hello this is a video of an example ally skills workshop recorded without an audience the reason we record it without an audience is that part of the format of the ally skills workshop is to allow people to feel safe making mistakes and taking risks so we can't record a live audience however audience participation will be simulated in this video by extra slides that summarize example audience responses that i've seen in the 10 years of teaching this workshop these slides are not included in the workshop when taught to a live audience you can see the normal slides and a bunch of other materials at this url i just for the rest of this video i will be pretending that i am teaching the workshop to a live audience hello and welcome to the ally skills workshop i'm valerie aurora my pronouns are she her and hers and i'll talk a little bit more about myself in a moment the format of the workshop will be a 30-minute introduction followed by about two hours of group discussion of real-world scenarios in which somebody can take action as an ally we'll end with a 10-minute wrap-up including a goal-setting exercise and question and answer period i will have a long break every hour and short breaks every half hour so a little bit about me uh my name is valerie aurora my pronouns are she her and hers i'm the founder of frame shift consulting which is a diversity equity and inclusion consulting firm that mostly teaches ally skills i've taught ally skills to over 4 000 people around the world and across many different places in the us before i did this i was a software developer and i specialized in linux and file systems for over 10 years i mention this because i want to talk about technical privilege so if you work at a tech company you probably have noticed this we're more likely to listen to people who are technical even in areas that are not part of their expertise so if i as a file systems developer say here's the file systems we should use for this project you should probably listen to me but if i as a file systems developer say hey here's how we should do hiring or here here's where we should go to lunch i shouldn't get so much people shouldn't listen to me in those areas more than anyone else but we do that's that's why it's called technical privilege technical privilege is complicated for example it interacts with other kinds of privileges it's more likely to be granted to white men as a white woman i often have to say to remind people that i used to be a software engineer so i've just explained technical privilege to you and in doing so i've made it less powerful and so i hope that you will learn how to do this with other privilege and the rest of this function what is privilege well we'll find out in a minute all right so what are ally skills let's talk about some terminology privilege is an unearned advantage emphasis on unearned given by society to some people but not all oppression is sort of the the background privilege or vice versa depends on your perspective one that you need both of them to make each other happen oppression is the widespread inequality that is present throughout society it helps people with more privilege and harms those with fewer privileges within this context a marginalized person is a member of a group that is the main target of a system of oppression so systems of oppression hurt a lot of people but there's a group of people that hurt it hurts the most and then an ally is someone that society gives some privilege to that is working to do two things and oppression and understand their own privilege so you know just these two things our actions we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment so being a marginalized person takes no action you just are marginalized people do it to you you can just be sitting in a chair and oppression will happen to you but allyship is an action not an ally it's all about what you do so that's why i talk about ally skills instead of allies we're only being allies when we're taking action depending on the situation you may switch between being a marginalized person and being able to take action as an ally people often want to know am i marginalized can i act as an ally and the answer is it really depends on the context so i'll use myself as an example as a white woman if my race is most relevant to a situation in the united states and in many parts of the world then i will be able to act as an ally most likely uh if my gender is what's most relevant to the situation um i'll more likely be a marginalized person and have a hard time uh making change all right so here's an example of these things so privilege here's a privilege you may have the ability to interview for a job and have the interviewer assume that if you have children you will continue doing a good job at work have children now or in the future oppression might look like this family expectations that mothers do more child care belief that mothers don't want to do paid work a financial system is unwilling to extend credit to mothers laws that put more burdens on mothers than fathers and you know paying men more than women so this isn't a complete list it's just a few of the examples of this how this system of impression works a marginalized person here would be any woman who wants to work for pay for an employer regardless of her plans for children systems of oppression don't care about our individual goals and ideas they just stereotype us so an ally then would be a man who does things like take on significant child care responsibilities donates to women's causes votes for feminist candidates and laws speaks up at work about against stereotypes about mothers and reads news articles about privileges that fathers enjoy and mothers don't so you notice that there are more people in the world than men and women at this point we don't have strong stereotypes about non-binary people about whether or not they are parents or won't be good at working when they are not when they are parents all right so why would we focus on ally skills there's a bunch of reasons for this i have an entire talk about this called focus on ally skills but here's a very short version of this in an experiment researchers found that when marginalized people work to increase diversity supervisors give them worse performance evaluations but when more privileged people work to increase diversity it does not harm the performance evaluations and it may improve them so the really short version is that people when they are in a position to act as an ally they have more time power energy resources and people are more likely to listen to them and they're much less likely to be harmed so in this workshop we're just going to focus on ally skills we're just going to assume that oppression exists it's bad we should try to stop it all that's possible to stop it we're really going to avoid giving advice to marginalized people even if they're asking this workshop are really going to focus on what can somebody do as an ally if you disagree with this it's no problem just argue about it somewhere somewhere other than this workshop as a note i don't i'm not a lawyer if i were i wouldn't give you legal advice in this workshop and i don't know what your employer's rules are around human resources people that sort of things so i can't answer any questions about those all right so here's your first exercise identifying your power and privilege how do you know when you're going to be able to act as an ally one of the issues with this is that often power and privilege are not as visible or are completely invisible to people who have them so downloading this exercise and filling it out will help you figure out when you can take action this exercise is voluntary you don't have to do it and when you're filling out this exercise there's instructions on the top that include this as well if people assume that you have a privilege that you do not you can make your own decision about whether to check it off on the list all right give you a couple of minutes for that so what did you think do you have more or less power than you thought do you have more or less privilege than you thought are there any surprises or things you hadn't thought about before all right here's some example audience responses most often i get something like i was surprised by how many boxes i checked i am used to thinking about the ways that i am at a disadvantage but this showed me i have more power than i think and then uh a couple of questions i often get why did you include not a mother as a privilege so this is a this is a tough one because many motherhood is not equally available to all and it is highly rewarding for many people what i'm talking about is in the context of the workplace if you are not a mother you have advantages because the workplace is designed for people who are not primary caregivers and women are stereotyped when they are when they are caregivers as the primary caregiver so this is not there's no criticism of being a mother it's just saying that society does not treat mothers very well another question is why do you include educated as a source of power or privilege so there's a section of of on this worksheet of things that are a combination of power and privilege so a combination of things that you worked for and things that were kind of given you so education is not equally available to all at the same time many of us worked very very hard for our education so it's just recognizing that while you you did work very hard for your education if you have privilege it was easier for you to get and there were fewer challenges put in your way all right so we're just going to talk about the basics of ally skills right now and in the scenarios we'll go into way more detail but this is just to get you started so when you're acting as an ally the first the first good idea is to be short simple and firm often we think that we need to come up with some sort of like long complicated response that takes into account all of the options that includes seven research citations often all you need to do is say we don't do that here or no way man or something as simple as wow doing it's much easier to say something simple so if you lower the standards for your response you're more likely to respond at all it's better to say something than nothing don't even try to be funny so there's some interesting issues with humor often when we're trying to be funny we are making fun of a marginalized group for example somebody might respond to sexism by making a homophobic joke that doesn't help anybody so i'm just saying take the take the pressure off yourself don't even try to be funny if you do try to be funny try to get somebody else to review your joke to see if it's classist or something like that first so play for the audience often when we are responding to something we're focusing on the person which has done something terrible the issue with that is that often that person is not going to change their mind but people who are watching often have not made up their mind and they're standing around wondering yeah do we make homophobic jokes around here and if you say we don't do that here we don't make homophobic jokes they'll say oh okay yeah that's what i thought so it's much easier to change their minds so once you've come up with a few simple responses for common situations uh you get to practice them so when you're brushing your teeth or walking down the street or in the elevator or something like that you can say we don't do that here we don't do that here we don't do that here and then when the situation actually rises it'll be much easier for you to say something or do something finally pick your battles so you are a finite human being with finite time and energy you can't and oppression is everywhere it surrounds us constantly you can't fight it all of the time what we're looking for is the situations in which you have the most power and the most chance of making a difference so the biggest return on your effort and to act in those times and then recover for the next time that you get to take action all right so i mentioned a little bit about this talking about why i don't recommend even trying to be funny when you're trying to help one group as an ally don't harm another group so here's a list i try to run down when i'm thinking in advance what am i going to do in this situation is my response sexist homophobic transphobic racist ableist ageist classist casteist yeah and am i criticizing someone's body or attractiveness if i am that's probably not helping anybody so just just spend some time to think about this one that's particularly difficult is classism and ableism all right so i've just been talking about a lot of difficult stuff including racism and transphobia so i like to have a little break these are fennec foxes they're my favorite fox i think they're the cutest fox by far they are very very fluffy and they have gigantic ears which is on topic because an important ally skill is listening so be inspired by the cute fennec foxes so at this point a lot of people ask what if i make a mistake and the answer is acknowledge apologize and move on if you wait until you're perfect to start acting as an ally you'll never start acting as an ally so what's important is to learn how to what to do when you do make a mistake so i just want to share one of my mistakes that was relatively embarrassing for me so i used to help run a conference that was mostly women you could see a photo from one of these conferences and in this conference we asked people to try not to say you guys it's not a huge deal but we were just making an effort during this conference i was on the microphone talking to everybody and said you guys about five times in a row fortunately a friend tapped me on my shoulder whispered to me that i had done this and i said hey everyone i know we asked you to not use you guys i know i just did it several times i'm really sorry about that i thought i had done a better job of getting this out of my vocabulary and i'll keep working on it all right so let's move on to the next part of the conference and that was it so yeah just when you make a mistake apologize acknowledge it correct yourself move on all right so i will take about a three minute break here and i highly recommend getting up moving around and then coming back refreshed okay so this is we're going to talk about some guidelines for our group discussions that we're about to start in a few more minutes so help us create a safer space here are some rules for the workshop you can leave a return at any time without explanation you just don't need to say why this workshop is designed to be voluntary if you aren't here voluntarily see rule number one you only have to share information in the groups if you feel comfortable doing so if you have if you know something that's relevant but you don't feel like you can handle talking about it right now that's fine please anonymize any stories you tell in this workshop or you repeat outside the workshop joining groups is optional you can just not accept the invitation and tell me using the chat if you don't want to be in a group with someone i often recommend that people aren't in the same group with somebody that they report to and there's plenty of other reasons that you might not want to be in a group with someone that say nothing bad about either of you all right so in each of your group discussions each group the first thing you'll do is choose a note taker and a moderator the moderator's job is to interrupt people who are speaking too much and invite others to speak over video the problem is usually people not speaking enough so be prepared to kick off the discussion with by asking somebody what they think sometimes the moderator speaks too much so feel free to moderate the moderator we just want to have somebody who feels like it's their job the note taker writes down some summer a summary of what you talked about and reports out that that out when we come back to the main group the note taker should be someone different each time because it's hard to participate fully in the discussion if you are taking notes there aren't any misleading scenarios i'm not trying to trick you you in this scenario means a potential ally that might literally be you or you might be talking about a theoretical person sometimes there's nobody in the group who themselves could act as an ally that's normal focus on what an ally can do not what a marginalized person can do if the whole world wants to give advice to marginalized people we're just going to carve out this time for talking about what allies can do if necessary make up additional details about the scenario sometimes people want to know for example if somebody's a manager just decide for yourselves if that person is a manager or not and then let us know in your report out you'll get a one minute warning from zoom when the discussion is almost up just keep talking during that one minute and you'll be returned to the main room automatically finally note taker write down your breakout room number it's hard to remember and we do report outs by breakout room number all right we're ready for our scenarios and group discussion so here's our first scenario what could an ally do at a meeting a woman makes a suggestion but no one picks up on it later on in the meeting a man makes the same suggestion and is given credit for it so first question is how many people have seen this raise your hand or in the video or type in the chat or something else this obviously happens a lot more in a lot more situations than just men and women all right great okay so a lot of people have seen this uh my next question is who could best act as an ally in this situation there are some example responses the meeting leader that's that's good that's somebody who has power and influence a man this is the question i want to to this is the answer i want to get for sure a manager this is somebody with relative power these are all three correct uh this fourth one i get a lot but it's wrong anyone can act as an ally and should in this situation so it's true that anyone can act they're just not gonna have the benefits and power of being an ally if they don't have relevant power or privilege part of what we're trying to do in this workshop is take all of the pressure off marginalized people to speak up and act in situations where they have the least power we're trying to get people who have more power and privilege to take action so i really want people to to focus on who has power who has privilege all right so here are some example summarized group report outs and how i might respond to them so we talked about how this could be happening accidentally so we should assume good impact so it is true that often this is this happens subconsciously people are not paying attention to people to other people speaking often there's a lot of good research showing that people simply stop listening when less powerful people are speaking or people that they think are just not important are speaking so whether or not it's happening consciously or subconsciously it's part of a pattern that's caused by this system of oppression called sexism so assuming good intent there it has a lot of issues with it there's a link in the handout to an article talking about the problems with good intent if you search for good intent and how it harms diversity and inclusion you'll get a long explanation of the issues with that but basically the problem is people who experience a lot of oppression often get a lot of people being concerned about the good intent of the person who has been harming them so we need to focus less on that all right another common response we talked about a lot of issues but didn't come up with an answer for what to do so this is this is fine when this happens so i will do my example response here that's great i'm really glad that you talked about the issues that were happening and became more aware of them and we'll see what the next group has to say all right here's another response the allies should say hey i think so-and-so was talking about that earlier but we couldn't decide if asking the original person to speak would be putting them on the spot so i really like trying to direct the conversation back to the person who originally had the idea even if they don't want to speak about it you're just acknowledging that they had the idea first the way that you handle the situation of am i putting this person on the spot do they want to speak is you ask them so i like to my favorite response for this is something like oh hey i'm glad you're picking up on so-and-so's idea that they brought up earlier in the meeting so-and-so is there anything you'd like to add and then that makes it really comfortable for them to either say yes there is something i'd like to add or no that's fine just keep going so that's that's the answer to a lot of the oh i don't know if i'm doing the right thing for this marginalized person but the answer is ask them all right so here's a here's an overall tip for this situation meetings without explicit structure inherit their structure from society at large and that means they're reinforcing the systems of oppression that are happening so you have to make a special effort to fight oppression in your meetings and that means structures so you can use things like agendas they seem super boring but that gives everyone time to prepare and to know to to prepare the things they want to speak about meeting roles that we are using today i'll talk about those more in a moment reserved speaking time for people so starting each meeting with one minute for everyone to speak if they want to you can use hand signals i love the hand signal where there's i want i want to speak maybe as a hand and then i just have a quick note right now that just very briefly i need to say is one finger something like that so i'm going to talk a little bit more about meeting roles a facilitator is somebody who runs the meeting and moves moves it through all the different topics the moderator is the way i'm using this term you don't have to use it this way is the person who is paying attention to whether everyone's getting a chance to speak so looking around seeing if there's somebody who wants to speak keeping track of how much time people are spending speaking the note taker takes note the the important part about this role is there needs to be a fair way to distribute this work so if there's somebody whose literal job is taking notes that's great if not there needs to be a fair system such as a round robin or a list or rolling a dice something like that to choose who's going to take notes finally the timekeeper is somebody who pays attention to how much time is available for each topic and reminds people that they need to start wrapping up so that they're able to get to everything so one person can do multiple of these roles this these roles can be split up between multiple people i especially love having more than one note taker with a shared document in this workshop i'm the facilitator and the timekeeper and then each of you has a moderator and a note taker so you can learn more about these roles at my website under meeting skills all right so as we go forward with the rest of our discussions i just want to raise your awareness of the dynamics that are happening within them so ask yourself who's speaking the most in your group is someone having difficulty being heard are there any patterns you're noticing related to gender race age or anything else and how do these discussions compare to ones you have in other contexts such as at work or at home or in your hobbies do you like it all right we're going to take a long break about 10 minutes and then we will get started again all right welcome back here's our next scenario what could an ally do you are in a meeting about hiring more people from a marginalized racial group into positions of power at your company a colleague of yours says it's great to hire more people from this group but let's not lower the bar before you can reply another colleague says oh yes we'll be careful not to lower the bar all right so my first question here is what is the system of oppression that's happening in this scenario so people are often very uncomfortable with talking about racism so it takes a long time for them to say racism there's long silence there then eventually i get that or i have to say it myself then i ask who could act as an ally i might get more long silence people will often say the meeting leader that's always a good choice a manager another source of power this is what i definitely want to hear people say someone not from the marginalized racial group so in the united states this is often going to be a white person in all cases someone from the dominant racial group is another way to put it but i really need people to be able to say racism dominant racial group or the name if the scenario talks about a specific racial group to to be able to say that right when people come back here are some of the things that they say very often i get we talked about the benefits of racial diversity and about telling this person who said this about them but we didn't get to an answer about what to do now and we realized that actually that's not the question yeah the people who often go into a lot of business cases for justifying this when actually the issue is something else entirely which i will talk about in a moment we couldn't decide whether to say something in the meeting or take them aside afterwards so this comes up on a lot of the discussions around scenarios so this is something that i would respond to this way which is yeah so often we don't have to choose whether we're going to do something now we can actually do something now and take them aside later we can take them aside later and then take it to their manager depending on the results right so the thing i like to keep in mind is who is going to be harmed if i don't do something now and in this particular situation that it's discussing hiring and so it could have a huge impact on people's lives all right so here's another group report out i'll get we suggested to ask that person to explain why they think we might have to lower the bar so i love this one asking somebody to explain other bigoted assumptions instead of just making those assumptions for them often make somebody realize what they're doing or they're too embarrassed to just spell it out so the assumption that they have here well i'll talk about that in a moment but i just want to say first that the caveat on this technique asking someone to explain you know i don't get it what do you mean don't do that if there's somebody present who is the target of their bigoted opinion you may still do it but it's just that they don't need to hear again all of the terrible ideas that people have about them all right so the problem here is that there's an assumption that at present everyone has an equal chance of being hired regardless of race so this is a goal but it is not the reality because you're having this meeting if this was true then it would it would simply be that it would be the case that people in this marginalized racial group were not as good in some fundamental way and that's what people are saying by let's be careful not to lower the bar is that they think the issue is just that people aren't as good in this group the reality is that when you look at vast amounts of research racialized people face a much higher bar than members of the dominant race in the hiring process and a bunch of other places just an amazing number of ways getting into schools just any kind of barrier is going to be higher for marginalized people so i talk about myself in this situation as a white person i haveskipped large parts of the hiring process before and i don't think that would have happened if i were a black woman or a woman of color in the united states so the reframe i like to use here in this situation is actually the problem is that people in this group have to pass a higher bar and we need to fix that so really coming in and saying like hey the problem is in our hiring process there are lots of qualified people we can hire more of them if we fix the problems in our process that are creating this issue all right so at this point there's going to be one to three more scenarios depending on the length of the workshop we'll have more breaks all that sort of stuff all right so thanks everyone for sitting through this long workshop it was really great to hear all of your ideas we're going to do a goal setting exercise and this is going to help you start planning how to use ally skills in your life so we'll start by downloading the goal setting exercise at this url spend about five minutes filling it out and type done in chat when you are done again this is optional you don't have to do that all right it looks like enough people are done with the goal setting exercise so we'll do some advanced ally skills and then we'll have a question and answer period so our first ally skill is speak less and listen more except when speaking up is risky so if speaking up is going to get somebody more power more money more recognition that's a great time to take a back seat and promote somebody who's more marginalized than you but if speaking up is going to get rotten tomatoes thrown at you then that's that's the time that an ally should probably be taking action specially since you're probably going to get a a less bad response treat ally actions as a bare minimum expectation so often when you start acting as an ally people will be really impressed and will want to praise you and say how great you are and give you rewards and all that sort of stuff my recommendation is direct is to respond with what that's just normal everybody who has this power should be doing that there's two reasons to do this one is it takes the focus off you as the ally and the more privileged person and then the second reason is that it encourages other people to start taking action as well and to help you out so less oh my gosh you're an amazing ally and more what everybody should do this i recommend that you follow and support leaders from marginalized groups they have the most information about what they need something i see in the tech world quite a lot is is some people not from the marginalized group showing up and saying hey i wrote you an app and inevitably the app does not do anything that is useful to this marginalized group so what you should do is find people who are already doing this work support them recommend them all that sort of stuff follow your discomfort if somebody something makes you feel bad find out more and understand why before reacting so sometimes when we're trying to act as an ally we actually do something that's harmful and somebody might let us know often then your first feeling there will be like guilt or shame and then your second feeling will be anger and really what you need to do is sit with that and figure it out and be thankful that somebody told you that you were doing harm but sometimes the reason that you feel guilty angry ashamed something like that is because somebody's being a total jerk to you so what i recommend is take your time figure it out before you react and of course when you make a mistake apologize correct yourself and move on acknowledge what you did if you know the right answer if you know how to fix it do it right then or if not figure it out later just don't make it about yourself and your feelings keep the focus on acting as an ally all right so we'll have questions and answers until everyone is done thank you all for being a great audience and give yourselves a round of visual applause all right thank you