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Description
What happens when educational interventions designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion unintentionally cause harm?
In this episode, the Backstory team is joined by Dr. Tiffany Chambers to discuss her paper, “This Is Not For Me”: A Counterstory on BIPOC Experiences of DEI Trainings. Drawing on critical race theory and counterstorytelling, the paper challenges dominant assumptions about DEI programs by centering the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) participants.
Together, the team explores how well-intentioned educational initiatives can inadvertently reproduce the very inequities they seek to address, and why elevating marginalized voices is essential to creating more equitable learning environments. Tune in for a thoughtful conversation on the unintended consequences of DEI training and what these findings mean for the future of medical education.
Timestamps
00:00 – Welcome
01:05 – Poem by Langston Hughes’: I, Too
01:35 – Personal reflections on identity, shame, and learning
08:17 – Introducing the paper
10:00 – Study methods and key concepts explained
22:27 – Hot takes on DEI programs and program evaluation
25:45 – Interview with Dr. Tiffany Chambers
26:03 – Dr. Chambers’ journey and lessons from designing educational spaces
28:50 – The backstory behind the research
31:36 – Whose responsibility is DEI education?
33:50 – Misconceptions about the paper
35:15 – Challenging traditional academic writing
36:08 – Academia, institutional change, and moving beyond DEI
38:20 – Book recommendations
38:52- Closing remarks
Paper Citation
Chambers T, O’Brien B. “This Is Not For Me”: A Counterstory on BIPOC Experiences of DEI Trainings. Teach Learn Med. 2025;37(4):468-479. doi:10.1080/10401334.2025.2471393
Transcript
00:00:00 Hannah [music plays] Hi, my name is Hannah Kakara Anderson.
00:00:06 Ben Hi, I’m Ben Kinnear.
00:00:07 Justin And this is Justin Bullock. And together, we are The Backstory Podcast. In health professions education, there’s always more to the story. It’s just how far back you are willing to go. We are a medical education podcast that explores literature in health professions education. We’ll provide you with cutting edge scholarship and cozy conversations with the authors. You’ll hear the three of us stumble through the literature, and then we’ll bring on the authors to the podcast for their side of the story. [music fades out] Welcome to The Backstory Podcast, where there’s always more to the story, it’s just how far back you’re willing to go. I’m here with my two homies, Hannah—
00:00:47 Hannah Hey, what’s up?
00:00:48 Justin —and Ben.
00:00:49 Ben Hey, everybody.
00:00:51 Justin And I guess I should tell you that my name’s Justin. And today we have a very—what I would call an American-oriented paper. But I feel pretty confident that it ripples across the world. But in my American spirit, I have a poem to start us off. It’s a poem called ‘I, Too’ by Langston Hughes:
“I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
‘Eat in the kitchen,’
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.”
So, today we’re discussing a really fascinating paper which is entitled, ‘”This is Not for Me”: A Counterstory on BIPOC Experiences of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Trainings.’ From the journal, Teaching and Learning in Medicine by Doctors Tiffany Chambers and Bridget O’Brien. So, today, you’ll hear us toss out a lot of different terms and we’ll try our best to make sure we define the terms as we go. The one term which I mentioned from the title, BIPOC, as a term which aggregates Black, Indigenous and other people of color. We chose this paper on The Backstory Podcast because we hope to model vulnerability and collective growth by bringing conversations that may be a little uncomfortable. So, Ben and Hannah, to start off, I would love to hear you both share either a personal or professional learning about identity that you might now look at and be ashamed about when you look back in time. And since I’m asking for you all to be a little bit vulnerable, in that spirit, I will take the first stab and share a moment for myself. So, back when I was in seventh grade, I took a world geography class and in that class, we had sections on each different sort of—a region of the world. And typically in class, we would often read sections aloud. And one day, I was reading, and I came to the word ‘Arab’. And I said that word in a way that I had always heard it in my community from my family members and friends. And there’s a pronunciation of the word ‘Arab’ that is a very well-known racial slur. And I said it in that way, as the way that I had heard it, and my teacher all of a sudden stopped me, kind of pretty firmly, and said, “That’s a bad word. Don’t say it that way.” And continued on reading. He told me how to say it correctly. And then a few days later we were in class again, and I came to the same word, and again, I pronounced it in the way that I originally had. And for the second time, and much more forcefully, my teacher cut me off and he said that I was done reading and moved on to someone else. And today we’re going to talk a lot about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion trainings, and as I reflect on that time, I think there are two things that I feel ashamed about. The first is that I felt ashamed that—I’m from Detroit. It is a city that has a very large Arab community, and I, before that point, was using this word over and over and over again, in a way that is very harmful. But the second part about it was, I felt shame in the way that I was corrected. At least at that time, I didn’t understand the impact of using the word, and no-one ever took me aside after class and said, “Hey Justin—” and took some time to explain this to me. And so, I remember just feeling very ashamed about that. And I would say, I actually didn’t learn the learning that was to learn about this until years later, reflecting back. And so, I’m so excited to talk about this paper, because I think it’s going to push us to have some, maybe uncomfortable, but really meaningful conversations. So, Ben, I’m curious if you have a moment that you wanted to share.
00:04:29 Ben Yeah. I think mine relates to language too. I’ve had several moments where I had
shame reactions to language that I’ve used, and a lot of them were phrases that I learned from friends and colleagues that have been offensive the entire time that I’ve used them but only recently realized that. So, things like, “You must be crazy!” or, “I wanted to kill myself, I’m so frustrated.” or, “Long time, no see.” or “Blind leading the blind.” These are all just phrases that were just part of the normal lexicon of growing up. And I mean, we all hear them all the time but I grew up in a smaller town in Missouri. Everybody was white—at least people who were visible in the public discourse were white and most of the time, people who were able bodied were also in those spaces and many different identities were not spotlighted or given a microphone to be part of the discourse. So, those phrases just got used and became part of who I was. And as I’ve learned more about why those words and phrases are harmful, I still catch myself using them because they are just part of how I speak and I have immediate shame reactions and sometimes over apologize and make things even worse. And so, because a language doesn’t just reflect reality but creates reality, that is a space where I am continually trying to do better in terms of the phrases I use, sometimes flippantly. There are ways to call you in when you have those moments and help you see how you can do better, and there are other ways that can sometimes just amplify the shame reaction but I’m really grateful any time that happens. What about you, Hannah?
00:06:05 Hannah I think the moment that sticks with me the most is a story that I’ve written about with Justin in a paper about culturally sustaining pedagogy, at a time when I was really, really early in my career and I didn’t recognize that I actually did operate a position of power. I was a very, very low-level staff member, and so, in my mind I didn’t really have power, but I definitely did. And there was a moment when I was asked to basically have a disciplinary conversation with a student about their dress code violation. And this was a student who, actually, I was quite close to. We share a lot of the same identities. And I didn’t feel that their dress code violation was particularly egregious and in fact, a lot of other students who had more privileged identities were doing the same dress code violation all the time. And I had this conversation, and the student was so upset, understandably. And my response to them was basically, “This is the way the world is. It’s not fair. Other students can get away with this but we’re under the microscope. You have to work twice as hard just to get half as far.” And that’s an adage that was told to me a lot. And so, I’m parroting this really harmful phrase back to a student and perpetuating the harm that was passed on to me, down to the next generation of students. And it sticks with me for so many reasons, partly because at the time, I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And at that time, I didn’t have role models or mentors who would have… processed that with me and helped me think through that. And now that I do, and I’m looking back at that scenario, I just feel like, “Wow! We have so far to go in really unlearning and having liberatory language, liberatory thought processes, and responses to each other.” And so, that’s a story that still is uncomfortable to share for me, but I learn new things about it every time I reflect on that experience.
00:08:17 Justin Thank you both, I appreciate you all for sharing. So, I want to jump into the paper so that we can get Dr Tiffany Chambers on so we can get her reflections and comments. So, starting with the framing of the paper: according to the authors, multiple systematic reviews on DEI trainings indicate that most trainings are standalone, single offerings and they’re typically evaluated with pre- and post-test measures—which we know, Hannah has many strong feelings about—which largely captures short term outcomes related to knowledge, attitudes and reactions. The piece begins with narrative writing where Chambers talks about being a health professions education fellow who was invited to work on evaluation of an institution-wide DEI program. The authors began reading through almost four thousand free text responses to the training program. Chambers became impacted while she was reading, and she writes, “I stopped coding to process emotionally what I read. Some participants wrote about experiencing microaggressions, minority tax, and re-traumatization within the training itself.” They talk about eventually presenting these results to their—to the education community, and, “A few months after we submitted the evaluation report,” the leadership stopped the training. The authors decided to, after this point, then interview BIPOC individuals who had completed the training. The authors sought to answer the following questions: how do BIPOC participants describe and understand their experience of DEI trainings, and how do they relate to the content and pedagogy of DEI trainings. And of note, while the trainings were stopped, Chambers decided to participate in it before it ended and her observations from this time were collected as field notes. So, Ben, I’d love to hear your reflections on the paper’s set-up and also on your reflections as a program leader of sort of stopping something midway as it’s going?
00:10:08 Ben Yeah. There were a few things I really loved about the set-up of this paper. First, I think we’re getting better in health professions education about using first-person writing. So, using “We did this,” as the authors. There’s not a lot of papers that say, “I,” but Dr Chambers used ‘I’ statements a lot. “I did this, I did that,” and it really kind of grabbed me as a reader and pulled me in in a way that…. It held me in place to read the whole thing, which was really cool. And you mentioned that it combines narrative in the beginning of the paper, and it was really neat—the authors kind of unpacked the backstory for us in the beginning of the paper. Before they go into the background of things like DEI training and what kind of program evaluation is done, they literally tell a story of how did they get to that moment of even having the question, which was really, really cool. It was basically like they were thinking about our podcast when they wrote it. And the last comment I’ll mention is that this paper, to me, sits at the intersection of program evaluation and critical race theory. And it really makes me think about the paper we did recently from Haji et al on program evaluation. And if people want to zip back to that episode, Haji called for people not just to look for whether programs work, but to be very sensitive to what they called emergent or new phenomena and asking, “What else happens, and how are these emergent phenomena happening?” And this study is a great example of exploring those emergent phenomena that go overlooked but are having significant negative impacts. And it took Dr Chambers and Dr O’Brien looking through program evaluation data that were already there and using a critical lens to see those emergent phenomena and then taking a further empirical exploration in that. And as a program leader, this is exactly what I would want to know. There’s always going to be balancing measures and emergent consequences to any kind of educational endeavor. And if there are harmful ones, that’s one of the worst things that you want as an educator, is to cause harm to people, especially without even knowing that you’re doing it. So, this is the exact kind of evaluation that I would want.
00:12:12 Justin Thanks, Ben. So, for the methods, the authors drew on a critical approach which was anchored in critical race theory, to examine the narratives of BIPOC individuals. The critical race theory draws its origin from critical legal studies, which describes how race and racism are enacted by the legal system. Critical race theory is often applied to educational settings. Some of the core tenets of critical race theory include interest convergence, whiteness as property, and counter storytelling. So, we have a lot of technical terms, so let’s define a few of them. So, the first is interest convergence. Interest convergence refers to the way that societal change typically only happens if the end result is for the benefit of members of the dominant group. One of the most commonly cited examples of this is that the identity group who benefitted most statistically from affirmative action were white women, with white individuals being the dominant racial group in the United States. Next, whiteness as property. So, whiteness as property is a term that really sort of brings up the legal origins of critical race theory. Whiteness, which is initially constructed as a form of racial identity, evolved into a form of property. In the US and in also many countries across the world, whiteness represents a type of status in which the white racial identity provides the basis for allocating social benefits. Things like which school a person can attend, which drinking fountain a person can use, and which community an individual can live in. And these arrangements are not only implemented socially but were actually ratified by law and enacted and affirmed by law, in ways in which only white individuals could possess. So, the authors recruited and interviewed a random sample of BIPOC participants who did the institutional DEI trainings between 2020 and 2022. The trainings of interest were eight hours on a single day training. During the pandemic it shifted to two, three-hour sessions which were over Zoom. They included facilitated large group didactics on microaggressions, implicit bias and allyship and unfacilitated small group activities. The authors completed eight thirty-minute semi-structured interviews. Participants received a twenty-five-dollar gift card for their time and the total data which the authors were working with were thirty-eight hundred open ended responses to the survey, the eight interviews, Chambers’ field notes, and various research artifacts, which they used reflexive thematic analysis grounded in critical race theory to explore this data. And finally, the authors used the method of counterstorying to present the results to the audience. They write that they used the counterstory method to tell the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told. They say it’s not just a response to the dominant narrative but an unearthing of truths that nourish and empower those at the margin. So, Hannah, I would love to hear from your perspective as a critical scholar. If you could give us some insights on the topic of counterstorying or counter storytelling.
00:15:07 Hannah Yeah, so counter storytelling is a method sometimes associated with narrative analysis, but it comes from the school of critical theories—critical race theory being one of the most prominent. But counter storytelling, I think, is also an artifact of a lot of marginalized cultures and our communities. When you’re sitting around the table talking with your family or with your community and you tell a story about, let’s say, the local election. Counter storytelling is jumping in and saying, “Well, actually, this community feels this way,” or, “I heard this story, that’s different.” That’s one very simple example of it. But in research, especially in contexts that use critical theories as a lens for understanding the story of participants, it can be really powerful to do just what the authors said. It’s not just to combat a dominant narrative and to say that, “Oh, this isn’t true for everyone.” But it’s also a way to uplift and illuminate stories that otherwise don’t get told, that sort of get whitewashed or removed, sanitized, you know, from the discourse and the narratives. I would say that a pretty strong, dominant discourse, is that DEI trainings are good. That DEI trainings provide benefit. And the counterstories in this paper not only show that that’s more complicated, right—it’s not just benefit, it also has unintended harm. But it also uplifts these other experiences that get silenced when we only believe the dominant narrative that DEI trainings are good. We also miss really important stories and knowledge and histories that otherwise we don’t get to listen to. Sandra Harding who is one of the originators of critical feminist theories talks about this idea that when a dominant narrative or a dominant discourse is the only thing that we have or the only thing that we listen to, it actually impoverishes the knowledge and the wisdom that we have as a collective. And so, counterstorying helps restore that. It’s like a nutrient dense restoration of wisdom and knowledge.
00:17:20 Justin So, the authors had three guiding takeaways. One, the DEI training extracted and instrumentalized racial trauma to teach white learners at the expense of BIPOC learners. Two, DEI training stirred up racial trauma and failed to provide space and community to process it. And three, DEI training did not create transformative change but maintained institutional image. This paper has so many fire quotes, so I decided to pull some of them. I’m also going to try and paraphrase in other parts. These quotes really highlight the harms and potential shortcomings in some of these types of training. One of the first topics that the authors write about are that, in many DEI trainings, minoritized members of certain groups often felt pressure to share stories that members of other groups have had the privilege of never experiencing. This resulted in a spotlight effect which centered people of color in an extractive way. That people, depending on their identities, seem to have differential experiences. Some people talk about not wanting to be spotlighted, while others talked about hearing these stories of difference as eye opening, inspiring, or very powerful. They briefly talk about the topic of having identity concordant discussion groups where people who share similar minoritized identities got time to process alone. One person said, “I think there’s definitely value in connecting with those of a shared identity, but I also feel like we just make things worse when we separate by race because then it’s just like, how will a person from a different race ever know what I went through if I don’t ever share it with them?” I like this because they’re showing that there’s not a uniform or singular experience for minoritized individuals. One of the field notes that Chambers wrote that I really liked regarding micro aggressions. “The white woman in our small group shared that she’s often asked where she is from due to her last name and she doesn’t take offense to this curiosity. She also shared that she felt the female medical student who was told that she was ‘the beauty of the operation’ and her male classmate was ‘the brains’ was misunderstanding a flirtatious joke.” One participant said, “I felt like I walked away with no new perspective or knowledge and was drained from sharing or hearing white people recognize things for the first time.” This and other similar remarks suggested that DEI training was not designed with the needs of people of color in mind. And then finally, “A man in my group chose a microaggression towards a lesbian to say to me, in order for me to respond. I didn’t expect for him to read that one and sort of froze for a minute. This poor guy has no idea I’m a lesbian and would probably be horrified if he knew that he chose to read a homophobic insult to a lesbian.” There is so much more, and I would encourage you to pick up the paper to dig in more deeply. But, Ben and Hannah, I know you all have thoughts, and I’m excited to hear them. Ben?
00:20:02 Ben Yeah, this was a really hard read for me. I’m the white guy on the podcast and I started thinking about any DEI initiative that I’ve been a part of and how some of those programs or even my personal behavior might have been causing harm in ways that I was not aware of. Especially thinking because I’ve been part of these programs with friends and colleagues and learners and just started thinking and wondering whether they were having similar experiences, some of them, to what some of the participants reported. And I’ve always imagined that, as a white man, if I bring enough curiosity and humility to a moment, that letting people share experiences is a good thing. And this was a really helpful moment to realize that even that, you can’t curiosity and humility your way out of harm by having people feel like their experiences are being extracted for my benefit. And so, I was really stopped in my tracks by this paper. And the authors use this term ‘racial voyeurism’, the idea of racially privileged people passively consuming racialized experiences during interracial dialogue. And I actually kind of got palpitations thinking back to how often I might be doing this. That word ‘voyeurism’ really drives home the negative impact of that. So, it was a very tough and humbling read and has me viewing DEI training a bit differently.
00:21:30 Hannah Yeah, I thought about all the times where I’ve facilitated at DEI trainings or programs and where… I’ve not only experienced dynamics like this but I’ve created the conditions for them to happen. The sense of spotlight effect where people have to talk about their experiences and sort of feel the pressure to talk about experiences and… perhaps retraumatize themselves in doing so. I have felt the spotlight effect. The need to put my trauma kind of on display for other people to understand me or to respect where I’m coming from. And I felt that both as a teacher, facilitator, and as a participant. And sometimes it’s normalized what’s expected in these DEI spaces, and sometimes it’s vulnerability that feels really, really exploitative. We call that learning and we’ve never stopped to ask, “Learning for who?”
00:22:25 Justin Alright, so, we’ve been going on for way, way, way too long. So, now, we’re going to give our hot takes and then we’re going to bring on Dr Chambers. So, Hannah, hit us with your hot take.
00:22:36 Hannah This is definitely an American hot take. Because right now in America we have a really intense national backlash against DEI, and I think we can’t go this whole episode without naming that that’s happening. That backlash, to my mind, it comes entirely from this backlash against the civil rights movement and all the progress that it’s made, so I don’t think that it’s well intentioned or actually generative. But I do think that, especially in the wake of 2020 and the murder of George Floyd and a national conversation, a lot of institutions just ran in with so much urgency and so much need to protect institutional image and be the face of DEI trainings that a lot of these programs kind of got implemented without understanding unintended consequences. And we saw a lot of these programs rise, and fall, and completely disappear, even before this current administration took the moves to penalize DEI. So, my hot take is that some criticism of DEI programs is really warranted. I’m not using criticism, the term, to evoke what the current administration is doing, but I think criticism, the tradition of critical theory like this paper, where we can be really curious and honest about the effects that even well intended programs can have.
00:23:56 Ben Yeah, I love that Hannah, thank you for sharing those reflections. And I’ll kind of build on that, that, as I mentioned earlier, this is a program evaluation paper and this is what program evaluation should do. It should find ways that we can make programs better or find the harms and mitigate them. And this isn’t as much of a hot take as a hot curiosity: I am so curious how the program developers and leaders engaged with this feedback. Like, was it surprising, was it upsetting, was it something that they suspected might be the case? Especially as I think about many DEI programs, at least ones that I’ve seen, are often led by people who come from minoritized backgrounds. They often get sponsored or pushed into those roles, and so may be people who experienced this themselves. So, I’m curious what the reaction was, and did they think about evolving the program versus just deciding to stop it, and was it a voluntary stop versus was it a forced action. And we may not be able to get that far into the backstory, I don’t know, but I’m really curious how this played out as a program leadership who were trying to do something good and then found they were causing harm.
00:24:58 Justin I’m changing my hot take last minute. I loved this paper because it is really pushing me deep inside of myself to reflect on my own experience. And I’m someone who’s spent a lot of my academic life sharing my experience and feeding into the voyeuristic aspect and sharing my experience as a bipolar person, et cetera. And my hot take, the thing that this paper shows very nicely is, it really just allows for space for the diversity of experiences that one might feel around these topics. And while it calls out the medical voyeurism aspect, there’s some participants who see the importance of it. And so, that’s my hot take of both can be true at the same time.
00:25:40 Ben I was just sitting in the glow of that. That’s such an amazing statement. I love that, Justin. Alright, we are so lucky to be joined by Dr Tiffany Chambers, the lead author on this paper. She is a physician educator and independent scholar. And Dr Chambers, welcome to the Backstory Podcast. How do you prefer to be called during this discussion?
00:25:58 Tiffany Yeah, thank you for having me. Please call me Tiffany.
00:26:00 Ben Fantastic. Well, thank you again, Tiffany. Before we get into all of your reflections, could you please just tell us who you are and we’d love to give you the same opening question that we all answered, which is, “Was there a personal or professional learning about this type of work that you might look back on now and be ashamed about?”
00:26:18 Tiffany Yeah. Thank you. Who am I? I feel like that’s constantly in flux. I would say right now I am someone who is learning who they are, and spent a lot of time learning how to be a pathologist, an educator, a researcher, and I want to integrate some of that into the next iteration of me of this constant evolution. But right now, I’m taking a step back from academic medicine, and composting a bit, but also there’s so many beautiful things like conversation in community about things that we care about that I’m definitely taking forward. And then the question about shame. I would say most recently, did a workshop at a small medical educational conference and I wanted to just think about my new obsession, speculative education, and play around with that. And I didn’t ask about identities of the participants in this workshop. And so they were everyone from faculty to medical students to staff and different racial identities there. And we were playing around with some of the theatre of the press stuff and power stuff, and so I’m asking them to do things that I feel are very playful but also really powerful. And then I didn’t, before deciding the workshop, think about the racial identities of the participants. And a Black woman had a really, really hard time with one of the exercises. And the director, who was a white woman, was having a great time. And so it was like, “Oh crap, I just did the thing.” But it was just like, oh, yeah, it’s really easy if you don’t ask before you think about creating something—ask about who you’re creating it for. It’s really easy to make mistakes and end up in a place where you’re learning. [chuckles]
00:28:22 Ben Thank you for sharing that. And just wanted to reflect back how helpful it is to hear from all three of you, moments where we’ve made mistakes or wish we could do something differently because I think of all three of you as some of the leading critical thinkers in health professions education and it’s amazing to hear mistakes and to say, “I made a mistake.” And that doesn’t mean that you aren’t doing well or can’t do better. So, thank you for sharing that. I wanted to ask one more question. Tiffany, the name of the podcast is The Backstory Podcast. Could you share a bit about the backstory of not just what got you interested in this work but also the journey of the paper in terms of submitting it and any editorial twists and turns that might have come your way?
00:29:08 Tiffany Yeah. I mean it’s a long process. And it started as a thesis. I was doing a master’s in education and a fellowship in health professions education. And I was going into it thinking I really value diversity and a lot of the things that I’ve done in medical education had been centered around DEI. Very much affected by White Coats for Black Lives, that movement in medical school. And so, wanted to continue that thread. And I went into this evaluation thinking that I’ll have a lot to learn because I was coming from an institution that I felt was great on the science but not so good on the social justice, racial justice, that sort of thing. And I thought, going to a place that had invested more resources into it and prioritized it for a much longer period of time. And this was after George Floyd, but it’s still in that energy. So, I was coming from a place that I like, really wanted to learn how to do it right. I was really surprised at some of the things I was reading. [laughs] And I was like, “Okay, hold up. What is happening? This is not what I expected or how I expected things to go.” And so we decided to just reevaluate what we were doing in terms of how we were looking [chuckles] at the data. And our approach took a big turn. And it also helped me take a step back and realize that maybe I was approaching things with a bit of a naive mindset to begin with. Because racism reproduces itself. Like, we’ve had it for so long [chuckles] because it just finds a way to reproduce itself. There were definitely turns in the publication process around removing things. One of the reviewer comments was the research questions. We had actually a third one wanting to understand what BIPOC imagine for the future for DEI. Trying to elicit that in an interview was really, really hard. And so, the reviewer was like, “Why do you even have this as like a research question, because none of your data is [chuckles] reflecting that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s true.” The imaginings went to, “I just want the burdensome part, the re-traumatization part, that to end.” Versus like, [chuckles] “But what is it that we want?”
00:31:35 Justin So, I would love to hear your reflections on whose work is it to teach those in our communities who maybe are earlier in their journey around these DEI related topics? Like, whose job is it?
00:31:50 Tiffany I mean, there’s so much out there. Like, this isn’t a new topic. And so, I wouldn’t burden an individual with educating yourself when there’s just a plethora of books, documentaries, and there are consultants who get paid to do that work and are choosing to do that work. So, when it comes to educating on the basics of DEI, I would say just… just spend some time on Google. [chuckles] But there’s deeper education. There’s a desire for a deeper education, and one that’s relational and maybe more of a conversation where you’re coming as two individuals on the same plane, and not so much as “I’m someone who has the knowledge to bestow on you because you couldn’t possibly have the experience of race because whiteness is not a race.” You know? No, like, everyone has an experience of race. Everyone has an experience of sexuality and gender, it’s just some people are less aware of that because their identities might be like, hegemonic and so it’s easier not to notice. But you still have the experience of it. So, if it came from a relational place of—that’s a different kind of learning versus, “Just tell me what words not to say.” [chuckles] You know? Find a book.
00:33:12 Hannah I love all of what you just said. It’s not an individual responsibility that only the minority faculty at your institution can teach DEI. That’s such a minority tax on those individuals. But it also sets that expectation that there is an expert in the room and—when really, the community conversation is so much more rich. Usually, when it avoids these sort of voyeuristic conversations and these—the pitfalls that you mention in the paper. It can be so beneficial for everyone involved. I do have a question too. I’m curious about what misconceptions you’ve heard that people have about this paper that you want to set straight. And are there places where we got it wrong as we talked about the paper in the first half?
00:33:58 Tiffany To answer the last question, I would say no, there weren’t places where you got it wrong at all. There is some interesting places where I’d wanted to stop and have a conversation. I’ve actually have not had a lot of conversation about the paper with other people, and so this has been a really lovely experience. I think how people perceive DEI is all over the place, and so that’s such a hard one. Some people of color dislike it for different reasons, and some people see it as a vehicle for change if we can continue to work with it. And so, working incrementally on reforming this until it works for us is the direction that we should be headed in or creating solutions to fix a problem or to fix a crisis maybe is a part of the problem. Or we’re perpetuating that and maybe it’s time to take a step back and figure out where we’re going before we rush there.
00:34:54 Hannah It’s like, you know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re an educator, everything looks like a problem that can be solved with a training [laughs] or a program. Right? Maybe a training is not what’s required, especially when it can have such unintended consequences. I would love to go back to—you said there were some points in the conversation where you really, really wanted to jump in and talk more. And so, I’d love to just do that for a little bit.
00:35:22 Tiffany Yeah. That would be so fun. There was this initial comment on narrative subjective versus academic objective language we’re more comfortable with in the sciences and health professions. And that’s really interesting to me, and I’ve been exploring how do I want to be in relationship with academic language. [chuckles] I would love to hear more about your perspectives. Because I did hear from the top, that it’s not the most common approach when you’re writing an HPE paper, to use the word ‘I’. And yet, I felt like that was the most honest way to say it because I’m being very opinionated and I didn’t want to put it on Bridget to share my opinions. [chuckles]
00:36:07 Justin I want to return your question with a question, which is: it sounds like you’re on a journey of deciding your relationship with academia and I would love to hear that.
00:36:19 Tiffany Yeah. I mean, part of the DEI experience has informed that. I think I ended the paper with a quote—Audrey Lorde’s that we all heard a gazillion times but it’s still good: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And I’ve been really sitting with that, especially with the new administration and not being able to really continue the thread of DEI work the way that, you know, if I were to continue in that space I would want to do it more radically, not less. And so, [chuckles] that doesn’t seem possible when I was working at a government institution. [chuckles] Yeah, it’s been a whole reevaluation of, “Am I really doing the work that I feel is needed? Is this the right method?” DEI in general. Because I felt like, to do this work around identity in academic spaces, it’s wearing the guise of DEI for a reason. It’s palatable, and… I don’t know if I want it to be palatable. I think it needs a little bit more than that.
00:37:27 Justin Yeah, when I give like, lectures to med students, what I always say is, “If we only advocate for change from the inside, change will happen too slowly. And if we only advocate for change from the outside, change won’t be sustained.” And it’s kind of up to each person to decide where they stand in those two. And it doesn’t have to be one or the other, it can be some combination of both.
00:37:49 Tiffany Yeah. I don’t think its necessarily like, you have to be on the inside or the outside. Right? Like, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a dichotomy, it could be a spectrum. Especially when we’re talking about where we’re getting our support from. DEI is intended to support people with marginalized identities. You can’t get all that support from the inside. I think you… [laughs] might need to be able to flow in and out of it.
00:38:15 Hannah Well, our last question for you, as we end: we’d like to ask you to recommend something that you’re currently reading that you really love and that you want to share with our audience.
00:38:26 Tiffany Oh my god, that’s such a hard question. The recommendation that I want to make is something that I’ve read a number of times and always have with me. It’s called Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs who is incredible. But currently reading a book by Bayo Akomolafe and it’s a collection of like, short essays and it’s called Selah and its beautiful.
00:38:52 Hannah [music fades in] Thank you so much Tiffany for being a part of the Backstory Podcast.
00:38:56 Tiffany Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so wonderful. Thank you.
00:39:04 Ben The Backstory Podcast is supported in part by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation. Production and editing by Rachel Holloway. Music by Hannah Kakara Anderson. Artwork by Kaitlyn Ripaldi. The Backstory Podcast is a sponsored project of the Learning Design Collective. Thanks for listening. Just a reminder that the opinions expressed here are our own and don’t represent the views of any institutions. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. For show notes and links, visit our website. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review. And check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram, and BlueSky @TheBackStoryPod. [music fades out]
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