Gain some insights into the experiences of people of color by learning about and hearing stories related to unconscious bias, micro-aggressions, and stereotype threat.
Unconscious Bias, Micro-aggressions, and Stereotype Threat.
Penny: Why is it important for people to think about, recognize and address unconscious bias?
Eric: If you have a brain, you have a bias. It's like this is rooted into us. I mean, I've had I had a white woman once just strike up a conversation waiting in line at a restaurant. I'm waiting for them cornbread to be baked. And we’re talking. And she talking, you waiting?.. And I say yeah I’m waiting for cornbread. And she tells me: “Oh, black people and their cornbread.” Right. At first I was like, do that. In my mind. I'm saying did did she say what I just thought she said? Because it takes you off guard.
Penny: I think it's important for us to think that all these things happening all the time really does make the lived experience of persons of color or persons who look or are identified as different from white majority culture in our country…. It really makes our lived experience significantly, qualitatively different.
Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project, supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key prospective, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
Welcome back to our next discussion in the topics of race in America. I'm here with my colleagues Will Katerberg and Eric Washington. And so you get to have the perspectives of someone who identifies as African-American, someone who identifies as white and a Canadian and American, and someone who identifies as Asian-American. And we are going to try to unpack three things or terms that you may have heard when you talk about issues of race and racism in America. And tell a little bit about our own stories related to those three things.
So here they are, our three things: unconscious bias, micro-aggressions, and stereotype threat. So I'm going to start with unconscious bias. When I think of unconscious bias, it's exactly what it sounds like. So it's bias. It's ways I tend to think sometimes that can be positive and sometimes it can be negative. So bias can be either way. Right? But there are things I tend to think about people or ways I tend to react, but I don't necessarily do it on purpose. So it's unconscious, right? It's just there and I automatically react. And one example, a classic example would be I'm driving my car and I pull up to a stoplight. And there is, let's say, a man who's dressed in not the latest fashion kind of maybe clothes that look a little worn and dirty. Possibly this is a person of color, they're standing at the corner and they're holding a sign. (You might have this image, too, in your mind, from your own experience) … is something like: “homeless. Anything helps.” And there at the corner, basically panhandling, asking for money. And all my unconscious biases and my conscious biases come in and I almost reach over and press my door lock button to make sure my door is locked. Right? That's me acting before I think about it. And then I think, no, don't do that, Penny. It's not a big deal. But those are kinds of unconscious bias. So I have these things that I associate and I don't even try to think about them. I don't want to judge that person necessarily. But they're just part of kind of the world I live in, in my own head and the cultural biases that that I carry with me.
Unconscious bias. What do you guys have to add to help our our listeners understand what that is a little bit?
Eric: Yeah, definitely agree with that, but that definition and description, I like to quote my my good friend, a former colleague here at Calvin, Dr. Christina Edmonson, would say often that “if you have a brain, you have a bias.” Saying this is like rooted into us.
Penny: Mm hmm.
Eric: So there are ways and again, this is this socialized is definitely socialized. It is also psychological. But it's in this case… is how we see people, how we size people up. We we make assumptions about people quickly in our in our brains, because that's how we function. We have to feel some type of safety or comfort. So, yeah, it would be if if if I see two white men, they say around 22… 25 years old and they say they're bald-headed and they're wearing black. If I see them coming at me, walking toward me on the street, then I am going to feel some discomfort. That these these dudes may want to do me some bodily harm or call me a slur or something like that. Yeah, that's. That's a bias.
Penny: And you can have a gut reaction, you can like tense up. Even before you had a chance to think about it really consciously and then like I do this too, right, you can tense up and then you go, oh, oh, stop that. You're just over-reacting. You're being…. But we can't help it. That's the unconscious bias part, right?
Will: Yeah, I resonate with what both of you said, and I've had the exact same kind of experience that Penny described. And it's often about race, but it's it's not only about race, it's also about social class and about youth. And so you have these situations where you think someone might be a threat or you're not sure whether they'll be a threat. And it's all happening in your brain unconsciously until you notice you're doing that. In which case you start thinking consciously. This is rooted, it seems to me, is something that is necessary to exist. We encounter so many people in so many situations. And just to get along in life officially, you need to know how to react in a circumstance without having to think about it, you know, when to reach your hand out, to shake the other person's hand. You can do that without thinking about, you know, in certain settings or certain of people, you behave in certain ways, and in some sense, you’d be interpersonally and psychologically frozen, if you had to think about how you interact with each person in every encounter. Most of it you learn over time from your infancy, childhood and adolescence … how to get along and relate with people. Problem, of course, is, as both of you were describing, is when those encounters and those ways of relating are shaped by these unconscious biases about gender, economic class, race and so on. The one that is that if you raise children in contexts where they regularly encounter people who look different, whether it's different skin color or hair types of different ways of dressing, those infants will grow up into toddlers and children who are comfortable interacting with people who have different skin color, hair types and clothing and so on. If children, infants don't encounter that kind of diversity as infants, they're more likely to react and be wary when they encounter people who looked different. So it's it's woven into the nonverbal kinds of interactions we have from infancy on and shape and shape our unconscious knowing how to interact with people. And I guess that gets to the sense of how deeply rooted racism and gender assumptions can be. We're learning them from before the time we can talk or even understand what other people are saying when they’re talking.
Penny: I think you're kind of saying it could be helpful to minimize or decrease a person's unconscious fear of otherness or difference, if they've been exposed to a lot of different things throughout their childhood. But I think that we can start that journey right now as adults, too. Right? I can try to watch movies, read books, listen to TED talks or podcasts, or get to know people or go to different worship services where I'm exposing myself to people who look different than I do, who maybe come from a different background and are just people and get to know them. And that sort of gives my mind more evidence to fight against those unconscious biases that are basically unfair prejudgments on people who haven't even done anything to me yet. And I'm already, like, afraid of them or thinking they're going to do something or assume that they voted a certain way. But actually taking little steps now to kind of engage with more diversity in my life can help me balance those things out.
Will: I think that's right. One way to think about it, though it might be that if you start doing this as a adolescent or an adult, you're going to be consciously thinking about how you react with people and aware of your biases, whether it's gender, sexual orientation, or race. And if you do it often enough, you'll start reshaping your unconscious reactions. It'll be a more conscious process. But like almost anything else, once you learn to do it regularly, eventually it will become half conscious and then even unconscious.
Eric: I understand all that good stuff. and I mean from K through 8, I was in classrooms that were integrated. I mean really, really integrated, not simply de-segregated. Well, at the same time… So I knew I knew kids who were … enjoyed being a white. It’s like this like Will was saying …growing up in the nineteen seventies, eighties, New Orleans. Kids we’ll say white kids were really connected to their ethnic heritage, so they were identified as Irish and French or whatever, but nevertheless, I got to know those kids. And I also could soak in culture around me through media, you know, television, radio. Listen to top 40 music of pop. But the reverse. Was was it always the case? You know, so I could flow in and out of white spaces or integrated spaces, but my my white friends, they never came to my neighborhood, hardly ever.
So there's I think… this in our context, the United States historically, there's been this circle, and at present, there's this imbalance. And when we talk about, you know, kind of dismantle or at least check and dismantle, check unconscious bias, I think I think the onus might be on those who are participants and occupiers of the majority culture rather than those who are in other cultures.
Penny: Why is it important for people to think about, recognize, and address unconscious bias?
Eric: Number one. You want to recognize people as individuals, but at the same time, people clump people together, certain folk. Oh, they're all like this. All Asians are like this, all African-Americans like this, all Latinos like this. And all white people are like, that's unhealth. something. That's one one way. And then another way would be, again, this this gets into like stereotyping and everything. Is that you… You don't want to like, say, criminalize a person of color. You know, you don't want to automatically think that if you see young African-American kids, a teenager in a certain space, you dress a certain way, she's dressed a certain way, … that that person's up to no good. And, you know, like like we have, especially in the last year, the last couple of years, all these calls on a young, young African-American woman and sitting in her dorm lobby or apartment lobby or whatever, and some white woman calls the police like or calls the campus police like she doesn't belong there. So is those are two things. I think it's important to check these these these unconscious biases.
Penny: I think in some ways, unconscious bias plays a role, too, in things like the shooting of young men of color by both police officers and other residents of the country because they perceive a danger. Right? They come with some unconscious bias and then they act on that. Assuming the worst, basing that on their biases, things maybe they've seen in movies or they've convinced themselves could be true of any person who looks like that. And that causes them to be fearful or to be protective, to phrase it a different way, and to do things that are actually really harmful. I feel like that's one of the reasons we need to at least talk about unconscious bias and become more aware of our own biases so that we don't act on them in ways that are actually unfair, are prejudging people, are placing them into categories that they don't deserve to be placed in at that moment. And it can result in, let's face it, they can result in someone dying.
Will: Absolutely. This is not a racial example, but a gendered one. The unconscious assumption reflecting unconscious assumptions about masculinity and femininity that women are, by nature, nurturers in a way that men are not that good. And I've talked to colleagues here and tell them that as women colleagues who when students don't experience them as nurturing, but as forceful or strong or what have you, they're surprised and offended by it in a way that they wouldn't be if a male professor was behaving in the same way because they wouldn't have the same unconscious and often without noticeable conscious assumptions about men as compared to women. And so it's it's, as you said, a matter of physical danger even death, if a police officer or a homeowner reacts to fear unconsciously to a young black man, in a way they wouldn’t let’s say, an older white man. It's also a matter of how do you get hired for jobs? How is your job performance judged? Do you get promotions? Unconscious biases in unjust ways shapes so many of our interactions. It's not just that we don't recognize people for their individual characteristics as people, we treat them as categories, and that results in injustices of a wide variety of sins.
Penny: I'd like to explore micro-aggression. This is a topic that comes up sometimes in workplaces or schools or you hear about it in communities. And I'd like to kind of unpack that a little bit, talk a little bit about what they are, how we may or may not have experienced micro-aggressions in our own lives, and why it's important to do so. And what we can do to kind of make things better in the world. Microaggression, what's your take on that and how can you help us understand that better?
Will: A microaggression, as I understand them, it's small, subtle, typically unintentional often indirect things we do that discriminate against the person from another group. The most common example that I think about and I've become conscious about as a teacher is trying to avoid conversations in classrooms that take the one or maybe two or three students of color in the class and ask them to speak for the experience of all students of color. Or … And this is this is one I've seen. I've probably done it. I can't think of a case but where you ask someone, “Where are you from?” And say it’s a person of Asian descent and they say they're from, I don’t know, Seattle, no, no “where are you really from?” In other words, you know, what part of China?
Penny: Will, this happens all the time. All the time to me.
Will: Yeah. Yeah. And and. And and this is one where it's unintentional, and even well-meaning, you are genuinely trying to learn about a person, but you've assumed that if they're white. So from here, in some sense, in a way, they must be from there, not here. And so I've gotten very mindful when I ask students whether they're white or whether they're students of color, asking “where is home?” And this leaving a very open ended for how they define “home.” And just try to avoid “where you from,” because even if I intended to mean and maybe expect them to say I'm from Seattle, they might hear me as asking and they might think that I'm expecting they're going to say I'm from Seoul or from the other part of the world. And so in order to avoid that particular micro-aggression, I've changed the way I ask people. Instead of asking where they're from, I ask them, where's home for you?
Penny: That's a great like little tiny tip that we could all do. And I think that would really be nice, because then it gives that other person kind of the opportunity to share more or less about themselves, whatever they feel they need to do or want to do or feel safe doing at that particular moment. And then I think it's helpful for us to realize that our curiosity, even if it's really well-intentioned, our curiosity about that other person is not more important, more important than that person's feeling, let's say, welcome, safe, respected, so that if even if I want to know more, if if they don't feel if it doesn't feel like they want to offer that, I should just respect that and move on to a different topic. We're just getting to know each other in a few sentences. It's not a big deal, people.
Eric: Yeah.
Will: And it's really complicated, even aside from things like ethnicity and race. I grew up the son of a minister, and so we moved over a few years. And if you ask me where are you from? Well, I really have no clue how to answer the question.
Eric: Right, right, right. Yeah. And I mean, I've definitely experienced micro-aggressions. They uh those … and micro …they’re small, but they also accumulate. In some cases, I think I think when I think context matter and who is the perpetrator of the micro-aggression. When it comes to micro-aggression, I've experienced where they come from, a white person, I feel it and I feel, you know, I feel some kind of way about that. I mean, I've had I had a white woman once just striking up a conversation waiting in line at a restaurant. I'm waiting for them cornbread to be baked. And we’re talking. And she talking, you waiting?.. And I say yeah I’m waiting for cornbread. And she tells me: “Oh, black people and their cornbread.” Right. At first I was like, do that. In my mind. I'm saying did did she say what I just thought she said? Because it takes you off guard. It takes you off guard and you have to process. And by the time you're able to really respond, the moment is past. So. So you walked away with that lingering thought. Was it last year? You know, it couldn’t have been last year but 2019 last day of February. I'm walking out of KFC and an old white man. You know, I greet him. I greet him with “good afternoon.” And his response was, “This is the last day of Black History Month.” And, you know. Okay, it sure is. And I keep walking. That's a microaggression. Was was he trying to be mean? No, I wouldn't say so. But is that how you would greet any other person, why you…? Because because you see me? And you see “Oh, he he's an African-American person” that you're going to tell me that …
Penny: on your way into KFC, past a stranger.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah. I'm walking out with my stuff. He's coming in or was it Burger King. It doesn't matter.
Penny: Right.
Eric: But I had a situation where I didn't feel any. Any type of, I would say, insult. I was I was in the airport, although I was in the airport in in Brussels a few years ago, and it was a little kid. And he I think he was biracial. I think his mother was the mother was white. His father was was black. And I'm waiting on the flight, the flight, the flights going to the visitors going to Monrovia, Liberia, but is also …it’s a layover in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
This is I'm sitting. Wait, wait, no, my flight and the little kids sit next to me and he looks at me. He says, where are you from? And I said I said, the states. And he said, no, where are you really from?
Penny: Nice. Nice.
Eric: So I couldn’t feel like this kid is being insulting to me. He was just being curious.
Penny: He's just being curious.
Eric: And he being curious. So I didn't take that with anything. I thought it was cute. But I've gotten questions for most of my adult life. People ask me, oh, are you Dominican, are you Puerto Rican or you Ethiopian or you Nigerian? I have had that experience. But but they've never it's never been like, where are you from? What you really from? So AND also, whenever I've been abroad, wherever I've been, whether it's been on Europe or in Africa or the Caribbean, I'm never American because they assume that Americans are white. So, …
Penny: So, I think another thing to know about microaggression is they can be like relatively harmless and coming from a good place or a curious place like the young little person that had that conversation with Will (*Eric). I know I spent two hours on a flight to Florida, one time sitting next to an older man, and we had a lot of conversation. It was just like a really pleasant conversation for about an hour of the flight. And we're landing in Florida. And he turns to me at the end of talking to me for an hour and says, you know, your English is almost perfect.
Eric: almost, almost,
Penny: almost perfect.
Will: Truth be told, Penny, your colleagues and talking about the this.
Penny: Yeah, right. And it was coming from a well-meaning place at the end. It wasn't just, you know, in and out of Burger King. It was after an hour of conversation with this person. And so sometimes micro-aggressions can come from just well-meaning places. And they're not, you know, intended to be harmful and they're not truly physically harmful. But other times microaggressions actually can be more harmful or a little dangerous. I think of the Amy Cooper event in Central Park not long ago where a white woman was walking her dog, took the dog off leash, and a person came up to her then who was a birdwatcher and said, oh, could you please let your dogs are not supposed to be loose in the park, which is true. And this person who said that happened to be an African-American man, and then the white woman, Amy Cooper, said… kind of threatened to say, to say, I'm going to call the police and tell them that you're harassing me. And that, in another way, is kind of a microaggression, too. It's just a more blatant, I would say, mean one with some different kinds of consequences.
But micro-aggressions can run that whole gamut. Right? And and I think, too, you know, Eric, you're so gracious to say and really just smile and kind of take the comments of that little boy in a good way. And the deal for me with microaggression and what I've learned, especially from some of my African-American friends and colleagues, is it's not just the one microaggression from the cute little boy in the airport or the nice older gentleman on the airplane. It's that this can happen, you know, it can happen several times a day and then, you know, a dozen or two dozen times a week or how many times is that a month. And so it's kind of like a papercut where one is a little annoying, but it's not a big deal. But if you had dozens of them every day, every week, your whole life long or the same cut like that, that same spot kept getting cut,. it.. Over time that has an effect. And it can really be hurtful and it can be damaging to who you are. And it can it can become a little hard to function in spaces where you're constantly waiting for that next papercut, you're constantly waiting for that next jab, that next reminder that you look different or they think differently of you or put you in a different category.
Eric: That's right.
Will: Even the harmless ones. And you described your encounter with the person who said you speak English almost perfect. You know, as as relatively harmless, but it still has the cumulative impact. Labeling some people as insiders and some people as foreign or “only recent”. So even the harmless ones that are experienced as harmless nonetheless, can still have a kind of a social ranking or layering or effect.
Eric: Right. That is right. And black folk can do it, too.
Will: What you just said, Eric, connects for me with a book that I read recently where an African-American woman who regularly does diversity workshops describes how her son on an airplane experience a young African-American man as a danger and the author reflects on this, that it's not just that biases are held by white people against black people. But black people themselves sometimes show those biases, those … unconscious biases.
Eric: That's right.
Will: And so I would imagine then similarly, the micro-aggressions are between people. They're not necessarily between people of different racial or ethnic or genders, but there nonetheless are these cumulative experiences that we call micro-aggression.
Eric: I would say that there's there's this big macro macro source that it comes from: history, context, present realities here in the United States, where we have looked upon certain classes of people, not just races, classes of people as dangerous or unseemly. So we we you know, a middle class black person will feel uncomfortable going into a black neighborhood that that is low income. So it has…it has to do with race, but it also has to do with with with class. Yeah, I mean, a black person adopting what Abram Kendi would call out what he would say “Class racism” or “class racialism,” as I would put it.
Penny: Stereotype threat is a term that I first got to know not that long ago, maybe about a decade ago. And reading the book by Claude M. Steele really helped me understand stereotype threat a little better. I'm wondering if you can help our listeners understand what stereotype threat is. And I'll chime in, too, but I'm going to let maybe Eric or Will start that conversation.
Eric: Stereotype threat is do you have a person or you have a stereotype of a group of people based on race, class, gender, and it could be terms of threat. really, in terms of criminality, that that that that type of threat, so … and deeming certain groups of people who occupy a certain class position as dangerous. It plays out in a number of different ways. I mean, I have my own stories with this. I mean, this. I've been dealing with this my whole life, ever since I was a little boy being followed in … in stores or going going to the counter at a convenience store, and, you know, the cashier who in this case was was black, you know, basically thought I had stolen something. You know, I emptied out my pockets to show him, look, I didn't steal anything. Or having a person, in this case, a white woman, at dusk, I was maybe 11, 12 years old sense my presence behind her. I was minding my own business, and she stops to let me go ahead of. So, yeah, those are stereotypes and threats and the threat is making me as an African-American at the time, boy, as dangerous, I'm I'm I'm a potential criminal,…a threat to that person or I'm prone to steal that sort of thing.
Penny: I think for me to like the flip side of stereotype threat or the related piece of it is that as a person of color, I'm aware that other people may see me certain ways. And that creates for me a different kind of stress. So I, I want to fully admit that it's going to be really different for a person who looks like me, an Asian American, than it would be for a person who looks like Eric, more African-American. But I still carry this with me. So, for example, I'm driving and in our city about a decade ago, we started seeing more of these roundabouts, you know, in the middle of the intersections. Instead, set of stoplights, they put like a round circle, and everyone's supposed to drive in the same direction around the circle and then exit, if you will, to make the turns. But you're still, yeah, it's not like a stoplight. It's this roundabout thing. And these are fairly new in my city. And I'm driving up to a roundabout. I know how they're supposed to work. So I'm like slowing down because there's a car to my right coming into that same intersection, but from my right. And I'm I was there first. So in theory, I'm allowed to go first around the circle. And the person on my right who I just want to say was in a pickup truck and looked like a white male is honking his horn at me and basically gesturing out the window like you stupid woman driver. And in my mind, I'm reading you stupid woman Asian driver. And what he did is he turned left in front of me, going the wrong way around the roundabout. And I was so mad. There was nothing I could do about it, right? He had a big truck and he turned in front of me. But. This is an example of stereotype that we're at the same time that I was annoyed and I really felt that I was in the right and he was in the wrong, I felt like, oh, no, he thinks that I, an Asian woman driver, don't know the rules of the road and am a bad driver. And that's kind of threat type threat. Right? Whereas a person like me, the person of color, knows what the other person or at least I think I know what the other person is placing on me and thinking about me and people who look like me. And then I have to live and navigate through that every single day with different people in different ways.
Will: Well, yeah, when I think of the stereotype threat, I think of where we create situations that put someone from a stereotype group in the position of confirming the stereotype we have around them.
Penny: Yes.
Will: And when Eric was talking about the example that came to mind was how a white person or white people, maybe police officers even, who perceive African-American men as dangerous, then interact with them and relate to them in ways that maybe push them or warn them, and not surprisingly, frustrate an African-American man and he gets angry. And that confirms the stereotype that African-American men are easily emotional and often angry. And I or someone like me who's white or a group of whites have created a situation where we're interacting with someone in the way that confirms our stereotypes about them. And I can imagine these other examples of that that would be related to gender, perhaps creating situations where women end up acting uncertain. And this confirms some … like the driving example. Someone someone creates a situation where you look uncertain and that confirms their stereotype about you, even though they're the ones who created it.
Penny: And for me to I don't I often say things will happen. I'm like, I don't want that person to see me doing this and then think all Asians or all Asian women or all women do this in this way. Right? So that's part of my consciousness. And I feel sometimes like, get over it, Penny. What's the big deal? Just do what you want to do or do it however you want to do it. But I'm I'm always conscious of that. Like I don't want to feed into someone else's negative stereotypes about my identities, whether it's Asian or female or short people or whatever. Right? So that's part of stereotype threat, too.
Will: And I would imagine there are ways there are ways in which people in a majority culture or in a privileged position can be expected to behave in certain ways too. The important difference to keep in mind, though, is that there's a rather large difference between stereotype threats or being put in a situation where you're expected to behave in a way that is characteristic of your race or gender or what have you… You know, there are ones that can reinforce privilege as opposed to reinforcing being in a subordinate position.
Penny: And this is related too. You know, when you hear about a mass shooting on the news and then slowly the information trickles out. I usually I'm sitting there going, oh, please, please don't let the shooter be a person of color,
Eric: Of course,
Penny: Because if it's a person of color or a minority. It could be a Muslim. So, you know, or it could be an Asian looking person or a a dark-skinned person, then suddenly..then suddenly I feel like everyone's thinking, oh, those those Asians.
Eric: That's right.
Penny: What are they doing in our country or those Muslims. You know, we shouldn't. And suddenly, because this one shooter had this identity, now the whole nation is feeling like that group of people is a danger to me. But if the shooter's white, no one's thinking, oh, all those white people, we shouldn't let them into my country. And that's kind of like part of stereotype threat, too, right? That the one person from the minority or the person of color can become this threat if if you associate that with something negative, that doesn't happen to white people.
Eric: That's right. That's right, and that's that's part of living in a racialized society. Is that. people of color no matter who they are. If one person does something, if one person messes up, it reflects upon everybody. We don't have that out. We we we're not we're not individuals. We're a collective. So, yeah. Doesn't matter, yeah, you're right, Penny. I do the same thing, I'm waiting. Oh, please don't let this person be whatever, don’t let this person be a a person of color, cause then the microscope will be reset upon me. The target will be on my back again.
Will: mm hmmm.
Penny: Mm hmm. So the three ideas that we've talked about in this conversation, the unconscious bias, the micro-aggressions in the stereotype threat, I think it's important for us to think that all these things happening all the time really does make the lived experience of persons of color or persons who look or are identified as different from white majority culture in our country… It really makes our lived experience significantly, qualitatively different. I think the fact that our lived experience is different because of these kinds of things, because of the unconscious bias, the micro-aggression, and the stereotype threat, I think it just needs to be recognized. And then we need to think as a society, as our whole country, but different communities in our society: How can we address these? How can we maybe acknowledge and give ourselves experiences that help us unpack our unconscious bias? How can we recognize when we're about to do a micro-aggression and stop it, or even when we have, to say, oh, I'm sorry, that wasn't appropriate? Let me let me rephrase that. I think that's OK. Like, I would really welcome that if someone said, oh, no, where are you really from? And then caught themselves and said, oh, I'm sorry, that's not appropriate. You share whatever you want to about your own self. Like that would go, wow, thanks. And then I probably would tell them way more than they wanted to know, right?
Yeah. So I just think it's helpful for us to think about ways that we can just become more aware of these kinds of things in our everyday interactions with people in our workplace, our dorm rooms, our houses of worship, or our neighborhoods.
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