What can white managers do to reduce racial harm?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications Podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and member-owner of Big Duck, and today I have the pleasure of being joined by Yejin Lee. Yejin Lee, she/her, is a queer Korean-American equity and justice practitioner, coach, and consultant with 12 years of experience in the New York City nonprofit sector as an organizer, fundraiser, and organizational design nerd. Yejin, anything else you want to share with folks about you?

Yejin Lee: Yeah, thanks for that introduction. You know, I’ve been trying to be a little more grounded in principles and practices of anti-capitalism. So, while I truly love the work that I’m paid to do these days, I also like to offset it by just sharing things that make me a person. So, something that I like to share is that I returned to my queerness in the last two years and that’s been super duper lovely. I’m married to a cis man. Been together for 14 wonderful years, but this return has brought me to a really incredible QTPOC, or queer, trans, persons of color communities, with whom I’m super actively connected. I invest a lot of my time and my emotional energies into cultivating platonic intimacies these days, and it’s been really awesome. And I’m also someone who’s been returning to my softness and my lightness for such a long time. As, like, a petite AAPI woman, I felt that I really needed to defy stereotypes and focused only really on, like, cultivating my anger and my rage and my confrontational nature and my sharpness and my hardness, and that all worked for a while in sort of service of my values, but I learned that I had to abandon other pieces of myself in order to do that. So, now I’ve returned to my full self, my wholeness, and I now identify as a carrier of dualities. So, the softness and sharpness, the love and anger, also my sun sign is a Gemini, so I feel like that makes sense.

Farra Trompeter: And that’s one of the reasons why we get along so well. My wife is a Gemini, I’m an Aries. You know, Aries-Gemini.

Yejin Lee: Yes!

Farra Trompeter: Well, I officially met Yejin through a workshop that she led back in April of 2021, myself and several other white managers at Big Duck participated in, called Unfiltering the Fury: Workshop for White Managers on Reducing Racial Harm. Though I discovered through LinkedIn and many other ways, Yejin and I crossed paths at the New York City Anti-Violence Project, maybe 10 or so years ago, I forget how many years ago, although we didn’t actually get to meet each other, but it was great to connect with her then, and I’ve loved talking with her. And so, Yejin, thank you for coming on the show.

Yejin Lee: Yeah, so happy to be here.

Farra Trompeter: There are just so many things I want to talk to you about, but we’re going to start with that training. I know you’ve led several other versions of that workshop, as well as other workshops, particularly for people of color, but focusing on the workshops you’ve developed for white managers in 2021, what led you to create and lead those workshops?

Yejin Lee: It’s an interesting question because it was sort of the first time that I had put out workshops like that in the world. I’d worked in the nonprofit world through summer of 2020, and then shortly after that, you know, started my own practice, and I say that the work that I was doing wasn’t new, but the way that I was doing it was because I was, for so long, embedded within institutions from that perspective, trying to sort of operationalize changes related to equity, but, you know, suddenly I was on the outside and that was an entirely different thing. And I had spent some of my time in 2020, especially after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent rebellions, really crafting and cultivating community and really wanting to figure out and be community-responsive. You know, I think that one of the things that I really appreciated about some of my experiences in the nonprofit world was community-centered design. So I was really thinking about how I can be truly responsive to the folks that I’m in active community with.

Yejin Lee: Right before the Atlanta shootings, I had organized and co-facilitated a critical connections retreat. It was specifically for AAPI people who were for racial justice. And so it was six hours of togetherness and that was really remarkable. And then one week later the shootings happened and I spent so much time connecting individually and sort of collectively with members of the AAPI, mostly women in the femme community because, you know, there is a lot that is sort of sexualized about the kind of violence that we experience and racialized violence that we experience.

Yejin Lee: And so, I was, like, hearing so many specific patterns so, obviously, the things that were really painful or just general, you know, erasure of our experiences. And so, you know, we had some of those broader conversations, but some people revealed that the folks who were causing the most harm in that moment in the aftermath of that immense fatigue and pain that people were experiencing was from their managers. So, from a work perspective, and many of them were saying, like, oh, you know, my white manager keeps sending me, like, sweet emojis, but isn’t actually doing anything to support me. Or, you know, they’ll say really sweet things and encourage me to take a day off, but then won’t actually change my workload, or the instances where folks are asked to, in a way, tokenize their voice and identities and write a statement of solidarity for the organization that actually has nothing to do with what the organization is doing to actively support AAPI folks and people of color.

Yejin Lee: So I was just hearing, just by being really embedded in the community and, you know, wanting to give care and tenderness, was hearing these patterns and, you know, none of this is new and none of this is necessarily specific to the AAPI community. I know that around also the murder of George Floyd, a lot of organizations suddenly had this, like, radical language and their statements of solidarity, and a lot of times it was written by their staff of color who were much more radicalized. And so, this is not specific to this group of humans, but as far as the timing of the work that I was starting to do, the communities that I was starting to build, it just felt like I was hearing enough of a pattern, and because of the kinds of roles I had played within the nonprofit world, I was like, this is a workshop that I can provide.

Yejin Lee: And so, I actually launched the Unfiltering the Fury workshop alongside the free one that I did for people of color, which is called Confronting Racism at Work: Strategic Self-Advocacy for People of Color, and I didn’t do it to be strategic, it was really just like, these are the two things that I can think of. On the one hand, I really wanted to do something that was genuinely centering people of color, which was confronting racism at work, but it was also just such a bummer to identify, like, we have to do all of this work. We have to undergo the burden of labor, of being strategic after experiencing racism in the workplace and out in the world, and it sucks that, like, we have to continue to do that labor because we’re, like, waiting for white folks to show up in a way that is genuinely transformational and transformed. So, that was the reason that I did both of them. It’s like, I want to focus on people of color, and I also want to acknowledge the fact that, like, we have to do that work, like, we have to use this framework that I created to support people in surfacing enough information to, like, radically center themselves as they figure out how to advocate for themselves because the white folks aren’t doing what they need to do.

Yejin Lee: So, I created these at the same time, and also I decided for Unfiltering the Fury, you can even tell by the title, that I was going to be pretty unfiltered, and that was a really active decision to be that way, in part, because I had accommodated whiteness and had to be so strategic around whiteness for so long when I was working in New York City nonprofit institutions, and I was like, you know what, now that I’ve been liberated from the institutional world, I want to do this the way that I want to do this. And so, I don’t know if you remember the event description, Farra, but I was really specific. I was like, this is for these kinds of white folks who are actually okay being decentered, who, like, can actually receive, be on the receiving end. A range of emotions, including my rage. And so I was like, people can opt-in, like, I really want people to have the autonomy to opt-in, and I also really felt that there would be, like, four people who registered because I was like, who would want this? Who would want me yelling at them for three hours?

Farra Trompeter: There were four from Big Duck. We checked that box, we got you signed up fast. No, I remember the registration. It was almost like an application. You were like, you need to really be okay that you were opting into this space, and you were very clear about it, and you said it and you’re like, all right, white folks, I’m going to yell at you a bit for the next three hours, and you need to hear me, and I’d, honestly, never been to a training like that before, and I think it was really refreshing and helpful. Although I’m sorry, the world has conspired that you had to deliver this content.

Yejin Lee: Right. Right. No, but it’s really interesting because, you know, I remember sending out the feedback form and then reviewing it. I was a little tentative, a little nervous. I wasn’t sure how it was going to be received also because it was one of my first real public front-facing events that I was putting on myself. But I remember the number of people who were like, it was actually refreshing. Like, one, they were like, “You weren’t as mean as I thought you were going to be, but also it was refreshing to be communicated with honestly,” and there was a part of me that’s, like, that’s so interesting, that’s so great, but also the reason that people haven’t been straightforward with you is because of you. Like, you are the reason for that so it’s very interesting. But, yeah, so there were a lot more people who registered for that than I had anticipated, honestly, but the number of people who registered for the free one, the Confronting Racism at Work that was specifically for people of color, I did two installments, and over 2,000 people had registered, which is not a testament to, like, Yejin’s abilities and more like, wow, this was clearly super duper needed.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. And I want to acknowledge, we’re recording this in March, a day before the anniversary of the Atlanta shootings and also two days after the second anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s shooting. So yeah, this is very much in the air right now, and I appreciate you spending time with me. One of the things you were talking about in building up that training were all the things that you were hearing, and one of the things that I’ve reflected on a lot since doing that training was this compilation you made of over 300 demands from almost 100 people of color who have repeatedly experienced racism from their white managers. And you sort of put a call out and said, “what do you want them to know?” but I want to just share five of them that resonated with me and then ask you about that.

Farra Trompeter: So, I am saying these out loud as a white woman. These are not my voice, these are voices that came through from people of color, but I did want to share some of them to give people a flavor of what’s in that document.

• “Stop misspelling and mispronouncing my name.”
• “Stop sharing articles about racial injustice with me that cause shock and awe for you but retraumatize me.”
• “Stop saying you want to have difficult conversations if you can’t come to terms with your own bias and privilege.”
• “Stop moving at the pace of white comfort instead of the urgency of marginalized needs.”
• “Stop telling me that I have changed when different facets of my personality emerge from dealing with your racism. People of color are humans too, and we are allowed to have a range of emotions.”

Farra Trompeter: So first of all, I just want to thank you for organizing this and compiling it, and everyone who did submit these demands. There’s so much to dig into in that document, and I hope that white listeners will do the work to come back to our website, download this document, access your content, and really reflect on these demands. But as people, as white people, consider their own response and actions, I’m curious what tools you would recommend managers, white managers can use to disrupt or interrupt these behaviors.

Yejin Lee: One of the things that I talk about as far as transformation work is, like, these three steps, though I don’t like to be prescriptive. And I don’t want to be, like, these are the three things you need to do, and then you’re going to be an antiracist. But I am a person who appreciates framework so I think the first step of really being able to identify what is going on, and I think even that one step requires an immense amount of work. And I’m not trying to be discouraging; instead, I think that a lot of the work that I do, specifically with white folks or folks with dominant identities and positions of power within institutions, is the work of humbling. Like, humility as a practice, humility as a discipline. As a student of abolition, I know that hope is something that, you know, you need to practice and enact as a discipline, and I think the same is true for humility. So this first step of being able to identify the ways in which each individual has default relationships to power, whether it’s racial power or positional power. Sometimes the work that I do with coaching clients is even just asking, like, really basic, but also really powerful questions. Like, where did you learn your relationship to power and authority, and how is it showing up right now? And so, some of the work that I do is in this coaching form. Sometimes I do small group coaching, sometimes I do leadership accountability coaching, but you know, regardless of how I’m engaging with folks, I think that you know, this first step of identification and being humble enough, especially for folks, I will say, everyone has the people who activate them the most.

Yejin Lee:For me, the folks who really grind my gears are white folks who have a level of fluency in racial justice speak and social justice speak who actually skirt accountability all the time and use their language and use their fluency to circumvent accountability. I think that the work of identification requires a lot of this operational practice of humility. And you might remember, Farra, from my workshop that I talk a lot about this, the importance of combining increased knowledge and attunement with practice, right? So one of the responses that we saw when institutions suddenly had money to do, like, racial equity work, when they said for so long that they didn’t have any money after the murder of George Floyd and the rebellions, was people started book clubs. And, like, I would never stop anyone from learning, right? Like, increased attunement to external factors that impact oppressive structures and how those are manifested and expressed, obviously super important. Really understanding the ways in which we hold power, privilege, and bias and reading in order to do that, super-duper important.

Yejin Lee:But one of the things that I found, and actually, when I was connecting with a lot of people about their experiences of frustration, specifically with their managers, it was, like, people are in book clubs, but, like, it’s not changing anything. And so, I think that sometimes this pursuit of knowledge by itself can be an act of indulgence. I think literally anything can be used to uphold oppressive power, and people can use like, oh, wow, I read this book and now I can sort of put that as a trophy that I’ve, like, done really good. Like, I’ve read The New Jim Crow, and now I know how to talk about X, Y, and Z, but if that’s not leading to transformed behavior, if that’s not leading to transformed practices, transformed frameworks, and constant mini shifts, then to me, that’s an exercise of self-indulgence. On the other side, there are also people who are like just trying to enact change without taking moments to reflect and learn and grow. So that, to me, is a little bit foolish. But I think that transformation becomes really possible when you combine the act of growing and learning and awareness-building with translation of that into action into change. And so, I think that the work of identify, like, it’s just one word but it requires all of these processes.

Yejin Lee: So that’s, you know, one bit, and then I think the disruption, this question of how you disrupt, so I think that once people can identify what their default relationship is to conflict, what their default relationship is to power or how it shows up, how it’s impacting those around them, and also increase a little bit of their emotional resilience to receive critical feedback, and if they’re told like, oh, I didn’t think I was being racist by saying X, Y, or Z thing. In order to be capable of disrupting it, they need to be able to know what it is but also need to be able to disrupt their own, whether they externalize their shame by being explosive or being dismissive, or they internalize the shame by spiraling, like, figuring out what you do in those moments of tension and discomfort becomes a really important piece to being able to disrupt it.

Yejin Lee: So if, for example, I am someone who goes into shame spirals, whenever I’m called in or called out, that’s going to get in the way of my actual ability to transform and change behaviors, right? And this is not just about transformation of behaviors, it’s about reducing the amount of harm we’re causing, maybe in the short term by stopping certain behaviors, but, like, going a little bit rootsier. But in order to do that, like, we might need to address some of our own wounds and our own triggers, right? Because if my shame spiraling is something that stops me from ultimately being transformed by accountability processes, then, like, there is going to be a really intense limit to the way that I’m actually going to be able to show up in service of racial justice and equity. I know that that’s, like, high-level and not really specific tips. It’s really important to me to emphasize how deeply personal this work is, and I think that the work of transformation is inherently going to be really personal. And so, in a way, this is like humanizing, right? It’s like, white people are people and have, like, wounds and shit they need to heal from in order to show up more fully. You know, not to use that as an excuse or a reason to be super indulgent and never get to the actual transformation part, but, like, literally there are things that are getting in the way. There are things that are serving as, like, personal and sometimes professional institutional barriers to transformation, and so, those are the “tips” I have.

Farra Trompeter: That’s great, and you have me thinking about a lot of things and especially the idea of really unpacking, identifying, and staying with something and not rushing to a response, but really trying to take apart for yourself if you’re called in or called out, why did I say it that, why did I do, why didn’t I realize that thing I wrote or said was racist or harmful and really pushing yourself to ask that. And like, was that because of another manager I had and how I learned, to your point, about like, where do we learn our relationship to power and authority? Was it because of my own childhood and how I react to my family, which is often the thing that things often come back to? Is it because I didn’t read the right book, but it’s not just about reading the right book, it’s about really understanding, and I just appreciate the emphasis you’re putting on identifying.

Farra Trompeter: And now that in my own, what I’ve been working on, too, is, you know, I am someone who does have an immediate, like, shame, like, oh, I can’t believe I did that. I’m embarrassed. I’m mad at myself. I can’t believe I hurt someone, but what I’ve been trying to work on, to your point, too, and just being real here, is to, like, identify, okay, I’m having that moment. Let me acknowledge I’m having that moment, and now let me keep moving into what else do I need to take apart here and peel back the onion. So, I think part of identifying is not just identifying the words or the action in and of itself, but also identifying how you are reacting and trying to move on from that and think about how your reacting impacts others too. Obviously, for those who’ve read White Fragility, and, like, you know, weaponizing. I think that was another one of your demands, in the list of the demands, was about weaponizing white tears. I think that was one that, or if I remember, you’re like this phrase came up six times. That often happens/ I think a white person might get upset when they hear something, but it’s not about them in that moment, and figuring out where is the space to have that. So anyway, I’m riffing off what you said.

Yejin Lee: Yeah, I think that’s really important, and I appreciate your willingness to share how your, like, mind, body, and heart responds. It’s so funny because as someone, you know, I mentioned in my intro that I had cultivated like my sharpness and my hardness and my confrontational nature, also in response to racism for such a long time, but I think that ultimately, this also led me to a place where I was like, racial justice work is not about healing. Healing is for folks who are hippie-dippy, like, I totally rejected this idea, and when I thought about institutional work related to racial equity and justice, I really was thinking only about the policies and procedures. And, you know, obviously, those things are important and you know, a little bit more amoeba-like, organizational culture.

Yejin Lee: But as I started doing my own sort of racial healing work and started moving more towards embodiment, I realized that there was a whole part of my experiences involved, that one, I had been largely ignoring, like, my own experiences of racial harm, specifically as you know, a Korean-American or AAPI woman, those are all things that I had put away for a really long time, but I bring this up because my recent obsession with sort of individual responsibility in this transformation work is relatively new. And it really came about through the individualized coaching work that I was doing, which I tell my coaching clients, I’m not a therapist, I’m not a healer. I say I’m therapy adjacent because we will talk about deep things like where we learned our relationship to power and authority and figure out how it’s manifesting.

Yejin Lee: But I bring this up to say, I’m also new to incorporating, like, the wholeness of people’s humanity, and while for some people, I’m certainly not the person to help them steward, right? Like some white people are definitely not going to like working with my directness or my interrogation style of questioning. But I think that regardless of style, my interest is really in seeing people’s wholeness, right? And so, what are the things that led you to arrive in this moment? And I think sometimes asking these questions of arrival, how did you arrive here? And even in moments of accountability, it’s not just, like, the transactional, I’m sorry for doing this thing, it’s like, how did I arrive here? What are all of the different threads and components that allowed me to be a person who thought this was okay when ultimately I was causing harm? And to the degree that you can be supported in not only figuring out these stories of arrival but also disentangle.

Yejin Lee: You mentioned relationship to family, like, all of these things show up in all the ways, and I think that some of the work that I do, again, is sort of around attunement-increasing so that people themselves can take their own individualized approach to disentanglement and figuring out how they arrived and then using that information to then transform and make discerning choices about how to move forward differently, right? Because I feel like if we keep operating in our defaults, even if we’re like learning new things, the thing that’s stopping us from transforming is, like, not knowing how we arrived here and not disrupting that and changing it and being an active agent who is autonomously deciding that we want to move differently. And so my work, whether it’s with institutions as a consultant or, you know, doing workshops or working with people one on one is really to support people in, like, increasing agency and autonomy by, like, knowing so much more information so that they can make proactive choices.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, I just want to amplify, again, the “How did I arrive here?” question. That’s such a great question that I think can be used in so many ways, but particularly around accountability. So thank you for stating it so clearly. I wrote that down. I feel like I’m going to be putting on a post-it note on my laptop. That’s a good question to reflect on.

Farra Trompeter: You were just talking a lot about culture and individuals and organizations. And I want to just connect to that point as one of our last topics, which is, you know, for there to be a deep change throughout an organization, this work does have to happen individually, right? And I’m just curious what happens if you’re working with an organization or maybe organizations you’ve seen when there’s someone there who’s not willing to change? Is an organization responsible? Should they be held responsible for individual transformation if they do identify or people have identified for them that there is a problematic person on staff who isn’t making those changes once they’ve been called in or called out?

Yejin Lee: Yeah. It’s a really interesting question, and I think it’s one that doesn’t necessarily have a blanket response. I will say, once again, as a person who went from this position of, like, institutions can only change X, Y, and Z types of things to being like, oh my God, individual transformation is everything, in part, because if you think about, like, the four manifestations of oppression, and in this specific case, racial oppression, you go from the internalized, the things that we believe, the assumptions we don’t know we have about racial inferiority and superiority, and that manifests itself in sort of interpersonal collisions, which then, the relationship between the internalized interpersonal racism and the way that it gets translated into institutional racism through active choices, suggest to me that obviously there’s a lot of work to be done in uprooting institutional racism.

Yejin Lee: So, like, excavating and removing things that are racist, that are embedded within policies, procedures, and to a degree, also organizational culture. But if it’s always going to be the humans that are enacting this, right, if it’s always the humans who are the ones who are making choices, whether they know it or not, there is some degree of responsibility for individuals. So what I will say, and you know this about my approach, I don’t believe that I have any universal answers. I simply am the person that I am and I arrived how I arrived, and if people vibe with it, cool, and if people don’t, there are other practitioners who work differently. I believe if you are an institution that explicitly and publicly states that it cares about equity and justice, that means there needs to be genuine measures and systems and processes of accountability. And accountability, to me, as I’ve said, cannot be understood as a transaction. It is actually a relational process. And I think accountability processes must happen in context of accountable communities. And so I say all this to say that, to me, an organization that claims publicly that it cares about equity and justice, to me, should require some level of personal individual responsibility around transformation and the ways that organizations can do that, obviously there’s, like, a different range of ways people can do it.

Yejin Lee: I do think that in hiring processes, for example, people often they’ll be like, oh, we’re really hiring for competencies, right? Like, we need this person to have project management skills, we need this person to have experience doing software design, like, whatever the thing is, but people never think about one’s relationship to equity and justice in the same way. And then what happens, so, they’ll hire people who have competencies but have, you know, zero, or maybe even like negative, like, actually have tons of red flags, but they’re like, that is a learnable thing. Everything is a learnable thing so why is it that organizations are never prioritizing this bit, this, like, genuine, observable commitment to equity and justice as part of the hiring process, the same way they would with any other competency or skill.

Yejin Lee: So I just bring this up because I think that there are ways in which we don’t know, as institutions, that we’re making choices to devalue something like someone’s relationship to equity and justice. So there are ways to find the right people. I think that for institutions that have already hired people and they’re undergoing a transition where they are actually genuinely caring, saying that they care about equity and justice, obviously organizational change and culture change is hard. And I think when it has, specifically, to do with something as sensitive or intense as racial equity and justice, it becomes all the more dramatic. But I think that a lot of organizations don’t do a good job of anticipating the ways in which people are going to respond to culture shift. So if organizations can say like, okay, we’re going from being an organization that doesn’t really explicitly care about racial inequity to being an organization that does, they should do the work of understanding how people are going to respond to that. Both folks of minoritized identities but also, like – I don’t know if you’ve heard this quote, but “for people in positions of power, equality feels like oppression.” So, for folks who suddenly aren’t able to constantly utilize their defaults, which might be causing harm, and they are so used to being able to do that, we should be able to anticipate as leaders who are thoughtful and inclusive and equitable that, like, those folks are going to struggle.

Yejin Lee: So, what does accountability look like? And also, I think, you know, maybe one of the last things that I’ll say is I do this workshop about values embodiment, and I think that not that we constantly need to be proving stuff, but if you go from not caring about something or valuing something to, like, caring and valuing the thing and nothing looks different, do you actually care about the thing? What has changed? What sort of shifts have been enacted to sort of demonstrate this lived operational commitment? And so, if you’re an organization that went from like, okay, we didn’t really do anything about equity and now we want to do things. We have public statements, we have included equity in our values, organizational values, it’s on our website, but like nothing is actually operationally different, maybe other than like providing a few trainings for staff, then are you actually an organization that is willing to transform? So, my recommendation, again, I do think that there’s a range of ways that institutions can hold its people accountable, and I think even from the outset of hiring, it’s really important to treat one’s relationship to equity and justice as a competency and just the way that they would, anything else, but I also think that maybe organizations should just not say they care about it if they actually don’t care about it. If it’s not leading to any operational changes, then what is the function of it? Is it really just a trophy? Is it a way of circumventing real change and accountability? And so I think that is the larger, more depressing question to ask.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, and a good one. I mean, one of the things we’ve been talking about is if you’re doing this work, you need to focus on it internally. Get it right before you’re worried about exactly what’s going on externally. Cause otherwise, you’re going to get into this place that you’re talking about.

Farra Trompeter: Well, we could talk all day, but I know both of us have fur babies to feed and lives to lead. So, if you’re out there and you are vibing with Yejin, I would encourage you to go to yejinlee.co. Y-E-J-I-N-L-E-E.C-O. At Yejin’s website, you can sign up for her awesome newsletter, learn about her trainings that she does, find out more about her consulting and coaching, and all of that. You can also contact Yejin on LinkedIn. We will link to all of this in the show notes. Yejin, anything else you want to share before we wrap up?

Yejin Lee: Obviously we could talk forever and ever, and maybe we will, but I think that is good for now.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, thank you so much for being with us today.

Yejin Lee: Thank you for having me.
Yejin Lee: So I was just hearing, just by being really embedded in the community and, you know, wanting to give care and tenderness, was hearing these patterns and, you know, none of this is new and none of this is necessarily specific to the AAPI community. I know that around also the murder of George Floyd, a lot of organizations suddenly had this, like, radical language and their statements of solidarity, and a lot of times it was written by their staff of color who were much more radicalized. And so, this is not specific to this group of humans, but as far as the timing of the work that I was starting to do, the communities that I was starting to build, it just felt like I was hearing enough of a pattern, and because of the kinds of roles I had played within the nonprofit world, I was like, this is a workshop that I can provide.

Yejin Lee: And so, I actually launched the Unfiltering the Fury workshop alongside the free one that I did for people of color, which is called Confronting Racism at Work: Strategic Self-Advocacy for People of Color, and I didn’t do it to be strategic, it was really just like, these are the two things that I can think of. On the one hand, I really wanted to do something that was genuinely centering people of color, which was confronting racism at work, but it was also just such a bummer to identify, like, we have to do all of this work. We have to undergo the burden of labor, of being strategic after experiencing racism in the workplace and out in the world, and it sucks that, like, we have to continue to do that labor because we’re, like, waiting for white folks to show up in a way that is genuinely transformational and transformed. So, that was the reason that I did both of them. It’s like, I want to focus on people of color, and I also want to acknowledge the fact that, like, we have to do that work, like, we have to use this framework that I created to support people in surfacing enough information to, like, radically center themselves as they figure out how to advocate for themselves because the white folks aren’t doing what they need to do.

Yejin Lee: So, I created these at the same time, and also I decided for Unfiltering the Fury, you can even tell by the title, that I was going to be pretty unfiltered, and that was a really active decision to be that way, in part, because I had accommodated whiteness and had to be so strategic around whiteness for so long when I was working in New York City nonprofit institutions, and I was like, you know what, now that I’ve been liberated from the institutional world, I want to do this the way that I want to do this. And so, I don’t know if you remember the event description, Farra, but I was really specific. I was like, this is for these kinds of white folks who are actually okay being decentered, who, like, can actually receive, be on the receiving end. A range of emotions, including my rage. And so I was like, people can opt-in, like, I really want people to have the autonomy to opt-in, and I also really felt that there would be, like, four people who registered because I was like, who would want this? Who would want me yelling at them for three hours?

Farra Trompeter: There were four from Big Duck. We checked that box, we got you signed up fast. No, I remember the registration. It was almost like an application. You were like, you need to really be okay that you were opting into this space, and you were very clear about it, and you said it and you’re like, all right, white folks, I’m going to yell at you a bit for the next three hours, and you need to hear me, and I’d, honestly, never been to a training like that before, and I think it was really refreshing and helpful. Although I’m sorry, the world has conspired that you had to deliver this content.

Yejin Lee: Right. Right. No, but it’s really interesting because, you know, I remember sending out the feedback form and then reviewing it. I was a little tentative, a little nervous. I wasn’t sure how it was going to be received also because it was one of my first real public front-facing events that I was putting on myself. But I remember the number of people who were like, it was actually refreshing. Like, one, they were like, “You weren’t as mean as I thought you were going to be, but also it was refreshing to be communicated with honestly,” and there was a part of me that’s, like, that’s so interesting, that’s so great, but also the reason that people haven’t been straightforward with you is because of you. Like, you are the reason for that so it’s very interesting. But, yeah, so there were a lot more people who registered for that than I had anticipated, honestly, but the number of people who registered for the free one, the Confronting Racism at Work that was specifically for people of color, I did two installments, and over 2,000 people had registered, which is not a testament to, like, Yejin’s abilities and more like, wow, this was clearly super duper needed.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah. And I want to acknowledge, we’re recording this in March, a day before the anniversary of the Atlanta shootings and also two days after the second anniversary of Breonna Taylor’s shooting. So yeah, this is very much in the air right now, and I appreciate you spending time with me. One of the things you were talking about in building up that training were all the things that you were hearing, and one of the things that I’ve reflected on a lot since doing that training was this compilation you made of over 300 demands from almost 100 people of color who have repeatedly experienced racism from their white managers. And you sort of put a call out and said, “what do you want them to know?” but I want to just share five of them that resonated with me and then ask you about that.

Farra Trompeter: So, I am saying these out loud as a white woman. These are not my voice, these are voices that came through from people of color, but I did want to share some of them to give people a flavor of what’s in that document.

“Stop misspelling and mispronouncing my name.”
“Stop sharing articles about racial injustice with me that cause shock and awe for you but retraumatize me.”
“Stop saying you want to have difficult conversations if you can’t come to terms with your own bias and privilege.”
“Stop moving at the pace of white comfort instead of the urgency of marginalized needs.”
“Stop telling me that I have changed when different facets of my personality emerge from dealing with your racism. People of color are humans too, and we are allowed to have a range of emotions.”

Farra Trompeter: So first of all, I just want to thank you for organizing this and compiling it, and everyone who did submit these demands. There’s so much to dig into in that document, and I hope that white listeners will do the work to come back to our website, download this document, access your content, and really reflect on these demands. But as people, as white people, consider their own response and actions, I’m curious what tools you would recommend managers, white managers can use to disrupt or interrupt these behaviors.

Yejin Lee: One of the things that I talk about as far as transformation work is, like, these three steps, though I don’t like to be prescriptive. And I don’t want to be, like, these are the three things you need to do, and then you’re going to be an antiracist. But I am a person who appreciates framework so I think the first step of really being able to identify what is going on, and I think even that one step requires an immense amount of work. And I’m not trying to be discouraging; instead, I think that a lot of the work that I do, specifically with white folks or folks with dominant identities and positions of power within institutions, is the work of humbling. Like, humility as a practice, humility as a discipline. As a student of abolition, I know that hope is something that, you know, you need to practice and enact as a discipline, and I think the same is true for humility. So this first step of being able to identify the ways in which each individual has default relationships to power, whether it’s racial power or positional power. Sometimes the work that I do with coaching clients is even just asking, like, really basic, but also really powerful questions. Like, where did you learn your relationship to power and authority, and how is it showing up right now? And so, some of the work that I do is in this coaching form. Sometimes I do small group coaching, sometimes I do leadership accountability coaching, but you know, regardless of how I’m engaging with folks, I think that you know, this first step of identification and being humble enough, especially for folks, I will say, everyone has the people who activate them the most.

Yejin Lee:For me, the folks who really grind my gears are white folks who have a level of fluency in racial justice speak and social justice speak who actually skirt accountability all the time and use their language and use their fluency to circumvent accountability. I think that the work of identification requires a lot of this operational practice of humility. And you might remember, Farra, from my workshop that I talk a lot about this, the importance of combining increased knowledge and attunement with practice, right? So one of the responses that we saw when institutions suddenly had money to do, like, racial equity work, when they said for so long that they didn’t have any money after the murder of George Floyd and the rebellions, was people started book clubs. And, like, I would never stop anyone from learning, right? Like, increased attunement to external factors that impact oppressive structures and how those are manifested and expressed, obviously super important. Really understanding the ways in which we hold power, privilege, and bias and reading in order to do that, super-duper important.

Yejin Lee:But one of the things that I found, and actually, when I was connecting with a lot of people about their experiences of frustration, specifically with their managers, it was, like, people are in book clubs, but, like, it’s not changing anything. And so, I think that sometimes this pursuit of knowledge by itself can be an act of indulgence. I think literally anything can be used to uphold oppressive power, and people can use like, oh, wow, I read this book and now I can sort of put that as a trophy that I’ve, like, done really good. Like, I’ve read The New Jim Crow, and now I know how to talk about X, Y, and Z, but if that’s not leading to transformed behavior, if that’s not leading to transformed practices, transformed frameworks, and constant mini shifts, then to me, that’s an exercise of self-indulgence. On the other side, there are also people who are like just trying to enact change without taking moments to reflect and learn and grow. So that, to me, is a little bit foolish. But I think that transformation becomes really possible when you combine the act of growing and learning and awareness-building with translation of that into action into change. And so, I think that the work of identify, like, it’s just one word but it requires all of these processes.

Yejin Lee: So that’s, you know, one bit, and then I think the disruption, this question of how you disrupt, so I think that once people can identify what their default relationship is to conflict, what their default relationship is to power or how it shows up, how it’s impacting those around them, and also increase a little bit of their emotional resilience to receive critical feedback, and if they’re told like, oh, I didn’t think I was being racist by saying X, Y, or Z thing. In order to be capable of disrupting it, they need to be able to know what it is but also need to be able to disrupt their own, whether they externalize their shame by being explosive or being dismissive, or they internalize the shame by spiraling, like, figuring out what you do in those moments of tension and discomfort becomes a really important piece to being able to disrupt it.

Yejin Lee: So if, for example, I am someone who goes into shame spirals, whenever I’m called in or called out, that’s going to get in the way of my actual ability to transform and change behaviors, right? And this is not just about transformation of behaviors, it’s about reducing the amount of harm we’re causing, maybe in the short term by stopping certain behaviors, but, like, going a little bit rootsier. But in order to do that, like, we might need to address some of our own wounds and our own triggers, right? Because if my shame spiraling is something that stops me from ultimately being transformed by accountability processes, then, like, there is going to be a really intense limit to the way that I’m actually going to be able to show up in service of racial justice and equity. I know that that’s, like, high-level and not really specific tips. It’s really important to me to emphasize how deeply personal this work is, and I think that the work of transformation is inherently going to be really personal. And so, in a way, this is like humanizing, right? It’s like, white people are people and have, like, wounds and shit they need to heal from in order to show up more fully. You know, not to use that as an excuse or a reason to be super indulgent and never get to the actual transformation part, but, like, literally there are things that are getting in the way. There are things that are serving as, like, personal and sometimes professional institutional barriers to transformation, and so, those are the “tips” I have.

Farra Trompeter: That’s great, and you have me thinking about a lot of things and especially the idea of really unpacking, identifying, and staying with something and not rushing to a response, but really trying to take apart for yourself if you’re called in or called out, why did I say it that, why did I do, why didn’t I realize that thing I wrote or said was racist or harmful and really pushing yourself to ask that. And like, was that because of another manager I had and how I learned, to your point, about like, where do we learn our relationship to power and authority? Was it because of my own childhood and how I react to my family, which is often the thing that things often come back to? Is it because I didn’t read the right book, but it’s not just about reading the right book, it’s about really understanding, and I just appreciate the emphasis you’re putting on identifying.

Farra Trompeter: And now that in my own, what I’ve been working on, too, is, you know, I am someone who does have an immediate, like, shame, like, oh, I can’t believe I did that. I’m embarrassed. I’m mad at myself. I can’t believe I hurt someone, but what I’ve been trying to work on, to your point, too, and just being real here, is to, like, identify, okay, I’m having that moment. Let me acknowledge I’m having that moment, and now let me keep moving into what else do I need to take apart here and peel back the onion. So, I think part of identifying is not just identifying the words or the action in and of itself, but also identifying how you are reacting and trying to move on from that and think about how your reacting impacts others too. Obviously, for those who’ve read White Fragility, and, like, you know, weaponizing. I think that was another one of your demands, in the list of the demands, was about weaponizing white tears. I think that was one that, or if I remember, you’re like this phrase came up six times. That often happens/ I think a white person might get upset when they hear something, but it’s not about them in that moment, and figuring out where is the space to have that. So anyway, I’m riffing off what you said.

Yejin Lee: Yeah, I think that’s really important, and I appreciate your willingness to share how your, like, mind, body, and heart responds. It’s so funny because as someone, you know, I mentioned in my intro that I had cultivated like my sharpness and my hardness and my confrontational nature, also in response to racism for such a long time, but I think that ultimately, this also led me to a place where I was like, racial justice work is not about healing. Healing is for folks who are hippie-dippy, like, I totally rejected this idea, and when I thought about institutional work related to racial equity and justice, I really was thinking only about the policies and procedures. And, you know, obviously, those things are important and you know, a little bit more amoeba-like, organizational culture.

Yejin Lee: But as I started doing my own sort of racial healing work and started moving more towards embodiment, I realized that there was a whole part of my experiences involved, that one, I had been largely ignoring, like, my own experiences of racial harm, specifically as you know, a Korean-American or AAPI woman, those are all things that I had put away for a really long time, but I bring this up because my recent obsession with sort of individual responsibility in this transformation work is relatively new. And it really came about through the individualized coaching work that I was doing, which I tell my coaching clients, I’m not a therapist, I’m not a healer. I say I’m therapy adjacent because we will talk about deep things like where we learned our relationship to power and authority and figure out how it’s manifesting.

Yejin Lee: But I bring this up to say, I’m also new to incorporating, like, the wholeness of people’s humanity, and while for some people, I’m certainly not the person to help them steward, right? Like some white people are definitely not going to like working with my directness or my interrogation style of questioning. But I think that regardless of style, my interest is really in seeing people’s wholeness, right? And so, what are the things that led you to arrive in this moment? And I think sometimes asking these questions of arrival, how did you arrive here? And even in moments of accountability, it’s not just, like, the transactional, I’m sorry for doing this thing, it’s like, how did I arrive here? What are all of the different threads and components that allowed me to be a person who thought this was okay when ultimately I was causing harm? And to the degree that you can be supported in not only figuring out these stories of arrival but also disentangle.

Yejin Lee: You mentioned relationship to family, like, all of these things show up in all the ways, and I think that some of the work that I do, again, is sort of around attunement-increasing so that people themselves can take their own individualized approach to disentanglement and figuring out how they arrived and then using that information to then transform and make discerning choices about how to move forward differently, right? Because I feel like if we keep operating in our defaults, even if we’re like learning new things, the thing that’s stopping us from transforming is, like, not knowing how we arrived here and not disrupting that and changing it and being an active agent who is autonomously deciding that we want to move differently. And so my work, whether it’s with institutions as a consultant or, you know, doing workshops or working with people one on one is really to support people in, like, increasing agency and autonomy by, like, knowing so much more information so that they can make proactive choices.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, I just want to amplify, again, the “How did I arrive here?” question. That’s such a great question that I think can be used in so many ways, but particularly around accountability. So thank you for stating it so clearly. I wrote that down. I feel like I’m going to be putting on a post-it note on my laptop. That’s a good question to reflect on.

Farra Trompeter: You were just talking a lot about culture and individuals and organizations. And I want to just connect to that point as one of our last topics, which is, you know, for there to be a deep change throughout an organization, this work does have to happen individually, right? And I’m just curious what happens if you’re working with an organization or maybe organizations you’ve seen when there’s someone there who’s not willing to change? Is an organization responsible? Should they be held responsible for individual transformation if they do identify or people have identified for them that there is a problematic person on staff who isn’t making those changes once they’ve been called in or called out?

Yejin Lee: Yeah. It’s a really interesting question, and I think it’s one that doesn’t necessarily have a blanket response. I will say, once again, as a person who went from this position of, like, institutions can only change X, Y, and Z types of things to being like, oh my God, individual transformation is everything, in part, because if you think about, like, the four manifestations of oppression, and in this specific case, racial oppression, you go from the internalized, the things that we believe, the assumptions we don’t know we have about racial inferiority and superiority, and that manifests itself in sort of interpersonal collisions, which then, the relationship between the internalized interpersonal racism and the way that it gets translated into institutional racism through active choices, suggest to me that obviously there’s a lot of work to be done in uprooting institutional racism.

Yejin Lee: So, like, excavating and removing things that are racist, that are embedded within policies, procedures, and to a degree, also organizational culture. But if it’s always going to be the humans that are enacting this, right, if it’s always the humans who are the ones who are making choices, whether they know it or not, there is some degree of responsibility for individuals. So what I will say, and you know this about my approach, I don’t believe that I have any universal answers. I simply am the person that I am and I arrived how I arrived, and if people vibe with it, cool, and if people don’t, there are other practitioners who work differently. I believe if you are an institution that explicitly and publicly states that it cares about equity and justice, that means there needs to be genuine measures and systems and processes of accountability. And accountability, to me, as I’ve said, cannot be understood as a transaction. It is actually a relational process. And I think accountability processes must happen in context of accountable communities. And so I say all this to say that, to me, an organization that claims publicly that it cares about equity and justice, to me, should require some level of personal individual responsibility around transformation and the ways that organizations can do that, obviously there’s, like, a different range of ways people can do it.

Yejin Lee: I do think that in hiring processes, for example, people often they’ll be like, oh, we’re really hiring for competencies, right? Like, we need this person to have project management skills, we need this person to have experience doing software design, like, whatever the thing is, but people never think about one’s relationship to equity and justice in the same way. And then what happens, so, they’ll hire people who have competencies but have, you know, zero, or maybe even like negative, like, actually have tons of red flags, but they’re like, that is a learnable thing. Everything is a learnable thing so why is it that organizations are never prioritizing this bit, this, like, genuine, observable commitment to equity and justice as part of the hiring process, the same way they would with any other competency or skill.

Yejin Lee: So I just bring this up because I think that there are ways in which we don’t know, as institutions, that we’re making choices to devalue something like someone’s relationship to equity and justice. So there are ways to find the right people. I think that for institutions that have already hired people and they’re undergoing a transition where they are actually genuinely caring, saying that they care about equity and justice, obviously organizational change and culture change is hard. And I think when it has, specifically, to do with something as sensitive or intense as racial equity and justice, it becomes all the more dramatic. But I think that a lot of organizations don’t do a good job of anticipating the ways in which people are going to respond to culture shift. So if organizations can say like, okay, we’re going from being an organization that doesn’t really explicitly care about racial inequity to being an organization that does, they should do the work of understanding how people are going to respond to that. Both folks of minoritized identities but also, like – I don’t know if you’ve heard this quote, but “for people in positions of power, equality feels like oppression.” So, for folks who suddenly aren’t able to constantly utilize their defaults, which might be causing harm, and they are so used to being able to do that, we should be able to anticipate as leaders who are thoughtful and inclusive and equitable that, like, those folks are going to struggle.

Yejin Lee: So, what does accountability look like? And also, I think, you know, maybe one of the last things that I’ll say is I do this workshop about values embodiment, and I think that not that we constantly need to be proving stuff, but if you go from not caring about something or valuing something to, like, caring and valuing the thing and nothing looks different, do you actually care about the thing? What has changed? What sort of shifts have been enacted to sort of demonstrate this lived operational commitment? And so, if you’re an organization that went from like, okay, we didn’t really do anything about equity and now we want to do things. We have public statements, we have included equity in our values, organizational values, it’s on our website, but like nothing is actually operationally different, maybe other than like providing a few trainings for staff, then are you actually an organization that is willing to transform? So, my recommendation, again, I do think that there’s a range of ways that institutions can hold its people accountable, and I think even from the outset of hiring, it’s really important to treat one’s relationship to equity and justice as a competency and just the way that they would, anything else, but I also think that maybe organizations should just not say they care about it if they actually don’t care about it. If it’s not leading to any operational changes, then what is the function of it? Is it really just a trophy? Is it a way of circumventing real change and accountability? And so I think that is the larger, more depressing question to ask.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, and a good one. I mean, one of the things we’ve been talking about is if you’re doing this work, you need to focus on it internally. Get it right before you’re worried about exactly what’s going on externally. Cause otherwise, you’re going to get into this place that you’re talking about.

Farra Trompeter: Well, we could talk all day, but I know both of us have fur babies to feed and lives to lead. So, if you’re out there and you are vibing with Yejin, I would encourage you to go to yejinlee.co. Y-E-J-I-N-L-E-E.C-O. At Yejin’s website, you can sign up for her awesome newsletter, learn about her trainings that she does, find out more about her consulting and coaching, and all of that. You can also contact Yejin on LinkedIn. We will link to all of this in the show notes. Yejin, anything else you want to share before we wrap up?

Yejin Lee: Obviously we could talk forever and ever, and maybe we will, but I think that is good for now.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, thank you so much for being with us today.

Yejin Lee: Thank you for having me.