of these things at work so here's a privilege you may have and not even know that you have that's the ability to interview for a job and have the interviewer assume that if you have children you will continue doing a good job at work oppression includes things like family expectations that mothers do more child care a belief that mothers don't want to do paid work financial systems that are unwilling to extend credit to mothers laws that put more burdens on mothers than fathers paying men more than women those are just a few examples so there are people who are neither men or women they're called non-binary and at this point we don't have firm stereotypes about whether non-binary people are primary caregivers whether they should spend most of their time on children or whether they should spend most of their time at work i'm sure we will develop that so a marginalized person would be any woman who wants to work for pay for an employer regardless of her plans for children that's the thing about systems of oppression is they don't care about who you are individually they just stereotype you based on your identity all right so within this whole system an ally would be a man who does things like takes on significant child care responsibilities donates to women's causes votes for feminist candidates and laws and speaks up at work against stereotypes about mothers and then reads news articles about privileges that fathers enjoy and mothers don't so interesting if you go look at the stats for the change in salary of new fathers versus new mothers new fathers often get a small raise new mothers often lose their jobs

that's not a great situation all right so there's your example there's your main definitions so here's my argument for this talk what's wrong with diversity and inclusion today i think that the problem is most work focuses on changing marginalized people and less work focuses on changing people with privilege so well first here's some examples of diversity and inclusion efforts and you'll see what i mean here so volunteer run affinity groups are for marginalized people primarily travel scholarships to conferences those are mostly aimed at marginalized people advice books almost all at marginalized people conferences here's what one was part of for women in computing these are all aimed at marginalized groups okay so here's a few reasons why we focus on changing marginalized people i'm not saying they're good reasons i'm just saying they're reasons so first of all marginalized people already want to make their lives better and so if you say hey if we change this thing your life will be better it's an easy sell for people to improve diversity and inclusion when they will benefit from it marginalized people are often but not always more aware of their oppression already so you don't have to do the initial education step of saying hey did you know that some people lose their jobs after they have children you don't have to do the the part where you raise the awareness of that oppression even exists marginalized people are often lower status and easier to tell what to do so imagine you're in a meeting with your ceo and an intern you've just hired and your ceo keeps interrupting your intern what's easier to do to say hey intern you need to speak up for yourself or hey ceo you need to stop interrupting i know which one would be easier for me a marginalized people are often seen as the cause of the problem so there's a reasonably common proposal which is maybe serious maybe not serious that one way to prevent sexual harassment at work would be to ban women from the office so this ignores the fact that sexual harassment occurs among people of all genders but the interesting thing here is that most sexual harassment is perpetrated by men and it would make much more sense to ban men from the workplace but nobody ever suggests that because women are seen as the cause of the problem of sexual harassment finally it lets privileged people avoid thinking about their unearned advantages so if you say oh we need to convince marginalized people how to negotiate better we can ignore the fact that privileged people are getting way more salary for no good reason not for any reason that they earned all right so here is my argument for why we should not focus on changing marginalized people so the first important point is that marginalized people are already overworked here's a shot of ginger rogers and fred astaire there's a common saying that ginger rogers did everything fred astaire did just backwards and in high heels so whether or not this is literally true there's a lot of research saying that marginalized people are affected by the prove it again bias so the prove it again bias says that people forget when marginalized people behave in ways that are against stereotype and so often a marginalized person will demonstrate their competence over and over and over again people just keep forgetting it over and over again you just have to keep doing way more work so this is one of the biases in the book what works for women at work which is by joan c williams and rachel dempsey this is the only book of advice for marginalized people i recommend for two reasons one it presents its advice in the context of you're not going to solve sexism yourself as a woman but you could make things easier for yourself which is true and the other reason i like it is that more than half of the women they interviewed for this book were women of color marginalized people are under more stress so discrimination and harassment at work cause a lot of stress and make life very difficult the abuse and assault people are becoming more aware of with much more in the workplace much more reporting on the experiences of women people of color disabled people all sorts of people at work what happens after multiple years or particularly bad experiences is post traumatic stress disorder so you can imagine all of these things make it really difficult to fix systemic oppression

marginalized people have less money so lesbian couples just a few random statistics this is just true across the board but i just love pulling out some statistics so women in lesbian couples make 79 percent of what men married to women make uh white women make 78 percent of what white men make mothers make 73 percent of what fathers make black women make 65 percent of what white men make people with disabilities make 63 percent of what those without disabilities make and latinas make 58 percent of what white men make this is in the united states these every time i give this talk in another country i can easily find another set of statistics showing that marginalized people are making less money in that country marginalized people risk retaliation when they act so here's and i've seen this a lot in my own life but here's an experiment researchers found that when marginalized people work to increase diversity supervisors give them worse performance reviews but when more privileged people work to increase diversity it does not harm their performance reviews and may actually improve them so i think we shouldn't be asking marginalized people to harm their careers further we should be asking the people who can do it without harm marginalized people are often in the minority not always this is not always the case but it does become true as the higher up you go in a hierarchy and the more a job is compensating compensated so here's just one example of many the gender of wikipedia editors in english i don't recommend doing your gender survey the way they did that they did email me to get more about it but you look at this and 90 percent of the people editing wikipedia are men so i look at this and i say oh we could ask the 10 percent of people who are not men to do a bunch of work or we could ask the men to do a bunch of work i know which one i would choose marginalized people have less power and influence so just as a few examples among fortune 500 ceos at the last time i checked fewer than eight percent are women fewer than one percent are black and fewer than one percent are openly queer in some way a related study looked at the management team of S&P 1500 companies management team includes the c-suite and the board of directors and they found that the probability that a woman occupies a top management team position is 51 percent lower if another woman holds a position on the same team so what this is saying is that tokenism is real sometimes there can be only one and the reason is not because women or black people or anyone else are so competitive or anything else it's because the people in power decide that there can be only one marginalized people are often seen as biased and selfish when they are acting to improve conditions for their own group so this is an accusation i've seen over and over and over again somebody will say oh you're you're just complaining about racism or ableism or transphobia because you personally did not get the job or the promotion of the award that you wanted and this just comes out over and over again no matter how accomplished a marginalized person is you can go all the way up to the supreme court and people will still be accusing you of this and yet when you look at the organizations out there to support marginalized people in tech which is my main area of expertise you see that it's mostly aimed at changing the behavior of marginalized people so black girls code callback women natives who code lesbians tech transhack pregnant scholar code 2040 mother coders these are all aimed at marginalized people and of course there is the grandmother of them all the lean in book which which does make the claim if women just work harder women can end systemic sexism that is definitely not true and cheryl sandberg has retracted some of her claims in this book so in contrast here's some resources for developing ally skills there are three things i've i put out the ally skills workshop the frameshift twitter account some other materials on our website and better allies which is by karen catlin and they have an account twitter account better allies there's not a lot of stuff out there all right so my proposal is this year we should focus on ally skills instead of teaching marginalized people how to be faster better harder so here are my reasons why allies have more time and energy just from recapping from the opposite position allies have more money allies are less likely to be harmed when they take action allies are often but not always in the majority allies have more power and influence and allies are seen as altruistic giving and kind when they do this work so i've talked about why allies should take action so what do good ally skills look like i'll review a few of them an ally self-educates so it's before you go ask a real live marginalized person something go ask yourself hey could somebody send me a let me google that for you link that answers my question basically can you just search for the answer to your question on the internet and will you get the answer so a good example here is if you want to know if your country is imprisoning people based on race at disproportionate amounts you can just look that up on the internet and you'll find out that racialized people are disproportionately imprisoned in almost every country in the world an ally listens and passes the microphone so this is saying that most of the time not always we'll talk about when to speak up but an ally should stop talking and listen and amplify the voices of marginalized people this is part this is partly because privileged people are used to getting to say what they want they're used to being listened to and it just it takes an act of will to become aware of that and oppose it so here's an example of somebody doing this alan eustace was a senior vice president at google back in 2014 at the grace hopper celebration of women in computing this event featured a male allies panel with several executives from other large tech companies and it was a complete disaster because the people in the audience knew a lot more

about this i think it was about seven thousand women so after this minor disaster alan eustace put out this tweet he said let's reverse the male allies panel you talk i listen and then he gave the room information then he and most of the other executives showed up to this room and listened while women came to the microphone one by one and shared their experience of working for tech companies and in some cases working for their own companies of the executives so that was a great example of listening and literally giving people the microphone an ally gives credit scrupulously so another great thing that happens as somebody with a lot of privilege people will just assume that you did the important difficult thing so this will happen even when you as the most powerful person in the room do not ask for credit so it's really important to be careful about giving credit and to give credit very as often as possible to marginalized people people often think oh well this is just you know being selfish or self-centered or something like that no you are opposing oppression when you do this so here's a great example of an norm that developed within the social justice community whenever we talk about the concept of intersectionality which is the idea that multiple systems of oppression interact and intersect with each other and produce fascinating new kinds of oppression this was coined by the legal scholar kimberlé crenshaw and we try to always credit her by name when we talk about it to give an example kimberlé crenshaw is herself a black woman she gets a oppression for being black she gets oppression for being a woman and she gets a different separate unique kind of oppression for being a black woman called misogynoir

an ally asks for consent whenever possible so often making progress in social justice requires individual marginalized people facing a lot of difficulty and stress the important thing here is that if you are not that actual marginalized person you should as much as possible ask for consent before putting the marginalized person in that position it's not always possible but when you can you should so an example of this is the fight for marriage equality so in most places around the world the right for people of the same gender to marry each other involved a lot of court cases where individual same-sex couples went to court for their right to get married and each of these couples suffered a lot of people harassing them writing mean newspaper articles about private details of their lives and of course they had to go to court a whole bunch it's not a great situation the important thing is that each of these same-sex couples chose to do this and were not forced to by some random heterosexual person

all right an ally keeps the focus on marginalized people so an interesting situation that happens again with being privileged is people really want to turn the conversation to you and you are used to the conversation being about you and your feelings there's a twitter account that makes fun of this called birds rights activist and i love this tweet i am feel uncomfortable when we are not about me so i like to remember that as a reminder that it doesn't have to be about me but i want to give another example about this it happened to me recently so somebody was complaining on the facebook for my apartment building in san francisco about somebody accusing them of being anti-asian for their behavior in an elevator in our building this is in the context of a wave that is still ongoing of anti-asian violence in our city and around the world as a result of covid this person was really really upset because they felt their behavior was not motivated by anti-asian racism and it was misinterpreted so i responded and said i feel sorry that your actions were mistaken for anti-asian racism and i feel even more sorry for the person who experienced so much anti-asian racism that they interpreted it that way let's focus on fighting anti-asian racism because that's the more important thing so i can acknowledge this person's feelings and then turn the conversation back towards the marginalized people an ally speaks up when it's unpopular this is the case where you don't want to be quiet and listen and pass the microphone it's when if you speak up you're going to get a negative reaction because you are saying something that's difficult for people to hear so here's an example i found on the internet mauktik kulkarni talked about

realizing that his being ignorant of his caste privilege when he lived in india made him made it hard for him to see racism in the united states when he moved to the united states so he was talking about two things he was talking about casteism and racism in the united states this did not get him a lot of fans but it was really important for him to use his privilege here to talk about these difficult things so he's talking specifically about anti-black racism so acting as a an ally to black people all right an ally uses their energy wisely so the internet is filled with trolls and some of them are even just automatic computer programs not even people there's no point in arguing with them there's no point in arguing even with the humans so here are some rules uh that you can use to not waste your time so charles' rules of argument were created by charles miller who had a blog on the internet and needed to find a way to stop spending so much time arguing with random people so his first rule is don't go looking for an argument there's going to be arguments in your sphere of influence where people know who you are and respect your opinion so when i was talking about speaking up on the facebook group for my apartment building people respect me in my apartment building because i run the garden don't go looking because there's somebody wrong on the internet somewhere if you do choose to to have an argument state your position once speaking to the audience so often somebody who's just done something terrible is not open to changing their mind but somebody who's just watching will be wondering do we make homophobic jokes around here i don't know and if you say we don't make homophobic jokes here they're going to be like right i believe you so speaking to the audience it's really important the next step is to wait for absurd replies where people either intentionally or unintentionally misunderstand you and then you reply one time to correct any genuine misunderstandings of your first statement and then here's the hard part do not reply again and then go do something you like instead like playing with your kids or walking your dog or drinking a beer whatever it is that's going to give you more energy for the next argument

all right an ally spends money so nobody ever feels like they have too much money i i read something saying that basically every single person in the world no matter how rich they are thinks they need about twice as much money as they actually have in order to feel safe but here's what you can think about is remember the statistics showing that marginalized people generally make less money than people with more privilege however much money you have it's more than somebody who is more marginalized you than you on average so the amount of money that doesn't seem like a lot to you can actually make a big difference so it's a great thing to spend money at businesses owned by marginalized people to invest in marginalized people to donate to non-profits that are supporting marginalized people all that sort of stuff an ally uses their social capital so as somebody with privilege you have access to a social network full of people with similar privileges and power and influence and one of the things you can do with social capital is you can actually share it with other people by inviting somebody to the dinner that's only for the people who with the most power in your organization or saying hey we maybe we should stop having ski trips and instead we should do something that's more accessible to people who didn't grow up very wealthy the nice thing about social capital is that you can often grow it by using it to fight oppression so if we combine it with the principle of an ally spends money for example you can start a group fund raising drive where you match donations to a non-profit and this often greatly increases your social capital because people think you're a great person and you raise more money that way talk to your local non-profit an ally acts even when it's uncomfortable so i love this dog this dog is so cute and it's being so good so one of the things i find is that people are just really really uncomfortable when they're witnessing some kind of social injustice or oppression or microaggression or whatever even if they're not the target of it and here's what i tried to tell people about these situations hey if you feel this uncomfortable imagine how uncomfortable it feels to actually be the target of what just happened that is what really helps me take action it's like i might feel weird but at least it's not the thousandth time that somebody has told me personally that i'm inferior so that's that's a good reason to speak up an ally sacrifices personal gain sometimes so as somebody with more privilege and power you're going to get more opportunities and one of the things you can do is try to share those and distribute them to other people which means that you're giving up something for yourself so one of the examples i that comes up a lot is panels so an all male panel is unfortunately quite common there's a twitter account called all male panels that that finds these all white panels are really common as well you'll see that you'll see a lot of all white male panels so i as a white person whenever i'm invited to be on a panel i ask first thing i say hey are there any people of color on this panel and if the answer is no then i say hey here are two or three people of color who are more qualified than me that should be on your panel instead of me you don't have to do this with the first panel you're ever invited to but around the time of your tenth panel it's something you should think about this goes for speaking at a conference it's really embarrassing to be one of the 60 white speakers at a conference all right an ally follows leaders from marginalized groups so again somebody with power and privilege people are likely to follow you do what you say give you money i see this in the form of computer programmers showing up and saying hey everybody i built you an app and if they're not part of that marginalized group inevitably that's not the app they need so the thing is is that there's already people out there who are members of marginalized groups who are leaders who know what they need and are asking for help and have made it easy for you to support them either through money or volunteer time or spreading the word or giving them

media attention all that sort of stuff so find and follow leaders from marginalized groups a great example of this is a saying in disability activism nothing about us without us this is the concept that if people are trying to do something to support disabled people then

disabled people should be part of that work an example would be if somebody is writing legislation to improve wheelchair access to public buildings people who use wheelchairs should be part of rewriting that legislation there's a great documentary talking about this this sort of self-advocacy or self-leadership amongst the disability community called crip camp it's on netflix it was nominated for an academy award it's actually not at all depressing and quite inspiring i highly recommend it one other note people often argue about whether to say disabled people or people with disabilities there's a disagreement within the group of disabled people i personally use disabled people ask the people you're working with and see what they prefer right final ally skill an ally makes mistakes and apologizes so if you wait until you're perfect to start acting as an ally you will never act as an ally nobody is perfect everybody makes mistakes what you're trying to do is start out with small mistakes and then move in your actions as you become more accomplished and knowledgeable and then when you do make mistakes you just acknowledge your mistake apologize correct yourself move on oftentimes i see people in a position to act as an ally making mistakes and then turning the entire conversation on to them and their feelings and how bad they feel and how they're such a great person i can't believe I did that etc etc etc so this is called making it about you so it's much better to briefly apologize correct yourself move on as much as possible all right so there's no way that you actually learned all those ally skills here are some ways to get a bunch of practice and to ramp up your ally skills so if you follow frameshift llc on twitter it's pretty low traffic i mostly just retweet four or five times a day helpful topics around ally skills dear ally skills teacher is an advice column going into more detail on specific questions and you can attend an ally skills workshop i teach these at organizations and very very very occasionally i teach them publicly all right i want to summarize here's what i hope you will take away most diversity and inclusion efforts focus on changing marginalized people but allies have more time energy power and influence to make change ally skills can be learned and we should focus on teaching allied skills to people of more power privilege and influence

all right if this was a live talk i would now answer a bunch of questions thank you for watching this and check out our website