I’ve been thinking a great deal about the idea of moral certainty, which I’ll define simply as an unwavering understanding of what is right and wrong. In today’s deeply dividing political climate, such surety in our beliefs can make disagreement feel less like an exchange of ideas and more like a contest between good and evil.

To be clear, strong moral conviction—our internal values compass—can inspire extraordinary courage and principled action, helping bring people together and fight for human dignity and justice. Think Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks or Mahatma Gandhi. The shadow side is that moral certainty can undermine social trust, as well as fuel dogma, intolerance and hate-based violence. Think Mussolini, Hitler or the Salem Witch Trials.

For some, it may be hard to imagine how this latter context occurs, where dehumanization of other people becomes so extreme that violence and death are acceptable outcomes. If you watch a movie or read a book on any type of persecution —be it the Holocaust, the struggle for civil rights in the US, or gender equality—it hard’s not to be emotionally moved. The stories, particularly of individuals who face injustice, activate our empathy circuits, a natural and protective response when we see another human in distress.

In fact, if it is our group that is dominating and hurting others, empathy is often key the key to perspective-taking. This powerful reflex can help re-orient our moral compass by questioning not just our group’s actions, but the justifications used to defend them.

But if you want injustice to continue, one strategy is to discredit empathy. Which brings us to Trump’s America today.

The Politics of Cruelty

The historical moment we are living through is clearly defined by Donald Trump, arguably the most consequential US president of all time. The waves and disruptions created by his presidency have upended the national and global order, reverberations that will last for decades to come. The politics of domination, grievance and cruelty have been signatures of his personal brand as well as the organizing principle for mass mobilization for the MAGA (Make America Great Again) coalition. Since the US Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that the President has broad criminal immunity while in office—pretty much verifying that Trump is above the law—much has happened, and at a head-spinning speed.

And moral certainty is a thread that runs strongly through Trump’s MAGA followers—with almost half identifying as Christian Evangelicals. Many of these followers believe that Trump was divinely ordained, sent by God to reset the country back to what it was “supposed to be”: a White, European Christian nation.

Trump and his officials have normalized dysfunction and corruption to such a degree that it’s near impossible to catalogue the daily onslaught. But Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth did capture the administration’s social agenda in one spectacularly dehumanizing sentence delivered to military leaders in Sept of 2026 of who would be excluded from their ranks: “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals.” The financial agenda is equally overt with Trump and his family’s fortune growing by billions of dollars since his second term started and convicted criminals paying top dollar to receive presidential clemency in a growing “pardon industry”.

The strong religious identity of Trump supporters is critical because Christian doctrine is their base—or at least that’s what’s advertised. Many rightly ask then, how it is that morally-oriented people can justify supporting a deeply corrupt and cruel leader? What happened to compassion?

Well, among the MAGA faithful, empathy is now considered self-destructive and sinful when applied to “outsiders”.

Popularized by books with such titles as “suicidal” or “toxic” empathy, the central premise is that compassion is misguided if directed towards minority groups as it threatens the status and survival of the dominant group. The fear driving this is part of “replacement theory”, a once-fringe racist conspiracy that is now a central plank in Trump’s presidency and amongst his MAGA followers: that Whites are intentionally being replaced by racial minorities across the Western world (as opposed to natural population decline in this part of the world and growth elsewhere).

These ideas have been amplified by Trump and his inner circle including vice-president JD Vance, and the beyond-ultra-rich, Elon Musk.

The implication?

If you see children crying as their parents are taken away by ICE agents, don’t empathize.

If you see a low-income family lose their health insurance, don’t empathize.

If you see LGBTQ+ people lose legal protections against discrimination, don’t empathize.

If you see peaceful protesters treated as enemies of the state, don’t empathize.

If you see a journalist threatened or fired for investigating those in power, don’t empathize.

If you see civilians killed in US military operations in lands far away, don’t empathize.

Instead, celebrate these horrors with “funny” memes online or during in-person events, demeaning further people who are already victimized. The key sources for such disregard are not simply individuals or “Russian bots” but Trump’s very own Truth Social posts, as well as official communications from the White House.

The logic is straightforward. If you find yourself troubled by any of these statements, then the problem is that you can’t see the righteousness of our cause. Which means YOU might be part of the problem.

This is a terrifyingly brilliant tactic to dehumanize those you consider to be “outsiders”. And to keep your own people in line.

Empathy, the very instinct that might prevent one human being from actually intervening in another human’s mistreatment or brutalization, is short-circuited. Instead of compassion being a universal antidote for bridge-building, it is now considered a toxin to the dominant group’s survival and therefore is discredited and distorted. And none of this is original—these are well-worn tactics used by fascist movements across history.

Culture is Defined by What Leaders Permit

There is a lesson here for every leader, including those of us who believe we are fighting on the side of justice.

When organizational leaders lionize unsustainable workloads, describe exhausted employees as uncommitted, make jokes a someone else’s expense, or punish honesty, they establish norms about which behaviours are acceptable.

If someone with power humiliates a colleague or direct report, what happens next in your institution? Do leaders or others colleagues speak up? Is there enough psychological safety for people say when something doesn’t feel right or identify problems? Or is keeping “heads down” and silence the norm?

For those working in social justice, do we notice or intervene when shame-and-blame strategies are used within our movements to demean, ostracize or shun people who use the wrong language, ask awkward questions or are imperfect allies? How do we address purity politics and cancel culture within our midst ?

For organizations, stated values are the weakest indicators of internal climate. Instead look to behaviours. To paraphrase a business adage: show me what is excused, permitted or punished within your institution (or movement), and I’ll show you your culture.

Looking for more?

No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

In response to the Cornell 7 rape case, there is a lot in my social media feed right now about teaching boys and men about consent, and “not to rape”. While I understand the impulse, I think this is insufficient.

The problem isn’t simply whether young men know right from wrong. It’s whether they can act on that knowledge when status, belonging and loyalty are pulling them in another direction.

Let’s back up slightly so we’re all on the same page.

A 20-year old woman, identified as Jane Doe, alleges she was gang-raped while at the prestigious Cornell University in 2024 by seven male students. The controversy stems not just from the incident but because many accuse the university, police and district attorney of mishandling and minimizing what happened. The case entered the public sphere only because of the persistence of the college’s student newspaper that published details collected over a two-year period. Public outrage both locally and nationally has resulted in the re-opening of the case with the assignment of a special prosecutor.

Whenever a horrific rape case hits the news, the response is a lot of rightful upset. After all, the statistics bear the intensity of the problem:

• ¼ of US women have experienced rape during her lifetime, with almost half experiencing this before the age of 18 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2016).

• ⅓ of Canadian women report having been sexually assaulted at least once since age 15, with 12% of young women experiencing sexual assault in the last 12 months (Statistics Canada 2018).

And in almost all cases, the identity of the accused is male. So while the response to “teach men not to rape”, feels like the correct response, it’s inadequate. And unsophisticated because there is a lot more going than simply being male.

To be clear, this essay is not a victim-blaming piece. I will not talk about the behaviour of women, what they wear or whether they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But I will explore what I think is missing in the education for boys and men on this topic.

High-Status Male Sub-Cultures

The basics of consent education is critical for all young people regardless of gender identity. Many Gen Xers in my cohort will recall that the blunt “No Means No” campaign was just a nascent campus trend in the late 1980s. It is relieving to know that awareness efforts have been teaching that consent exists along a scale from the overt to subtle. That young people are taught to recognize pressure, persistence that crosses boundaries and to identify if the other person is actually “into it”.

But most 18-year olds boys don’t need a seminar to understand that raping someone is wrong.

What might be more useful is educating them on power, hierarchy and socialization, the foundation for membership into high-status male subcultures like fraternities and elite-sports programs.

We know that sexual violence disproportionately happens to young women under the age of 25. This demographic of victims overlaps with insights from studies about sexual assault in post-secondary. The strongest predictor of committing sexual assault— of being a perpetrator—is if young men had a history of doing so before they enter their educational institution. The second factor is peer approval for sexual assault.

Both of these were alive in the context of Cornell.

The alleged gang-rape took place in the context of the Chi Phi fraternity, an exclusive all-male residence on campus for over 150 years. The allegations include a vulgar message of free sex available through the house group chat with a 20-year old Jane Doe, who was intoxicated and given ketamine. The Washington Post reported that, “One fraternity brother responded to that piece of information by writing “I f---ing love Chi Phi”; another either sought or provided clarification, “Like you can walk in and whip it out.” A third message inquired a little later, “Shop still open?”, referring to Jane Doe’s availability.

Jane Doe alleges that seven men sexually assaulted for hours. And that no one intervened.

While these are still only allegations and not proven in court, the group chat alone reveals a considerable amount of disturbing behaviour. And it has to do with the fraternity being a high-status male organization that tends to attract a specific type of aggressive individual while simultaneously transforming other normative guys negatively along the way.

The Selection Process

What I mean is that frats are notorious for binge-drinking, hazing rituals and sexual aggression. It is not surprising then that this type of reputation attracts a higher proportion of men who are sexually aggressive, believe that date-rape is a myth, endorse beliefs in male status and double-standards for women. The research suggests that there will be a higher proportion of those with a sexual assault backgrounds in fraternities, as compared to their non-fraternity counter-parts.

Secondly, men who are more normative and less likely to hurt women, can become worse versions of themselves. Powerful socialization is how this works.

If you are unfamiliar, there is a specific process to becoming a member of a fraternity. It begins with self-selection, meaning individuals express strong desires for membership. Older members— who uphold group norms—decide who makes the cut and who does not. There are longstanding traditions and rituals to ensure both belonging and adherence of social norms. Once part of the frat, protecting the group becomes paramount. The benefits of group membership extends beyond university as the alumni network is part of the reasons many join, with recruitment materials that explicitly highlight successful alumni in business, academia and politics. The long-term implication is access to elite circles.

And while not all prospective fraternity recruits hold these views, this often changes once accepted. The intense socialization creates group norms that are normalized and protected. Research that followed individuals before they entered higher education and found that many begin to change their attitudes in alignment with frat house norms, including heavy drinking and sexual exploitation. This is why being part of a fraternity itself has been identified as a risk factor for sexual predatory behaviour.

A similar pattern plays out in elite men’s team sports where similar self-selection, and team selection processes combine with group norms and high status. Consider the 2018 Canadian World Junior Hockey Team scandal in which another 20-year old Jane Doe, alleged she was forced to have group sex with five players in a hotel room. After having consensual sex with one player, a message was sent to the team group chat asking if anyone wanted to participate in a “three-way”. Multiple teammates then came to the room in spite of her being intoxicated. Again, there was no one who tried to stop it.

All five of the accused were acquitted in 2025. The court did not find that the prosecution had proven sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, the undisputed involvement of a group chat bringing several teammates into sexual behaviour identifies a troubling peer-mediated process similar to the Cornell 7 situation.

For many young men in high-status male contexts, this socialization process creates confusing grey-zones where they may override their personal values:

She’s really drunk, but everyone else seems unconcerned.

The older guys are laughing.

My teammate invited everyone upstairs.

Nobody else is stopping this.

Am I overreacting?

I don’t want to be that guy.

And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Research also indicates that, not all fraternities are created equal and that men in frats can change their attitudes towards more pro-social behaviours towards women and sexual assault. At the heart of it is about group norms and leadership.

My Experience of All-Male Dorms

As someone who has lived in all-male residences in two different Canadian universities and worked on a varsity hockey team, I have some first-hand experience.

It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the all-male dorms, to be sure there was stupidity, drunkenness, sports, parties and lots of conversation about women. Brotherhood would be a defining feature with one set of guys who still meet for annual gatherings 40 years later.

But the vibe regarding campus women?

It was hormone-driven excitement but never predation, at least not in my experience. This may have been because we hadn’t selected one another. We were placed into residences through a housing lottery, without an elaborate membership process or powerful hierarchy of older students deciding who is accepted. While there were traditions, they were pretty tame and varied according to who was in charge on any given year. I also worked on a men’s varsity hockey team and had a similar experience. As someone who didn’t drink alcohol because of my Islamic faith, there was curiosity but never coercion in either context. I also recall a peer who publicly refused to swear because of his Christian upbringing during Frosh Week events. He was affirmed and respected for his stance by the seniors.

These were small moments, but they revealed something important about the sub-culture: you could say no to the group without losing your place in it.

This is not to describe an idyllic campus life without sexism and sexual assault. This was the 90s cusp after all, and it would be extraordinarily naive to suggest such a thing given the era was one in which the consent conversation was not even a thing. The White Ribbon Campaign, of men encouraging each other to speak up about male violence, was just emerging. Not to mention that homophobic language was rampant not just on campus, but across society.

Yet I offer these personal anecdotes simply as counterpoints, that all-male environments are not automatic breeding grounds for sexual violence or heavy drinking. They can be, but not always.

And while I point to both fraternities and elite men’s team sports, these are also not monoliths, with a wide variety of cultures within these from high to low risk. This includes fraternities with cultures that promote respect for women, equality for gay men and racial equity.

This is part of what we need to teach boys and young men, how to assess risk in their environments. So beyond the “don’t rape” message, let’s teach them to detect when they are in spaces where male power and status is paramount. To identify when group norms create silence. To ask questions of their peers and seniors even when the situation is unclear. And to speak up and step in when someone might be in social danger, regardless of gender or identity.

This sophistication in our messaging may also limit the defensive, shame reflex that occurs for many boys and men during moments like the Cornell 7, that often carry an all-men-are-bad undertone.

It’s also important to state that the responsibility cannot be on young men alone to manage this context. That’s too individualistic.

They need a culture around them that supports pro-social efforts. The difference-maker is the tone and values set by leadership. When leaders show respect for difference, as they did for me abstaining from alcohol, others will follow. Same goes for attitudes towards aggression or violence, be it based on gender, race or other identity factors. So words and choices matter, especially those of coaches, team captains, university leaders, and other institutions both on and off campus including politicians and captains of industry.

The real test is what behaviours earn respect, which actions carry consequences, what happens when someone challenges group norms. To paraphrase the famous business adage, culture is defined not by what you preach, but what you are willing to tolerate. This is especially salient if the person crossing the line is a powerful peer, a star player, or an influential leader.

Because knowing right from wrong is one thing. Doing right when it threatens your status, reputation or sense of belonging is another thing entirely.

It’s a life lesson for all of us, not just young men.

Looking for more?

No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

My family had a surprise moment one summer a few years ago that can really only happen in a large urban context.

We went to watch a movie with the kids at the theatre and were confused to see a line wrapped around the block of the building. Very unusual as this was also an out-of-the-way venue on the east side of the city that never has lines.

What was going on?

We asked people who were waiting in the snaking crowd and were surprised to hear that Ed Sheeran was playing.

Pardon?

I knew he was playing a series of sold-out shows at the fifty-thousand person stadium downtown, but performing at such a tiny club beside the theatre? We would later learn that he often does small shows like this to try out new material. While intrigued, we continued to the movie in the adjacent building. After it ended, the kids wanted to walk by the club just to see where Sheeran was performing.

The red velvet ropes marked the entrance as did a couple of friendly bouncers. But no people were visible as the show had already been running for about 30 minutes. My kids, being their high-energy, demanding selves, started begging to go inside to see Sheeran, “just to take a peak”. Their antics caught the attention of the lone ticket reseller still present, himself a dad, who offered us tickets at a remarkably reasonable rate.

My kids went ballistic with excitement as we proceeded inside! I still couldn’t believe this was a legit thing until I saw him performing on stage.

It was magical.

Sheeran told stories, performed new songs as well as his greatest hits. He was gracious, charming and humble. My wife and I kept looking at each other with goofy expressions on our face: Is this really happening?!

As I said, a big-city moment. We all have fond memories of that experience and a real warm spot in our hearts for Sheeran who impressed us in so many ways including how down-to-earth he was.

Which is why it was extra jarring when I learned what happened on Sheeran’s recent fall tour in the United States with his opening act, Macklemore.

To recap, Macklemore said “Free Palestine” and spoke about the plight of Gaza partway through this performance. He performed a song he had written honouring Columbia University students that risked their nascent careers and scholarships to protest Israel’s invasion of Gaza. It also questions why his tax dollars should go towards funding a genocide—the formal term being used by leading genocide scholars and independent human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders to describe what has been happening there since 2023.

Many US stadiums, led by billionaire owner Robert Kraft, threatened to cancel Sheeran’s tour if Macklemore was part of it. Kraft is a staunch supporter of the Israeli government and denies the accusation of genocide, calling it “hate speech”.

Sheeran claims he spent a week trying to broker a deal behind the scenes, acting as a bridge between all sides including promoters and venue owners. In the end, he admitted defeat stating the decision to remove Macklemore wasn’t his. He also said that he doesn’t use his professional platform for politics and prefers to create a space of “safety and sanctuary” for all fans. Furthermore, he didn’t want to abandon the many people on his tour who count on him for their livelihoods, including workers and other performers.

Then something remarkable happened.

Several of Sheeran’s supporting artists including Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga and Lukas Graham —who were also in the circle that “counted on him”— withdrew from the tour in solidarity with Macklemore.

In the following performance in Philadelphia, Sheeran stood alone on the stage and expressed remorse for his decision thoroughly chastened by the controversy.

There are at least three lessons about leadership and change buried within this mess. The first begins with neutrality.

The Limits of Neutrality

Sheeran’s position is understandable to many people: I don’t take sides.

While an appealing idea, neutrality has serious limits. It’s easy to take such a stand when it’s a fair fight and opponents are evenly matched. But what happens when it’s not? For decades, schools have rightly taught kids to not be bystanders when a schoolyard bully mistreats another child, but to intervene and be an “up-stander”. If the bully has their own painful history of abuse—as is often the case—it does not erase the need for an intervention. Domination because of physical or emotional power differences is not acceptable in contemporary society.

But some issues are harder to stand up for than others.

For example, Sheeran himself performed at a fundraiser for Ukrainians and said “I stand with you”, in reference to Russia’s invasion. He also had a clear public position for England staying as a part of the European Union during “Brexit”.

But the question of Israel and Palestine was more controversial and he preferred to keep his personal position to himself. The optics of this choice appeared as selective neutrality, rather than consistency. And he’s not alone in this contradiction, as it reflects the position of the vast majority of leaders of all types and stripes, both within and beyond organizations that I’ve worked with.

This in spite of clear power differentials between the two sides. Israel being one of the world’s most powerful nations militarily, politically and economically against a people who are considerably poorer economically, have no standing army and have lived within in a grey-space of international laws for generations relying on the nation that is their brutal occupier to also be their benevolent guardian. The sheer death toll demonstrates this asymmetry: over 70, 000 Palestinians killed by Israel since the 1200 Israelis were murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

But Israel itself was created because of the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, which makes this political issue such a struggle for most leaders. Many within the mainstream feel frozen or become one-sided due to a number of historical and political reasons. Do we prioritize anti-Jewish hate or anti-Muslim hate? This false binary constantly emerges, as though it was a zero sum game. It’s precisely why organizations need decision-making processes for politically charged issues before the crisis arrives, something I’ve written about previously.

And this relates to both identifying as well as exercising organizational values before challenges mount.

Integrity Is A Muscle

Sheeran was threatened with the cancellation of his shows because of Macklemore’s pro-Palestine stance, a fact confirmed by billionaire stadium owner Robert Kraft.

That’s real pressure.

Which makes this a leadership dilemma rather than a simple intellectual exercise. And it also makes the response of Sheeran’s supporting artists noteworthy. They walked away and took the immediate financial hit for their beliefs. Values become meaningful when holding them costs you something, a reality that is always easier said than done.

But there is another angle on values. We become what we practice. Meaning, upholding values requires the discipline of practicing them. Without effort, we do not magically develop the “muscles” to behave with integrity, and even less so during a crisis.

Organizations identify core values such as “respect” or “collaboration” yet these always ring hollow for me. For most institutions, these seem to be a branding and public relations activity without any real commitment.

My question is always: what are the actual behaviours that model your beliefs on a daily basis?

An institution that identifies “team work” as a value but can’t reconcile siloed departments continually at odds with one another. A school district that I worked with identified both “positivity” and “leadership” as values yet leadership toxicity resulted in more than one formal human rights complaint being was filed.

In contrast, another of our clients demonstrates a core value of “community” by providing employees with 16 paid hours to volunteer with external charities. Another organization translated their value of “respect” into simple daily behaviours that ranged from saying “good morning” to one another to providing clear, timely feedback to colleagues and bosses.

It appears that Macklemore—and the other artists—had far more practice with standing up for their values than Sheeran. Due to the blow-back from fans and media, Sheeran did eventually say that he was sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians and said it was “catastrophic” and “disproportionate” without calling Israel’s response a genocide. Even if shaky and read of a teleprompter, he experienced the vulnerability that comes with taking the first steps beyond selective neutrality. He experienced first-hand what many people feel when values they hold are attached to possible consequences.

But beyond Sheeran, Macklemore, too, also has room to grow from this situation. His learning offers a third lesson for leaders: how to be non-polarized.

Non-Polarized Leadership

Macklemore tried to distinguish criticism of Israel from hostility toward Jewish people. During his speech, he addressed his “Jewish brothers and sisters” and said his criticism of Israel, apartheid and genocide was not criticism of them. This was an explicit attempt to clarify that anger directed at Israeli government should not be conflated with Jewish people more broadly, as that is a variation of anti-Semitism. In the 2-3 minutes he was on stage talking about Palestinian freedom, he spent about 15-seconds talking to Jewish people directly.

This was not enough.

Macklemore, and many of his supporters, may believe that he had been fair enough with his statement to Jewish people and therefore done his job. But one of the lessons I’ve learned from three decades working on human change is that being right and doing right aren’t the same thing. Being right asks whether our position is morally justified. Doing right asks whether we understand human beings well enough to move them.

People don’t process words like “Free Palestine” or “Israel’s right to self-defence” as dispassionate political propositions. We hear them through identity, belonging, fear, memory and lived experience. In other words, this is the terrain of the unconscious mind which is emotional and unpredictable. And if we are unaware of, or intentionally ignore that extremely powerful domain because we believe our argument is superior or morally correct, we may inadvertently make change harder.

For some Jewish people carrying the historical memory of persecution—and confronting very real antisemitism today—”Free Palestine” can be heard very differently than the speaker intends. That doesn’t mean you stop saying it. It means you become skilled enough to hold two truths at once and speak to both audiences authentically.

For Macklemore and leaders broadly, this means unequivocally defending Palestinian humanity while also making unmistakably clear that Jewish fear and historical trauma matter. You can oppose the actions of the Israeli government passionately while clearly acknowledging the fear caused by antisemitism, a perennial target for hate-mongers of all stripes. Many don’t recognize that this form of bigotry extends more than two-thousand years, long before the Holocaust. Many people often underestimate the impacts of such intergenerational trauma giving it short shrift in the immediacy and relative recency of issues such as Palestinian plight.

I still think fondly of my family’s unexpected moment seeing Ed Sheeran when my kids were little. And while Ed’s glow has dimmed a little for me, I see his personal struggle as reflective of a broader misguided belief in neutrality that obscures power dynamics.

Non-polarized leadership is neither neutral nor does it ask us to give up our moral conviction. It should also not be confused with both-sidesism—a dishonest debate style that treats two sides of an issues as equally valid, contrary to actual facts or evidence.

Non-polarized leadership asks something harder.

Can I know where I stand yet have the psychological fluidity to move towards people emotionally on different sides of a conflict? Can I understand what they fear, what they have experienced and what they need to hear—even if I disagree with their conclusions? Can I be compassionate with myself and others through our inevitable missteps and misunderstanding in order to move forward collectively?

To be non-polarized is a practice that ask much more of us. And in a world of increasingly supercharged political and identity conflicts, it’s becoming one of the defining leadership capacities of our time.

Looking for more?

No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

It was exactly five years ago this month that my book, Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice was published. In hindsight, it looks like that was the high-water mark of DEI. George Floyd’s murder had sparked a global racial reckoning, organizations were making unprecedented commitments to equity, and resources about racism were in high demand.

A lot has changed since then.

DEI has been battered politically, abandoned or renamed by some organizations, and subjected to a reckoning that was partly imposed from outside and partly earned through mistakes left uncorrected from within our field.

And yet something surprising has happened: the underlying belief in diversity appears remarkably resilient according to recent studies from both Canada and the United States over the last two years.

For example, this month’s Gallup research found that 71% of Americans believe diverse workforces are more profitable and 75% believe they produce more innovative products—both significant increases from just a year ago. Even US Republicans, more than 40% feel positive about DEI, up 11% from 2025.

So, on this fifth anniversary I’m sharing the book’s introduction with my community. I went back to the chapter where I first introduced the Deep Diversity model and reviewed it. I believed then, as I still do now, that to truly understand systemic forms of discrimination like racism or sexism, we need to grapple with the unconscious role of four key factors always at play: emotions, bias, identity and power.

I think back to how drastically the world has changed since 2021. And feel good that the central argument of Deep Diversity has held up remarkably well: if we want to understand racism, discrimination—or really, how human beings change—we have to understand how the hardware of the the brain combines with the software of socialization. The latter is changeable, the former is not. The role of the unconscious mind and neuroscience research features prominently in my writing, which helps shed light on why our behaviour and choices often contradict of our stated beliefs. And, of course, my bias missteps are prominent throughout the book so readers know this is a “We” not a “You” problem.

I’m currently working on my next book. It will focus on what I’ve learned from the last three decades of working with leaders and organizations about the psychology of human behaviour when pursuing justice goals and trying to make social change. Many of the ideas I’m thinking about are being pressure-tested in this newsletter, Beyond Distrust. So as always, let me know what you think!

I hope you are having a wonderful transition into Autumn.

Shakil

P.S. All the references for the chapter are included at the end, which makes the formatting a little unwieldy in spots - apologies in advance!

Ch1. The Four Pillars of Deep Diversity

What We Say, Not What We Do

A university student, Nina, sits patiently in the waiting area of a nondescript office. Two other students, one Black and one white, are also waiting to be called in. After a few moments, the Black student notices his cell phone is missing and heads to the adjacent hallway to retrieve it. On his way out, he accidentally bumps the white student’s leg. No words are exchanged, but once the Black student has left the waiting room, the white student mutters a nasty racial slur, one that specifically targets Black people.^[i]

Nina (a fictitious student whose identity we’ll discuss later) has arrived at this office to be part of a research project. She doesn’t realize, though, that the study has already begun in the waiting room. What’s happening is part of a Canada-U.S. study conducted by researchers from York University, University of British Columbia, and Yale University.^[ii] The Black and white students are actors, and the focus of the study is on Nina’s response to the ugly racial insult.

Importantly, there were three research groups. One group saw this exchange happen on a video (Watchers). A second group only read about it (Readers). The third group (Experiencers) actually experienced the interaction directly with live Black and white actors.

Unsurprisingly, when asked to imagine themselves in this situation and how they might feel, the Readers and Watchers indicated that they would be outraged. When asked which student they would choose to work with in a follow-up activity, more than 80 percent of the Watchers said that they would choose to work with the Black student over the white student.

Similarly, about 75 percent of the Readers said that they, too, would choose the Black student as a partner.

None of these results should be surprising. After all, they took place in a university setting in Toronto, one of the world’s most multicultural cities.

But what were the results from the Experiencers group? How did Nina and others like her feel or respond to the situation? How many of the Experiencers said or did anything in response to the racist comment?

We would expect the numbers to be a little bit lower. For most of us, responding in real time is more difficult than an imagined intervention. We might expect that maybe 50 percent of the study group would have stepped in. But perhaps that still sounds too high. A conservative guess might be that 30 percent—three out of every ten students—would have said or done something in response. Or skeptics in the crowd might suggest that only one out of ten students would step in.

The actual results? According to study co-author Kerry Kawakami, of those who experienced the racist event first-hand, no one intervened or said anything.^[iii] Nor, when interviewed later, did anyone report being upset by the comment. And disturbingly, most of the students chose the white person who made the racist comment as their partner for a later assignment.

Excuse me? Yes—you read that correctly. The vast majority of the students—over 70 percent—chose the white student rather than the Black student as a partner, despite having witnessed the incident first-hand.

Here’s another thing—all of the students who participated in the study were diverse in their background (except none were Black, as the study was examining anti-Black racial attitudes). On top of being well-educated, young, and living in a profoundly multiracial city, the composite character of Nina could have been white, Chinese, Indian, or some other ethnocultural racial identity. A diverse bunch of university students—the odds don’t get much better for a group we would expect to have empathy for their peers and potentially intervene in such a situation.

This study investigated emotions and behaviors in the context of racial difference. Although it took place before the powerful influence of the Black Lives Matter movement in society, the general conclusion of the researchers is still solid: we are poor at accurately predicting how we will feel—and therefore react—in future situations, especially regarding racial bias and discrimination.

So why are emotions important? It turns out that how we feel directly influences how we act.^[iv]

Our emotions are invisible and controlling. Whether we’re aware of them or not, they significantly influence our choices and behaviors. Some scientists even argue that we feel rather than think our way through the world.^[v] Further, social pain (for example, from being excluded) and physical pain (from being hit, say) share overlapping neural regions in the brain. This helps shed light on why we react strongly to rejection or others’ anger.^[vi]

To tackle contemporary discrimination and racism, we need to connect what we feel with what we think, the choices we make with how we behave. Developing emotional literacy, therefore, is the first pillar in Deep Diversity.

*

He Who Hesitates

Pleased with having selected a new pair of eyeglasses from a trusted shop, a consultant realizes he needs an updated prescription. The owner of the eyewear store recommends a local optometrist who does eye tests. She hands over a business card.

The consultant looks at the plain, unimpressive business card. He reads the name: Abdeiso Kiyanfar. And then he hesitates, suddenly uncertain about the recommendation. An image arises of an older, unskilled “foreign” man in a musty, disorganized office. The consultant puts the card away and heads home, with the better part of a day passing before he recognizes how unfairly he’s been feeling toward the optometrist. This was a referral, after all. He pushes aside his hesitation and phones to make an appointment.

This story about a hesitation—an unstated manifestation of prejudice—is based on a true event, and it has some interesting plot twists.

First of all, the consultant in the story is a seasoned veteran in diversity and anti-racism issues. Second, his ethnicity is South Asian—he’s a brown guy. The third interesting fact is that he is me.

I share this story to illustrate how vulnerable we all are—vulnerable to prejudice, racism, and bias. Also, because it holds some deep lessons about discrimination and inclusion. I am certain that if the “plain, unimpressive” business card had said Adam Wright or Ellen Goldstein, I would not have hesitated. And I would not have needed a referral, either, to take a chance on an unknown quantity with the “right” name. It’s my hesitation—a brief moment of inaction—that’s the issue.

Imagine if I were a hiring manager reviewing resumés and hesitated in the same way because a non-white name like Abdeiso Kiyanfar (not his real name) evoked a negative response? Or if I was a landlord renting an apartment and was turned off by “foreign-sounding” names? We all threaten fairness when such unconscious reluctance or preferences guide our decision-making processes when relating to others.

Project Implicit, a collaboration between Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington, would describe this hesitation—this first negative association with a “foreign-sounding” name—as my implicit or unconscious bias.^[vii] (An interesting thing, given that my name, Shakil Choudhury, would also be considered outside the norm by most North American standards.)

This is the second important insight regarding issues of diversity and inclusion. As humans, we all have biases we are not aware of that play out on a daily basis.

According to Mahzarin Banaji, one of the great minds behind Project Implicit, our implicit biases exist not on a conscious thinking level, but entirely on the unconscious, emotional plane.^[viii] Implicit bias may be invisible to us, but it is obvious to those who are impacted by it. Multiple studies demonstrate that there is a link between unconscious prejudice and our behaviors.^[ix] Consequently, understanding and uncovering implicit bias is the second part of the Deep Diversity lens.

*

Not till You Drink like Us

In a suburban setting, a man sits quietly watching a video. The images on the screen are of a mundane, repetitive nature: a man drinking a glass of water. The only variation is that the person shown drinking the water occasionally changes, from a white man to a Black man, to an East Asian or South Asian one.

During this unremarkable experience, something unusual starts to happen. Unbeknownst to the watcher, his brain responds differently to each image that he observes. An electroencephalograph (EEG) machine monitoring his brain activity indicates to the researchers in the University of Toronto Scarborough lab that he has greater empathy for those who share his racial background.^[x]

When he watches a person of his own race, the motor-cortex area of his brain lights up as it would if he were doing the task himself. But when the person on the screen is of a different race, there is hardly a blip in the register. In fact, for some participants, observing someone of a different race having a drink of water resulted in their brains registering “as little activity as when they watched a blank screen.”^[xi]

Thus, the third insight on diversity and inclusion. We have greater empathy—more care and concern—for those who are most like ourselves. It is widely reported in research that there are neurological underpinnings to same-race empathy as well as racial anxiety toward other-race people.^[xii] We are very group-ish in nature, making identity the third pillar of Deep Diversity. Belonging to groups is not only a key driver of human behavior, but it also helps form our sense of who we are.

Our group orientation helps explain the extreme polarization between liberals and conservatives, especially in the context of the United States, and why race/ethnicity is such a strong undercurrent. The identity-based nature of politics is why, for example, so many conservatives that opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy when he was running to lead the party supported him once he was chosen, in spite of the litany of scandals, lying, incompetence, and corruption that was so clearly and extensively documented. Identity was, and is, a defining feature with both nature and nurture forces at play.

But progressives also play a part in political division—even if it is a lesser role—with an overreliance on strategies that alienate, diminish, shame, blame, “call out” and push away potential allies. Highly academic jargon, self-righteousness[SC1] [js2] [SC3], invisible codes of conduct, and the politics of purity often get pushed forward in the name of social justice, making it difficult to talk about issues for fear of ostracization and punishment, and further re-enforcing Us/Them dynamics within and outside progressive organizations and movements. These responses, too, are tied to our being hard-wired to define—and demand—in-group allegiance based on whatever social identity markers are relevant to the context, be they race/ethnicity, nationality, religion, or political affiliation.

*

Beyond the Third Dimension: Power

Emotions. Bias. Identity. Any element of this trio offers a formidable challenge to nurturing diversity, inclusion, and fairness in society. But it gets even more complicated. The unconscious influence of these three psychological dimensions fuses with the legacies of history, politics, colonization, and economics creating—and perpetuating—imbalanced power structures in society. The result is the entrenchment of historically high-status (more power) and low-status (less power) groups based on social identities such as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability, and religion.

Power and group status can sometimes be obscured in Western democratic societies like Canada, the United States, or the United Kingdom. Here, fairness and equality are highly valued, and overt forms of discrimination, especially on the basis of race, are no longer acceptable in the mainstream society. Yet subtle, less visible forms of bias are still pervasive across institutions. They are intimately linked to the way that power in society is divided along racial lines.

For example, few white people are likely to know that their names give them an invisible advantage in the job market. But in fact, those with white-sounding names are 40 to 50 percent more likely to receive a callback for a job interview than applicants with Black or Asian-sounding names. A light skin color also increases one’s chances of receiving better health care and decreases the likelihood of being a victim of police shootings. Studies that we’ll look at in upcoming chapters demonstrate that this type of discrimination is so prevalent that it has to be called “systemic.” And, invisible privileges as well as drawbacks come with belonging or not belonging to the racial norm in society.

This is the final insight offered by the Deep Diversity approach. Even in egalitarian, democratic societies, power needs to be named, challenged, and equalized to create greater fairness between racial groups.

Unlike old-fashioned symbols of bigotry such as burning crosses and white hoods, this form of systemic racial discrimination is subtle and difficult for most of us to discuss. There’s a simple reason: it is hidden. It requires talking about data—the collection and analysis of the experiences of thousands of people. Such data is abstract and inherently depersonalizes the conversation for some people, while activating—at times enraging—others because it verifies their experience. And this hidden racism, when named, can further polarize the Us/Them dynamic as it identifies which racial groups have more social power and less.

The racial divide quickly gets exposed following any number of tragic high-profile deaths. In 2020, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered on camera by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, who choked him to death with a knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-five seconds. The nation erupted with protests and outrage that spread across 150 cities, as this was another example of the prevalence of anti-Black racism.

Yet, in spite of the evidence, top government leadership in charge of the situation, Ken Cuccinelli, denied that race played a factor, instead portraying Chauvin’s behavior as that of a “bully.”^[xiii]

This pattern has played out repeatedly. In 2014, a similar thing happened after the death of another young Black male, Michael Brown, who was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Weeks of protests by Black people (and their allies) followed, clearly articulating the alienation and persecution they experience. The white mayor of Ferguson, in contrast, said he was unaware of any racial frustrations before that tragic shooting that made them the center of global headlines.^[xiv]

The same sentiment emerged following the 2012 shooting death of an unarmed Black teen, Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a twenty-eight-year-old gun-toting man in Sanford, Florida. A local newspaper editor, who is white, is quoted as saying: “Until this latest incident, race didn’t seem to be a huge issue in Sanford... Even now, after it’s happened, I still think Sanford is a non-racist town.”

The head of a Sanford diversity organization, a man of color, responded by saying, “I understand white folks saying that... but there are Blacks in this community who have lived through [racism] a long time.”^[xv]

***

Fifty years after the civil rights movement, the essence of the problem we struggle with the United States and Canada is still captured by these two statements: Race isn’t an issue, says the white person. Racism is a problem that’s always been here, insists the person of color.

Us. Them. On one side are millions who say they are experiencing a major difficulty that not only limits their ability to go after their dreams and get ahead but also threatens their physical lives. On the other side, millions of people say they don’t see the problem and question whether it’s actually “that bad.” Frequently, they suggest that there may be other explanations.

Of course, no group sees any issue uniformly. People of color disagree with one another; whites disagree with whites. Yet public polls still demonstrate a significant racial divide consistently exists on the topics of discrimination and prejudice in society.^[xvi] Although there has been an important shift in public attitude following the George Floyd protests, with 74 percent of Americans recognizing that broader racial injustices underlie such incidents—a whopping 31-point increase from 2014 following the shooting of Michael Brown^[xvii]—how far that understanding goes still contains significant gaps. For example, a YouGov poll conducted the months following the George Floyd protests showed that 49 percent of whites supported the protests, compared to 77 percent of Blacks. Similarly, 87 percent of Black people believed that in difficult situations, police officers would use excessive force with Black people while only 49 percent of white people believed the same thing. Overall, whites have much more trust in the institution of policing, at 56 percent, versus only 19 percent of Black people feeling the same way, a 37-point difference.^[xviii]

In the context of political polarization, race becomes another wedge issue dividing liberals and conservatives, with the cycle of the Us/Them on continual, predictable repeat. In cases like George Floyd’s or Michael Brown’s, as the rhetoric and pain increases on both sides, so do the extreme positions and hurtful words: Racist! I hate white people. White justice doesn’t serve us. Race-baiter! Blacks are criminals and deserve to be racially profiled...

Besides those already mentioned, a sample list of those whose mistreatment or death have prompted racial division and heartbreak includes J.J. Harper in Winnipeg (1988), Rodney King in Los Angeles (1991), Faraz Suleman in Toronto (1996), Amadou Diallo in New York (1999), Fredy Villanueva in Montreal (2008), Eric Garner in Staten Island (2014), Sandra Bland near Houston (2016), and Josephine Pelletier in Calgary (2018).

The tragedies continued through the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 as a disproportionate number of Black and Latinx people were targeted for social distancing infractions by police.^[xix] In more extreme cases, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while jogging through a white neighborhood in Georgia^[xx]; Breonna Taylor shot by Louisville police in her apartment^[xxi]; two Métis men—Jake Sansom and Morris Cardinal—were shot and killed in an altercation with a white farmer in rural Alberta^[xxii]; and Joyce Echaquan, an Indigenous woman, filmed a Facebook Live video of herself dying in a Quebec hospital while experiencing racial abuse from staff.^[xxiii]

These are just a handful of cases from an enormous pile of evidence that racial profiling exists, in the criminal justice system generally and in policing specifically. In Canada alone, over fifteen official government reports since the 1970s have shown this.^[xxiv] In the U.S., racial profiling came into public consciousness because of legal cases in Florida and Maryland in the early 1990s, with the first official legislation passing in Congress in 1999 (but failing in the Senate, therefore not becoming law). But the ugly truth is that racial profiling started with “slave patrols” in 1700s and early police departments in the 1800s, whose job it was to control a “dangerous underclass” that included enslaved people, immigrants, and the poor.^[xxv]

To say that historically marginalized communities, like Black and Indigenous Peoples, may feel racial profiling is a topic that’s been known and studied to death would be an understatement. Yet, as a public conversation, it’s a train wreck. We talk about it like we’re unruly beginners.

And it’s not entirely our fault.

I’ve come to believe that to understand what’s going on, we must go deeper than skin color, both literally and figuratively. Our core struggles regarding Us/Them lie hidden in the architecture of our brains. The way that we are neurologically wired is then weaponized through the ordinary processes of being socialized into the power dynamics between racial groups. Both nature and nurture forces are at play. While we can’t change our biology, we are able to alter how we are socialized, and that’s our leverage.

It’s important to recognize that emotionally charged issues like racial profiling and partisan politics easily trigger an Us/Them dynamic because much of what’s happening is below the radar of awareness, hidden even from ourselves. Our state of “autopilot,” that is, our default position—what we can’t see—has great influence. And it’s often unhelpful. As a result, situations, issues, and choices repeat themselves over and over. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

*

A Compassionate Approach to Tackling Contemporary Racism

Once you know why change is so hard, you can drop the brute force method and take a more psychologically sophisticated approach.

—Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist, NYU Stern School of Business^[xxvi]

For twenty-five years now, I’ve been an educator and consultant on issues of diversity, inclusion, and racial justice. I help organizations work through their differences, to nurture environments where all people feel like they matter and belong. Our team at Anima Leadership consults with executive teams and boards of directors when a human rights settlement requires an intervention. We train staff and students when a school has a racist incident. Our team has also developed curricula and measurement tools for public and private sector organizations, helpnig improve their diversity outcomes. Internationally, I’ve led intercultural dialog projects for communities in conflict, specifically in Europe and South America.

For a long time, I believed that issues of racism and discrimination were simply a matter of ignorance. I thought that if we, as good citizens in egalitarian, democratic societies, had the “right” information, we would make better, more thoughtful, and fair choices. Gradually I discovered that this appeal-to-the-head-and-behavior-will-change strategy—a cognitive approach to social change—only works in a limited manner.

As the opening vignettes indicate, the problem is much more complex than being misinformed. The Yale–York–British Columbia study demonstrated that even young, educated, and ethnoculturally diverse students have a significant discrepancy between what they think and feel about discrimination, and what they actually do in the face of a racist event. The drinking-water study from University of Toronto suggests that we have greater empathy for those who are racially most like ourselves. And my own story about hesitating at the optometrist’s name shows the presence of unconscious bias even in someone whose life’s work is to educate others about issues of discrimination and difference.

An irrational preference for a white over a Black student. Greater empathy for those of our own race. A hesitation.

Notice the subtlety of each of these three examples. There are no neo-Nazis, no segregation, and no deliberate persecution. In short, there are no signs of our ugly and easily identified villain, overt racism. Yet all three examples are manifestations of its slyer but still toxic twin, subtle racism—also referred to as systemic racial discrimination. This form of racism is hard to see unless you have been trained to notice the patterns. Because it’s hard to solve a problem we can’t identity, there is a need to develop pattern recognitions skills to identify these less obvious forms of racism, something explored later this chapter. In short, this book is an encouragement for readers to become system thinkers about race and identity issues.

As exemplified by the public conversations following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Joyce Echaquan, the inability to see each of these as reflective of system-wide racial profiling trends rather than isolated tragedies can easily fracture groups along racial lines. And in this highly divisive post-Trumpian, post-pandemic era, this is what’s holding us back collectively. This book will argue that in order to tackle Us/Them dynamics, we must first understand how central racial identity and discrimination is in the conversation. Deep Diversity offers a nonjudgmental, compassionate approach to nurturing social cohesion in both organizations and communities at large.

In short, the Deep Diversity approach helps expose hard-to-see intergroup racial dynamics. In doing so, it makes both our brain (cognition) and heart (emotions) vulnerable to constructive change. It involves learning to ask four key questions when faced with issues of ethnocultural and racial differences:

• What are the influences of emotions?

• What are the influences of bias?

• What are the influences of identity?

• What are the influences of power?

*

Using Brain Science to Understand Us/Them

At the heart of the Us versus Them dynamic is our tendency to see a person as a symbol of a group, especially of a racial or ethnic group, rather than as an individual.^[xxvii] When we do this, our empathy is reduced and we may dehumanize the person in some small or big way. Research described as “robust” demonstrates our tendency to see those who are racially different in simplistic, primitive stereotypes—more like animals or objects than people.^[xxviii] This tendency, called infrahumanization or objectification, shows itself whenever we make generalizations about a subset of people, especially so-called minority groups. (For example, making derogatory associations of Black people with apes and violence, or seeing East Asians as hard-working, expressionless, and almost robotically efficient.)

Fundamental to this discussion is understanding that our unconscious mind—which is automatic, reactive, emotional, and intuitive—easily dominates the conscious mind, the realm of logic, language, reason, and abstraction.^[xxix] In the words of a respected researcher, Joseph Ledoux of New York University, “Consciousness may get all the focus... but consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it’s a slave to everything that works beneath it.”^[xxx]

As this book will show, our unconscious biases and automatic brain processes frequently favor those most “like us,” creating hard-to-see racial discrimination that become systemic against “them.” These factors coupled with power dynamics and group status function as the root system of discrimination, preventing many hard-working individuals and communities from getting jobs or accessing appropriate health care services, or causing them to be over-policed. This same combination of biological impulses and social conditioning contribute to the divisiveness in politics.

Turning inward to the level of gut feelings and emotions will offer a greater appreciation of the problem, as well as possible solutions. As we appreciate the depth of what we collectively face and are able to generate some compassion for why we get stuck, we may be better positioned to progress toward racial equality and political cooperation in new, more helpful directions.

In brain science terms, we have to disrupt and alter the neural pathways that result in biases that do not serve us collectively.^[xxxi] In plain language, we have to break some bad habits regarding issues of racial difference.

*

Breaking Bad Habits, Nurturing Good Ones

To say that we, as humans, are creatures of habit is a profound understatement. By habit I’m referring to something much bigger than a daily ritual of grabbing a coffee before work or going to the gym at set times. Most of our waking life is habit-based, from our posture, walking gait, manner of speaking, accent, and favorite expressions to how we think, chew, eat, feel, laugh, move, play, or sleep.

A significant part of our lives, therefore, is experienced in a state of autopilot. We don’t think about what we do, we just do.^[xxxii] This is both the brilliance and the drawback of our neural architecture. For example, learned behavior that becomes unconscious (such as driving a car) allows us to function efficiently. It frees up our mind to pay attention to new, less familiar things in our environment (a driver in the wrong lane) and prioritize our actions (swerving out of the way).

If we had to pay conscious attention to all the stimuli in our environment at any given moment (all the minor and major tasks required in driving a car), even basic events would be overwhelming. We couldn’t focus on what was important, which could put us in harm’s way. The flip side is that such autopilot results in filters and bias, and a state of comfort with how things are. This makes change difficult for us.

Habits are also larger than the individual. Habits shared by a group of people—whether in a corporation, profession, or nation— become social norms (also called cultural norms). Our environment marinates us in these customs, behaviors, and thinking patterns. They range from what side of the road we drive on to how we greet people (with handshakes or kisses), how much eye contact we make (as a sign of respect or disrespect), and what kinds of clothing or public displays of affection are acceptable. We are social beings whose individual identities are influenced by a wide variety of forces, including ethnic and gender norms, family, friends, co-workers, communities, social class, and religion, to name just a few.

A large body of research demonstrates that many social norms are invisible (for example, greeting a stranger with a handshake) until they are breached (being greeted with kisses on both cheeks by someone you don’t know).^[xxxiii] And the experience of norms being broken can often be emotional. We might have a sense that something is not right or feel confusion, embarrassment, or anger. As a result, we may begin to avoid specific people, places, or situations.

Whether such habits are learned or genetically influenced, they are usually unconscious. Our culture, then, provides the “software” that both helps and hinders racial interactions. But Deep Diversity also explores the “hardware” side of things. It turns out that we are biologically predisposed to bias and discrimination. We are preprogrammed from birth to define who are our “people,” who is part of my in-group and who is not.

This aspect of the research demonstrates that bias, fear, and prejudice are intertwined in the mind with normal processes of how we perceive, categorize, remember, and learn.^[xxxiv] It suggests that the mechanisms for Us versus Them are, at least partially, built into the human design. From my experience, accepting and admitting this is a good collective starting point. It gives us permission to have conversations about bias, prejudice, and discrimination that otherwise are almost taboo. After all, how can we talk productively about prejudice and discrimination if these concepts are associated only with neo-Nazis and overt racists but not with the rest of us?

Enhancing diversity, inclusion, and equity requires both learning and unlearning about others and ourselves. It requires developing more psychologically sophisticated strategies to advance diversity and inclusion. In short, it requires us to break generations of bad racial habits and nurture good ones. Unless we understand the roles played by both hardware and software components in our mental processes, fairness and justice will always be threatened in our personal, professional, and community lives.

The Deep Diversity Model

The Deep Diversity approach, then, argues that we must understand the brain and mind—its conscious and unconscious dimensions. The psychobiology underlying human behavior motivates racial interactions as do socialization processes. On one level, when faced with issues of racial and ethnic differences, Deep Diversity asks: What are the influences of emotions, of bias, of identity, and of power?

On another level—if you can imagine people as being like computers—it’s about disrupting and debugging the Us/Them default setting that the human program is predisposed to. Attempting to answer the four questions posed by the Deep Diversity approach makes possible a more nuanced understanding of what’s happening for, and to, us.

Each of the four key questions can be a gateway into a series of related questions. For example, the question of emotions in a racial situation, which Chapter 2 focuses on, may generate the following:

What do I feel about this situation, group, or issue?

What do others who are involved in this situation, group, or issue feel?

What is the emotional history or tone underlying this situation, group, or issue? And how might that history still influence perspectives and outcomes today?

How might we address these feelings and the underlying needs?

Similar questions need to be generated on the topics of bias, identity, and power. Chapter 3 demonstrates that all humans have implicit biases that result in personal, collective, and societal blind spots regarding issues of racial difference. Such invisible prejudices lead to behaviors that can undermine fairness and impair judgment, with outcomes that can be mild (for example, social slights) to severe (violence and death).

Chapter 4 explores the concept of identity. Belonging to groups is a significant driver of human behavior, as important as the need for food, water, and shelter. Our sense of who we are as individuals is developed through our interactions in groups both consciously and unconsciously.

Understanding our group-ish nature will help us explore the divisive nature of politics today from another angle. A look at social identity will help us explore why for example, Republicans and Democrats, see each other as enemies today rather than adversaries, and how that distinction is a threat to democracy itself.

Chapter 5 focuses on power, exploring the interplay of social power between dominant and non-dominant groups. This is a critical lens in tackling systemic forms of discrimination such as racism. Power is a complicated subject, though, that requires more than a single chapter.

Chapter 6, therefore, explores personal power, our leverage in helping achieve racial justice. This section argues for developing resilience by beefing up our psychological and spiritual qualities important to advancing equity and social cohesion while preventing burnout. The conclusion of the book, in Chapter 7, brings all the pieces of the Deep Diversity approach together.

**

Neuroplasticity: Changing Habits of the Mind

Deep Diversity focuses on habit breaking and forming. It is entirely possible to change our habits: there are proven ways to change how we think and perceive, thereby developing new neural patterns. There is considerable evidence that human brains exhibit neuroplasticity, meaning that where we put our attention and what we focus on helps change the structures of the brains.^[xxxv] Just as muscle mass can increase through physical workouts, we can grow parts of our brain, allowing us to form new habits and shift our perspectives in the ongoing task of increasing racial harmony.

Many of the strategies outlined in this book build on the principle that thinking influences actions, similar to what is taught in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT is an evidence-based form of treatment that has been used since the 1960s to help people change unproductive ways of thinking and behaving.^[xxxvi] CBT has proven successful in helping people address a wide variety of issues, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, anger management, post-traumatic stress disorder, and low self-esteem.^[xxxvii] Why not consider similar principles to tackle prejudice and stereotypes? After all, biases and preconceptions about others are, in many ways, just distortions in our thinking. Change the thinking, change the behavior.

**

Inner Skills and Compassion Support Deep Diversity

In the words of neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, “you can do small things inside your mind that will lead to big changes in your brain and your experience of living.”^[xxxviii] Deep Diversity emphasizes that we can change how we think and feel about others and ourselves, especially regarding racial issues, so as not to be unconsciously swept away by ancient brain processes and structures. It requires some work and effort, but it is entirely possible.

These “small things” that Dr. Hanson refers to I’ll call inner skills, as they have to do with what’s going on inside our individual heads and bodies. These are micro-abilities that help us stay balanced and centered when things get emotionally heated. We can call on them when controversy clouds our thinking and threatens to divide people along lines of race, ethnicity, and identity.

Each chapter will introduce one or two inner skills to enhance positive relationships with ourselves and others. The skills—self-awareness, meditation, self-regulation, empathy, self-education, relationship management, conflict skills, and meaning-making—serve as the action component of the Deep Diversity model. These skills can be developed and enhanced. And they can help us nurture greater ease, resiliency, and flexibility in dealing with others.

To support systemic change efforts, it’s also crucial to develop enhanced awareness of systemic patterns. I’ll refer to this as racial pattern recognition (RPR), the ability to identify repeating trends and cycles in society—and within ourselves—in order to expand our knowledge base to include subtle and system-wide forms of racism and discrimination, not just the overt. Understanding patterns helps make meaning of the world around us and is at the heart of the human experience, whether it’s children decoding the patterns underlying reading and mathematics or a skilled doctor quickly detecting a life-threating illness from a patient’s symptoms. Expanding our RPR repertoire to include, for example, that resumés with non-white names are often more critically assessed may help us counter the pervasive invisible pro-white bias and enhance fairness in organizational decision-making.

It’s also important to develop psychological pattern recognition (PPR) skills, a term I’ll use to refer to the neuro-biological tendencies influencing the formation of our social identities and how we navigate the world. Returning back to the resumes example, PPR helps us understand that while we work to eliminate pro-white bias and racial oppression, it’s important to avoid concluding there is something inherently “bad” or “wrong” with white people. As we will explore through this book, there is a universal tendency—both unconscious and conscious—for the dominant social group to design the rules and norms within a society to most benefit their own group members, resulting in mistreatment and unfair power dynamics with minoritized groups. Understanding such global patterns may support the development of more effective strategies to disrupt discriminatory behavior, increase the participation of non-dominant people in decision-making while also motivating dominant group members to support change efforts without an overreliance on shame-and-blame tactics.

Therefore, at the end of each chapter, you will be encouraged to reflect on, and expand your, RPR and PPR repertoire with a dual focus on systemic patterns and psychobiological tendencies.

Compassion, the “mental state of wishing that others may be free from suffering,” is the underlying principle for all of this work.^[xxxix] It is needed because diversity, by its very nature, is about our differences. It is about the places where we are not, and may never be, the same. We will—we must—make mistakes, both big and small. That’s part of the process of learning about each other. But making mistakes feels bad, so most of us have learned to avoid, deny, or minimize them.

When walking through the field of racial justice and discrimination—which is pebbled with mistake-making opportunities—our “secret power” is compassion. Turned inward, self-compassion can help soothe the voice of the inner critic that judges harshly and tends to dwell on errors and missteps, preventing us from moving forward. It can help us all accept that humans—regardless of background, color, or identity—are imperfect creatures. We are all on a learning curve regarding unconscious prejudice and intergroup dynamics. Accepting this as part of the process may help us move past the internal and external judgments that hinder learning.

As we begin to grasp the impersonal nature of prejudice and discrimination—that it’s a leftover of primitive elements of our brain—we can generate more compassion for others and ourselves. Some of our struggles are a result of neural hardwiring, shaping a good amount of our group-ish nature. However, a significant amount—a result of socialization, norms, and socio-economic structures—is changeable. The former is not our fault, but the latter is our responsibility.

**

Intentional Focus on Race

Although Deep Diversity has implications for a variety of equity issues—including gender, class, sexual orientation, and disability—this book focuses on race and ethnicity. This focus is intentionally narrow. It will allow us to drill down into one specific area and apply the method of Deep Diversity comprehensively. As we understand the patterns of difference more clearly and grasp the hair-trigger tendency to fracture into Us and Them, the possibility emerges of creating a map for other equity issues.

This book is steeped in my identity as a middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gender, able-bodied, university-educated Canadian male of South Asian ethnicity. I was born in Pakistan, the child of two parents who survived partition—the bloody process of overthrowing the British that resulted in the independent states of India and Pakistan. I have family today on both sides of those national and religious divides, representing both Islam as well as Hinduism. In the early 1970s, civil war between West Pakistan and East Pakistan—now Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively—again pushed my family into exile, this time arriving in Canada. It was about a half-dozen years of the immigrant shuffle before we landed on our feet in the 1980s. I claim my identity and personal journey as the source of strength and insight for this book, and openly name it as the basis of bias and weakness, both conscious and unconscious. I don’t believe we can ever be truly objective; our worldview is always tainted through our personal filters. But we can be transparent about our starting points.

I’m also not a neuroscientist or psychologist. I have, therefore, provided citations for the research to back up my claims, and stayed within ideas that are generally accepted in these fields. I’ve also invited a wide variety of professionals, including those with science and psychology expertise, to review my writing. The final decisions, however, are mine alone, and I take full responsibility for what’s written here. Just as a professional coach in the business world knows they are not a therapist and can only work to a certain level of depth with clients, I have learned to be respectful of my professional boundaries. But I’ve also had to step beyond my field of expertise, developing an interdisciplinary approach that I think is important to share.

That’s my entry point.

Regardless of your starting point in this conversation about diversity and fairness, the journey ahead is a shared one. It’s about all of us as humans—there is no “them.” The collective step, however, begins with the individual. It begins with each of us venturing out of our comfort zone and taking a risk, trying something new.

In the words of world-famous musician Yo-Yo Ma: “Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there’s got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you’re at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together.”^[xl]

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Looking for more?

No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

Reference:

Choudhury, Shakil. Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice. Greystone Books, 2021.

Sources for Chapter 1. The Four Pillars of Deep Diversity

^[i] The racial slur used by the white student that specifically targets Black people is today considered so offensive that it shouldn’t even appear in print.

^[ii] K. Kawakami, E. Dunn, F. Karmali, and J.F. Dovidio, “Mispredicting Affective and Behavioral Responses to Racism,” Science 323 (2009): 276–78.

^[iii] Shakil Choudhury, interview with K. Kawakami, Toronto: York University, Department of Psychology, October 18, 2012.

^[iv] Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 35–65.

^[v] Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, 36.

^[vi] Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013), 39–54.

^[vii] Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York: Delacorte Press, 2013), 32–52.

^[viii] M.R. Banaji and R. Bhaskar, “Implicit Stereotypes and Memory: The Bounded Rationality of Social Beliefs,” in Memory, Brain, and Belief, eds. D.L. Schacter and E. Scarry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 139–75.

^[ix] Brian A. Nosek, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Anthony G. Greenwald, “Harvesting Implicit Group Attitudes and Beliefs from a Demonstration Web Site,” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 6, no. 1 (2002): 101–115.

^[x] Jennifer N. Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht, “Empathy Constrained: Prejudice Predicts Reduced Mental Simulation of Actions during Observation of Outgroups,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46 (2010): 841–45.

^[xi] ScienceDaily, “Human Brain Recognizes and Reacts to Race,” April 7, 2010, www.sciencedaily.com.

^[xii] Shuihui Han, “Neurocognitive Basis of Racial Ingroup Bias in Empathy,” Trends in Cognitive Science, May 1, 2018; Bradley D. Mattan, Kevin Y. Wei, Jasmin Cloutier, and Jennifer T. Kubota, “The Social Neuroscience of Race-based and Status-based Prejudice,” Current Opinion in Psychology, December 2018.

^[xiii] John Bowden, “Cuccinelli says George Floyd’s Death Wasn’t About Race,” The Hill, June 8, 2020.

^[xiv] Tom Blackwell, “Ferguson Mayor Says He Was Unaware of Racial ‘Frustrations’ in Community until Michael Brown Shooting,” National Post, November 26, 2014.

^[xv] Konrad Yakabuski, “Trayvon’s Killing Echoes an Uglier Time in America,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 30, 2013.

^[xvi] Frank Newport, “Blacks, Nonblacks Hold Sharply Different Views of Martin Case: Blacks More Likely to Believe Race Is a Major Factor,” Gallup Politics, April 5, 2012.

^[xvii] ABC News, “74% of Americans View George Floyd’s Death as an Underlying Racial Injustice Problem: Poll”, June 5, 2020.

^[xviii] Jeffrey M. Jones, “Black, White Adults’ Confidence Diverges Most on Police,” Gallup, August 12, 2020.

^[xix] Ashley Southall, “Commissioner Denies Racial Bias in Social Distancing Policing,” New York Times, May 12, 2020.

^[xx] BBC News, “Ahmaud Arbery: Father and Son Charged with Murder of U.S. Black Jogger,” May 8, 2020.

^[xxi] Eric Levenson, “A Timeline of Breonna Taylor’s Case Since Police Broke Down Her Door and Shot Her,” CNN, September 24, 2020.

^[xxii] Chris Stewart, “Metis Hunter in Alberta Says Threats Not New in Province,” ATPN, April 6, 2020.

^[xxiii] “Remembering Joyce Echaquan: Frequently Asked questions and the facts so far”, ATPN National News, October 7, 2020.

^[xxiv] Maureen J. Brown, We Are Not Alone: Police Racial Profiling in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom (Toronto: African Canadian Community Coalition on Racial Profiling, 2007), 9.

^[xxv] Connie Hasset-Walker, “The Racist Roots of American Policing: From Slave Patrols to Traffic Stops,” The Conversation, June 4, 2019.

^[xxvi] Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 43.

^[xxvii] Feng Sheng and Shihui Han, “Manipulations of Cognitive Strategies and Intergroup Relationships Reduce the Racial Bias in Empathic Neural Responses,” NeuroImage 61 (2012): 786–97.

^[xxviii] Dora Capozza, Luca Andrighetto, Gian Antonio Di Bernardo, and Rosella Falvo, “Does Status Affect Intergroup Perceptions of Humanity?,” Group Process & Intergroup Relations 15, no. 3 (2012): 363–77.

^[xxix] David Dobbs, “Mastery of Emotions,” Scientific American Mind (February/March 2006): 48.

^[xxx] Dobbs, 44–49.

^[xxxi] Daniel J. Siegel, Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (New York: Bantam Books Trade Paperbacks, 2011), 133.

^[xxxii] Siegel, 198–200.

^[xxxiii] Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1991), 36.

^[xxxiv] Banaji and Bhaskar, “Implicit Stereotypes and Memory,” 142–43.

^[xxxv] Siegel, Mindsight, 24–25.

^[xxxvi] Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 37–38.

^[xxxvii] Beck Institute for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, “Cognitive Therapy Can Treat,” www.beckinstitute.org.

^[xxxviii] Rick Hanson, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, 2009), 2–3.

^[xxxix] Lorne Ladner, The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychology (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2004), 14.

^[xl] Edith Eisler, “Yo-Yo Ma: On the Silk Road,” All Things Strings (May/June 2001), www.allthingsstrings.com.

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The politics of contempt is destroying the country, was the theme of a conversation between governors Josh Shapiro and Spencer Cox on eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. While this is obvious to many, it’s refreshing to hear two leaders from opposing US parties—a Democrat and a Republican—promoting a different type of conversation at a time when tolerating disagreement seems nearly impossible, especially when it comes to politics.

In his new book, Cox defines disagreement as “you are wrong” while contempt says “you are beneath me.” The latter is coded in hate, with a belief that people on the other side are evil and therefore our enemy.

Such contempt is a prerequisite to political violence. Because before we hurt people, we need to construct beliefs about why our concerns, identities, histories and suffering matters more than theirs. And remarkably, that’s easier to do than most of us are aware. And it remains true even if we have experienced pain and humiliation ourselves, which is the focus of this piece.

Let me explain with a story.

One of the people I’ve followed online over the past couple of years is Brianna Wu. If you don’t know her, Wu is a video game developer and transgender activist who became one of the central targets of “Gamergate”—a 2014 online campaign that targeted women in technology under the guise of promoting ethics in the video gaming industry. The coordinated harassment campaign escalated to rape and death threats and doxxing. The public abuse that Wu and her feminist peers sustained was beyond terrifying.

What I appreciate about Wu isn’t simply that she survived it. It’s that she has consistently resisted the moral certainty that can accompany victimhood. As that controversy died down, she continued to speak on a variety of issues. She criticized polarization on the political left, publicly challenged excesses within activist culture, and spoke candidly about the pressure and threats of conformity. In an era where many public figures retreated into their own political bubbles, she willingly stepped into uncomfortable terrain by criticizing her own.

She also spoke with incredible vulnerability about being a trans-woman and the threat facing her community from anti-transgender policies in the United States. On more than one occasion, she would plead with the public to see her humanity. It was touching and powerful.

Which is why I was completely caught off guard with Palestine.

As the war in Gaza unfolded, Wu’s social media feed became overwhelmingly focused on defending Israel’s military campaign. Civilian deaths were repeatedly contextualized through the threat posed by Hamas, the militant group for the October 7, 2023 attacks that killed approximately 1200 Israelis. Her framing of what was happening was almost exclusively through the lens of Israeli security.

It was far beyond someone trying to offer complex views on issues.

Palestinian received little to no empathy from her and were often characterized using dangerous stereotypes. She described “Palestinianism” as a violent “death cult” and wrote that Palestinians “literally want the destruction of Israel”. She also appeared to rationalize Palestinians as responsible for their own suffering, in spite of a death toll with estimates climbing over 70,000, of mostly women and children. As this point, Israel’s war in Gaza meets the definition of genocide according to numerous scholars of genocide as well as human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Doctor’s Without Borders.

The complexity and humanity I had admired in Wu’s thinking about trans issues and activist culture seemed to narrow dramatically when the conversation shifted to Palestine. And I was unclear why.

I found myself asking: How can someone who has personally experienced dehumanization appear so one-sided and willing to dehumanize others?

Then I realized I was asking the wrong question. Because history suggests this isn’t unusual at all.

Victimhood Doesn’t Always Produce Compassion

One of the most persistent myths in social justice—and perhaps in human nature more broadly—is the belief that suffering naturally produces compassion.

It can. But it often doesn’t.

Groups who have endured persecution remain capable of excluding, dominating or discriminating against other minority groups. The group’s pain can provide a license for the persecution of others, particularly when our group has power and is finally “in charge”. This trend is far beyond the Israel-Palestine tragedy, from the macro to the micro context, true in the past as well as the present.

I’m South Asian in ethnicity and our history demonstrates this explicitly. India liberated itself from British colonialism in 1947, which was followed by horrific sectarian violence between religious factions that were allies during the anti-colonial struggle. Today Hindu nationalism is alive and well, with minorities—particularly Muslims—facing persecution.

The other half of my people, in Pakistan, have done no better. A country partly born from fears of religious persecution itself has long discriminated against a Muslim minority who also live there, the Ahmadiyya community. Pakistani passport applications, for example, require Muslims to declare that they believe Ahmadiis are non-Muslims—a political act that formally denounces their neighbours, friends and colleagues.

Closer to where I live in Canada, the pattern continues. Quebec, the French-speaking province with a long history of persecution by the nation’s English-speaking majority, has enacted policies that have created unequal realities for minorities. Since 2019, for example, Quebec’s secularism laws prohibit religious minorities from serving in the public service if they choose to wear any of their religious articles of faith, whether Jewish men wearing a kippa, Muslim women wearing hijab or Sikhs wearing turbans.

Even marginalized communities created as sanctuaries have, at times, marginalized others within their own ranks. Gay neighbourhoods across North American urban cities, largely established by gay, white men have histories that excluded lesbians, transgender people and racial minorities.

These ironic, double-standards demonstrate a remarkably consistent pattern:

Victimhood does not automatically enlarge our moral circle.

Often, it shrinks.

Why?

Firstly, it gets at one of the central problems with social change: knowing something is true does not mean we will act accordingly. The gap between truth and behaviour is where social change gets stuck, especially when identity, threat and belonging are involved. We can understand injustice and even experience it personally. Yet, victims can become the perpetrators of others without recognizing the shifting roles.

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Brain Biology Makes Some Stories“Sticky”

Secondly, many people believe that dehumanization is based on stories that are shared within a society. This was exemplified in a podcast conversation between well-respected progressives, Ezra Klein from the New York Times and Bryan Stevenson, author and civil rights lawyer. On the eve of the 250th year of the founding of the United States, they reflected on the state of the country, and the link between its current and past struggles, with slavery, segregation and racist laws.

My attention was piqued when they talked about what would prompt one group of humans to subjugate, vilify and violently mistreat another group based on skin colour. They focussed on the power of storytelling to dehumanize.

“And what stories it must have taken to not see the humanity of the people before you—not see that when they were weeping, their tears mattered. Not see that the families you were destroying and dissolving one another and mattered exactly as much as your own. Not see that they were humans and that you had become the monster. And to do all of this with a Bible in your hand.”

“What was wrong with them?” would not be an unreasonable question.

But the unsettling truth is that nothing was “wrong” with them. Slaveholders and Nazis were completely normal humans with spouses, children, parents, economic worries and social concerns.

There was, and is, something much deeper than shared cultural “stories” that allows one group to denigrate another. Because not all stories are equally “sticky”. Brain biology is the difference maker.

Our brains are less like blank slates and more like a series of loaded mousetraps. Negative stories of outsiders do not create the dehumanization reflex but instead, springs it. Our brain is designed to automatically pick up positive stories about people most like us—our in-groups—while being wary or suspicious of outsiders, our “out-groups”.

Some of the troubling part of the research is related to dehumanization, suggesting that we process stigmatized out-groups in an entirely different part of the brain than in-groups. When thinking about such outsiders, the social relationships part of the brain quiets down, or may turn off entirely. This allows us to perceive them in simplistic ways, sometimes as objects rather than people. The neuroscience is explained in greater detail in my book Deep Diversity.

The disturbing truth is that our brain is designed to dehumanize others, because we are built for conflict. It’s the flip side of our incredible ability to cooperate. There is fertile ground for negative beliefs about Them to take root, and positive beliefs about Us to flourish. It’s a disconcertingly normal part of being human, which is why threatening stories of out-groups—be they foreigners, immigrants, or asylum seekers—make so many people wary so quickly.

Once we understand this reflex, modern conflicts and stubbornly difficult social change become simultaneously less mysterious and more unsettling. Our brain prioritizes threats and persecution of our own group above that of others. We are hard-wired to rationalize double-standards and ignore inconvenient hypocrisies. This is particularly true when identity and threat are pulling in the opposite direction as facts, figures or objective truth.

Mistreatment, cruelty and even murder of out-groups can feel like “rational” choices, whether its the burning of “witches”, gassing of Jews or lynching of Black people in the past…to the persecution of transgender people or the bombing of civilian populations in Gaza in the present.

And this is why I’ve kept thinking about Brianna Wu. My initial reaction was to focus on her contradiction: How could she not see it?

But the more important question is much less comfortable: Where don’t I see it? Why would I assume that I’m immune?

Why should you?

Governors Shapiro and Cox are right: contempt begins when “you are wrong” becomes “you are beneath me.” But perhaps the hardest part of resisting contempt and dehumanization is recognizing that none of us stands safely outside it. Having been humiliated doesn’t prevent us from humiliating others. Being marginalized doesn’t prevent us from marginalizing someone else. And knowing what dehumanization feels like doesn’t prevent us from dehumanizing our opponents.

To be clear, this is not a Jewish problem, a Palestinian problem, a Republican, Democrat or even a Nazi problem.

It’s a human problem.

A history of hurt is a key part of the equation and may cloud our perception of “justice”. Because victimhood confers experience, but not necessarily virtue.

Looking for more?

No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in organizational leadership, conflict and DEI issues. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

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Examples used in this essay are a composite of my experiences with different organizations and teams.

A professional group contacted me after a decision had gone badly wrong. The year before, their organization had invited a Palestinian speaker to participate in a year-end event. At the last minute, under pressure from stakeholders, they withdrew the invitation.

The fallout was immediate.

The speaker was understandably disappointed. So were many members of the organization. What followed was an explosion of conflict that damaged the organization’s public reputation and, perhaps more consequentially, fractured relationships internally.

Like many organizations since October 7, 2023, they discovered something uncomfortable: they did not have a good way of making decisions when the issue was emotionally charged, morally complicated and deeply connected to people’s identities.

And they were hardly alone.

In the months after October 7th, 2023, organizations across North America and Europe found themselves making similar decisions under extraordinary pressure. From New York’s 92NY cancelling an appearance by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, to the Frankfurt Book Fair postponing an award ceremony for Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, to anti-racism advocates being disinvited from speaking to law clerks at the Supreme Court of Canada.

Often it was social media comments by speakers that were interpreted as pro-Palestinian. While the circumstances and consequences varied considerably, the controversies generated protests, withdrawals, accusations of censorship, and in some cases, resignations. The details differed as did the merits of each decision.

But the organizational problem was remarkably similar: leaders were being asked to make consequential decisions quickly, while fear, grief, identity, reputation and moral conviction were all activated at once.

The professional organization that contacted me, however, did something deeply insightful. They recognized that the problem wasn’t simply the decision they had made, but that their decision-making process was flawed.

They wanted to help their board of directors—more than 30 academics—develop a different approach.

Professionals Are Trained to Debate, Not Listen

There is a common belief that more intelligent people will make better decisions. The rationale appears sound. The greater the intelligence, the greater the ability to weigh evidence and identify weak from strong arguments, right?

Yes. But not always.

When issues are emotional and tied to identity, belonging or morality, these very same skills can be used to defend what people already believe, both consciously and unconsciously. It’s part of what’s known as motivated reasoning: we identify data and arguments that help rationalize our existing point of view.

Plus, many smart people use their big brains to nitpick facts and figures in what others are saying, missing the proverbial forest by focusing only on the trees. Putting smarter people in the room isn’t enough. What happens between them matters more.

And training smart people can be difficult, especially if they are compelled by external forces rather than internal curiosity or needs. From my experience, this is particularly true of two groups: academics and lawyers.

It’s part of the reason I was brought into this organization: they were exceptionally good at debating, less so in listening. That’s also why I felt a little tightness in my stomach at the start of the session. Some of the board members were looking down at their phones, while others chatted in small groups. I calmed myself with a few deep breaths and began.

I welcomed them to the training, its purpose and agenda.

Then I challenged them:

“This training is going to be difficult for some of you,” I said, “because it goes against both your professional training and, for some of you, your temperament”.

One leader in the second row cocked their head to the side, like her attention had just come online.

I continued. “As a group of academics, you are exceptionally well-trained in argument and logic. You are good at debate. That skill is double-sided— it can be a help and a hindrance in decision-making. Which is why today we will focus on dialogue. The purpose of debate is to win. The purpose of dialogue is to understand.”

A few heads started to nod.

Dialogue skills are more likely to help when organizations face sensitive questions involving race, gender, religion, war, political conflict or competing moral values. Understanding has to come before debate; otherwise, good decision-making is often undermined. This distinction becomes especially important when people are deeply invested in the issue.

Under such conditions, facts and arguments aren’t the only things in the room.

In the foreground, there usually issues related to personal image management. Meaning, if they say what they actually think or feel, how will colleagues perceive them? In the background, below the surface of awareness, much more is going on. Fear is common, so is identity and the drive to belong—to not be an outcast. Negative past experiences also lurk in the shadows, unconsciously influencing our words and actions.

Yet organizations routinely try to make decisions without awareness of these underlying dynamics. They live and die entirely at the levels of facts and opinions. Part of my task was to help create the conditions to gently explore what was below the surface. To create enough psychological safety for an exploration of the issue at hand.

Listening on Two Tracks

I asked the leaders to practise something I call two-track listening. Track One was familiar territory: facts and opinions.

What happened? What does the evidence tell us? What are the arguments for and against a particular course of action? What do I believe?

Most professional organizations are pretty good at Track One.

Track Two is different as it asks us to listen for the feelings and needs underneath the words spoken.

What is matters deeply to this person? What might they be experiencing but not saying? What are they trying to protect or are afraid of? And, importantly, what is happening inside me as I listen?

The point isn’t to replace facts with feelings. Nor is it to minimize the need for debating ideas or to suggest that every argument is equally valid. It is to recognize that human beings don’t leave our emotional lives outside the boardroom or at the workplace entrance.

When we pretend emotions aren’t there, they don’t disappear. They simply operate underground, unconsciously. And, paradoxically, they grow in influence.

That’s the complicated reality of emotions. What we can’t see has more power. What’s hidden has more influence. But when we can identify and name it, we can also tame it.

Issue Mapping Before Deciding

In democracies, the right to debate freely is rightfully lionized. The only problem is that debate tends to work in some contexts but not others. The mistake most often made is that we jump to debate too soon or decisions are made too quickly. This is especially true inside organizations attempting to address complex, sensitive issues like systemic racism or the multi-generational trauma underlying the Israel-Palestine tragedy.

So there was another shift I asked the group to make. I didn’t want them to focus on making decisions—that would come later.

First, we would map the issue.

Using a polarity management framework, I asked them to become generative rather than argumentative.

• What were the legitimate concerns on one side?

• What were the legitimate concerns of the other side?

• What might be gained by pursuing one course of action? What might be lost?

• What were the risks of going too far in either direction?

• What views or possibilities hadn’t been considered yet?

Post-in notes work well with in-person groups while the chat function accomplishes the same thing when the gathering is virtual.

We deliberately practised on a live organizational issue that mattered to them, but one less emotionally charged than Israel–Palestine. The group was deciding if their events should be offered for low cost to attract more diverse participation? Or to stay with the current higher fees, more in alignment with the exclusivity which is part of their existing brand?

For this initial stage, I asked participants to temporarily loosen their grip on their preferred outcome.

Don’t persuade, rebut or decide. Get curious—something that is surprisingly difficult to do if we already feel strongly about an issue. Following the mapping phase, speakers were given two minutes each to share their thoughts and views about this issue. But there were not to make recommendations—that would come later.

Many people spoke in a professional, logical manner covering a wide spectrum of issues, perspectives and concerns.

We often believe that good decision-making means getting to the answer quickly. But on complex, polarized issues, speed can create more problems than it fixes. It also reduces the quality of thinking because anxiety tends to run high while empathy runs low, impacting our capacity to listen and learn. Sometimes leadership requires staying with the issue long enough to understand what’s actually behind the issue. There is almost always a need to go deeper.

Going Below the Surface

So I began asking different questions related to Track 2.

What’s still hard to say or unspoken? What hasn’t been expressed yet? Whose voices or what emotions are still missing from this conversation?

There was a certain type of quiet that filled the room. Everyone was suddenly attentive in a different way. A couple of people shifted in their chairs.

Finally, one participant admitted being nervous about being judged by her colleagues. Another expressed uncertainty about how personal bias might be impacting his views, and he didn’t know how to “fix it”. A confident, outspoken leader acknowledged something much more vulnerable: she was afraid that because of her strong opinions, people might perceive her as racist.

Woah.

Suddenly, we weren’t talking about the decision anymore. The group was naming some of the hidden forces shaping the decision. This opened up others, who shared their own fears and uncertainties. People began saying things they hadn’t said before. These were people who had worked together for years, yet rarely talked this openly to each other.

This is precisely what many people misunderstand about sensitive issues and why they are so difficult. We think we are arguing policies, facts of principles on Track 1. But a covert, more influential conversation is happening on Track 2: Am I safe in saying this? What will this cost me afterwards? Will I still belong?

The greater the number of people who feel they can express their views without fear of negative outcomes, the greater the level of psychological safety.

When we got to the final stage, each person was given one-minute to share their recommendations to the executive team for final consideration. Given what was expressed, the need for debate felt unnecessary. The executives reflected back to the group what they heard, and felt confident in their ability to make a thoughtful decision.

The participant debrief verified the value of this new decision-making process.

One of the organizers enthusiastically shared: “This is the most engaged I have ever seen our board! I’ve never seen so many people talking, and so respectfully.”

Another participant was struck by two-track listening. Separating facts and opinions from feelings and needs had been so useful, she said. “It forced me to listen very differently and deliberately. We should consider doing it in all our meetings moving forward.”

But perhaps the most revealing observation came from someone who had been unable to participate directly and had instead listened to the process unfold by phone.

They noticed that the conversation had two distinct stages.

“Initially, people were thoughtful but largely cognitive. They discussed positions, consequences and possibilities. But the tone changed when Shakil prompted the group to identify what was difficult to talk about. You could hear it in the way people spoke: it was vulnerable and emotionally real.”

When done with professional care and appropriate boundaries, taking risks to surface unspoken feelings and views can create greater trust and psychological safety. In doing so, we increase the potential for processes that people trust, even if they do not get the outcome they wanted.

A good decision-making mechanism cannot guarantee everyone will be happy at the end, or agree with the final decision. What it can do is increase the likelihood that people believe the decision was reached legitimately. That that they had a voice, that their concerns were genuinely considered and that decision-makers actually listened.

But don’t take my word for it. This has been studied for decades in organizational psychology. Researchers call it procedural justice—that process matters to people often as much as the outcomes.

The seeds of this reality began to sprout with this professional group. They used this method both with and without my support to make decisions following our session. It’s part of the architecture of good decision-making and that may be the most valuable outcome.

They hadn’t discovered a magical method for eliminating conflict. They had developed greater capacity for moving through conflict. At a moment when organizations are struggling with increasingly polarized questions, that distinction matters.

At my organization, Anima Leadership, we’ve spent years helping leadership teams work through precisely these kinds of moments—when an issue is too important to ignore but too polarizing for the organization’s usual decision-making processes.

While I tend not to use this platform to promote, I’ve had a number of questions about it when discussing it online. So it’s worth mentioning that for those interested in more, we are offering a new online course on Decision-Making on Sensitive Issues, using dialogue, two-track listening, polarity management and other practical tools for navigating disagreement without requiring full consensus.

There is no doubt the next divisive issue will emerge sooner or later for all of us. The need goes well beyond global politics, a national crisis or specific organizational emergency. While it will be different for each institution, the human dynamics underneath will be the same.

We don’t need workplaces where everyone agrees. We need workplaces capable of disagreement without fracture. And that starts with a deceptively simple shift in sequencing:

1. Understand first.

2. Debate when needed.

3. Decide with integrity.

The question isn’t whether intelligent people will be sitting around the table when a tough issue lands. It’s whether they know how to talk through the issue when being intelligent isn’t enough.

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No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

Sources:

Adamovic, M. (2023) “Organizational justice research: A review, synthesis, and research agenda”, European Management Review, 20(4), 762–782.

Gurin, P., Nagda, B. A., & Zúñiga, X. (2013). Dialogue across difference: Practice, theory, and research on intergroup dialogue. Russell Sage Foundation.

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The following story is a composite of my experience working with a variety of leadership teams across sectors.

A few years ago, I was working with the senior leadership team of a large school district on the heels of a very public, racism-related controversy. The incident was shared across media platforms, and the district’s response only made things worse. Decisions were made quickly, communication was confusing, and divisions deepened across the community.

Because of my previous work with this team, I was brought in to help debrief what had happened. The conference room was hosting thirty people spread across a half dozen tables with pads of paper, pens and coffee. But almost no one was talking.

As the facilitator, I invited personal reflections and small group discussions. People spoke quietly, as though no one wanted to be heard. When it was time to talk as a large group, there was silence. I prompted the group with additional questions. A couple of carefully framed, largely innocuous comments were made.

The back of my neck was getting hot. An unnatural stillness hung in the room.

What is happening? I wondered. The team was in the middle of a public crisis, yet no one is willing to say anything? Was this reluctance or something else?

During the break, I spoke to the three members of the executive team, including the Director who was ultimately in charge. It was clear that big emotions were in the room, but people were afraid to share their ideas. Did they have any ideas of what might be happening or what steps to take?

The executives discussed briefly and made a decision. They returned to the room and spoke directly to the senior leaders. This is a “safe space,” they urged. We need you to be honest with us so we can learn from this issue. Please share your views and concerns. We promise to listen.

For the next hour, this seemed to work. Slowly, people began taking risks.

One leader described how difficult it had been to learn about critical decisions through social media rather than from their own team. He was confused about how decisions had been made. Another leader described how painful the district’s response had been for Black families. As one of the few racial minority leaders herself, she fielded many of these calls and felt angry on their behalf. Finally, a White male leader became emotional, his voice cracking in an effort to hold back tears. He felt ashamed of how their team had handled the situation.

The silence had popped, and it had become safe enough for people to say important things, difficult things. I helped them harvest the lessons learned and identify possible next steps for the team. I felt grateful and relieved. I left believing the group had gotten to the other side of a difficult, complicated situation.

I was so wrong.

The very next week, I learned that the executive had humiliated one of the senior leaders in front of their peers because of something said during our session. Berated by the very same executive team who had offered a “safe space’’ to their subordinates.

To say that trust was undermined would be a gross understatement. This was a total breach of leadership ethics. The series of events that followed included a mental health leave for the singled-out employee, a human rights complaint filed against the executive, and further public embarrassment for the school district that resulted in the removal of the Director. An follow-up investigation would identify a “culture of fear” and “toxic workplace” for employees.

Suddenly, the silence I’d encountered that day looked different. I had assumed people were reluctant to be vulnerable. More likely, they simply learned that vulnerability carried a cost. Their silence wasn’t evidence that they didn’t care. It was evidence that they understood their organizational culture much better than I did.

For me, the heart of this story demonstrates the absence of psychological safety—a shared belief that employees can raise issues, share concerns, and admit to mistakes without fear of negative consequences. Popularized by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School, there is considerable evidence that psychological safety is a critical—possibly the most important—factor for high-performing teams. It is also essential in nurturing DEI issues in the workplace.

The executive team’s decision to single out one of their leadership team members for something said is the exact action that destroys trust. And the lesson wasn’t delivered only to the person publicly shamed. Everyone watching learned something too: candour carries consequences here.

Some leaders believe this kind of directness ensures their direct reports understand what not to do next time, a corrective step to support accountability. This would be a classic misunderstanding of how change happens. Such shaming tactics create compliance, not transformation, something I’ve written about previously.

Strangely, the executive team in the example had promised a “safe space”, a concept which is adjacent but very different from psychological safety. Not only did they not deliver on this, but it would also have been extremely difficult to do so. And undesired.

As someone who has considerable training in trauma therapy, let me explain.

“Safe space” is an idea rooted in therapeutic and support settings where the primary objective is protection and recovery for people experiencing trauma, abuse, or violence. Think of a women’s shelter, counselling environment, or support group. These spaces are intentionally designed to minimize threat and maximize emotional safety.

Yet over time, particularly in discussions of DEI issues, this concept has been widely misused beyond its original intent. This is particularly common in not-for-profit organizations, universities, and other public-sector organizations such as the school district in my example. While the intention is usually positive, the term is often misunderstood and misapplied, particularly in the context of professional organizational teams.

Simply put, a workplace is not a therapeutic space. Safe space asks us to reduce emotional threats. Psychological safety asks us to make interpersonal risk-taking possible.

Organizations exist to provide services or products. They solve problems, make decisions, give feedback, manage performance, and navigate disagreement. Discomfort is not only inevitable—it is often necessary for learning, accountability, and innovation. A professional workplace should never promise freedom from discomfort or challenge.

But all workplaces should strive to create psychological safety.

A psychologically safe workplace is NOT one where everyone feels comfortable all the time.

It is one where people can do uncomfortable things because they trust they will be treated with respect. Anger wasn’t the problem in that school district meeting. Neither were tears, shame, disagreement or discomfort. Those were precisely the conversations the team needed to have. The problem was what happened to someone for having them.

That distinction matters.

According to Edmondson’s research, psychological safety is a signature of high-performing teams because it is the absence of retaliation that encourages risk-taking, constructive disagreement and innovation. If the executive team had such an environment, they may have truly taken the lessons learned and gotten stronger.

Looking back, I understand that initial silence differently. It makes much more sense now.

People weren’t necessarily afraid of disagreement, discomfort or difficult emotions. They were afraid of what might happen to them if they spoke honestly. And, as it turned out, they had good reason to be.

That’s the difference between “safe space” and psychological safety.

A healthy workplace shouldn’t promise that people will always feel safe or comfortable. The reality is that difficult feedback can sting. Disagreement can get heated, and accountability can be uncomfortable. Learning sometimes requires discovering that we were wrong, and this is especially true for leaders.

Psychological safety promises something different: it is the belief that you can take interpersonal risks without being humiliated, punished, or pushed out for doing so.

The goal isn’t a safe space.

It’s a workplace where people can do difficult things without having to protect themselves from the people they work for.

#Leadership #PsychologicalSafety #HumanBehavior #Trust #Inclusion #DEI

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About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

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A few years ago, I met a young woman of colour who had recently been hired into a lead DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) role at an international not-for-profit organization. Let’s say her name was Farah. Given she had contacted me for a consultation, her vague questions and answers made me curious about her background. What kind of DEI work had she done before? What major initiatives had she led? What challenges had she navigated?

I was not entirely surprised by her answers.

She had spent most of her career in the public sector and, by her own description, had served on a DEI committee for a year or two. Beyond that, there was little evidence of the kind of knowledge or experience normally required to lead complex organizational change efforts related to DEI. She had never overseen large-scale transformation projects, managed contentious stakeholder dynamics, or built a substantial body of expertise in the field. Even the way she talked about DEI revealed she was a relative novice.

The issue was not that she lacked potential or general talent. The issue was that she had been placed into a role for which she had not been adequately prepared.

This is a pattern I have witnessed more than once.

In Farah’s case, it was a potential institutional failure, even before her tenure began. If there was conflict, things got challenging or went wrong entirely the individual hired, not the organization, would end up “wearing it”.

Which brings me to the tragic death of Jason Arday, the British academic at Cambridge University, who took his own life following months of intense public scrutiny of his work due to accusations of plagiarism. Glancing through even a sliver of his media coverage, I can’t imagine how intense it would have been to face all that pressure, vitriol, and toxicity.

My reflections today, however, are about the responsibility of institutions like the university that hired him.

When Institutions Take DEI Shortcuts

A longstanding finding in educational psychology is what separates experts from novices in any field. The less we know about a subject area, the more difficult it is to distinguish genuine competence from superficial indicators of skill, something I have written about previously. What’s true at the individual level is also true for institutions.

When organizations lack expertise in a particular field, they also lack the ability to distinguish, let alone assess, between competence and symbolism. Instead of developing a robust evaluation process that integrates de-biasing strategies to help select the most qualified candidate, they often take hiring shortcuts and make the mistake of selecting based on a proxy like race, ethnicity or gender.

That can mean confusing lived experience with professional expertise. To be clear, our identities can provide valuable insights, especially in DEI work. But identity is nowhere close to enough. Identity does not automatically provide the skills required to lead organizational transformation, facilitate conflict, manage resistance, interpret research, or influence executive decision-making.

Like with Farah, this flawed decision-making happens often enough in the DEI field that it’s glaringly obvious to those of us with actual expertise.

Fundamentally, institutions that make such choices often misunderstand how change happens. Real organizational transformation happens slowly. It’s relational work that requires engaging many different employee and stakeholder groups from across the organization, which takes time and effort. This is especially true if the desired outcomes connect to any part of the people management trifecta: uncovering systemic bias, improving performance, and nurturing psychological safety. These intertwined objectives require trust, credibility, and skillful political navigation.

Yet organizations under pressure from stakeholders or the public frequently look for shortcuts. Rather than building internal capacity, auditing policies, investing in leadership development, listening to employee experience authentically, or confronting difficult cultural issues, they hire a single person and implicitly assign them responsibility for fixing the problem. Or, they quickly select a small group of women or racial minorities to show how “serious” they are in order to rebalance decades of systemic hiring biases. The appointment becomes a substitute for the work.

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When things go poorly, the person hired into the role is often blamed for not succeeding. Both their confidence and reputation often suffers. Many eventually leave or are pushed out, their entire career trajectories are altered.

The consequences of such quick fixes are rarely borne by the institution. They are borne mostly by the individual. This is what I feared for Farah. And seemed to be the underlying driver in Jason Arday’s heart-breaking case.

To be clear, beyond the plagiarism accusations there is considerable evidence that Arday made up some far-fetched things that could not be backed up with evidence. This ranged from being an elite long distance runner who ran with broken bones, to raising millions of dollars for charity, to falsely claiming to have a Master’s degree in mental health. More importantly, several Black academics interviewed in The Guardian questioned whether he even possessed the scholarly record typically associated with such a prestigious appointment. He had very junior level experience for a senior, world-class post. Whether those concerns were ultimately justified is less important than the fact that Cambridge itself was responsible for assessing his readiness for the role.

The university cannot simply position itself as a bystander in this story. Institutions are responsible not only for who they hire, but also for the expectations they create, the scrutiny they invite, and the support they provide once people arrive.

Cambridge, like many UK universities, has a poor track record of diversity representation, something that it’s been criticized for in the past. The evidence so far fits a profile that I’ve seen in many organizations: there was pressure to show how much “DEI progress” had been made, particularly on the hiring of Black professionals who were, and still are, under-represented due to age-old biases in hiring processes. My hunch is that certain flaws were overlooked and underestimated with rigour in the selection process loosened in order to select a young, charismatic Black man with a backstory that seemed too outrageous NOT to be true: that he was mute until age 11 and couldn’t read until age 18 yet still completed his PhD a dozen years later.

These selection misjudgements culminated into a massive reputational crisis with rightful public outrage. The tragedy here is not simply that a man died. It is that a preventable institutional failure may now be interpreted as evidence against an entire principle of fairness.

When organizations make symbolic DEI appointments without doing the harder work of building expertise, capacity, and support, they do more than place individuals at risk. They undermine public trust and feed the very backlash they claim to oppose. This makes life harder for the countless highly qualified Black and minoritized scholars, leaders, and professionals whose accomplishments then become viewed through a lens of suspicion they did nothing to create.

This is just one of the ways that systemic racism functions: minorities carry what’s called the “burden of representation” that their White counterparts do not.

Accusations of plagiarism or of outright falsifying scientific data by a White academic become about that specific person. The individual is a liar, corrupt or entirely mediocre. The same accusations against a racial minority becomes a reflection on their entire racial group. Suddenly, all Black academics are seen as under-qualified or minimized as “DEI hires”.

Furthermore, systemic racism also manifests with racial double-standards.

Take the case of another Cambridge professor, William O’Reilly in 2021. He was accused of not just plagiarism in several situations but also of sexual assault and abuse of power. Neither you or I heard about O’Reilly because it wasn’t reported in mainstream media, in spite of occurring in the era defined by the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter. Besides an apology, there was no real consequences following internal investigations.

Same university and similar accusations, yet the consequences were radically different. One man was Black the other was White. That’s the double-standard.

Fairness matters.

It’s clear that the Arday pile-on compared to the silence on O’Reilly is part of a pattern. There are decades of data of similar realities facing racial minorities across sectors. That’s why it’s called "systemic” racism t’s something I covered extensively in my previous book, Deep Diversity.

So the Arday tragedy is not a surprise for those of us who study systemic forms of racism and try to help society reduce it.

Representation matters.

And only those people who belong to groups so abundantly over-represented seem to believe otherwise. The larger lesson is that representation without competence, preparation, and institutional responsibility is a fragile foundation on which to build either excellence or justice.

To prevent such failures in the future, here are a few things that organizations and executive leaders can do:

1. Define the competence before hiring the person. Use thoughtfully developed criteria as one part of a transparent, inclusive selection process.

2. Treat a high-stakes appointment as the beginning of institutional responsibility, not the end. What supports this person will need in order to succeed in this role?

3. Create early warning systems to identify challenges before they become crises. Institutions should monitor role clarity, workload, and performance of new hires with regular two-way feedback mechanisms.

Ultimately, institutions should not confuse simple acts of demographic representation with organizational change. Hiring the right person is just the start of the intervention.

My hope is that Cambridge University may ultimately be remembered not as an example of DEI gone wrong, but as a warning about what happens when institutions seek shortcuts to change. Real progress is built through capacity, culture, competency and trust. When organizations attempt to compress that work into a symbolic appointment, it is often the individual—not the institution—who pays the highest price.

RIP Jason Arday. And condolences to the Arday family.

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No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

Sources:

Choudhury, Shakil. Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice. Greystone Books, 2021.

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About a dozen years into my career, I realized I only had a superficial understanding of “expertise”.

My perception permanently changed after an experience attending a dialogue on racism and identity facilitated by two veteran facilitators. What’s important to state was that while I was a participant, I wasn’t there as a beginner. I had already run hundreds of trainings and conversations with organizations on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) issues. Yet within an hour, I realized I was watching facilitators operate at a level I barely understood. I was impressed…and disoriented.

I won’t get into the details but the two veterans guided our mixed group of White and racial minority people through tears, anger, defensiveness and vulnerability. We entered depths of a racism conversation that I had never experienced before in a group setting. The dialogue also helped identify and bridge some significant divides within the group. We were more repaired than broken at the start.

While I was exhausted just being a participant, I was also deeply fascinated. The facilitator team was responding with such agility, precision and depth that left me in awe. It felt like watching elite athletes perform at a level I could barely comprehend. I knew then that I was only catching a fraction of what they were doing. They inspired me to integrate conflict skills into my work and embark on a new area of professional development. I was both humbled and excited to learn!

What happened afterward was equally memorable. Over lunch, another participant, also a DEI-type, confidently remarked: “I could do what they did.” I was stunned at their hubris. This was an individual, who on more than one occasion, had demonstrated nothing more than a basic level of skills and knowledge.

Expertise Changes Perception

I asked a mentor about this later and they gave me an answer that I’ve never forgotten:

Experts make things look easy. Unskilled people don’t know what they are looking at. You have to be competent to notice competence in others.

That insight extends far beyond facilitation. Athletes refer to this as “Game recognizes game”, a term borrowed from hip hop culture. Take basketball. For non-fans and non-players, all they see is two teams running around with a ball that is eventually put through a hoop. Players and true fans notice the small things that lead to points: offensive sequences, defensive positioning, spacing, off-ball movement, and key playmakers even when they don’t score.

Expertise changes perceptions of what is unfolding in front of us. Novices notice superficial information and get easily overwhelmed if things get even a little complex. Experts recognize patterns and categorize information differently. They are less likely to get overwhelmed and their perception slows things down focussing on the details that matter and ignoring what does not. Sometimes called the “Matrix effect”, elite training and experience—along with a dash of genetics—allows high performers to anticipate what will happen before it happens. These realities are true whether in professional sports, medicine, auto mechanics, engineering, academia, or conflict work.

In the racism dialogue, the beginner might have witnessed a difficult, perhaps anxiety provoking conversation that also involved more than one person crying. A DEI expert may have noticed the status dynamics, shame, identity threat, racial privilege and marginalization. The veteran facilitators were at a higher level still. They not just noticed these complex dynamics but understood how to support the conversation with dexterity, allowing it to unfold on the group’s terms in order for understanding to occur between the multi-racial participants. And they held such an emotionally charged conversation without being emotionally triggered themselves. They were perceiving and responding to patterns in at least three dimensions: racial, emotional, and dialogue-supportive.

I was deeply humbled realizing my skills were sub-par in comparison. There was another tier if I wanted to be as effective in my work, requiring greater knowledge and study.

Universal Lessons from Parenting to Leadership

There are a few broader life lessons here. Learning is not simply acquiring new information. It is learning to perceive reality differently. It’s a universal principle and applies in all contexts and professions.

Take a common parenting situation: a child melting down in the grocery store. Before becoming a parent I used to interpret that situation as the child being spoiled, rude or entitled. Judgemental thoughts often followed: “If that were my kid, I would…”

After becoming a parent, the situation shifted drastically. Experience taught me to consider: Was that due to overstimulation or a nap missed? Hunger or embarrassment? Or, simply a developmental stage? The behaviour was not excused but understood in a different light, with more complexity.

When negotiating with young kids, non-parents often think: just tell them “no”. Experienced parents know that you have to pick your battles, and not all are about obedience. Sometimes it’s about autonomy, emotional regulation, hormones or development. The child’s behaviour hasn’t changed but the interpretation has.

Inexperienced observers think parenting is about rules. Experienced parents know it’s about relationships. In each of these situations, novices see the superficial while veterans understand the context, decode patterns and hold complexity.

Wise parents are able to understand the behaviours and environmental stimulants not just with their own kids, but can appreciate the skill in other adults who are good at managing the behaviour of children in empathetic ways that support accountability. Same with good organizational leaders.

The most effective leaders I’ve worked with tend to not just lead with skill but see the excellence in others. They recognize when others have “game” and don’t feel threatened by it. Effective leaders build trust through:

• Giving genuine recognition

• Owning both their personal strengths and limitations

• Admitting to mistakes and apologizing when necessary

• Asking thoughtful questions

• Surrounding themselves with people who challenge them

Effective leaders reveal their competence through what they say and don’t say, what they do and don’t do. Insecure leaders often do the opposite and undermine trust. They avoid questions, resist feedback, struggle to acknowledge mistakes, and surround themselves with people who are easy to control.

What they don’t know is that competence begins with humility. The more skilled we become, the more we realize how much there is still to learn. One of the clearest signs of expertise is the ability to recognize it in others.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

References:

Choudhury, Shakil. Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice, Greystone Books, 2021.

Li L., Smith D.M., “Neural Efficiency in Athletes: A Systematic Review,” Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, Aug 5, 2021.

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Since the pandemic, it is more common to see people wearing face masks in public. This is particularly true of my mother. She is in her mid-80s—a smart, thoughtful and very conscientious person. If she has even a mild cold and needs to go out in public, she puts on a mask without hesitation. She genuinely does not want to pass on a virus to others or make herself more unwell.

There is just one problem. Her nose is never covered.

Instead, the mask sits somewhere between her chin and the bottom half of her mouth, rendering it ineffective. It has become something of a family joke. We’ve reminded her dozens of times, both gently and plainly.

“Mom…your nose.”

She pulls it up. A few minutes later, the mask migrates down again into chin-guard mode. No amount of explanation seems to change the pattern. She understands perfectly well that viruses don’t politely avoid entering through the nose. And yet, the pattern persists, as it does for many other people.

While I still find myself exasperated by the situation, I find some relief when I remember how human this is.

We tend to assume that if people know the right information, they’ll naturally change their behaviour. But if that were true, smokers would quit smoking. Leaders would stop micromanaging. Couples would stop arguing. We all would exercise daily for at least 30 minutes.

And my mother would wear her mask properly.

I have a two-part theory about what might be happening. Firstly, my mother’s decision to wear the mask is itself emotional. She cares about her health and doesn’t want to make anyone else sick. So the decision to wear a mask feels right. But another feeling may be competing with that concern. Perhaps the mask is uncomfortable or makes breathing slightly harder. I don’t really know.

What interests me is the compromise her mind seems to reach. On one hand, she doesn’t make the choice to not to wear a mask because one part of her wants the protection and reassurance of wearing it. But she doesn’t keep it properly over her nose either, perhaps because of discomfort.

Secondly, my mom has worn it this way hundreds of times now. Pulling it down has become automatic. Like so much of human behaviour, repetition has turned a conscious action into an unconscious habit.

And so: the chin guard.

Rationally, it makes little sense. Emotionally, it may make perfect sense. In fact, emotions are almost always guiding our decisions, whether we are aware of them or not.

A ten-cent tour of the mind might help illuminate what’s going on. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt offers a metaphor that forever changed how I think about human behaviour1. Imagine your mind as a human rider sitting atop a very large elephant. The Rider represents your conscious, analytical mind. It plans, reasons, debates and solves problems. It’s the part we are most familiar with, the domain of “thinking”.

The Elephant represents your unconscious mind, which is older and far more powerful. This is the domain of emotions, habits, intuition and unconscious reactions. It’s simultaneously the root of our most impulsive traits as well as the source of our inner wisdom.

Most of us like to believe the Rider is in control. According to neuroscience research, we would be wrong. It’s something I’ve written about extensively in my book, Deep Diversity2. Our conscious mind is almost-literally along for the ride, as most of us have not been taught that there are hidden Elephant impulses we need to be on guard for. And the less aware you are of your Elephant—its primal urges, biases and habits—the more powerful it becomes.

This helps explain one of the great frustrations of being human. Facts and information rarely change behaviour — those are Rider tools which do little to sway the Elephant. What does influence our larger inner companion are emotions, habits, relationships and belonging. And because the Elephant can want contradictory things at the same time, human behaviour is rarely as straightforward as simply knowing what's right and doing it.

Yet, entire fields of study are based on using Rider tactics in attempts to change people’s behaviour, including mine, social justice. We teach people to recognize systemic patterns, interrogate power, master an evolving vocabulary and analyze events through the lenses of race, gender, class, disability and other identities. As a result, our people can spot a bias or micro-aggression from a hundred yards!

But the skills of building relationships are sorely underdeveloped. This includes staying curious when someone sees the world differently, tolerating ambiguity, building trust, acknowledging our own insecurity or motivating people to change intrinsically. As a result, when Rider strategies don’t work then many justice-types resort to morality, shaming-and-blaming out of frustration.

Every form of education teaches us how to interact and interpret the world around us, be that philosophy, religion, or culture. And what we repeatedly practise becomes increasingly automatic, turning into habits. Furthermore, what our peers model, reward and celebrate tells our Elephants something crucially important: this is how people like us think, feel and behave.

Traditions and ways of being are passed from one generation to the next, both good and bad. We become what we practice. And this is no different in social activism.

I saw this a few years ago while observing a group of university activists organizing against far-right agitators and White supremacist groups that were threatening Pride events celebrating gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and Queer communities.

I recall a group of twenty or so people gathered around a large table trying to kick start their conversation. One young person wearing a jean jacket with various protest pins jumped in first, stating that this was a working class city and so working class people should take a lead in organizing the response. A few heads nodded in agreement.

That’s an interesting way to start the conversation, I thought. No introductions and right into the content?

A second person countered that Queer people of colour should be front and centre because they were most impacted by the violence. Many people “clapped silently”, a gesture to signal agreement without interrupting the speaker. Someone else emphasized disability access concerns.

All legitimate issues.

And, like my mother’s concern about protecting others, the motivations underneath them were admirable. These were young people who cared deeply about injustice and wanted to protect people they believed were vulnerable.

Yet the meeting felt competitive, cold, and tense. Happiness and joy seemed to be absent. Psychological safety was low. The well-being that comes with collectively facing a struggle was non-existent.

Human motivation is rarely singular. Alongside compassion can live anxiety. Alongside commitment can live insecurity. Alongside the desire for justice can live the very human desire for status and recognition.

As stated previously, the problem is that we are not trained to recognize these hidden motivations influencing our behaviour. Self-observation—a specific Rider gift—is deeply needed yet underdeveloped across society. Furthermore, our Elephants are so powerful that they prompt our Riders to construct coherent explanations for our behaviour, rationalizing and hiding unflattering impulses lurking below the surface of awareness.

In the room of young activists, the methods they were trained was apparent. The language of justice had quietly become a competition for identity-based status. People were not simply attempting to collaborate against White supremacy. They were jockeying for position morally and intellectually within the group. Analytical fluency itself was a form of social power.

This has been the case in many social justice rooms I’ve been in over the decades. It’s part of the tragedy.

Movements built to advance human dignity can unintentionally reproduce fear, hierarchy and isolation when emotional development fails to keep pace with ideological sophistication—when Rider strategies are prioritized over the needs of Elephants.

But my point is much bigger than social justice. The longer I work with leaders, educators and activists, the more convinced I become that our greatest hurdles are emotional in nature.

Human beings are extraordinarily intelligent. We’ve sequenced the human genome and built artificial intelligence. We’ve landed spacecraft on distant planets, and we know how to diagnose complex diseases and model climate systems.

Thinking isn’t our primary limitation.

The true challenge is learning how to work with the skittish, status-oriented and habit-driven Elephant that each of us carries within. While thinking skills will always be important, it is the imbalance with emotional literacy which is the core problem.

We teach people how to analyze, but not how to notice when they’re becoming reactive. We train people to win arguments through debate, but rarely teach how to build understanding through dialogue. We reward the immediacy of right answers and “hot takes” rather than value the time required to consider right actions.

These issues show up everywhere.

It appears in executive boardrooms where brilliant leaders become controlling under pressure. In hospitals where exhausted clinicians diminish and stereotype their patients. In law firms, where disappointment turns into blame. In families where a parent’s difficult day at work somehow becomes a child’s problem at the dinner table. It is wherever emotions are minimized or “checked at the door”.

The same pattern repeats because our powerful, non-conscious mind—the Elephant—is driven by hidden impulses, motivations and automatic processes. Paradoxically, the more feelings are ignored in our personal lives or minimized in the name of professionalism, the bigger they become. Hidden Elephant energy is more likely to influence—even dominate—the dynamics of a room, as it did with the young activists.

This is why I no longer believe lasting change happens for the vast majority of us through better information, arguments or analysis. While these matter, they speak mostly to the Rider. If we want healthier organizations, stronger relationships, better politics and more resilient communities, we require greater skills for identifying and working with our Elephants. As already stated, self-observation is the key, which is actually one of the Rider’s underused gifts, and is a post for another day.

My mother still wears her mask over her chin more often than her nose. We’ll probably remind her again the next time we see her. But these days, instead of seeing someone who simply “won’t listen,” I see something much more familiar.

I see all of us.

Intelligent people doing what human beings have always done: knowing the right thing while struggling to do it. Perhaps that’s the real work of leadership.

Maybe the question isn’t, “How do we give people better information?” Maybe it’s, “How do we help their Elephants want to come along for the ride?”

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

Sources:

Over a decade ago, I released my first book, Deep Diversity, hoping it would help change the mainstream awareness about racism, especially its hard-to-see systemic forms. I’ve confronted an uncomfortable truth over this time: for social justice to succeed, the change makers themselves must also change. This is a harder task, requiring a new way to think about our methods.

A few years ago, I stood backstage preparing to give the largest keynote of my career. More than 7,000 people had gathered for one of North America’s marquee social justice gatherings, the People of Color Conference. I had spoken at conferences like this for nearly a decade and knew what audiences anticipated.

They expected a talk about systemic racism and unconscious bias. About power and privilege. They expected the certainty that comes with social justice spaces of the last many decades: outrage against oppression and its many agents.

Instead, I spoke about something else. I talked about how the justice world had become over-reliant on shame-and-blame strategies, pushing people away with our moral certainty and inaccessible language. I spoke about the need for greater compassion and to nurture the skills of the gifted school teacher—knowing how to break down complex, emotional ideas in ways students can learn.

I talked about neuroscience and that if our goal was to change human beings—not simply educate or persuade them—then we needed to understand how the brain responds to threats, especially from other humans. When people feel publicly judged or morally condemned, they rarely become more open to learning. More often, they become defensive, silent or performative. As a result, they comply rather than transform.

A few people walked out. There is always a contingent that cannot tolerate criticism in any form, even if it is constructive and coming from an insider. The vast majority stayed. I answered a number of post-speech questions, and there was applause, but nothing extraordinary like a standing ovation. All my books, however, did sell out at the on-site bookstore.

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The mixed response left me a little confused and deflated.

I sat in my hotel room with a coffee and wondered if I had misread the moment. Doubt pulled at the edges of my mind.

What I had hoped for didn’t happen. After my session, there were no spirited conversations about our methods—that some DEI strategies should be built upon, while others should be abandoned. No thoughtful discussions about the shaming techniques of callout culture and how they often backfire. Or explorations of trust, and why it’s more effective in changing minds than logic or powerful arguments.

On the way to dinner, however, something small but significant occurred. A woman stopped me and said something that stayed with me.

“Thank you for that speech. It wasn’t something we expected—or even wanted—but it was something we needed to hear.”

Her comment clarified something for me. I knew I wasn’t the only one wondering about the shortcomings of our methods. Across North America, I kept meeting people having these conversations. But they happened quietly at the side of the room, over meals and on car rides home.

It became obvious that I was pushing against the existing social justice current—its practices and beliefs. As soon as people left my presentation, they re-entered the accepted justice culture with ‘speak-truth-to-power’ and ‘protect-vulnerable-minorities’ messaging.

This culture was, and is, effective in teaching skills in analysis, to identify injustice in its systemic forms. As a result, activist-minded people are incredibly good at recognizing biased language and decisions in others. The most important part of the work, however, is underdeveloped: how to transform people so they are internally motivated to notice and change their biases.

The former is exponentially easier than the latter. A thought is easier to change than a feeling.

Without recognizing it, we had made one of humanity’s oldest mistakes about change: We emphasized the “head” when we need to influence the “heart”—the realm of emotions and behaviours.

I realized for the first time that even if I was right, it wasn’t enough. I could spend another decade doing keynotes and perhaps sway a few thousand more people. But it wouldn’t change the conversation. A solo voice was not enough. What I needed wasn’t a bigger stage. I needed more companions.

Looking back, I am grateful for the realization, as it pushed me in a new direction. If I wanted to take this conversation away from the margins of social justice, I needed more people asking the same questions and willing to be critical of our own movements.

I had been in conversations with many such people previously. But these were isolated, spontaneous discussions. There was no intention or planning behind it. And that’s what needed to change.

Many of these people had years of experience experimenting with more relational, compassionate approaches to justice. None were arguing against accountability. None were abandoning a systemic analysis.

We were all asking something deeper.

How do we pursue justice without reproducing the very patterns of humiliation, exclusion and domination we’re trying to dismantle? What if some of our own methods—like callout and cancel culture—were not just making change more difficult but also nurturing backlash that was waiting to be unleashed?

A gathering of such people was needed.

One name in particular came to mind, Dr. Loretta Ross, an African-American elder based in Georgia with over 50 years of experience in grassroots justice work. We had met a number of years ago at a conference and immediately connected over our shared views on social justice. Loretta had been arguing for “calling in” people rather than simply calling them out, something she became nationally famous for.

Like me, she wasn’t suggesting we become less honest. She was asking how honesty can become transformational rather than merely punitive.

So I called her, and we collaborated on developing a different kind of gathering. Instead of organizing another conference, we imagined something much smaller, an in-depth symposium. We invited people who had been wrestling with similar questions, from activists and educators to community organizers and writers. Some were from Canada, others from the United States. Some knew one another, while many didn’t. We met in person in Washington, DC, in August of 2024, and then continued with monthly virtual follow-up sessions for almost a year.

Our purpose was remarkably simple. To host conversations by practitioners who have incorporated compassion into their social justice work.

In hindsight, I realized we were doing something our movement rarely does.

Every profession performs post-mortems. Hospitals investigate medical mistakes. Airlines investigate crashes. Elite sports teams watch game film after every match.

Yet social justice movements over the last 50 years—which ask human beings to examine their own assumptions—rarely pause to examine their own. There often seems to be an unspoken assumption that because our goals are just, our methods must be as well.

This has always struck me as strange. If we’re asking society to become more reflective, shouldn’t we be willing to do the same? Shouldn’t we be examining our own strategies with the same honesty we ask of everyone else?

All social change tactics are not created equal. Some build trust, while others build fear. Some invite people into authentic change while others encourage performative actions. It’s necessary to identify the ones that are helpful from those that are not. To amplify those that help bring a critical mass of people on board and minimize those that reduce our size and impact. To amplify the strategies that build courage and people power from those that weaken and fracture.

So we gathered to ask uncomfortable questions. Why were movements fragmenting? Why were so many people afraid to ask genuine questions? Why have terms like “systemic racism” become so misunderstood? Why did so many people support racial justice in principle while avoiding conversations about it? Why were activists burning out?

We also wanted examples of social justice work at its best, not theoretically but practically. What were people actually doing when they successfully transformed relationships, organizations and communities? And what was the role of compassion in all of this?

But this was not a simple or smooth process.

The first morning of this 3-day gathering started with introductions, asking people to share their work. To describe what they saw as the key problems and opportunities, as well as how compassion was part of their solution. What I thought would be a simple starting step was anything but.

Instead of lots of nodding heads and affirmations, the simple process of introductions created confusion and raised questions about the symposium’s purpose. One moment was particularly telling. A participant made an observation from their work that the rise of authoritarianism was linked to many young, White men feeling both blamed for society’s racist past and feeling without a home in a rapidly changing, multicultural world. Someone strongly disagreed with this view, and we got bogged down in debate. This was one of the many moments that felt clunky.

At lunch, Loretta turned to me and said, “We’re going too fast. People don’t know each other.”

Of course! There was not enough trust in the room to strategize.

Once again, we replicated the same social change error discussed previously: we prioritized head strategies over heart. Even with a group of compassion-based practitioners, we needed to build trust before we could engage in constructive dialogue. We needed vulnerability to create the relationships necessary for a post-mortem. We needed to know each other’s stories.

Which is what we did over the next twenty-four hours, sharing how we got into justice work, our motivations, challenges and breakthroughs. This critical, improvised step allowed us to explore the symposium’s content as the threads of both compassion and justice were already woven into our personal stories.

As I synthesized our meeting notes, a striking realization emerged: regardless of our diverse backgrounds, a shared set of core patterns consistently surfaced.

Participants continually emphasized balancing compassion with deep accountability. Of upholding integrity while leaving room for human imperfection. There was a collective focus on elevating relationship skills and navigating disagreements or conflict competently. We identified the need to leave the “right answers” and rigid thinking at the door of activist culture, and embrace the messy complexity of life. The priority was broad coalitions of the many rather than ideological purity of the few. And of creating a vision of the world we were for, not just what we were against.

We weren’t inventing something new. We were noticing and identifying something old. These principles had always existed and were used by many people in and beyond the room. You could see them in the civil rights movement and in restorative justice. They were in community organizing and within Indigenous peacemaking traditions. It was just a less-travelled path, at least in today’s justice world.

These principles are also modelled by exceptional teachers and thoughtful organizational leaders. They are in healthy families and in workplaces that value their employees. We were simply collecting them in one place.

Eventually, we gave these principles a name and a definition: Just Compassion—a way to achieve justice and human rights goals through love, fairness, and forgiveness.

Just Compassion doesn’t ask us to choose between truth or trust, right answers or right relationships. It insists we need both. Justice without compassion often becomes punishment. Compassion without justice becomes avoidance.

The future requires both.

Because in the end, the question isn’t simply whether we can identify injustice. It’s about whether we can build the kind of relationships, at scale, that can change it.

In the coming weeks, I’d like to tell you more about the Just Compassion principles—and why I think they may help us change both hearts and minds in a divided world, whether at home, work or in our community.

Thanks to the members of the Compassion-based Leadership Project, whose rich conversations helped create the Just Compassion framework, meeting regularly from August 2024 to June 2025. While there are many people who participated at different stages of the project, I would specifically like to appreciate the wise contributions of the deeply committed steering committee: Caroline Blackwell, Suzanne Hawkes, Isabelle Clark, and my incredible co-organizer, Loretta Ross.

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About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

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In a middle school context, a teacher is bothered by a comment she overhears from a student, Maurice. He is talking to his friend group while working on an assignment at the side of the room. His tone is disdainful as he expresses surprise at the high marks students receive in this class, given the little effort he and others put into their work: “Seriously, nobody does anything in this class!” The group of friends scoffs in agreement, not just because he is “dissing” the teacher—he is—but because the comment was accurate. Her reputation was that of a highly disorganized and inconsistent teacher by the school community, including the adults in the building.

What happened next was surprising, and one of the most common misunderstandings of how change works.

From the front of the room, the teacher snapped back loudly:

“Maurice, you are very rude and don’t know what you’re talking about!”

The student froze, realizing he’d been “caught”. The other little nervous systems in the room also went into high alert. The students became quiet. Nobody else criticized the teacher.

While Maurice was away for a dentist appointment in the afternoon, the teacher found a reason to weave him back into a class conversation. She explicitly stated that he was a bad student and a poor example for others. Again, no one said anything in defence of the student or teacher. But many of his peers were silently outraged.

Whether the teacher felt embarrassed, undermined, or simply frustrated by the student’s comment, her shaming response accomplished something immediately: the room became quiet.

While this teacher’s behaviour—based on a real example—may be surprising for some, many of us use shame as a corrective measure in our personal and professional lives. We often do this without realizing it because shame is so woven into our culture, upbringing and language. It’s a strategy to get people to follow rules, to learn, to comply. But don’t confuse compliant behaviour for transformation.

At first glance, it looked like the teacher’s strategy had worked. The students stopped talking, and nobody criticized the teacher. Order returned to the room. But appearances can be deceiving.

Research on shame suggests that it is ultimately a counterproductive strategy. Instead of fostering genuine change, it pushes individuals into a self-protective “threat” response. Biologically, our nervous system kicks into survival mode, with increased blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones helping us scan for threats. Under these conditions, people typically shut down, become defensive, and stop learning. While shame might enforce short-term compliance, its long-term consequences are overwhelmingly negative.

This stands in sharp contrast to guilt. Guilt implies “I made a mistake,” which leaves room for empathy, reflection, and behavioural change. Shame, however, signals “I am a mistake,” “I’m bad,” leading directly to more negative responses such as self-loathing, avoidance, and defensiveness. It fundamentally undermines trust while catalyzing the seeds of resentment and rebellion.

The use of shame extends well beyond the domain of an under-skilled middle school teacher and is used across society. The result is frequently visible, performative behaviours that often mask invisible beliefs that go unexpressed.

During a high-stakes project review, a manager singled out an employee for a miscommunication that delayed a project milestone for their client. The employee, caught off guard, meekly apologized. The tension in the room increased dramatically, and not for the first time due to the manager’s authoritative approach. Some team members looked away while others shifted in their seats. The manager made suggestions for the next project deliverable, and the meeting ended in agreement, as no other suggestions were made. From one perspective, employee accountability and expectations had been reinforced.

Behind the scenes, the dynamic shifted in ways the manager failed to see. Frustration was expressed in the parking lot and behind closed doors. Fear kept the team from admitting mistakes, and cliques formed. Cooperation decreased, as did work quality. The manager was left baffled as deadlines continued to slip and morale plummeted, never realizing that their reliance on shame to enforce compliance destroyed the trust required for the team to actually succeed.

Workshop trainers from the world of racial justice and equity can also make the same mistake of using shame strategies, often without awareness. Instead of engaging in questions as opportunities for genuine conversations, such educators give barbed responses that shut down conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI):

• You are trying to derail the conversation…

• You’re centring yourself and need to check your privilege.

• Your comment is White Supremacy in action.

By framing genuine questions as accusations of moral failing, underlying issues go unaddressed, and DEI growth is stunted. Instead, such responses signal that the workshop is emotionally unpredictable, with “right” and “wrong” questions and answers, thereby eroding the trust needed to learn new, difficult ideas. Such trainers come from what I call a “rigid DEI” tradition, rather than a more restorative approach, a topic I will explore in the future.

Regardless of whether we are a student, an employee, or a workshop attendee, the use of shame signals a threat to safety, reputation, and identity. It implies that our moral worth is in question and may even elicit temporary behaviour change. But compliance is not transformation.

The urge to use shame is a common human tendency, driven by various motivations. We may reach for it when we are unskilled and want to exert authority, as in the case of the middle-school teacher; when we believe it will enforce accountability, like the manager; or when we are convinced we are morally correct, like some facilitators who use a rigid DEI approach.

Regardless of the intent, shame erodes trust, relationships and the possibility of learning. Shame is frequently mistaken for a shortcut to change. And like most shortcuts in life, it creates more problems than it solves.

It is the easiest thing to mistake silence for agreement, especially when we have power over others. It’s the hardest to know if anything has actually changed inside another person.

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No problem. You can also find Shakil on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.

About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

Sources:

Brown, Brené. (2021). Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Random House.

Choudhury, Shakil. Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice. Greystone Books, 2021.

Edmondson, Amy C. (1999). “Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Lieberman, Matthew D. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. Crown Publishers, 2013.

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In one of the world’s longest civil wars, a rebel commander once saved the life of a military general. Only a few months earlier, they had been trying to kill each other. What happened between those two moments?

At first glance, it seems highly unlikely—perhaps impossible. How does someone move from seeing another person as an enemy worth killing to someone worth saving? The answer might surprise you.

Adam Kahane, an internationally renowned facilitator who has spent decades helping resolve seemingly intractable conflicts, tells this remarkable story from Colombia. For decades, the country was trapped in a brutal conflict that claimed more than 250,000 lives. Many groups—government officials, military leaders, business leaders, civil society groups, and armed rebels—viewed one another as enemies. They disagreed on almost everything.

The common misconception is that social change occurs because one side has better data and arguments than the other. After all, that is the premise of our North American culture that loves debate, right?

But that rarely happens in real life, and it certainly did not happen in this case study in Colombia. Kahane and his team created a dialogue and problem-solving process where these opposing groups were brought together to build relationships and jointly explore the future of their country. Over time, people who had previously seen one another as enemies began to see one another as human beings. In a crisis situation where an assassination contract had been placed on the military general, it was a rebel commander—also part of the group—who convinced his own people to rescind the order. The life of a former enemy was saved because of the relationship that had developed between them through the dialogue process.

Think about that for a moment.

People who had once been on opposite sides of a deadly conflict were willing to act on behalf of one another. The trust that emerged did not magically erase their disagreements, but it created something that had not existed before: the ability to work together.

Those early conversations did not end Colombia’s civil war overnight. What they did was create something that had been missing: enough trust for people to imagine a shared future. Over the next two decades, the ideas developed in those dialogues spread through Colombian society. One participant, Juan Manuel Santos, would later become president and negotiate the 2016 peace agreement, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The lesson is profound.

Colombia did not move toward peace because people suddenly discovered better arguments, evidence, or “facts” to stop fighting. They moved toward peace because they built enough trust to begin working through the facts, evidence, and arguments together. Truth mattered, but trust came first.

The purpose of sharing this story isn’t to dissect a civil war in Colombia; it’s to explore why almost every attempt to change another human being begins in the wrong place. This has implications for many spheres of life, whether in parenting, leadership, or the workplace.

We live in an age where many seem to believe that if people just knew the facts, they’d change—that “truth” is the key. The assumption is that better information and better arguments will change how people behave, vote, and treat one another. We see this assumption daily on social media, where people argue constantly. Ironically, research shows that most people avoid these hostile exchanges and are leaving social media in droves, leaving only the loudest, most aggressive minority behind to “fight it out.”

The reality is that if facts alone changed people, smokers would quit after reading warning labels, couples would solve conflicts by exchanging statistics, and politics would become less polarized after debates. We would also follow through on all those New Year’s resolutions that usually end within weeks, if not days.

Yet, this does not happen.

After three decades working at the intersection of leadership, conflict, and social justice, I’ve come to believe something both simple and deeply counterintuitive: For human beings to change, trust usually comes before truth. Relationships are the safe container within which difficult truths can be considered in order to make better choices. Whether we are parents, leaders, teachers, activists, or managers, our first task may not be developing great skills of persuasion. It may be to become more trustworthy.

To be clear, truth matters. Facts matter, as does accountability. But when people feel threatened, ashamed, or disconnected, they often become less—not more—able to hear those truths.

Trust doesn’t guarantee change, but it often creates the conditions that make change possible.

A story from a family friend about their teenage son illustrates this point. During his previous school year, things began to unravel: late nights, parties, missed homework, and declining grades. Like many teenagers, their son became increasingly defensive whenever his parents tried to hold him accountable.

The conversations were always built around facts:

• Your assignment was not done.

• You promised you would do your homework before you went out.

• Your teacher sent an email again.

Everything the parents said was true. Every fact was accurate. There were even consequences. Yet none of it changed the son’s behavior.

Every conversation ended the same way: arguments, blame, and defensiveness. The more evidence the parents presented, the more their son insisted that everyone else was the problem—his teachers didn’t understand, his parents were too controlling, and the expectations were unfair.

The parents finally tried something different. They stopped trying to argue, convince, or shame. They stopped trying to win.

Instead, they spoke from the heart. They sat him down and told him how much they loved him. They shared how hard it was to watch him struggle and feel increasingly disconnected from those who loved him. One parent became emotional and admitted through tears, “I feel such sadness because I know you are struggling, but I don’t know how to help you.” There was no debating. No accusations. No yelling. Only vulnerability.

Something shifted. The teen stopped defending himself and finally took responsibility. He admitted that his choices—not his parents or teachers—had created the situation, and he promised to strive to do better. In spite of some minor setbacks, this has largely been the case. More importantly, there were fewer arguments and explosions, with the teen showing up for himself and his family more positively than before.

What changed? It wasn’t the truth; the facts had been there all along. What changed was the trust in the relationship. The parents created enough emotional safety for the truth to be emotionally considered and truly heard.

Why does trust work?

This isn’t simply a nice story; it reflects decades of research on how human beings actually change. The explanation begins with a surprisingly uncomfortable fact: We are far less rational than we like to believe. Contrary to popular belief, the emotional part of our brain reacts before the rational part has finished thinking. I’ve written about this in my previous book, Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt captures the core idea well through the metaphor of the Rider and the Elephant. The Rider represents our conscious, reasoning mind, while the Elephant represents our larger emotional and intuitive system. The size mismatch between these two parts of ourselves is significant. The Rider can plan our next steps, but it’s the Elephant that decides whether it is safe enough to move forward.

Trust speaks primarily to the Elephant. It is emotional in nature, not cognitive. We “feel” its presence or absence—we don’t think our way to it. Our emotional system has already made the decision about someone’s trustworthiness well before we consciously decide.

This is why facts, figures, and arguments rarely change us. These are Rider appeals that rarely penetrate the thick skin of our Elephants. We need security and safety in order to consider new, challenging information. Information reaches the Rider, but trust motivates the Elephant.

There is a second factor to consider. We don’t receive information neutrally, but through the filters of identity, values, and beliefs. In ambiguous situations, our Elephant system asks questions like:

• How would people like me consider this issue?

• What does my community believe?

• Is the information coming from a source that my people trust?

Psychologists call this “motivated reasoning.” At the Elephant level, we are not just considering whether the information is true; we are weighing how much accepting the information will cost us and our sense of belonging to our group. The context and the issue trigger aspects of our identity—such as ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, political leaning, or economic status. But make no mistake: some part of our identity is almost always at play, whether we realize it or not. Trust, then, is essential if people are having to consider information that is new or unpopular to our existing identities. But it is very possible as shown by the story of Columbia.

Psychological Safety is Trust in the Workplace

In the workplace, trust is often discussed as psychological safety and is one of the most important ideas in leadership. Popularized by Amy Edmondson from Harvard University, it is often misunderstood as simply making people feel comfortable. It is something much more demanding. Psychological safety is the ability for employees to raise concerns, speak up about issues, be vulnerable about mistakes, and talk about sensitive topics like bias, harassment, and discrimination—all without fear of retaliation from colleagues and supervisors. It is the number-one factor for high-performing teams, as well as critical for nurturing diversity, equity, and inclusion. All the “good stuff”—greater creativity, productivity, outside-the-box thinking, and increased resilience—is more likely to show up under these conditions. Innovation becomes possible because trust nurtures both risk-taking and accountability.

Creating environments of trust is key to any change effort. Before asking, “How do I convince this person?”...perhaps we should ask, “Have I created the conditions in which they can genuinely hear me?”

Because human beings—whether we are rebels, generals, employees, spouses, or children—rarely change simply because we lose an argument. We change when trust makes a different truth worth considering.

Perhaps that is the real work for change-makers: not simply becoming better truth-tellers, but becoming more trustworthy ourselves.

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About the Author:

Shakil Choudhury is an award-winning educator, speaker and consultant with over 30 years of experience working in racial justice, organizational leadership and conflict. He coaches executive teams and has worked with thousands of leaders across sectors in Canada and the United States. Shakil also facilitates dialogue processes to resolve inter-group conflict, having led projects internationally as well as with organizations locally. He is the author of Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice.

Sources:

Choudhury, Shakil. Deep Diversity: A Compassionate, Scientific Approach to Achieving Racial Justice. Greystone Books, 2021.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). “Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Basic Books, 2006.

Fabian Hutmacher, Regina Reichardt, Marlene S. Altenmüller. “Known Unknowns in Motivated Reasoning: A Closer Look at Three Open Questions”, Collabra: Psychology, January 2025.

Kahane, Adam. Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2017.

Törnberg, Petter. “Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020-2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization,” arXiv.org, 2025/10/29.

For most of the past thirty years, my work has happened in boardrooms, classrooms, and organizations, often hosting difficult conversations—not online. I’ve spent my career helping leaders and organizations navigate DEI issues, conflict, and change. While many people were building audiences, I was usually facilitating another workshop or helping leaders understand their organization’s strengths and weaknesses.

To be honest, I’ve never really built a consistent online home for my ideas. Two years ago, I stepped away from social media almost entirely because my caregiving responsibilities expanded from children to include aging parents. Plus, I found myself distracted, thinking more about algorithms than ideas.

But as life stabilizes and I’m researching my next book, I’ve realized that the questions I’m wrestling with are much bigger than DEI leadership. They’re about human beings.

Why is change so difficult? Why do smart people become so divided? Why does shame often undermine learning? Why does trust matter so much? And what can conflict teach us about leadership, relationships, parenting, and society?

That’s what this newsletter, called Beyond Distrust, is about.

As is my style, I’ll use stories—a moment from my work or life—and explore the larger patterns underneath human behaviour. My hope is not to tell you what to think, but to help us all see a little more clearly.

I’m glad you’re here. I look forward to exploring these questions together.

Shakil

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