Other Negative Organizational Impacts

00:06 Let's think about some other ways where microaggressions, assumptions and stereotypes can have negative impacts in any type of organization.

00:15 One of the things and I'm going to start off with the assumption that people with accents are undocumented and making those type of references to people as illegals or assuming that they have family members who are.

00:30 So what are we gonna do with that when we make disparaging comments about reporting someone that ties into that foreigner comment that I brought up earlier.

00:38 We don't ever want to do that.

00:41 And make people feel again, like less than, because how can you thrive in an organization no matter what your role is in that organization if you do feel like less than, if you feel like you can embrace who you are, and like I said, in another segment, we'll talk about covering and code switching.

01:00 But those types of comments, those microaggressive comments are what lead to people feeling the need to do that.

01:06 We talked about dress codes, this is a huge one in terms of labeling and microaggressions happening and assuming things about people.

01:16 When certain clothes are banned, because it's someone's ethnic background or head coverings.

01:22 People should be able to embrace their culture and express themselves.

01:28 As long as you're not being offensive again in those things, I'm talking about we wouldn't want people to wear a bathing suit to work or to school or whatever.

01:36 But if I want to wear her job, because that's a part of who I am.

01:40 If I don't want to wear traditional nursing school outfits, medical school outfits.

01:45 I won't say because I don't want to, maybe that's not a part of my religion and what my culture embraces, maybe I can't do that.

01:54 Thinking back to inclusive excellence.

01:56 When we label people who wear hoodies, especially black people as a thug, or if I'm wearing my hood on my head, this has actually happened to students who were accused of cheating because they had a hood on the head because it was cold in the room.

02:11 So those kinds of things are things we need to be aware of.

02:14 If we have casual dress at work and someone wants to wear whatever it is that's non offensive, then we should allow that self expression and freedom of expression and not prevent people from being successful no matter what that is.

02:30 If you're a student from progressing through a program or being labeled as a troublemaker, or going against the grain.

02:37 When we think about Black/African American people and traditional hairstyles that are usually rooted in our African ancestry braids, dreadlocks, afros, none of that means that we're less intelligent.

02:54 And why can't we express ourselves? Again, because it doesn't fall into a Eurocentric thing.

03:00 I'll give an example.

03:01 I have a colleague who told me this is a male colleague who's black that one of our white colleagues, who he's very good friends with, made a comment that his hairstyle was urban.

03:14 It was like a somewhat of a Mohawk.

03:16 And it offended him but he didn't say anything.

03:19 So my question was, first of all, who said? Because I wanted to have a conversation.

03:24 What does that actually mean? And then secondly, he didn't want to say anything.

03:30 So how would they learn from that? If you don't say, "What do you mean by that?" Again, clarifying questions are so important, rather than walking away from a situation and formulating something in your mind, because the first thing I thought about, "Is this someone that I interact with? Is this person racist? Like what even does that mean?" So that was my biggest question.

03:51 And so I was asked not to address it.

03:54 So I did, and I respected my colleague's feelings.

03:57 But thinking about those type of microaggressive statements, what does that mean, urban? I know what it means.

04:05 But I wanted to know if that person knew what it meant, and the negative impact it had on our colleague.

04:11 So thinking about everything before we say it, you know, just ask a question, "Oh, you got a new hairstyle?" Something like that.

04:19 If you wanted to make a comment, "I like it" or whatever, or just don't say anything at all.

04:24 We've talked a lot about bias and how microaggressions or a corollary of bias, and I've talked about the psychological impact.

04:33 So when we think about that, and try to contextualize it from a healthcare perspective, because I spent a lot of time talking about it in general because it does happen across spaces.

04:43 But we can understand what happens with scar tissue and repeated infarcts, right? So I like to think about that and how bias and microaggressions impact your heart and your psychological safety.

04:55 So in terms of when that continues to happen, and we think about infarcts, what happens when we have infarcts? That area deteriorates, so then it affects us self-esteem.

05:06 It affects our ability to feel psychologically safe in certain environments with certain people.

05:13 And we know that anytime scar tissue builds, then the ability to function becomes compromised.

05:19 So if you think about that, when you're doing your self-awareness assessment which it does take each of us taking a very deep look inside of ourselves.

05:28 Acknowledging that these issues happen, acknowledging that we're human, being able to be humble enough to apologize when we do, when we are, let's say the perpetrators of microaggressions.

05:42 So if I can be humbled, people can forgive you in that case, and when you're working on yourself.

05:47 Remember, this will never be a, "I have arrived at a specific place." Because you're always be human, you will always have biases.

05:55 You will commit microaggressions unintentionally, even when you're working on yourself.

06:01 You can control the intentional ones, but you may not be able to control the unintentional.

06:07 If you're on the receiving in of a microaggression just tying a bowl of this, you have to be able and courageous enough to ask the other person what they meant by something so that resolution can happen.

06:19 That's the only way you'll know what the intent was.

06:22 And that's the only way you'll be able to change the impact and forgive, show people grace.

06:29 I want to end this segment with a quote that I love from Maya Angelou that is very relatable to biases and microaggressions.

06:37 "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." And when we think about that, it's so true, because I can give you a version of what someone said I can give you a version of what someone did.

06:53 But as human beings, we never ever forget how someone made us feel and words are damaging and can be very hurtful.

07:01 So as you move forward in your transformational journey, you can use this quote to think about how your transformation, the way you change, the way you express yourself, and what that impact might be on other people.

07:15 You can use this quote as one of the tools in your transformational journey.