Author: ktnorlander

When I was in college, I joined my school’s InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter. I felt comfortable in our chapter’s meetings, probably because they were reflective of our small, liberal campus. But multi-campus InterVarsity events were different. I’d grown up in the Episcopal church and was unfamiliar with the evangelical subculture. What I encountered was very different from my experience. Worship consisted of praise songs led by a rock band. There were no hymnals; instead, lyrics were projected onto a screen, and you learned the tune from the band. A promotional video for a week-long summer session was filled with shots of people parasailing and water skiing and singing praise songs in a large group. Based on my initial encounters with evangelical subculture, I would describe it as loud, extroverted, and active. My opinion hasn’t changed.

It’s not that I didn’t like rock music or that Episcopalians don’t water ski. But as an introvert who loved hymns and had absolutely no interest in parasailing, I felt out of place.

While they rarely intend it, many organizations have a dominant culture. A workplace may encourage bonding or reward hard work with tickets to sporting events. This is great for sports lovers, but not so fun for people who couldn’t care less about sports. A church women’s group might include a knitting circle, while men might be encouraged to meet for a game of basketball. A church youth group might start each meeting with an ice-breaker guaranteed to inspire shy people to pray. “Please, Lord, don’t let anyone pick me!”

When an organization allows a dominant culture to form, people who don’t fit into that culture feel like they don’t belong. When my daughter was growing up, our church’s youth group schedule didn’t work well for us, but I was still disappointed she expressed no interest in youth group. Then I started to volunteer with the youth, and I understood. She wouldn’t have fit in. My own teenaged self wouldn’t have fit in. Although regular meetings did include time for small group discussions, their composition shifted from meeting to meeting. This meant that the shy kids never got a chance to warm up to their group over time. And most of the scheduled “extra” events had that “loud, extroverted, and active” flavor I associate with evangelicals: snow tubing, bowling and arcade games, a visit to a trampoline park. How could a quiet, nerdy kid ever hope to fit in?

The solution to the problem is simple: organizations need to listen and respond to all members, not just those who fit the dominant culture. And this listening needs to be ongoing. What worked 10 years ago may leave some people feeling alienated now.

Because people who don’t fit into the dominate group may be shy about sharing their preferences, leaders may want to distribute surveys to everyone in their organization. As you learn what people want, your goal is not to replace one dominate culture with another one. Instead, you should work to include people who have previously been left out. If you lead a workplace that encourages bonding by distributing sporting event tickets to employees and their guests, you don’t need to stop doing that. But if you find that some of your employees are more interested in the arts than sports, you might want to throw in some concert tickets once a year or host a social event at a small gallery in place of one of the sporting events you usually attend.

There will always be special interest groups that cater to certain individuals. There’s no need for a poker group to sometimes make knitting a part of their meetings; a Spanish conversation group doesn’t need to hold some of its meetings in French. But if you want your organization to be welcoming, it’s time to stop assuming that everyone fits in a certain mold. Listen — especially to the quiet folks, the ones who seem unengaged — and find ways to include them. Your group will be stronger for it.

Dressember is the brainchild of Blythe Hill, who combined a personal fashion challenge with a desire to fight human trafficking, particularly in the sex industry. The idea is simple: women commit to wearing a dress every day during December. Exceptions may be made for work uniforms, exercise, cleaning, and sleeping. Participants use their commitment both to generate awareness of human trafficking and to raise funds to fight it. The Dressember Foundation gives 80% of the money raised to its partner organizations. This year, those organizations are International Justice Mission, A21, and McMahon/Ryan Child Advocacy Center.

Yes, it would be more effective to donate money directly to Dressember Foundation’s partner organizations. Yes, there are many ways you can raise awareness of human trafficking. So why participate in Dressember?

• First, it helps you make a month-long commitment to actually fight human trafficking, instead of simply putting it on your to-do list.
• Second, people respond to activities like this. You could donate money to an anti-trafficking organization and ask your friends to do the same. But there’s something about saying, “I will do x for organization y. Will you contribute money to support that organization?” Perhaps we feel more comfortable asking people to make contributions when we’re willing to do something to demonstrate our own commitment. Perhaps people are more willing to give in those circumstances. Whatever the reason, these things work. I’d be willing to bet that Dressember could be particularly effective if you don’t normally wear a dress.
• Also, while you can collect money from friends and mail it directly to an anti-trafficking organization, you and your friends may feel more comfortable if you set up a fundraising page through an organization like Dressember. It allows each contributor to get a receipt for their donation, and it removes the trust issues  that might be involved if they sent the money to you.

Although Dressember is geared toward women, men are welcome to participate. One pastor wore a dress for a day, but men may feel more comfortable committing to wearing a bow tie, suspenders, or some other distinctive piece of clothing.

Essentially, Dressember can be an effective, easy way to fight human trafficking. If it appeals to you, why not give it a try?

This week I encountered two articles about privilege. One was a series of photos that visually explain privilege by flipping what we expect to see. The other was a thoughtful article about privilege from a conservative point of view. Privilege has been on my list of potential blog topics. The articles were the nudge I needed to write about it.

“Privilege” essentially means that you are born into a world where certain advantages, power among them, tend to come with being in a group or groups to which you belong. Powerful people are more often like you than not. Desirable goods and services are geared toward people like you. You don’t need to worry that if an Airbnb host tells you they cannot accommodate you, it’s because of who you are.

Privilege is often talked about in terms of race. Indeed, it’s very important to acknowledge the existence of white privilege and racism. But privilege can be tied to other things, such as financial status, gender, and religion. When we are willing to acknowledge privilege exists, we can take steps toward a world where equal opportunities for different people really exist.

There’s a lot that can be said about privilege. I want to tackle just a few things here. First, I want to talk about why people may deny that they are in a privileged group, because I think that’s the biggest obstacle to dismantling a system that favors certain groups over others. Then I want to address privilege from two perspectives: that of a Christian and that of a geek.

Why won’t we acknowledge our privilege?

We’ll never address the problems of privilege if we don’t acknowledge privilege exists. So why don’t we?

• Conservatives often see privilege as a liberal idea, and therefore one they must reject. This is why I am so moved by David Marcus’ article in The Weekly Standard. While he disagrees with some of the ways he sees privilege treated by people on the left, he makes the straightforward statement “[White privilege] absolutely describes an actual phenomenon.” I often worry about the gap between liberals and conservatives. It’s one thing to have different approaches to tackling a problem and another to not even agree whether or not a problem exists. People like Marcus give me hope.
•  We don’t feel privileged. The world is a scary place, and the problems we face just seem to be getting worse. Wages have been largely stagnant for decades. Good jobs seem scarce. If you feel like you are constantly struggling to stay afloat, if you are worried about retaining your value in a tight job market, you certainly don’t think of yourself as privileged. Likewise, Christians are quick to deny Christian privilege, because we live an increasingly post-Christian society. We fail to acknowledge that Western culture mostly has been based on Christian culture for nearly 2,000 years. Even as we move into a post-Christian society, the advantages of being a Christian still linger. One example? While many people do not celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, Christians did such a great job of establishing it as a major holiday that schools close around Christmas for winter break, and many people (though not all) get the day off work. As a Christian, I confess I love having Christmas off. But let’s face it — most of us don’t expect our employer to close for Rosh Hashanah or Eid Al-Fitr.
• We can’t see the forest for the trees. This is related to the point above. We may use things like instances of ridicule directed against us as evidence that we are not, in fact, privileged. Similarly, if we fail to “win” something, such as a job, and we see someone from a traditionally underprivileged group get what we wanted, we many conclude we aren’t privileged after all. For decades, white people have used the existence of affirmative action to argue that minority groups are actually privileged, but when so few people of color hold leadership roles, that argument doesn’t hold water. We need to look at the big picture rather than focusing on instances in which we didn’t benefit from privilege.
• We think that people who want us to acknowledge our privileges just want us to feel guilty and ashamed. I’m sure there are people who want just that. There are people who seem to derive great joy from shaming others about all sorts of things. They may be the Eeyores in our life, people who say things like, “Don’t mind me. My birthday doesn’t matter. You just go along and have your fun.” They may be people who delight in leaving nasty letters about things that are none of their business. I have no doubt that there are people whose goal is to make you feel guilty about belonging to a privileged group. But just because people like that exist doesn’t mean you should deny your privilege. Acknowledging privilege isn’t about living a shame-filled life. It’s about working toward a world of equal opportunities.
• We believe that privilege will always exist with one group or another. Maybe it really does rest with us now, but if we change things, it will just go to another group. At any rate, it will always be here. It’s part of human nature. So why bother thinking about it? I actually do believe that there will always be privileged groups this side of heaven. It is, indeed, part of human nature. So are things like murder, rape, and child abuse. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight those things. They are wrong, and it is our job to take a stand against what’s wrong.
• We don’t want to give up our privilege. When life seems to exist to favor people like you, it can be a very scary thing to actively work toward changing things, thus giving up the advantages you were born with. But that brings me to the section of my post that tackles privilege from a specifically Christian point of view…

God’s kingdom is about giving up privilege.

The Bible is subversive. Christians worship a God who “made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:7-8) If we call ourselves Christians, we are supposed to imitate Jesus. What does this look like?

• Jesus was born into poverty and died the death of a criminal — exhibiting powerlessness in birth and death.
• He hung out with rejects, such as tax collectors; welcomed the powerless, such as children; and told stories in which the respectable came out looking bad and the role of the hero was played by someone unexpected, like the Good Samaritan.
• Jesus preached about an upside-down kingdom in which the first are last and the last are first. He spoke of a day when the hungry would be satisfied, and the well-fed would go hungry. In God’s kingdom, power structures are reversed.

It’s not always easy to figure out how to faithfully follow Jesus in the modern world. What is clear is that it requires willingness to give up power rather than grasp it. As for Christian organizations, wouldn’t be amazing if their leadership looked less like Fortune 500 companies and more like God’s kingdom?

Shedding privilege is an adventure.

If you’ve dreamed of getting an acceptance letter to Hogwarts or having the Doctor offer to take you anywhere in time and space, you’ve felt the pull of adventure. Alas, these daydreams will never come to pass, but there are real-life adventures we can pursue. One of those is the willingness to shed our privileges. If you belong to a privileged group, imagine living in a world that did not accommodate people like you. If you’re a geek, you may have had times when you felt like an outsider. Jump in and embrace that feeling! Shedding privilege is uncomfortable, but as Bilbo learned, adventures aren’t comfortable… but they change life for the better.

I’m short on specifics about how to go about this, because I myself have taken mere baby steps on this adventure. I’ve become aware of my privileges, and I try to think from the perspective of those who do not have them. If I’m donating food to a food shelf, am I including foods that might especially appeal to the immigrants who live in my community? Am I in a position to recommend a talented person from a disadvantaged group for a position of power, so that they can gain experiences that previously may have been denied to them?

Outside of considering the perspectives of people who don’t share my privileges, I need to be willing to become uncomfortable. How do I feel going into a space where I am the minority? How do I feel about accepting leadership from someone who has less privilege than I do?

These are only small steps on the adventure of shedding privilege, but they are steps. What can you do today to notice the privileges you have, and how can you let go of those privileges for the good of others?

“Generous” is a broad term. Many of my posts have touched on generosity one way or another. But today I want to encourage you to help others succeed professionally, even if it never benefits you.

Use LinkedIn With a Generous Spirit

If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll find several ways to help others, starting with being open to connecting with people you don’t know. When I first joined, I believed strongly that LinkedIn wasn’t a place to accept connection requests from strangers. There are articles that advise just that. Then I received connection requests from two young women who had graduated from my alma mater and wanted to talk to me about my career. After they explained why they wanted to connect, I decided to accept their requests. Because the women lived near me, I could talk with each of them face-to-face. When the first woman contacted me, I questioned my ability to help. But both seemed to appreciate the connection and the chance to talk about their career ambitions. I still don’t accept every request, but now I’m open to connecting with strangers if I can genuinely help them.

You can also help others through recommendations. Of course, it’s great to respond positively to direct requests for recommendations, assuming you feel the person who approaches you is worth recommending. But if I like someone’s work, I won’t necessarily wait for them to ask me to write a recommendation. I’ll just write one, which they can accept, reject, or ask me to edit. If you’re connected to someone on LinkedIn, a recommendation can be a wonderful gift of appreciation.

Leave Positive Reviews

This year we had to call a repair person to look at our washing machine. He declared it dead (or, rather, not worth the expense of fixing) and recommended certain brands to replace it. He also told me to check out professional reviews, such as Consumer Reports, rather than relying solely on review sites. “People are more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones,” he said. He’s right. There are times where I’ve had a particularly bad experience with a business or product and felt motivated to write a negative review. While I do leave positive reviews, I think I’m less likely to take the trouble to do so. In fact, I’m ashamed to say that the repair person’s business card is sitting in a pile, waiting for me to go online and recommend him!

We don’t need to forego all negative reviews. I think there’s a time for that. But it would be great if we left at least as many positive reviews as negative ones — if not more. Especially for small businesspeople, such reviews can be gold. If you love something — the way the stylist cuts your hair or the food at that little restaurant you’ve been going to for years or the new podcast you just discovered — give it a positive rating. We base so many of our choices on ratings these days; let’s help the people we appreciate get more business by giving them positive reviews.

Say a Good Word to Someone’s Manager

This is something I think about doing from time to time, and I always lose my nerve. A good part of it is that I imagine myself as the person behind the counter and think that the words “Can I see your manager” would probably sound like the prelude to a complaint. I don’t want to make the person panic, so I don’t say anything at all. But if we made a practice of asking for the manager to share kind words about someone, maybe people wouldn’t assume the worst when we asked to see their supervisor. And I’m sure managers must get tired of always being summoned for complaints. Hearing compliments about employees could very well brighten a manager’s day, too.

Offer People Opportunities to Build Their Credentials

Many years ago, I sat in a meeting in which people discussed two different speakers for a nonprofit conference: a man and a woman. The people who had heard them both speak felt they were equally good speakers, but the man had more speaking experience. Eventually, the people in the meeting decided to offer the speaking opportunity to the man because of his experience.

There’s no denying that name recognition is a big deal, so if you can afford the person with more credentials, it makes sense to offer that person the opportunity. But at least some of the time, I think it can be appropriate to pick the less experienced of two people with equal abilities, if only to give them the opportunity to grow their career. This is particularly true when you can add diverse voices to an event or a team. If we don’t give opportunities to capable people with less experience, we’re holding them back… and we’re missing out on what they could contribute if only they were allowed to do so.

It’s Okay to Ask for Help

There are reasons experts warn people away from self-centered networking: real relationships aren’t about using people. That’s why I believe in giving without expectations. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask for what you need to achieve your career goals. I’ve asked people for LinkedIn recommendations, and I’ve asked people to review my book. But when I do things for others, I don’t want them to feel that what I’ve done for them is part of a transaction. If I choose to write a LinkedIn review for someone, I don’t want that person to feel beholden to pay me back with a review. My review of their work isn’t about getting something back. It’s about offering help to that person. If we want to make the world a better place, we can make a real difference through little things, like generously helping others to grow their careers.

… or, if you prefer the British spelling, grey.

I’ve stated before that I believe in right and wrong. But I also believe that we live in a world where many issues are not black-and-white. There are shades of gray. And if we embrace the gray, we may be able to listen to and understand others better.

I’m going to use a personal example that will probably alienate me from many people on both sides of the abortion debate. I have talked about this with very few people, but it feels like the right story to share here.

When I was a teen, I identified as pro-choice. For me, my stance was a no-brainer. Legal abortions were safer abortions. It was clear to me that many women would seek to terminate an unwanted pregnancy for a variety of reasons, whether or not abortion was legal. I believed that legal abortions would at least protect the lives of the women who chose them.

Partway through college, I changed my point of view. A large factor in my shift was an ethics class I took. During class, we examined abortion through a pro-choice perspective outlined in the “people-seeds” example from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” While many people agree with Thomson’s reasoning, I was disturbed by it, because it granted no consideration to the “person-plant.” To stick with Thomson’s analogy, since a woman whose mesh screen failed to keep a “people-seed” from taking root in her home would only be obliged to put up with the person-plant for nine months, it seemed to me a callous point of view not to consider possible pain and suffering and even a right to life on behalf of the person-plant. In fact, it seemed to be a very selfish point of view.

During this time, I began to encounter liberal people who embraced feminism but who were also pro-life, challenging my sense of what sort of person a pro-lifer was. Meanwhile, my fellow pro-choicers were alienating me. I was put off by the slogans chalked around campus, such as “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries.” It seemed to me that many women were approaching the issue from a very “me-centered” point of view. While I continued to believe in the legality of abortion when a woman could lose her life or was a victim of rape or incest, I was concerned about the rights of the unborn child, too. So I began to identify as pro-life.

While I did switch sides on the debate, I refused to condemn the faith of pro-choice women. Some Christians (though certainly not all) seem to equate being a Christian with being pro-life. I knew that I was every bit as passionate about following Christ when I was pro-choice as when I was pro-life. I no longer agreed with my previous pro-choice perspective, but I knew I’d held it out of a deep concern for what I thought was the best solution to the difficult problem of unwanted children. This willingness to acknowledge good will in another’s point of view is part of what I mean by embracing gray.

Since college, I’ve continued to meet people on both sides of the debate who are people of good will. I’ve witnessed acts of intolerance by both pro-choicers and pro-lifers toward people they disagreed with (although I can’t think of a time when a pro-choicer has bombed a pro-life facility). I’ve met women who chose to have an abortion, such as a Catholic woman who was pregnant with an anencephalic baby. I’ve met women who chose not to have an abortion, including another woman who was told her baby had anencephaly — and the diagnosis turned out to be wrong. (I don’t believe this means that the first woman I mentioned was wrong to make the choice she did.)

I’ve been deeply disturbed by people who say they are pro-life but who will not embrace completely pro-life principles, including abolishing the death penalty. Likewise, I’ve been frustrated by some of the proposed pro-life legislation at state levels that seems to prove exactly what pro-choicers have said about pro-lifers: They only care about unborn children, not women. Many pro-lifers seem to fail to see that by addressing issues related to women and poverty, such as paid maternity leave and adequate health care, they will go a long way to reducing abortions.

On the other hand, I’m saddened by the refusal of many pro-choicers to refer to an unborn child as anything but “fetus,” to avoid doing anything to humanize him or her. We need to have serious conversations about pain and suffering and about how oppressed groups are frequently dehumanized. Are we dehumanizing and oppressing unborn children, who cannot speak for themselves?

While I don’t see both sides of the issue completely (I’m not God), I do see them to some extent. I believe there are nuances we need to acknowledge and discuss. We need a deeper conversation than merely whether or not abortion should be legal. For me, abortion is not a black-and-white issue. It’s colored in shades of gray. Maybe that’s why I’d rather not identify myself as pro-life or pro-choice these days.

I’m not telling you this because I think I’ve reached some sort of mystical state of enlightenment on abortion. I haven’t. If anything, I’ve felt a little jaded lately and could use more of God’s grace. But my journey is an example of how we can acknowledge that issues are more complex than the stark black-and-white colors we want to paint them in. We live in a world of gray, and that’s not a terrible thing. If anything, being willing to embrace gray may help us grow in humility and in love for those we disagree with.

As we engage in debates about all sorts of issues, let’s acknowledge that there’s a lot of gray in the world. We don’t need to become relativists. But if we’re willing to respectfully engage in deep conversations and to wrestle over more difficult questions than “Which side of the issue is right?” we may actually make progress on some of the world’s most difficult problems. If nothing else, we’ll ease some of the tensions between groups with opposing points of view.