Kyle’s parents were believers, whom Kyle describes as “well-meaning white people.”…Before Kevin [Kyle’s husband], Kyle does not remember talking about race at the family dinner table. Kyle says, “[My parents] had never thought of the systems narrative.” When Kyle and Kevin explained how tailwinds benefit well-meaning white people, moral identity reflexes kicked in….”But I am a good person,” Kyle’s mom, Jodi, protested. “I’m not a racist.”
The Person You Mean to Be, Dolly Chugh, pg. 131
Consider the differences in a world experienced by a young person in 2018 versus 1998 versus 1968 versus 1948. We are each a product of the time and place in which we live. Look for the opportunity to ask someone of a different time and place about his or her perspective. Reverse mentoring sounds very formal, but it can be casual. Start a conversation with a young cashier or a young colleague or a young relative.
The Person You Mean to Be, Dolly Chugh, pg. 141
One thing I really love about Chugh’s book is the way the challenges she sets for us seem to cascade into each other, and the way that her anecdotes eventually build to paint a complete picture of the way that we can apply what we’ve read and the people we met in the pages of her book to our own lives. If you’re reading along with me, or following this series so that you see how I’m applying what Chugh teaches us, I’d love to hear what you’ve gleaned so far.
As I’m diving deep into how each part of this book makes me think or reconsider, I feel, as I heard a guest on newsradio say in the wee hours of the morning after President #45 won the 2016 election, a sense of alertness. “I feel awake,” she said, when asked how seeing a racist and a sexist in the White House made her feel, and although I can’t remember who it was, I still remember the tone of her voice. She sounded surprised, as if she didn’t know what she’d say until the words actually popped out of her mouth.
I feel this way, too—awake, to how I see things, and how events and circumstances make me react. I feel like everywhere there are opportunities for me learn and grow, whereas before I feel like I was scuttling around in the dark, looking for the right verbiage with which to express myself.
The big reveal of the first quote above is that “Jodi” is Jodi Picoult, who’s written a number of best-selling novels that explore a wide variety of social situations. The upshot is that, despite the fact that Picoult is a “good person” who tackles “the hard issues” in some of her books, she hadn’t even been aware to the idea that she might be carrying around some systemic baggage.
And in the verbiage around the second quote, Picoult reveals how much she’s learned from her son and his husband, and how listening to them allows her to be reverse-mentored. (I think this phrasing, which is from Jack Welch, is about the traditional model of mentoring being old-person-to-young-person.)
I haven’t noticed a lot of reverse mentoring in my life. I think this is because I grew up in a household that regularly told kids we don’t know anything. Now, I just assume I know nothing, although in my teens and twenties and probably my early and mid-30s, I was keen to prove I already knew everything.
So yeah, I think I can probably say that it’s just in the last decade that I’ve begun to embrace “I don’t know” as a place of comfort and curiosity, rather than defaulting to a defensive position.
Some of that probably has to do with seeing my parents come late to knowledge. Our family and extended family identifies as Buddhist and Confucist. (I myself practice neither, although elements of each are interesting to me.) In Confucianism, here is no room for anything but respect when it comes to older and younger: the elder is always right. (Further, the wife is always obedient to the husband, but that is a whole ‘nother bag of worms.) So, in my parents’ societal construct, there was never a possibility that they could learn from any younger people. We’ve reached a kind of equilibrium now, and they’re asking about things that I think they should have known ages ago (LGBTQ! The role nonprofits play in society! How readers can tell a poem is a poem!), and this depresses me.
The other part of it has to do with the fact that I’m 45, but I kind of stopped counting at 30, or something. A while ago a younger friend said to me, about a mutual friend, “Mm, she’s more your age,” [emphasis mine] and I had to reconfigure my thought process about just how old I was. Part of me takes comfort in the idea that I’ll always be young and stupid, and that there will always be something to learn.
The unintended effect of all of this is that I had to fight my way to seeing that everyone out there can teach us something. It’s a thing I repeated to myself over and over all the way through my twenties until it became quickly proven to me and then just became habit. It keeps me happy, I think, knowing that knowledge, or another perspective, is right around the corner, and that my only job is to be open to it.
And while I think that phrase—”reverse mentoring”—only addresses the idea that traditional mentoring is done older person to younger person, it’s important to me to recognize that we often unconsciously put people in varying strata of experience, skills, and knowledge. Maybe because they don’t speak English as well as we do. Maybe because they’re younger, sure, but maybe because they don’t work in our chosen profession, say, and so don’t have the same knowledge set we do. (Why, for instance, would I expect my doctor father to understand what a poem looks like, and be able to identify it? Would he expect me to be able to identify a rash?) Or maybe because we’re too quick to write off what they do know as irrelevant to the things we care about.
These are all mistakes I’ve made. I’m glad to have been proven otherwise by people who were patient enough with me, and to have had time in this life to rectify those mistakes.
18 years ago, my friend Andrew said to me that he thought kindness was a function of time. (I wrote about this here.) Until very recently (last night!) I thought it meant that *I* needed to give myself the time and space to be kind. But I think now that it’s more complicated than that. I think it’s that we need to be cognizant that change takes time and space. And that it’s not going to happen overnight, but that if you can be aware that time and space are broad, then maybe you will eventually see the breadth of what you don’t know.
And this, eventually, will lead to kindness, too.
I recently had a conversation with my cousin’s daughter. (In Taiwanese she’d call me aunt.) She’s in her mid-twenties. I remember my mid-twenties. A little while ago our conversations started to shift. Before, she was asking me for advice. Now, we talk to each other. Over Thanksgiving dinner, puzzling out a big overarching thing I was struggling with, I asked her if she thought it was more important to be kind or to be right.
“It depends,” she said. “If you think you can help someone to see a different perspective, then I think it’s more important to be right. But with people like our parents? It’s more important to be kind.”
I agree with her. And I also think that I can see how kindness is still the pathway to being “right,” whatever we think that means. Regardless of what our perspective is, we’ll never get someone else to see it if we’re, well, mean.
I’m not sure how to end this post. I just know that I’m so grateful for all the people with different perspectives out there, even if I’m not ready to hear them yet. At some point, I think I’ll have to take the time to listen more carefully.
