The power of privilege: Tiffany Jana at TEDxRVAWomen

so as you just heard I'd like to talk to you today about privilege diversity and giving back but honestly when I hear introductions like that they make people sound so spectacular so I'd like to offer another possible introduction for me Tiffany Jonah started college when she was 15 years old she dropped out at age 18 got married way too young survived a teenage pregnancy at 19 was on food stamps while surviving domestic violence so she finished college online started her first business tanked that business got divorced not once but twice and married three times let's welcome her to the stage that paints a very different picture but that is reality that is the truth of Who I am and I am nothing without my failures it's part of my invisible diversity so I've survived a lot of really difficult things with help from some really amazing women and it has taken me a long time to get here to the point where I'm standing on a stage at its head X event speaking to all of you but for a long time I was fixated on all of the injustice --is that had happened to me and the injustice is in our society now I don't know if you guys noticed but I'm gonna let you in on something I'm a black woman I know right a bunch of you don't even see color so you didn't even notice but I'm just saying so I was frustrated that some people in our society had more privileged than I did I was frustrated that when I walked into a job interview I had to deal with the stereotypes and assumptions that other people had of me before I even walked in the door that I had to work twice as hard to be seen as equally competent that when I travel airport security searches through my hair I was frustrated that our society has bought into a belief system that some human beings have more value than others that some people are perceived as more intelligent than others simply because they have a different skin color or that some people are seen as more natural leaders because of their height or their gender I mean come on the more I thought about what other people thought of me and what other people had done to me the less I was able to believe in my full potential and that's one of the problems with privilege when society tells you that you are worth less than somebody else it's easy to start believing that all of that started to change for me when I learned the story of one of Richmond's most remarkable women Maggie Lena Walker Maggie Walker had every reason to focus on being justices of her day and to fixate and complain on the privileged that she didn't have by contemporary standards she didn't have very at many advantages she was born a servant the near descendant of enslaved Africans and a woman but even in her day she had some privilege she was literate well-educated highly respected employed and as strange as it sounds she was fair-skinned in a society that devalued dark-skinned and that was a privilege Maggie Walker became a teacher a wonderfully acceptable occupation for a young lady in her day then she became a social enterprise executive defying all of the normal conventions as an ensign social enterprise executive she created hundreds of jobs through a 20 state insurance cooperative and a department store through a fraternal order called st. Luke's as if that wasn't enough this woman chartered a bank all right no small feat for a black woman in 1902 Maggie Walker did not allow the obstacles that society put in her path to prevent her from achieving greatness instead she used the privilege she had to become the first female bank president in the United States of America what's more important and more impressive is that she didn't use her privilege to simply gain notoriety and wealth for herself she used it to improve conditions for the men women and children in her community and across the country now I have had the distinct privilege and honor of sharing Maggie Walker story with thousands of people through a one-woman play called the penny executive by Foster Solomon at the Science Museum of Virginia Maggie Walker's story changed my life it inspired me and it gave me resilience when I was at the lowest point in my life so you can imagine how my heart grew three sizes when I found out a few weeks ago that Maggie Walker was my great-great aunt twice removed not exactly blood relation but I would have been invited to the family reunion and eating the same potato salad and that is good enough for me so I have other relatives who survived the odds despite all of the things that were sort of working against them a gentleman by the name of John groves was a literate Virginia slave he was my great-great-grandfather and he joined the Union Army when the troops marched through the south literacy was a privilege during slavery and my family only had it because John's white father was also his owner and he chose to educate his half black son a white slave master used his privilege to break the law and help mitigate the effects of racism on his offspring because he knew that his skin color would be a liability for the rest of his life that one small act of sharing privilege helped me land on this stage generations later the gentleman in the far right hand side of this photograph is my grandfather and John grosses grand son his name was Harry groves and person he was just accomplished beyond belief I honestly don't have time to tell you all the amazing things that my grandfather did I will tell you he was a very accomplished attorney and one of the ways he used his privilege was to help fight for the rights of senior citizens in the United States of America now does anybody notice anything about this picture in particular do you recognize anybody anything look familiar go ahead say it don't be shy Martin Luther King jr. yes you're you're you're fine that doesn't just look like Martin Luther King jr. that actually is in your good it's okay so I put this up here to show you that I have had this picture for ages and I never noticed the father of the American civil rights movement in the center of that picture because all I could see was my granddaddy my family member okay I literally was completely blind to that so I'm a question for you is what are you missing that is right in front of you sometimes you have to change your frame to really see people I changed my frame by telling Macky water story and by learning about the obstacles that my family overcame and in doing so I was able to see some things that I had been missing that were right in front of me I was so fixated on the privilege that I didn't have that I missed much of the privilege that I do have I missed the fact that being an army brat and having international experience and being multilingual and having a great education and a mom with a PhD and a dad with an MD all gave me plenty of opportunities for success and that's one of the traps our society lays for us we think of privilege as something that you either have or you don't have it's like a switch either it's on or it's off and if we allow ourselves to focus on the privileges that we don't have then it's really easy for us to become blind to the ones we do have and privilege can blind those of us who have it at least that's what my husband tells me my husband is a white male heterosexual Christian who grew up in a wealthy suburb with a great public school system that guy had a lot of privilege and what he tells me is that some people who have privilege can't even see it some don't even want to acknowledge that it exists because why should they you don't need to see it to survive if you have enough of it but the thing is if you excelled in college we're offered a great job and are working your way up towards that corner office then the idea that even a small amount of your privilege might have come from the fact that you have a certain skin color or a certain gender or worn in a certain country that might shed a little bit of doubt on the cause of your success and that's a difficult pill to swallow privilege also does not necessarily mean that you are guaranteed a perfect life you can have abundant privilege and be completely unfulfilled completely empty so I'm sure that there are a bunch of you who are sitting in your seat right now maybe looking at your program and hoping that the next speaker will be a lot funnier maybe a little bit more inspiring maybe talk about something less uncomfortable but the fact of the matter is sometimes we need to be a little bit uncomfortable in order to understand the power that we have to affect the change on our lives and to effect a change on the lives of others now I've got a question how many Millennials do I have in the audience are there any Millennials whoo-hoo Millennials Gen Xers got new Gen Xers out there all right excellent I'm not telling you which generation I'm in but it's one of those um so I know that a lot of the Gen Xers and Millennials have a hard time understanding why we're still focusing on diversity because guys things are so much better now and it's true they really are so much better we only read about the horrors that surrounded the civil rights movement we don't have to live through them but the other thing I know about our generations is that we are very passionate about making the world a better place and we can't do that if we don't deal with the legacy of diversity and understand how decades of institutional bias continue to affect our society in ways that benefit some people more than others whether we like it or not whether we did it on purpose or not the fact of the matter is white families still have six times the wealth of black and Latino families and that gap is getting wider it's not getting better the Great Recession had a much larger impact on Hispanic and black family owned workers than it did on white workers we have mountains of literature that tell us that men and women are still being treated differently in the workplace from income disparities to board representation a famous Yale study sent out two copies of identical resumes to science professors across the country the only difference between the resumes was the name and the gender of that name the fictitious male applicants were offered more job opportunities higher starting salaries and seen as more competent than their female counterparts with the exact same resumes so why am I being a Debbie Downer and telling you all of this I'm telling you all of this because race still matters gender still matters society still suffers from the fallacy of the hierarchy of human value privilege still dictates who gets job interviews who gets hired and who gets promoted so for those of us who want to make the world a better place we simply cannot achieve that without dealing with the legacy of diversity and privilege I had my aha moment when I finally decided to embrace my privilege and release the grip that loss and lack had on my life when I recognized that I had the skills and the resources and the role models to become a social enterprise entrepreneur my whole life changed I could have taken my privilege and stuck it in a little corner and used it all for me but I learned about this social enterprise movement and I decided to start a Virginia benefit corporation and become part of the global B Corp movement so that I could use the power of business to help solve complex social problems like the ones we've been talking about like racism and inequality the bottom line folks is that we all have privilege so I invite you and I challenge you to look into your areas of privilege figure out what they are and use them for good acknowledge the advantages that you have and use them to restore equity wherever you see bias you are not powerless against institutional bias or unconscious bias you have power to make a difference in this world I want you to remember the humanity of the people around you the people you work with the people on the street in my line of business the vast majority of the challenges that I help deal with in workplaces and in society all come back to the fact that we forget that we are all human that we are all in together remember people's humanity change your frame and see people as part of your extended family you don't have to like them all heaven knows we all have family members that drive us nuts but that is part of being human so I just want to leave you with the notion that if you're a little uncomfortable or any of these ideas might have challenged you no one in this room none of us here and arguably none of us on the planet at this time created this mess we're all stuck with it though and it is going to take all of us to make it better

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 428,604

Keywords: Privilege, TEDx, Tedxrvawomen, ted talk, ted, English Language, tedx talk, ted x, tedx, Legacy, tedx talks, Family, Empower, United States, ted talks

Id: N0acvkHIiZs

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 06 2014