Bridging the personal and professional
I’m in it…bridging the personal and professional. I really do not see any other way to do this work. How to I make authentic connections to my clients, students and research without deep awareness and knowledge of self? How do I train, coach, teach or lead if I am not real to my vulnerabilities, challenges and gems? I was doing this work for quite some time before I realized I needed to bring it home. My mother is a white and Jewish woman, and my father a black Latino. My mother and I do not share the same racial identity and I have watched her over the years operate in ways that are very much connected to her privilege as a white woman, yet until somewhat recently, we never spoke about it. My mom also taught me about learning the world through relationships. My parents divorced during my adolescence and so did my racial and cultural identities. People have often asked me how am I able to get along with so many different types of people? My response is, I had to. I survived by negotiating many different worlds, worlds that did not and do not accept one another. My grandfather, my mom’s dad, Papa, as we called him, did not believe in interracial marriage, despite my parent’s union. Up until months before he passed away we engaged in more than one conversion about his conviction that “white people should not marry black people.” This played out in many ways in our relationship and also in the community where he lived. When visiting my Nana and Papa’s home in Florida, I was told on more than once occasion to get out of the pool because I was “too dark” to swim in their pool. And on the other side, the antisemitism from my fathers’ side was real, mostly in the form of jokes and intense stereotyping. I have more stories to share, but my message is I bridge my personal and professional world because I have to in order to operate as a whole person and provide authentic services to my clients and to my students. Discussing with my mom the issue with buying my black daughter a white barbie doll, is very much connected to my work with helping white executives understand their privileges and increase awareness to the normalcy and ordinariness of whiteness in our American culture.
“To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa