Interview with an educator 4 paths for productive conversations about bias Amber Cabral
The first thing I think that is important
is that you enter this space
and any space with bravery.
People are going to judge you, you’re
going to judge people,
everybody’s making mistakes
all over everywhere.
In my trainings I usually tell people,
everybody’s biasing all over
everywhere, it’s happening.
And so the thing that’s really important
is just to be prepared for the possibility
that you will be offended and
also that you will offend.
And one of the ways that you can do
that is just carry the spirit of apology.
Be prepared to apologize.
An apology is not “if I offended you,”
it’s not conditional,
it is literally, “I am sorry for”
“Going forward I will”
“I am sorry for mispronouncing your name,
going forward I will say it correctly.”
It’s––just being able to do that
goes a very long way.
The other thing is respect people how
you want your loved ones respected.
So a lot of people say, “Treat people how
you want to be treated.”
But I don’t know that we do a good job
being conscious
of how we are treating ourselves,
I don’t know that we do a good job
thinking about how we want to be treated.
But we know how we want our
kids to be treated.
We know how we want our parents
to be treated.
And so when you are
engaging with people,
especially when there’s an opportunity
for you to encounter someone
different than you––
rather than doing that “similarity bias”
and scampering to your familiar spaces
or conforming to the norm,
make a pointed effort to say,
“What if that was my aunt,
or my uncle or my children,”
someone that you really care about,
“What would I want respect
to feel like for them?”
“How do I create a space that makes
them feel safe
in the way that I would want someone
I really love to feel safe?”
And then the last thing is just
reminding yourself that
you can be––you can hold several
ideas in your mind;
you can hold several stories; you are
comprised of so many layers.
And just as you have that,
others have that,
and so you don’t get the
opportunity to have––
you can’t grow, you can’t experience
the world, you can’t…
there’s so much you miss out on
by not opening up your aperture
so that you can invite
the stories of others,
other than the one that they
show you immediately,
other than the one that you
see with your own two eyes,
how do you get to that next level,
where it’s like,
I would never have imagined that this
is an experience that a person can have,
and there’s so much richness there.
And so I just think it’s important for us
to at least keep those 3 things in mind
so that we can create the
experiences necessary
to give each other the grace to grow and
live in the fullness of our identities.
The better we can do at teaching our
children and our families and our friends,
and I teach adults,
that people need to both be
okay in their identity
as well as invite others to share
the parts of their identity.
It’s not a––it’s a personal
personal personal thing,
but it’s also a thing that’s shared and
that’s a very interesting place to be in
and so we have to be a bit more
deliberate about making sure
that we recognize that it’s going
to share these two spaces,
and so there’re going to be times when
you can dip into a very personal space,
and you need to give someone the room
to do the same with you.