In this episode, Marcel Schwantes and john a. powell explore how fear drives othering, the importance of belonging, and how leaders can foster inclusive environments by prioritizing human dignity and structural change.
Transcript
Marcel Schwantes:
Hey, it's Marcel. Before we kick off today's episode, I just want to remind you to join me and my guest over in the green room at Substack immediately following today's episode. Now, if you're hearing about the green room for the first time, this is the private virtual lounge for my premium subscribers to drop in and hear me ask my guests questions you're not going to get anywhere else.
The practical stuff like how to motivate people, deal with conflict, build the right culture, boost your mental health, improve work-life balance. So I'm putting the link to the green room in the show notes if you'd like to join us for more private conversation. Enjoy the show.
Welcome to the Love In Action Podcast, this show that explores all the ways you can evolve into the best version of yourself as a leader. I'm your host, executive coach, speaker and author, Marcel Schwantes. I believe that when we show up with our full humanity to work a lead from a place of love and care and inclusion, it will make a radical difference in your leadership, your business, and your bottom line. This is a show about love as a leadership and business strategy. Let's do this.
Hey, glad you are here. Welcome to the show, and thanks for joining us. I know there are a lot of podcasts out there, and we're just grateful that you chose to listen to ours today. So in the last episode, which was episode 226, I featured two ID&E experts, as you'll recall, Eddie, Pate and Jonathan Stutz. They call it ID&E, not DE&I. They put the inclusion in front of diversity and equity.
So they wrote a book called Daily Practices of Inclusive Leaders. And today we're going to follow in a similar path, but we're going to take a deep dive into the belonging piece. So here's a quote. The root of all inequality is the process of othering and its solution is the practice of belonging. So you just heard a direct quote from the authors of a very important book, and you're going to know it's important by its title, and here it is, Belonging Without Othering, How We Save Ourselves and the World.
That new book is co-authored by John Powell and Steven Menendian. So I think personally that it's innately in our design as human beings to seek connection and to want to be in a community. Of course, I may be biased because in my line of work, I follow the data, and this is what the data is pointing to that communities of practice that are closely aligned, they have shared values and they have a shared future, are going to do really well in business.
They're going to do really well in establishing a culture that has a good identity, a good business identity, a good climate, a good culture. So I said I'm biased. As a coach and as a speaker, that's sort of the world I live in. And yet here we are, we live in a very divided time when we're just feeding off all this fear and a lot of us follow media narratives.
So yes, there are some very extreme narratives there, and that's informing how we see other people. And so the more that we're doing that, the more we cast people in a negative light and well, and the further we get away from this very idea of connecting and building communities and belonging and having empathy and compassion, and really seeing people, first of all, that they're visible and that they're worthy and et cetera.
And sitting down and having respectful, open dialogue so we can learn from one another. I am seeing that starting to disappear because of this whole idea that we're going to talk about today, this whole idea of othering. And we're going to define what that is. So the authors of Belonging Without Othering, they have prescribed a new approach that encourages all of us, whatever your affiliation and wherever you come from, whatever your upbringing is, to turn toward one another, okay?
And they're going to define that in some pretty radical ways that for a lot of us, it may be new to be able to turn toward each other and not away from each other. So sit tight because this is going to be what our episode is all about today. So I have the honor of speaking with one of the authors, John Powell.
John is an internationally recognized expert in civil rights, structural racialization, housing and democracy. He is the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute at University of California, Berkeley, and he is a former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Don't forget, at the end of the episode, John and I are going to continue the conversation over in the green room on my Substack, and that's going to be a private conversation for paid subscribers. So I'm going to put the link in the show notes, if you'd like to join us, click on it and we'll see you over there. All right, John Powell now joins us. John, so glad that you are here. Welcome to the Love In Action podcast.
John A. Powell:
Thank you, Marcel. Good to be here.
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah, John, we start the show this way. You ready?
John A. Powell:
I'm ready.
Marcel Schwantes:
What's your story?
John A. Powell:
Well, you asked a great question, and I have been asked that question before, and I've started referred back to early conversation with a famous Buddhist feminist named Joanna Macy. Some of you may know her work. One of her books that really influenced me was World as Lover, world as Self. World, as Lover, world as Self. Isn't that a beautiful title?
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah.
John A. Powell:
So I met her when I first met her, she said, "Okay, John, tell me a story." And my response to Joanna was that, "You know Joanna, we all have many stories. None of them are complete. They're always changing a little bit." And she said, "Of course, just pick one." So I say that because I do think it's really important in terms of our health as individuals and collectively not to get stuck on a single story.
And there's a Nigerian writer who talks about the danger of a single story. I grew up in Detroit, six of nine children. My parents were sharecroppers before moving to Detroit. And I grew up in an area in Detroit where literally they called it Black bottom, which is where Black people lived in Detroit. And my family is deeply, deeply religious and Christian, my father was a Christian minister, he passed away a couple of years ago.
I actually shared in some of my writings is that when I was about 11 years old, my world changed. Or 11, I was deeply nestled in my family. I had a wonderful loving family and stayed loving, but I got pushed out or I left depending on how you look at it.
And what happened was that when I was 11, first of all, my grandmother died, my great-grandmother, but she was so important to me and I loved her so much. And then I started reading about different parts of the world, and I ran across some readings about the Chinese and the church doctrine. I belonged to the Church of Christ. Church doctrine was that unless you were baptized in that church, not in another church, unless you were baptized in that particular church, you're going to hell.
And so at the end of every sermon on Sunday, they would end the sermon by asking a question, and the question was, does anybody have any questions? And I had been in that church my whole life and it never occurred to me I'd never seen anyone ask a question. But on this one Sunday, I stood up and there was a audible gasp. He's going to ask a question.
And the minister said, "That's all right. That's all right." It was my father. Said, "What's your question, brother Powell?" And I said, "What's going to happen to the Chinese?" And everybody was like, "What?" Needless to say, he didn't have an adequate answer. My thought was that something fundamentally wrong, saying a billion people are going to go to hell because they weren't baptized in that church and they never even heard of that church.
And I won't go through the whole story, but I never went back to church after that. And it created this structure in my family. It took a long time to heal. It did eventually heal, but it took years to heal. And so in some ways, I went from belonging in a profound way to being othered in my very family.
Marcel Schwantes:
Wow. Wow. John, what a story. I have similar ties to that story being raised in a Christian sect or denomination, if you want to call it as well, that also thought that they were the only ones going to heaven and everyone else, if they didn't follow a particular set of doctrines, then you weren't going to make it. Do you want to share another one, or should we get into your book?
John A. Powell:
I will share another one.
Marcel Schwantes:
Okay.
John A. Powell:
When I graduated to my school, I got a scholarship to Harvard, but Harvard was still special status, or you might have said negative status for women, not letting women in through the front door. I have five sisters and I'm 17 years old and low-income family, and cared about education. But also, it just struck me that there was something wrong with that.
So I announced that I was not going to go to Harvard. Again, my family who was not formally educated, but they had heard of Harvard and they expressed some chagrin. It's like, "You're not going to go to Harvard. What's wrong with you?" And I gave them the reason that they didn't really accept women. They had Radcliffe, but not.
And I didn't have the words or the language to actually explain it in great detail, but it was clear to me there was something wrong with that. And my family was not very happy that I was turning Harvard down, but I did not go to Harvard of the many of the lead schools were in a similar situation. Yale, others.
So Harvard wasn't unique in that respect. So I tried to find a school that was strong, that accepted women, and it brought me out to California, and I ended up going to Stanford.
Marcel Schwantes:
Wow. John, you have decade of experience in this area that now has labels, right? But you predate all the labels, DEI, DEIB, whatever it is now. And so how is this book, Belonging Without Othering, build on all of the work that you've done in previous decades around belonging?
John A. Powell:
Well, one of the things that came to Berkeley to found the institute, it was initially called the Haas Institute for Affair and Inclusive Society, and it was organized with seven clusters and then a staff. And the clusters were around race and religion and disability, and looking at how groups were marginalized.
And what occurred to me at some point is that all the groups were really, even though they had their own stories, their own struggles, their own histories, they shared in their desire to belong to something bigger. And that by focusing just on their own situation, they were not only missing what other groups were experiencing.
To some extent, there was a kind of soft othering. In other words, people were saying, my issue, there's a line by Bob Marley, one of his songs, to paraphrase him, he says every person thinks his burden is the heaviest. And so whatever person is suffering, whatever their group is suffering, I'm aware of my suffering. I'm not aware of your suffering.
So I may be suffering from racial injustice. Someone else may be suffering from disability, someone else may be suffering from age, someone else, or multiple. And it's not that that's unimportant, but unless we open up in some ways, we don't see other people suffering, we belittle other people suffering.
And so I wanted to address that. And I felt like the way of doing that was to not just look at particular expressions of marginality or othering, but to understand the structure of othering and understand not just what's happening now, but we also want to look at the history and look at it globally because not just a US phenomena, it's not just the phenomena of 21st century, it's actually been around a long time in various expressions.
So in some ways, it was really nice because when I was 11 years old or when I was 17 years old, I didn't have a language. And so part of what this book does is give these experiences, these insights, a language.
Marcel Schwantes:
Gotcha, gotcha. So I want to acknowledge that there may be people listening that have not heard the term othering, right. So in your own words, John, how would you define it? What is othering?
John A. Powell:
So basically, othering is not according to someone else, full expression, full dignity, full mutuality of their humanness. And so in some ways you're saying either they can be less than conditional or completely invisible. In some way, they don't count, and it's a gradation. So it can be, I just ignore someone, or it could be I construct a whole story that they're a threat to my very existence.
So not acknowledging someone is an expression of othering. But genocide is another expression of othering. Ethnic cleansing, that's another expression of othering. And othering can happen at many different levels. So it can be, I don't acknowledge another person, but it also can be my government, or the government doesn't acknowledge certain people.
So there's a gradation, but it's always about saying a group is less than, they're not accorded full human dignity, full equality, full mutuality. To use your words, they're not loved.
Marcel Schwantes:
Right, right, right. Okay. So how prevalent is othering? I know that it's been around forever. How prevalent is othering right now in 2020?
John A. Powell:
It's expanding to some sense, and it's being weaponized since not interpersonal is actually being used. And it's accelerating all around the world. And we see literally people being kicked out of countries, we see people being vilified. We see sometime people just saying, literally, you don't belong here. You don't belong here.
And actually, I remember growing up having people ask me that question, and there's a wonderful exchange between Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, and James Baldwin, the great writer, and he asked her one time, he said, "You're a woman in the field that's heavily populated by men. Do you feel like you belong?" And she said, "I'm white. I'm English, I'm educated. I'm upper middle class. I feel like I belong everywhere."
And then she turned to Bald and she said, "What about you? You're a brilliant writer, famous, well-off. Do you feel like you belong? Where do you belong?" And he said, "I don't feel like I belong anywhere." And what he was talking about was by being gay in the 1950s in the United States than much of the world, it wasn't accepted.
So on one hand, we've seen this movement of bringing in more people. A lot of people don't realize that much of the world. It was against the law. It was a crime to be gay in the 1950s. And that's changed in many ways. So in some ways, we're opening up, but also we're closing down. So we have these different movements and they're related to each other in some ways.
Marcel Schwantes:
Where do you think we're closing down? Because like you said, I see much more tolerance, especially towards the LGBTQ community, people of other races and ethnicities, et cetera. I mean, we live in a melting pot, at least I think so. And here in the United States of America in 2024 where the white population is decreasing, but that's not a bad thing.
And maybe if you view it through the lenses of white people, they fear that. So perhaps I'm answering my own question, but what's the fear factor here of that's contributing to these other forms of othering that we haven't seen before?
John A. Powell:
Right. That's a great question. If you think about, not again, just happening in the world happen in the United States, but the world, and part of it's exactly what you said. It's like as we open up, there's a reaction, there's a backlash. So the very opening up in some ways can create some anxiety.
And one of the things we talk about in the book is that one reason we're seeing a more profound expression of othering is that we are changing. The change itself, not just for humans, but for all mammals, rapid change creates stress, creates anxiety.
And when Darwin talks about survival of the fittest, partially what he's talking about is that those who can fit into the environment, those species actually thrive, or what happens when the environment change? Can the species adapt? And if the change is slow, the answer is inevitably yes. When the change is fast, it's not clear.
And what we're seeing is that the change is happening in human society and on the planet is speeding up. And there's several areas. So think about technology, think about transportation, think about the environment, think about the economy. And the big one, of course, they're all big, is demographics. I think you already mentioned.
And so whatever the United States print or publish, that the country will no longer be majority white by 2045. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's what we can actually measure the anxiety in the country going up. Literally, some people it's like, ah, can't we do something to stop that? One of the things that caused Brexit was the fear that England was changing.
And if you go to London today, you'll sort of understand that fear. London is an incredibly diverse city, and it's everybody from the whole world. The British Empire has come to London, and on one hand that's a beautiful thing, but on the other hand, it's like whatever you experienced London 30 years ago, that London largely doesn't exist today.
And at the heart of that fear, and it is fear, at the heart of that fear is that as the world change, my group will not belong. There will not be a place for me in this new world.
Marcel Schwantes:
And that's a bad thing. How's that? Why should I fear that?
John A. Powell:
Well, you shouldn't. Fear is not rational though. And so there are two big stories. One story is that the world is changing, and we're changing and we are going to have better food. We're going to understand each other, we're going to have more diversity. And it's a beautiful thing. And there's space for everyone.
Arari just did, the guy who wrote Passion, Sapien rather, he says there's enough land, he's an Israeli. He's talking about what's happening in the Middle East, and he says, "There's enough land and enough food for everyone. So what are we fighting for? What are we fighting about?" If it's not really land and food, if he's right, what are we fighting over? And in fighting over ideology, we're fighting over fear of, if you're here, I'm not.
Story is that in order for us to be okay, they have to be consigned to a certain place. Think about this. When I was growing up, and I think I'm a little older than you, literally, in half of the states in the United States, it was a crime for there to be interracial marriage, miscegenation. It was a crime. And part of they would say is that in defining whiteness, you lost that category of whiteness if there was one drop of black blood in your body.
I don't even know what that means. I don't know what black blood is. It doesn't matter. It's not a rational decision, but it's like idea of purity. And so you have in Hungary right now that the lead of Hungary saying Hungary is a country for Christian whites. This is the head of a country. Putin comes very close to saying that about Russia.
So the world is changing, becoming more diverse. There's certain people who are really clamoring for a mythical time when it was homogeneous and pure. There was never such a time. But that's the reach and part of it. So we have that story, but the other is a threat. We also have the story that there's no real other. We're all in this together.
So the first story we called it Breaking Story because it fractures people. The second story we called it Bridging Story because it brings people together. Both of those stories are being populated. And there's a concept, a group called conflict entrepreneurs, that is that there are people who tell you they take the conflict, they take that anxiety, and they construct a very dystopian story.
And for your listeners or viewers, just turn on television tonight and watch what's on television. Almost all the movies about the future are dystopian. The future that we're being sold is full of vampires, zombies, robots in a sense. It's a future where humans don't belong. So that's the fear.
So these conflict entrepreneurs and authoritarian leaders, they actually always talk about going back, not forward because forward is very unknown, potentially anxiety. And there things we should be anxious about. I mean, how should we feel about AI? Should we embrace it? This is a wonderful new possibilities, or is this the end of humanity? We don't really know.
Marcel Schwantes:
Oh, wow. So many places we could go here. I want to maybe ask a personal question. You're a well-educated Black man in a institution of higher learning, and that is UC Berkeley, right? Do you still experience othering in this day and age?
John A. Powell:
It is a great question and a complicated question. One of my favorite writers is a Brazilian writer named Roberto Unger, and he says that we're born and the world seems strange, and we spend the rest of our life trying to make this home. See, he asserts that our very birth creates a sense of distance and separation.
My father is a Christian minister. When I asked him, what is sin? What is death? He says, "Separation." And so what he would assert is that our separation from each other and our separation from the divine is sin and death. And in a sense, almost all of our efforts in some ways is to heal that separation, is to find home. And when I was a kid, my mom would sing this beautiful song and it was this, in a few more days, my work will be done. In a few more days, my race will be won and I can go home.
So in a sense, our life is about trying to make it home. And sometimes then my making it home, my imagination might think you can't have a home if I have a home. So we get into a zero-sum game. So yes, do I feel othered at times, yes, not just about being Black, about being old.
I live in the Bay Area. I just went down to a tech company and gave a talk, and I was twice as old as the average age of the person there. I was the only one wearing a sports jacket, everybody else was wearing T-shirts. It wasn't pernicious. I mean, I didn't feel threatened, but there was a sense of maybe this wasn't my place, not because of my race, but because of my age.
But part of thing is can we make it so it's fluid? So it's like, okay, maybe I don't feel quite comfortable here, but maybe I'll feel maybe I can do something to make it more comfortable. Maybe I can talk about it. Maybe I can actually walk up to someone and say hello. And so part of the thing we're trying to do in the book is to invite the multiplicity of our identities.
We have several identities. Race may be one of them for me or may not be important for someone else. There's a Nobel economist named Amartya Sen. He's Indian, and he says, if some aspect of your identity is threatened, that aspect will become important to you. If you remove the threat, that aspect will become less important.
So in the United States around race, yes, it's extremely important, and then at times it's less important. And so I try to lean into my multiple identities and also I try to acknowledge that I have a pretty wonderful life. I mean, all of us have our struggles, but I have good health insurance.
I teach at a wonderful school, have friends. I know I have food to eat, I don't worry about paying my mortgage. And I grew up in Detroit in the 1950s and 60s with Mary Wells, Daniel Ross, and Stevie Wonder. I mean, it doesn't get much better than that.
Marcel Schwantes:
I love it. John, you're familiar with, or most of the people listening to this show probably familiar with terms like microaggressions, and you dropped something earlier called Soft Othering. I want to explore what that is.
John A. Powell:
Well, when I talked about my family, othering is complicated. So when I left the church and it was hard, I actually thought I was going to him, so it wasn't a small thing. So in the sense I was leaving God and leaving my family, that doesn't sound very soft, but my family still loved me.
I had no doubt that I would still eat. I had no doubt that I would have a place to sleep at night. I had no doubt. And my mother just worked tirelessly to heal that riff. She never gave up on bringing the family back together. So I was being othered, but it was softer othering. We also talk about long and short bridges.
So you think of people who maybe they have the same language, maybe they have the same race, maybe they have the same religion, maybe they have the same food, maybe they're siblings, they might still break and other each other on something that some of us might say is completely silly. It's like as your client talks about a break between vegetarians and vegans, and most people's like, what's the difference?
So sometimes there's a break or othering that there's a lot of clear shared values, commonality, culture, history. People know each, they care about each other, they can still other, but usually in those situations, it's not Genocide. It's not leave the country. It's not get out of my neighborhood. I'm not inviting to my house for Thanksgiving.
So it's still othering, but it's softer. Or sometimes it's even like grandpa has Alzheimer's, so we don't talk to him anymore. He doesn't understand. We still love him. Even what Susan Fisk calls pity him, right? Pity is a kind of othering, it's care, but it's care that's tinted in some way. It's care where dignity is no longer intact.
And I have family and friends who have Alzheimer's, and literally, sometimes we're in conversation and I'll just turn and talk to them, even though I'm not sure they're tracking a conversation, but I still want to acknowledge them. And one of the biggest kind of abuse in America today, not just America, but all over is elder abuse.
And again, that's oftentimes a soft other. And I've seen people, it's like, "No, you can't go to the bathroom, grandma." I said, "Why?" "Well, she just went to the bathroom." And again, grandma may be struggling with some cognitive issues, but there's a way you still can acknowledge and give her dignity.
So that's soft othering and soft breaking, but it still can be very pernicious. We're not saying grandmother's not human. We're not saying, but we're not fully dignifying her as a person.
Marcel Schwantes:
Are there soft othering examples that lay out in the workplace, whether we do it subconsciously or not? Are these things happening and we may not even be aware of it?
John A. Powell:
Sure. Some examples. Who gets listened to? Who gets invited to sit down and have lunch with? Again, you're not saying person shouldn't be here, but it's like... So I was at a conference some time ago and there were a bunch of speakers and I was one of the speakers, and then I had a bus taking the speakers back to the hotel, and one of the speakers was in a wheelchair and she was at the back of the bus and everybody moved away from her.
And in a sense, they were uncomfortable. And she called us on it, she called it out. It's like, I can still talk. I'm not contagious, I'm just in a wheelchair.
Marcel Schwantes:
Oh, it's a leprosy.
John A. Powell:
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was just looking at my cell phone. But it wasn't that really, it was that people were uncomfortable and they dealt with it by pulling themselves away from her. That situation. And that happens a lot when someone is the other, and it can be the racial other, the gendered other, but it's soft.
It's not saying this person doesn't belong at all. It's like I'm just a little uncomfortable. And I've done that myself. I did an interview with a guy from, I think it was from Washington Post, and he had, from my perspective, a serious speech impediment. And he came to my office and I hardly understand him.
And my first five minutes I was like, I felt bad. I wanted this guy to leave because he was talking, I couldn't really understand him. And it's like, when would the center be over an hour and a half later? We were cracking jokes or whatever. But that kind of soft othering, it's like I'm uncomfortable with him, so how do I deal with this discomfort and just avoid them. And that happens in the workplace all the time.
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. I remember over 25 years ago when I was still doing the corporate grind, I was part of an IT consulting company that had a lot of H1B people from India and Pakistan very smart people because they had the technical skills of programming and database administration. And I was the recruiter that would go and find them and get them processed and employed into our organization.
But yet there was the language barrier and there was the culture barrier. And so most of the Anglos, you could almost see an invisible barrier between what you would deem as, and I'm putting the air quotes if you're listening, culture fit, which what really meant was white male wearing khakis and a polo shirt like the one I have on now.
But yet those Indians, they felt so excluded because they could feel it. It was palpable. They were so ignored because of the language barrier, even though they spoke English. But a lot of us couldn't quite understand them and so recommended in working a little extra hard to feel like, hey, they're part of the team, feel included. A lot of the guys would just ignore them completely until they felt invisible.
John A. Powell:
And your point is that a lot of this is unconscious. People are not trying to do it. They're not in a classical sense, racist or xenophobic. And it happens all the time. I was helping a tech company, I won't name a company, trying to increase his number of African-American engineers, and literally shared with me a story about recruiting a guy from one of the ACBU's comes up to me, this guy's stellar.
He comes to the interview and he's wearing a suit and tie and they don't hire him. I said, "Why didn't you hire him?" They said, "He wouldn't fit in here. We don't wear our suit ties here." He's come from ACBU. They teach them that when you're doing something, when you're meeting someone of prestige, you dress up. I mean, this is actually inculcated.
You want this student, you want people from ACBU, but you don't want the culture. Instead of having a conversation, you just say, well, he wouldn't fit in. What does that mean? Could he do the work? Yes, but he wouldn't be comfortable here. We wouldn't be comfortable with him.
Marcel Schwantes:
I want to transition to belonging, but there's a term I want to get out in the open free to explain because I see othering as, one, is fear-based. A lot of our fears are unfounded and they're not based on reality. And it might be because we are the dominant group, whatever that group is.
And so we fear that if we're losing our power, our control or whatever, then what's that going to do to my group? And one of the terms that you use is, well, there's two terms, identity threats and status threats, and you use those as examples of othering. And I'm wondering how many of us fit under those two threats? Explain what each one is if you could.
John A. Powell:
Yeah, so an identity threat as the term suggests, it's like when someone says there's something about your identity that's a problem. It interesting you mentioned earlier about the melting pot, and there's also in the 1970s we used to talk a lot about assimilation. We don't use those terms so much anymore.
The idea of assimilation in the sense as an identity threat is basically saying, or the melting pot, even the melting pot was really for eastern Europeans coming to the United States saying not that we would melt mutually is that they would become more like us. They would become, the term we would use then, they would become more like the Wasp.
And so literally, you see someone from Eastern Europe and the name would be Joe Smith. And you said, oh, that's an interesting name. It's not the name you grew up with. No, people can't pronounce my name. So I had to drop my name. I had to change my name, change the way I dressed, change the food I ate. So all of those are in a sense, identity threats.
We're saying who you are is problematic. If you're willing to change, if you're willing to assimilate, maybe you can fit in. You can fit in. It's like you do all of the accommodation. There's a misfit here. So are we going to change the system, the culture to help? No, it's going to stay exactly as it is. You will do all the changing.
Marcel Schwantes:
Even though you're in the extreme minority. In that case, the dominant culture is telling you that you need to change who you are, which explains all of these whitening resumes that we see now with people that have really hard names to pronounce. They are now Joe instead of their given birth names.
John A. Powell:
And I have friends, I'm in Berkeley, and we have students from all over the world and we have no ethnic or racial majority. And so I have students whose names I can't pronounce, they say over and over again.
It's an interesting process, but it is worth it, right? Your name means something to you. There's a concept of sacred symbols. Your name leans into that process of sacred symbols. Jesse Jackson, what's the name? The great hundred yard dash who won in the 1930s Olympics.
Marcel Schwantes:
Oh, Jesse Owens?
John A. Powell:
That wasn't his name.
Marcel Schwantes:
What was his name?
John A. Powell:
He spoke with a thick southern accent, whatever it means, the teacher couldn't understand him, so she renamed him. That's how he became Jesse Owens. He came home from school. He said, "Mom, my teacher gave him her name." It was Jesse. That wasn't his name. So we see that in terms of identity threat all the time.
Status threat is when a group feels that it's in some ways getting its sense of worth by having a certain status. And I'll give you just two quick examples. If you think about women's consciousness, big movements in the seventies and eighties, at some point it became a threat to men because men and women by and large, even if you gay, are in relationship with each other.
So if the man is up here and the woman is here, if the woman starts moving up, that changes the man's status. Part of his sense of his well-being is his status. Now, I grew up in a Christian home and one of the things we talked about was the man being head of the household.
So I literally know a lot of friends who I grew up with that if the woman made as much money as the man was a threat. Because the assumption how people interpreted the biblical passages about Jesus being head of the church is that the man is supposed to not only be head and in control, he also is supposed to be the primary breadwinner.
His status comes from being the primary breadwinner and being head of the family. So what happens if he's not the primary breadwinner? And literally, sometimes people would, I call him, right? They say, you're not a real man who wears the pants in this family. It's like we both do. So status is dependent upon your relationship with some other group or other person. Identity threat is where something about you is not acceptable.
Marcel Schwantes:
So in patriarchal societies, and in some of the even, talk about Middle Eastern and some of the Islamic traditions, women have no place in society.
John A. Powell:
That's right. I lived in Africa and visited people's home and literally, respecting their culture, but literally the woman would fix us elaborate food, but she would never eat with us and it would be inappropriate for me to say something directly to her. So that's status. The man has a status.
And in fact, I won't say which country, but I did some work in the country and the work turned out well. So they offered me a permanent position and I said no. And I said, basically a lot of money, a house, a driver, you're good at the job. Why won't you consider it? I said, "The way you treat women." And literally, I said this, "You treat women as if they're not as good as men." And a woman who is educated said, "But they are."
Again, this is back to college. It's like women don't count in some way. So a lot of men, so if you're in a high status, a lot of times you derive your status from someone else being a low status. And so equality is very disconcerting. If you believe in status hierarchy. And I was teaching this the other day in class, some of the alt-right folks are clear.
This says, let's stop all this talk about equality. There are certain groups whose rightful place is above and to dominate other groups, they just say, that's just nature. You look around, let's talk. Equality is just woke stuff, we should drop it.
Marcel Schwantes:
Interesting. This permeates so many other sectors of society. And being that we're a business podcast, I see this play out also in the gender inequality and even other inequities that we see in the workplace because of how one dominant group dictates the terms or even the narrative or the belief system. You're right, it is disconcerting even to this day that we still have these belief systems that are still dominant.
John A. Powell:
No, it is tricky because when women start coming into the workplace in large numbers, starting in World War II, but it really took off again in the 1970s and 80s and literally women showed up in the workplace in many workplaces, they had pornographic pictures on the wall and the women expressed some concern about that. It's like, we don't want to be in this environment. And part of the response from their co-workers and even from management was, this is the way it's always been.
Marcel Schwantes:
Boys club.
John A. Powell:
Boys club, and you have to adapt. You can't come in here changing things. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court and the opinion was written by Chief Justice Rehnquist who was a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court, and that's what came up with the hostile work environment. That's where that concept was in a sense, normalized.
But now looking back, it seems so easy. But at the time it was like, we've always done things this way. You can come in here but don't start changing. And in fact, one solution that management came up with is that we'll make room on the wall and you can put up your own pictures so they can put up, if they want nude women, you can put up nude men. It's like, wait a minute.
So even structures, you think about American Disabilities Act in terms of workplace where you have no ramps. We hire some interns every summer, we're hiring someone and we hire someone who's blind, and the hiring committee, it's like, well, we're going to hire her, but can she do the work? Can she do the work? Is the only question you should be asking.
Fact she's blind should not be an assumption that she can't do the work. This is liberal Berkeley. And my manager came back, we did hire, came back later and said, "I was wrong. She was great."
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah. So you have put some new meaning into the practices that I came from before I went on my own and established a practice and a thought leadership space. But when I was recruiting for major companies, there was this stigma that if your resume went beyond 10 years of experience, now we're getting into ageism.
Now this is in the 90s, mind you, okay? This was happening in the nineties, then don't forward a resume to a hiring manager. And so people then would cut their experience just a page or two, but they wouldn't expand beyond 10 years. And some of them wouldn't even expand beyond five years because they wanted to get their foot in the door to have an interview.
And it was so interesting to see people have to be dishonest about what they're presenting on the piece of paper in order to get their foot in the door so they can say, I can do the work. I have the qualifications. And I remember the faces in the room of a guy that was in his 50s and extremely qualified.
Nobody knew that he was in his fifties because he didn't show it in his resume. And so everyone assumed that this is a guy that was probably in his early 30s, and fit the prevailing culture again of that high-tech company that I belonged to at the time.
So that created some anxiety in the room when a well-qualified person on paper that presumably fit the culture walks in the room and it's 25 years older than most people hiring, interviewing him. So you've put this othering term to fill in the blanks to a lot of things that are happening, ageism and people with disabilities and neurodivergence, gender, LGBTQ, et cetera.
What would you say, and I want to use this question to transition us to belonging practices, to really rid our workplaces of othering, but what would you say right now is maybe the most significant barrier to creating a sense of belonging in a team or organization?
John A. Powell:
Well, I think you touched on it earlier. I think fear and lack of curiosity. When you are fearful, you're not curious. We also tell these stories about the other. So part of the ways these stories work is that, we're all 20 and you're 50 and you want to work here, I immediately have a story about that where you're old, you probably don't know what you're doing, you probably don't know how to do IT.
Those are all my projections. And instead, I could come and talk to you like, okay, you're atypical in some way, but tell me about that. Why do you want to work here? What is your story? What is your interest? So actually we have stories about the other, and the stories are usually flat. We know of ourselves, we think of ourselves as complicated beings. I don't fit in a box, but the other, oh, yeah, they fit in a box. I know their box.
So the driver really is fear, and fear can be manipulated. And fear, as we talked about earlier, it's not rational. It is necessary. It's evolutionary part of who we are. It's the amygdala activated and it's fast. It's faster than our conscious thought. So we don't think ourselves into fear necessarily. We can tell a story around it, but the fear is already there.
And I say to people all the time, so how do you talk to the lizard brain? Don't talk to the prefrontal cortex, which is rational, logical. But when fear is really activated, it's not the prefrontal cortex that's doing the thinking. It's the amygdala, which is the part of the brain we share with the lizard. So I say talk to the lizard, and we're not good at talking to the lizard. We're good at manipulating, but what the lizard is most afraid of, it's not belonging.
Marcel Schwantes:
Well, that brings us to the topic then. How do we create a culture of belonging? You talked about some conditions in your book. Do you want to touch on some of those or what's a good starting point here?
John A. Powell:
Sure. So first of all, it's actually interesting because a lot of people feel like the foundation of the way we organize society and work and culture is really othering. That othering is really the driving force of everything. And it makes sense someone would say that it is quite powerful, but they still, it's still not quite right.
We said belonging, it's a driving force for all human contact. And I remind people they were all born literally, not metaphorically, literally attached to another human being. And we don't survive. We cut the umbilical cord. We don't survive if we cut the emotional and spiritual cord.
A baby needs, and not just us, we look at other primates, they need more than food, Maslow's hierarchy, they need to belong. And what we do in many instances is that we say, in order for you to belong to this group, you have to other that other group. So we end up othering in the name of belonging.
Marcel Schwantes:
And that's a trap.
John A. Powell:
That's a serious trap. And so part of it, part what we need, there are techniques, but we also need a story. We need to believe that it's even possible. And there are many reasons not to believe it. We just look around the world and the stories were being sold and already talked about the future that the media is selling to us.
The whole thing is constantly, you think about this, it's this, be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. And if someone says, fear is part of life, but it shouldn't define life, and love could be part of life and is part of life, and that's one reason I admire what you're doing because sort of hard edge business, culture, love, are you kidding me? How does that fit in?
So I think to tell a story, to help people imagine, and I can say more about this, but the really serious gift that we got from our evolutionary growth a hundred thousand years ago was the ability to imagine. We didn't always have that.
So humans are over 2 million years old. Imagination is only a hundred thousand years old. And with that imagination, we can tell stories and then make them real. And then I think there are also things you can do in terms of leadership matters. There's a lot of research showing that people have different feelings, and our feelings are sometimes conflictual.
And where they tend to settle is the cues we get from leadership and the culture we're in. So if I'm in a culture that's very pernicious, I'm more likely to behave that way myself. If I want to quit smoking, the best way to quit smoking is to hang out with people who don't smoke. It's not a slam dunk, but we're social animals.
So to create incentives, create stories to help people, and what we don't want to do, just be clear. We don't want to shame and denigrate people. So I think even though it may be true that in some cases we're homophobic, in some cases we're xenophobic, in some cases we're racist, I think it's almost never useful to tag someone with that lie.
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah. What advice would you give somebody in a leadership role right now who's struggling to address this issue of othering? Maybe they have a team and they're soft othering, maybe not even soft, maybe it's just blatantly othering. A lot of people don't really know what to do, especially if you're from a dominant majority. How do you manage that?
John A. Powell:
Well, so leader has many roles, but one role is to hold the container that holds for everybody else. So we're all live in these containers and these containers are cracking now. And so we don't trust them as well. And so the leader's role is to hold the container and to tell the story. We also say values.
So what does the company, what does the school, what does the institution stand for? What is it about it? And if we can say, this is a place where everyone's belong, and we organize around human dignity, and I want to reflect that.
I can give you a concrete example, a true story. So I'm at this school, which I won't name, but I've been there for many years, and I'm the only Black tenured faculty member, and it's a large faculty, and the dean is a good guy, and he's now is the president of the university.
I go talk to the dean, and I said, "I've been here for six years, and I'm still the only Black faculty member here." And he says, "Well, John, what can I do? Literally, we spent millions of dollars getting recruiters and advertising and searching and hiring search firms. What else can I do?"
And I say, "You can make it clear that this is not something you're doing for me, that this is something you're doing because it reflects your values and reflects the values of this institution. So it becomes a priority, and this is your priority. It's the institution's priority."
That school now has many African-American faculty members within a short period of time. But as long as people thought it was something that, okay, you're supposed to do, but it was exhilarating to your work and it didn't really matter, and you could give what we call lip service.
You could say the words, but every year you say you're open to anyone, but not really. And doing a way that actually helped people feel good about themselves. Now, it's not just something that's happened out there. Every summer, we would hire 15, 20 students at OBI, other than the Belong Institute to come work for the summer, summer interns from all over the country.
We're here in Berkeley. Berkeley is considered the disability capital of the United States, if not the world. And every year we would hire 15 students. Not one of them would have a visible disability, not one. And they're here. One thing, you walk around Berkeley and I'm saying, there's a problem with this. They're at the university, they're in our community, and we don't hire one out of 15.
And so I put a freeze on. I said, next year we can't hire until we do two things. I want to see a pool that includes disabled people. And then when we hire, if nobody's hired out of that pool, before we go forward, I want to review it.
People who are a little bit hurt as they're saying, are you saying we're know biased? Are you saying basically, we're bad people. We don't dislike disabled people. It's just that we don't know how to do it. All of our structures and mechanisms carry with them a bias that filtered out disability people.
And so part of it was to look at the structures, to look at the data. The data tells you something, and not just look at people's intention. That's where they went. You're saying I'm a bad person. I'm not saying you a bad person. I'm saying, it's not working. This is our value. We look at the bottom line to see is it really working?
So now a number of workplaces have belonging barometers. They literally can go in and measure and they say... And sometimes there's surprises. In one recent study done, Asian women were the least likely to feel like they belong. And to me, one, I love that when studies come up with surprises, weren't expecting that.
And then you go back and talk to them, what's going on? What do we need to do? What do we need to do to make sure that you feel like you belong? Not what do you need to do? So I'd say look at the data, but also do it in a way, again, constantly without shaming or blaming a person. One of the things I say is be hard on structures of soft on people, but too often we're hard on people and soft on structures.
Marcel Schwantes:
I am so glad that you brought up the need to examine or re-examine systems and structures and processes that lend to othering because they do exist. And sometimes it's people in positions of power and control that dictate those structures and systems and processes, right.
Wow. Thank you for that. That's really good. That's really good. Okay, John, I want to give a shout-out, if I may, because you mentioned it to the Othering and Belonging Institute over at Berkeley. Tell us more about it. What projects do you got going on? What kind of work do you do there?
John A. Powell:
Yeah, a wonderful institute, and it's called the Othering and Belonging Institute. It used to be called the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society supported by the Haas Junior Fund. We're fairly big. We have seven clusters, and each cluster has about 12 to 15 faculty members associated. So they're studying different themes and different populations. Altogether comes about 120 faculty members.
And then we have a staff, and the staff is great, and we do everything. And we have literally, I think part of our faculty, we have at least I think one or two Nobel laureates. So these are serious researchers at Berkeley, and we have a moonshot. And our moonshot, a funder came to us and said, "If you had resources to do what you want to do, what would it be?"
And we said, "What we try to do is create a global norm within 15 years of belonging without othering." Now, when you look at it, if you get into the literature, you'll find out that belonging is actually quite old. It's probably the oldest human history, but people have organized institutions around belonging, but usually with othering.
So if you look at any major religious institution, there's a sense of a group of people belong, but another group is othered. Look at any major philosophy. There's a constant thing about who makes up the corpus of society, who does not. If you look at the nation state, so there's been all these expressions, we're literally thousands of years of belonging, but at the same time saying, you belong, they don't belong.
Marcel Schwantes:
Right.
John A. Powell:
You're the faithful, they're the infidel. And so we've said what we bring to the table, it's the possibility, the aspiration, the need, belonging without othering. A thousand years ago, if you lived on one side of the mountain, you belong and somebody left on the other side of the mountain, you could sort of coexist on your respective sides of the mountains.
The mountains doesn't exist anymore in the 21st century with technology, with the internet, with social media, with airplanes, the world is everywhere. And so there's no mountain to divide us. We are on top of each other. And so it's not just something that would be nice to have. It's like if we don't figure this out, we're in trouble. We have each other.
And so the institute does work all over the world. We have about 10 staff in Europe. We are taking a delegation to India. Later this year, we've been doing work in Latin America. And every place we go, people sometimes use different words, but they get it almost immediately, oh, yeah, belonging is important. That group doesn't belong.
And it could be Muslims in India, it could be [inaudible 01:04:57], or it could be everywhere you go. Every nation is struggling with this issue in some way. And what we're saying, just listen, name it. And the last thing I'll say on this is interesting because some people will say this is just unrealistic, and it can't happen.
In 1948, in some ways led by Eleanor Roosevelt, majority of nations came together and adopted the Declaration of Human Rights, which basically said, every human person on the planet have certain rights to be treated with dignity and equality. This is 1948. This is at the end of World War II, we just killed 6 million people in Germany.
So the idea that everybody mattered, everybody should have dignity. In fact, W.B.E Dubois criticized that effort. He said, look at England still has colonies all over the world. What do you mean that everybody matters? And some people today will say it is just an aspiration. But today, there were 2000 laws and rules around the world, around the Declaration of Human Rights.
It changed the way we see people. It's not perfect, but it basically lifted up the possibility that everyone should matter. And it actually helped her in among other things. A number of countries drop in the death penalty. Now think about that. So it very concrete implications because beginning of the 20th century, almost every country had the death penalty.
Now, 140 countries have dropped it. Not perfect, but it's sort of saying again, there's something special about life and about human life. They should be treated with dignity no matter what.
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah, we got to live in the possibilities, John, and see that this can become a reality all over. And I'm a firm believer of that, and that's going to take a lot of unity and the sharing of those values and those beliefs. But I think that it may not happen in my lifetime, but I am optimistic that eventually, we will come together.
John A. Powell:
Yeah.
Marcel Schwantes:
Yeah. All right. Well, we wind down here with two final questions as we do with every guest. And the first one is, people sometimes they wait for the whole episode to get to this point because they want to know the love question.
So sticking with the themes of belonging and inclusion, how do I lead with more practical, actionable love? Not the fuzzy pie in the sky stuff, I mean the real down in the trenches kind of stuff. How do I lead with love day in and day out?
John A. Powell:
Well, part of it, I think like belonging, love and belonging I think are maybe twins or at least first cousins.
Marcel Schwantes:
Right.
John A. Powell:
So what do we mean by love? And I think of immediately go to think about the Greeks who have at least six different terms for love. But basically, it means for me at least, attention, dignity and respect. I tend to people so I can love someone, but never say hello, never think about them. It's like, I love my cousin. I haven't seen her in 20 years, but oh wait, she's not even alive anymore. Okay, that's sort of too loose.
Loving in practice to me is like showing up, is attention that comes from the same word as being present according to person, dignity, being curious. And in some ways at the heart of it is recognizing. So go back to the thing in terms of eliminating death penalty. If you go back and look at the debates the country's had about eliminating death penalty, a lot of that was deeply informed by religion and morality.
Some of us informed by practicality, death penalty is not very practical in terms of reducing crime. In fact, if you look at countries that still have the death penalty consistently, those are countries that have the most crime, most violence. So those countries who go to that debate, some of them say you shouldn't take a life because all life is part of the divine.
And so part of it is a South African word called sawubona, which translates into, I see you. It also is translated that the God in me is the God in you.
Marcel Schwantes:
Wow.
John A. Powell:
That's it, right? And the Ubuntu is like, I am because you are. I am because you are. And it shows up in the South African constitution. And I talked to a former justice of the South African Supreme Court and I said, "So this concept of belonging, does that inform?" He said, "Absolutely. That not only inform, just central to how we think about it."
And a number of people including Cornel West, it says, justice is the public face of love. So how do we love in public? How do we attend to each other? How do we care about each other? Judith Butler talks about everybody being grievable. We make some lives not grievable.
So we hear that some people die, another homeless person died, or the enemy died. Whoever we think the enemy is, we don't grieve them. So love requires a vulnerability, it requires an openness. And it's not just one direction. Ubuntu, I am because you are, so I cannot be a full person if you're not accorded dignity, it's not just one direction.
It's moving in both directions and both to my family and my father was that we are deeply connected. We are deeply connected. So I have a relatively large staff, almost 200 people altogether. And I try to attend to each one of them. I try to give each one of them attention, and I say to them, and I mean it, that I care about each one of them.
And we have a project we have coming out called The Power of Bridging. How do we bridge with someone? Bridge someone by listening, not just with the head, by listening with the heart and loving someone and bridging with someone and listening to someone doesn't mean you agree with them. It doesn't even mean you like them, but it means you care about them, which is different.
So how do we show that in the workplace? How do we show that we care about everybody? One last thing I'll share with you. I inherited an organization, this is 25 years ago, and it was about 200 people, and we got half of our budget cut. So I had to lay off a hundred people. Some of these people have been in this place for 20 years.
People were pissed. I went to the board and we lost half of our money. And I said, can we take a certain percentage of that money and use it to help people in this transition? And there was some debate back and forth. We just lost half our budget and you won't take another part of it and give it to people who were pushing out the door. I said, "Yes, I do." We did.
We didn't have one complaint. There was no lawsuits. Some of the people... Part of what it was is that we were treating people with dignity. We're saying the budget requires that we cut back, but we still see you. We still see you're human. And we tried to help people find jobs. We provided a counselor and part of it, they weren't just fodder, they weren't just, we don't need you anymore, you have no value.
We're saying we care. And when I talk to people and we do stuff with organizers now around bridging, and we talk about how do you connect to someone who you think of as the other? And we talk about, and the research on this is really, really powerful, caring. And what the research shows is that when someone feels like you care about them, magical things happen.
So the organizers was like, "So you have to pretend like you care?" I said, "You can't pretend. You have to really care." And so to your point, where we're going with this, you care, love, can you love the person, even if you disagree with them and work, when you're out there on the trail. And if you can, magical things happen.
Marcel Schwantes:
John, this has been a fascinating conversation. You are a fascinating human being. I want you to close this out your way. So just boil this down into the one final takeaway. What would that be?
John A. Powell:
Well, there's the famous Dr. King expression that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it moves towards justice, bends towards justice. And I obviously have tremendous respect for Reverend Dr. King, but I think it doesn't bend towards justice. We bend it. If it bends, it's because we're bending it.
And I would say to paraphrase them, it bends toward belonging. It bends toward belonging. That if you look at the arc of human history over the last several thousand years, it's been up and down, but it's moving toward a space where everyone belongs. And when I say everyone, I talk about a circle of human concern or no one, but no one's outside the circle.
But I want to expand the circle just a little bit more. Someone, when I said that to someone, they said, "What about the earth itself?" Said, the word human comes in word humus, which means of the earth. So when we fully lean into our humanity, it means we're in relationship with the earth.
So yes, how do we create a world? How do we celebrate a world? How do we become part of the world where everyone belongs, including the earth? And that requires not just change in politics, change in techniques, requires a change in who we are and how we show up.
Marcel Schwantes:
The book again is called Belonging Without Othering. If you're watching on YouTube, there it is. And that's why the subtitle is so fitting, John, how we save ourselves and the world. That's what it's going to take.
So I appreciate you so much being here. John, if people want to connect with you, where can it go? Where can they visit you and find out about all your resources and all that?
John A. Powell:
If you type into the URL, Othering Belonging Institute, you see Berkeley. We're right there. And we have free university classes, classes on bridging, classes on empathetic listening, classes on belonging. There's actually a book club on the book online, and they're all open to the public. So reach out to us. We have a newsletter and we'd like to hear from you.
Marcel Schwantes:
Fantastic. And I'll be sure to put that link and other links to find John on the show notes of this episode. So go check it out. So this episode is officially over, but we're going to see John again. If you are a subscriber to my Substack, head on over there because we're going to keep the conversation going. The link to it is in the show notes as well.
I'm going to ask John more practical questions about, for example, what specific strategies or policies do I need to implement to foster a place of belonging at work? So we're going to get into that. And other things around belonging and inclusion to help you become a more effective leader, head on over there and we will see you in the green room. All right, John.
Thank you for listening to the Love and Action Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it, subscribe, and leave us a review. Until next time, don't forget, the future of leadership is Love In Action. Believe it, practice it, and watch your leadership and business flourish.
