What we say is just as important as what we do, when it comes to matters of identity, diversity, and justice. Every action begins with a conversation. But with evolving societal standards and heightened awareness, a conversation about identity can be constructive or harmful, which increases our anxiety about having them. So how do we talk about it?

Nicole Smith, editorial audience director at Harvard Business Review, addressed the issue in a fireside chat during From Day One’s June virtual conference. Smith spoke with Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, authors of Say the Right Thing: How to Talk About Identity, Diversity, and Justice.

Yoshino and Glasgow trust in the power of conversations. Both authors being gay men, they remember every single conversation they had when they came out to their friends and family. “[We] remember all the ones that went well, which were transformative,” said Yoshino, Chief Justice Earl Warren professor of Constitutional Law at New York University School of Law. “And we remember the ones that went not so well, which could often be quite devastating.”

Yoshino acknowledged that a conversation is not an ending point. “We ultimately are lawyers,” he said. “We believe in policy, we believe in law, we believe in culture. But all of those actions, we think, emanate from good conversations.”

Identity conversations, as defined in the book, are any conversations about the social identities we all hold. It could be an identity based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, and more.

“There's a really long list, and we're trying to encompass any conversation that relates to that topic,” said Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. “It could also be a broader conversation about identity-related social movements, like Black Lives Matter, or the Me Too movement, or Stop Asian Hate. And we're ambitiously trying with this book to give people tools to have all those kinds of conversations.”

The book cautions against ignoring people's group identity, while also not reducing them to their group identity. “Is that possible?” Smith asked.

“People say to us, ‘That's contradictory, you can't have it both ways,’” said Yoshino. “I think we have to have it both ways. We have to be able to find that middle path. All of us are more than just one identity. But if you don't see the identities that are salient to how I navigate my world and my own lived experience then you're not really seeing me.”

Other undesirable behaviors that jeopardize having healthy conversations about identity, diversity, and justice are what the authors call the four conversational traps: avoid, deflect, deny, and attack.

Deflection is when you change the subject to some other topic that you want to talk about. Deflecting to yourself is a subset of deflection, which can be done in a few different ways. One way would be to deflect to your own moral credential.

“So if someone criticizes you, if someone suggests that you displayed bias,” said Glasgow, “you would respond by saying something along the lines of ‘Don't you know that I'm in an interracial marriage?’ or ‘I grew up in a diverse neighborhood,’ or some other reason why you can't accuse me of doing anything wrong, because I have strong moral credentials.”

Another form of deflecting to yourself is by broadcasting your hardship, such as mentioning you had a difficult upbringing and therefore can’t be accused of doing anything wrong in the conversation. Yet another way would be deflecting to your good intentions, or saying something like, “I didn't mean it that way.”

All of these forms of deflection impede effective engagement in conversations about identity because they're changing the subject from the issue that the other person has raised with you.

“If someone comes to you and shares an experience or a perception that they've had,” said Glasgow, “they want to talk to you about an issue of bias or exclusion that they're experiencing. And then [if] you're pivoting away to some other topic, that person is going to feel frustrated, they're going to feel unheard, they're probably going to feel like you're not someone that they can come to with concerns that they might have in the future.”

Thoughtful conversations are an integral part of true allyship, or active support for the rights of a marginalized group you’re not a part of, versus performative or optical allyship. Yoshino thinks of allyship as an interaction among three different parties, or what he calls the “empathy triangle.”

“There's the ally, ‘I saw it,’” he said. “There's the affected person, ‘it happened to me.’ And then there's a source of non-inclusive behavior, ‘I did it.’ Effective allyship means going through the process of reflecting on yourself, as an ally, reflecting on your relationship to the affected person, and then reflecting on your relationship to the source of non-inclusive behavior and making sure that all three of those parties are fully in mind before you step into allyship.”

In order to be a true ally, it’s important to ask yourself questions about your motivations, your relationship to the affected person, and your relationship to the source. These questions could include: Am I doing this to virtue signal? Am I informed enough to ask? Does this person want this kind of help? Am I unintentionally burdening the affected person in some way? Am I challenging the source’s behavior, instead of calling them out as a “bad” human being?

“We want to give people broad principles for how to have these conversations,” said Glasgow, “but allow people to develop the actual words themselves, emanating from those principles that they've absorbed.”

Often when you witness non-inclusive behavior, it requires an immediate response. But when you can't think of what you're supposed to say in the moment, you experience a phenomenon called “staircase thought.” It’s what happens when you leave the room and you're walking down the staircase, and you immediately think of the perfect comeback that you should have said when the comment was made.

“We wanted to provide people with a sort of menu of options that would enable them to overcome that staircase thought,” said Glasgow. “The first step is go down the list, figure out which one sounds authentic to you, commit it to memory so that you can have it when something happens.”

“Inevitably in these conversations, we are going to mess up,” said Yoshino. “It's not a question of if, it's a question of when, and so we thought it would be really useful to have a strategy for how to apologize.”

It's important to be generous to people who make mistakes because it's only a matter of time before we're the affected person, and only a matter of time before we ourselves put our foot in it, and are the forces of noninclusive behavior.

“We actually want to create something that's a bit more like a coaching culture,” said Glasgow, “where people commit to coaching each other to do better in these conversations, rather than condemning them out of hand.”

Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who’s written for regional publications in Hawaii and California, with forays into medical cannabis and food justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, California.