5

Incorporate Other Perspectives

IN 2015, A PERSON whose name seems to be Tobi learned that his company’s upcoming corporate retreat was going to be held on a plantation in Alabama.¹ What’s more, the retreat organizers had scheduled a “period-appropriate” costume ball for one of the evenings. His colleagues were putting together outfits, including a few people who planned to come dressed as Confederate officers.

“But they apparently forgot about me, their lone Black employee,” he wrote in a Reddit post. “I am often forgotten about. The moment I saw the theme of the party, I realized I had once again been overlooked.”

So, Tobi decided to teach them a lesson. A lesson that would remind them that there was more than one perspective when it came to southern plantations and plantation life. And, as a top performer in the company who usually “keeps all my shenanigans segregated separate from work,” he felt like he was in a safe enough position to do it.

(I’ve seen and heard about so much retaliation against people pointing out bias that reading his story, I got really nervous on his behalf. But it sounds like things turned out okay for him.)

Tobi put together a costume that mirrored what an enslaved person of the period might wear—a roughly woven hat, tan shirt open almost to his waist, suspenders made of coarse rope, rolled-up pants legs, and no shoes. Shortly before arriving, he went to a nearby field, picked some cotton, and put a large sprig in his shirt pocket. (Apparently, his wife asked him to not include his planned name tag, which would have read MY NAME IS: Kunta Kinte TOBI. She felt this would push his costume one step too far.)

Tobi showed up early at the party site in his costume and waited as one of his fellow employees walked down the grand staircase, modeling her own costume—a floor-length blue dress with a large, ruffled skirt. A dress that she probably thought was romantic and glamorous. A dress that reflected “plantation life.”

And then she saw Tobi at the foot of the stairs, and her face changed in shock. There are photos. You see her pointing to Tobi and, according to the caption, saying, “OMG . . . Did you see what [Tobi] is wearing? Omg . . . I can’t even . . . . . . . . . *silence*.”²

Management quickly cancelled the party, citing “inclement weather” as the reason. And the CEO, who was supposed to be there for the celebration, ended up a no-show.

The company did not acknowledge the more likely reason for the cancellation and the no-show—the organizers’ and management’s sudden embarrassment and realization that the retreat location and party theme might have been problematic. Tobi reported, “The climate definitely got palpably stiff and awkward for the rest of the retreat. I was clearly avoided, on more than one occasion. Apparently, an off-color person with matching humor was a bit much for them, lol.” He had a few close friends who were bummed he wasn’t going to mess with the “Confederate officers” at the party, but otherwise the response was mostly silence.

(At least that weekend. Not long after the retreat, Tobi got a promotion, a raise, and better benefits. One Redditor commented that Tobi was the only Black person they’d ever heard of who had “successfully received reparations from the white man.”)

What does this story tell us about perspective?

For one group of people, a group that surely includes the retreat organizers, plantations have the flavor of the romantic past. They envision people who look like them in big-skirted gowns and with fluttering fans, or wearing droopy bowties and drinking mint juleps on the shaded porch, or being served elaborate dinners by smiling and deferential dark people. It’s Gone with the Wind. It’s a romance novel. It’s an earlier and gentler time, a golden age, part of the proud heritage of the South.

From the perspective of people who are white. Who are safe. Who are being served and tended and catered to.

Where is Tobi in this scenario? What is his heritage? What is his role at the plantation? At the party?

The organizers and attendees didn’t just ignore their lone Black employee. They ignored the perspective of Black people altogether.

Instead of quietly going along with this oversight, Tobi used his costume to bring it front and center. He might have gone along with their vision—a vision that conveniently forgot about what his 1850s plantation reality would have been like—and shown up in the kind of “period-appropriate” costume they were envisioning for male employees. Like maybe a vest, frock coat, and cravat. But instead, he made it impossible to ignore the reality that they had, up to that point, entirely neglected to incorporate into their vision—the existence and presence of enslaved people.

Because for the descendants of enslaved people, plantations have an entirely different flavor. For stolen and enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants, plantations were essentially concentration camps. Locations of forced labor, torture, and the deprivation of almost all human rights. Of systemic rape and forced reproduction. Places where labor and knowledge were stolen and used to enrich others. (Can you imagine a company holding an on-site “concentration camp” party? Where you dressed up as a guard or an experimental doctor or an SS officer and remembered with gentle nostalgia their contribution to your heritage?) These people were not wearing beautiful gowns and frock coats and walking around a beautiful plantation house being catered to. They were the ones doing the catering—and not by choice.

People in power positions often forget that their experience isn’t everyone’s experience. That their lived reality isn’t everyone’s lived reality. That the flavor for them isn’t the flavor for everyone.

So you end up with situations like this terribly planned corporate retreat. An American example that has parallels in other places where European colonial conquest is romanticized, whitewashed, and presented only from the perspective of the white colonial rulers.

When we forget to incorporate other perspectives, we run the risk of erasing people, of forgetting about people, of causing pain for people. And forgetting about other perspectives makes it harder for us to make good choices, or choices that signal our good intentions.

WHAT IS PERSPECTIVE TAKING?

Have you ever found yourself thinking, “Well, I wouldn’t mind if someone said it to me”? Like Rob in Chapter 1, who couldn’t understand why his work friend Shirin was so touchy, seemed so “oversensitive,” about being called exotic. (Or like me, before I did my dissertation research and really dug into language and social meaning.)

This response can be a real blocker to inclusive language and is usually a failure of perspective taking.

Perspective taking is a cognitive skill that involves projecting into another person’s point of view. There are two major components:

1. Role switch. Here, you look at the situation from the other person’s perspective. You’re saying something like, “if it was me in that position, how would I feel?”

2. Lived experience. Here, you take into account potential differences in experiences, norms, and values. “If I had had that person’s experiences and I was in that position, how would I feel?”

It is very common for people to skip this second step. But if you do, you’re likely to make suboptimal choices when it comes to inclusion.

Because even small changes in position can really change your life experience. Like height, hair texture, or your place in the birth order. Bigger changes in position can cause even bigger differences. For example, many of those dimensions of human identity that I laid out in the Introduction, such as gender, religion, race, disability, neurotypicality, class, and sexuality, can lead to very different life experiences.

And different lived experiences can lead to different reactions to the same situation.

For every category where you’re the dominant group, you’ll probably have to do a little extra work to understand the life experiences of people in other groups. That’s because you’ve probably grown up with a data deficit, where you just didn’t get enough information on other kinds of people to have accurate mental models or databases.

For example, if you’re male (and were assigned male at birth), you might have to do some research to understand the life experiences of people who aren’t male. If you’re allistic, you’ll probably need to learn more about autistic experiences to do that important second step of perspective taking. If you’re a dominant race or ethnicity, you might have to put in some effort to learn more about the experiences of other races and ethnicities. And if you are and have always been abled, you might need to learn more about the experiences of—and challenges faced by—disabled people.

So, when you say “I wouldn’t mind if someone said that to me,” you’re only taking the first step in perspective taking. You’re missing that crucial second step, where different experiences can lead to different reactions to the same situation.

You may get stuck in your intent. You may try to explain why there isn’t a problem, saying things like:

• “But there’s nothing wrong with that word.”

• “You shouldn’t take it personally.”

• “I’m sorry if you took it the wrong way.”

This is a failure of perspective taking. You’re not going the whole way. You’re getting stuck in your own experience.

So the next time someone tells you they have a problem with a word, now you know you need to take both steps in perspective taking. How does that person’s lived experience differ from yours? How has that caused the flavor of that word to be different for them than it is for you? Is there an article or social media post you can read to learn more?

WHO IS IN THE PRONOUN CIRCLE?

It was Mother’s Day, and the cashier turned to Layla and asked, “Are you a mother?” The tears Layla had been holding back spilled out of her eyes, and she could barely get out the words that were stuck in her throat. “No, I’m not,” she whispered hoarsely. “And I don’t think you should be asking people that question today.”

The cashier looked surprised and uncomfortable. “Oh, sorry,” he mumbled. “I was told that I’m supposed to wish everyone a Happy Mother’s Day if it seems appropriate.” He was clearly upset at the distress he had inadvertently caused by just following the orders his manager had given him.

Mother’s Day was already a difficult day for Layla. It was a day that she was reminded of her miscarriages and failed IVF treatments. Of her desperate longing to be a mother, and of the heartache she felt that all their attempts so far had failed. So, to have someone ask her, point blank, “are you a mother?” when she was simply trying to buy groceries? It was just too much.

Layla resolved that next year she would just hide out at home. Because who knew how much pain interacting with other people might cause, even if she was just running a mundane errand like going to the supermarket.

• • •

What went wrong here? In this case, we can trace the trouble back to the pronoun everyone.

There are a small number of pronouns that turn out to be problematic if you use them unthinkingly. If you don’t actively work to incorporate other perspectives when using these pronouns, you might be forgetting about people. And causing them real distress, like with Layla, who was brought to tears by what was meant as a simple, friendly question.

These pronouns are:

• You

• We

• Us

• Everyone

• Everybody

How does this play out with Mother’s Day? Here in the US, I see companies of all kinds sending out messages like “This Sunday, we all honor our mothers” and “Wishing you a Happy Mother’s Day.”

But not everybody finds Mother’s Day a day of celebration. Like Layla, some people want to be mothers but aren’t, and it is incredibly painful for them—they’ve had fertility issues or miscarriages or stillbirths. Other people have a child who has died. And some people have chosen to be child free.

So when a manager tells a cashier, “I want you to wish everyone a Happy Mother’s Day if it seems appropriate,” they are setting up that cashier for trouble. The manager means that the cashier should say “Happy Mother’s Day” to every customer who appears to be female and old enough to have children.

They are not being careful with who is a part of that everyone and who isn’t. Not every female customer in a particular age range will welcome questions about their parental status or be happy to be told “Happy Mother’s Day.”

There are also issues with language that suggests that “we all” honor our mother on Mother’s Day. Some people were raised without a mother—they might have two dads, or have been raised by their grandparents or some other family configuration, or have been raised in foster care.

Some people were raised by abusive mothers and have cut contact. Other people have mothers who have died.

So, when companies put messages like “We all honor our mothers” into their external communications, they are guaranteed to make some people feel forgotten about. Or to cause sorrow, as some people think about the good mother they never had or the good mother who is now gone.

• • •

Let’s picture who is being pointed to by a pronoun. You can think of the people being referred to as being inside the circle. Let’s call this the pronoun circle. When you use we in a sentence in which you are addressing an audience, you probably want the pronoun circle to include everybody reading or hearing that sentence.

But, unless you’ve been proactive and extremely careful, there is always the chance that someone is getting left out.

There may be groups of people who are not actually getting mapped to the set of people inside your current pronoun circle. Because their perspectives haven’t been considered, and they have been left out.

The goal is to make sure that either 1) everybody in your intended audience is included within the boundaries of the pronoun circle or 2) you change your language to be more precise. You don’t have to try and shove everyone into a pronoun circle; sometimes it’s better to write or say additional words that acknowledge that your statement doesn’t apply to everyone.

You probably wouldn’t write, “Having problems finding just the right furniture for your second home? We’ve all been there.” (Unless you’re writing for a magazine or website specifically aimed at people known to have second homes.) Because it’s probably obvious that there are many people who don’t have second homes, and so they don’t fit in that pronoun circle.

If you work in internal communications, you probably wouldn’t write “We’ve all dealt with difficult clients” in a message going out to everyone in your organization. Because people who do back-office work or internal services aren’t dealing with clients.

But in spring of 2020, in the early months of the pandemic in the US, I read articles that said things like “Now that we’re stuck at home and we have more free time . . . ” Here, the authors were forgetting about people taking care of young children and doing remote work at the same time. And they were also forgetting about essential workers—medical staff, supermarket workers, gas station attendants, and more—who were risking their lives and physically leaving home to go to work.

I see things like “Worried you’ve put on weight after the holidays? We’ve all been there.” But some people don’t worry about their weight. Or have eating disorders that mean they are dangerously underweight and are being encouraged to gain weight. Or have cancer and wish they could have enjoyed holiday food the way they used to.

So if you’re writing something like “We’ve all been there,” you really want to make sure it’s true. And that everyone in your audience has actually been there. Otherwise, the implication is that either you haven’t remembered that there are people who don’t fit in the pronoun circle—or that you’ve thought about them and decided that they don’t really matter.

In the late 2010s, I was struck by an Ancestry.com ad every time I saw it on the internet. The short ad asked readers, “What does your English last name mean?” And if you went to the blog on Ancestry.com, you could read a 2014 article explaining the seven types of English last names.³

As a reader, you could learn that your English last name originally described an ancestor’s occupation (Carpenter), personal characteristic (Swift), location (Burton), estate (Staunton), father’s name (Richardson), nearby landscape feature (Lake), or patron (Kilpatrick). But, like the organizers of Tobi’s plantation retreat and period ball, the authors of this ad and blog post seemed to have forgotten about another category: the descendants of enslaved Africans.

For millions of people in the US and elsewhere, their English last name means that their ancestor was owned by someone with an English last name. If you’re a Black person named Washington, you’re not tracing your heritage back to a charming town in England that lent its name to your ancestor. You’re tracing it back to a slave owner named Washington who forced his family name onto enslaved people as a sign of his ownership.

So what can you do to avoid mistakes like these? One of the easiest fixes is to add language that shows that you recognize that not everyone is included in the pronoun circle.

Instead of “We all honor our mothers on Mother’s Day,” you can write, “For those of you celebrating Mother’s Day this Sunday . . . ”

Instead of “Remember your time in your college dorm?” you can show that you recognize that not everyone went to college, and that even people who did go to college might not have gone away or lived in a dorm. “If you lived in a college dorm, you might remember . . . ”

And instead of, “You’ve been dreaming about your wedding since you were young,” you can use language that includes other perspectives—because not everyone wants to get married, has historically had the opportunity to get married, or has been focused on their wedding day. “If you’re the kind of person who has been dreaming about your wedding since you were young . . . ”

Before you send out a piece of writing or video—like a widely distributed email or press release or article or ad campaign—it’s a good idea to take the time to quickly think through the pronoun circle for each time you have used you, we, us, everyone, and everybody.

Are people being left out of that pronoun circle? If so, then you can make your language more precise and show that you have thought about and incorporated multiple positions.

REMEMBER THE PERSON WHO HAS BEEN HARMED

Content warning: sexual assault.

Brock Turner was in his first year at Stanford, an elite university in Northern California. In January of 2015, he was found behind a dumpster with a fellow student who was unconscious.

Instead of helping her—like using her phone to call a friend or bringing her to a campus office—he was found brutally sexually assaulting her. The graduate students who found him, tackled him when he tried to run, and then restrained him were so upset by what they had seen that one of them was crying when the police arrived.⁴

But both the letter of support that Turner’s father sent to the court and the judge’s comments during the case focused almost entirely on the perspective of the rapist. And not the victim.

When it comes to problematic behavior, including harassment and assault, it is common to find a focus on the perspective of the perpetrator when that person is in a position of power. Which, as I’ve mentioned before, can mean either institutional power, like being a dean of a law school, or social power, like being male and a member of the dominant race or ethnicity. In these cases, the perpetrator is often extensively humanized and empathized with. Treated with compassion. With care and concern for their career, their education, their life. And their victim’s perspective is ignored.

In his letter, Turner’s father wrote about how his son was “absolutely devastated by the events of January 17th . . . ” but fails to mention what those events were—his violent rape of an unconscious woman and his attempt to flee. And he mentions that “this incident” has had a “devastating impact” on his son. But there is no mention of the devastating impact that his son’s brutal assault had on his victim.

In his comments and his ruling, the judge, Aaron Persky, said things that continuously humanized and sympathized with Turner. Persky pointed out that a character letter in support of Turner “just rang true” and that his character “up until the night of the incident” was positive. The judge was especially concerned that this student athlete studying at an elite school would be unduly harmed by a long prison sentence, worried that it would have “a severe effect” on him. In the end, Turner was sentenced to just six months in prison, and was released after serving only three months.

Almost entirely absent from the judge’s comments, and seemingly from his consideration, was the perspective of the assault victim. Even though in the victim impact letter she read to the court, she said she wanted to “take my body off like a jacket.” And she pointed out how Turner had taken “my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice . . . ” When the ruling was made public, there was real outrage in response to Persky’s extreme concern for the sexual assaulter and minimal concern for the victim of his assault.

Failing to consider who in your audience doesn’t share your experience is a general type of exclusion, as we saw with Tobi and Layla, both of whom were hurt when people didn’t consider things from the perspective of people in their group. But in cases such as sexual assault, someone very specific is often excluded from consideration: the actual victim of the assault. And the legal consequences—or lack of consequences—can be even more frustrating and have more problematic outcomes.

In Chapter 2, I wrote about the linguistic distortion I call softening language. One major way softening language can cause problems is by getting a reader or listener stuck in one perspective and erasing or ignoring other perspectives. And that preferred perspective is almost always of the person in a power position. For Brock Turner, it was being white, male, an athlete, and at an elite college.

When it comes to sexual assault, it is common to find softening language used to describe the actions of the perpetrator, the person causing harm.

For example, 2020 headlines reporting the death of former teacher Mary Kay Letourneau were filled with softening language. Such as “Mary Kay Letourneau, who made headlines for her relationship with underage student, dies.”⁵

This summary doesn’t tell us what kind of headlines Letourneau made, although by the end of the sentence you can assume they weren’t good ones. And “underage” is vague, so you might think the student in question was maybe just below the age of consent.

But the word “relationship” in particular is deeply problematic and distorting. Think about the standard semantic frame for a romantic relationship. There are probably two people, both of them consenting, and an ongoing emotional connection and possible sexual activity.

The more accurate term to use for Letourneau’s “relationship” with her underage student is rape. A child cannot have consensual sex with an adult. And the student was indeed a child. He was in sixth grade and twelve years old; she was thirty-four. In the end, Letourneau was convicted and jailed for two counts of felony second-degree rape of a child.

At the time of her trial, Letourneau was young and white and pretty. Even decades later, at her death, the softening language that so often describes problematic behavior by pretty white women was still being used.

A more accurate and unsoftened version of the headline might be “Mary Kay Letourneau, who went to prison for raping her 12-year-old student, dies.” This headline is no longer stuck in the sympathetic perspective of the sexual assaulter and better reflects the world.

When it comes to public descriptions of sexual assault by people with power, softening language seems to be more common than accurate descriptions. In a tweet from August 2022, a church member wrote,

In a later tweet, she added, “Only the survivors know how horrific it was. It’s still going on but at another church now. The leader has never shown any remorse. The damage is incalculable.”

So, when we’re aiming to be more inclusive, it’s important to pause and remember the person who has been harmed. Is their perspective being incorporated? Is their voice being heard? Is softening language masking the amount of harm that was done to them?

If you find softening language, it’s useful to take the time to translate the sentence into a more accurate reflection of reality. This will help counteract distortions and create more accurate mental models.

WHO IS CENTERED?

I love watching house tours on YouTube, especially the ones where you get sneak peaks into the homes of interior designers. One day, I watched a house tour on one of my favorite channels. When the homeowner opened a door off the bedroom, the host exclaimed, “Oh, a master bathroom! . . . And you’ve got Oriental rugs instead of bathmats, I love that.”

It’s time to stop saying Oriental. Let me break down why even a way to refer to a rug can have deeper and more unpleasant meanings that you might realize. (It’s also time to stop saying master bathroom, but I’ll talk about that in Chapter 7.)

• • •

So what’s wrong with Oriental? It’s just an innocuous word that means “Eastern” or “Asian,” right? Well, like a lot of other problematic words, once you dig a bit deeper, you start to find the complications.

Oriental comes from Latin and means “from the east,” originally, the place where the sun rises.

So then the big question is: To the east of what? Who is at the center?

The answer is, of course, originally Europe. (Note that from where I am sitting in California, Asia is actually due west.)

Let’s look at the semantic framing for Oriental and the scenario it invokes. The base scenario is a European person defining places to the east in relationship to themselves.

In this scenario, many different locations, ethnic groups, art styles, cuisines, and objects are being lumped together under one giant umbrella—Oriental.

In addition to “incorporate other perspectives,” this use of Oriental violates a few more of the Six Principles: show respect, draw people in, and prevent erasure. It’s not respectful to define more than four billion people only in relation to yourself. It is marginalizing to use a monolithic label to refer to billions of people and seventeen million square miles of territory. Using a single term erases all kinds of differences and suggests that the group is much more homogenous than it is—flattening out more than two thousand languages, various histories, and greatly different cultures.

You may have heard of the male gaze.⁷ The term comes from theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1975 analysis of gender in cinema. She noted that most films and television shows were set up in a way that implied that the watcher—both the person behind the camera and the eventual viewer—was a heterosexual man. And that women (and often girls) were presented as passive objects of desire and constantly sexualized. That they were seen as objects, and unlike the male viewer, not as fully individual people.

With Oriental, what we’re seeing is the “white gaze.” Where whiteness is at the center. And where the presumed speaker and audience are white.

It’s like when people say “a diverse candidate” to mean a person who isn’t white or isn’t male or abled. Who is the default? Who is a “regular” person? Who is at the center? Who is universal?

As I noted in Chapter 4, diversity is a word that refers to more than one person; everyone contributes to diversity. Phrases like diverse candidate suggest that whiteness is normal and the assumed center point—the perspective from which the world is observed, catalogued, and talked about.

In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, a book that has been influential for decades.⁸ He pointed out many problems in European depictions of “the Orient,” which covered territory from North Africa through the Middle East and over to East Asia.

Orientalism fetishized people from these places, especially women and young boys.

Orientalism lumped together traditions and ethnicities and relied on vague and inaccurate stereotypes.

Orientalism was contemptuous of people from these places and presented Europeans as inherently superior.

And Orientalism was part of a world view that presented white Europeans as the “saviors” and rightful conquerors of the immoral, inferior, and primitive inhabitants of the Orient.

With this additional perspective, the term Oriental doesn’t seem that innocuous. Or like it’s just a neutral way to refer to a carpet or a chicken salad. In fact, Oriental is a term that promotes and centers whiteness.

So I recommend being more precise with your terminology.

Want to talk about a rug? Be specific. Is it Moroccan? Turkish? Afghan? Chinese?

Want to talk about a cuisine or object or ritual or person? Use a nation or ethnicity. Like Kurdish. Hmong. Tuareg.

People and objects shouldn’t be inherently defined in relation to Europe or whiteness. When we work to incorporate all kinds of other perspectives, we can do a better job of including, respecting, and centering people with backgrounds different from our own.