Stopping the white noise of bias and creating an inclusion symphony through narrative intelligence

I had a wild imagination as a kid.

Give me a sandbox and some time, I’d create entire narrative characters beating intergalactic monsters and finding cures for diseases. I enjoyed playing with other kids, but could always rely on my own stories to entertain and accept me, especially when peers went out of their way to remind me why they couldn't play with me. One particular incident stood out, in first grade. During recess, a young white girl approached me while I was playing solo, going out of her way to tell me that she could not play with me because I was black: a white noise narrative she learned from home and enacted out on the playground proudly, unprompted.

Bias is narrative, built through laws like Jim Crow and Red Lining, and also passed on as crusty heirlooms through stereotyped stories picked up at home, in church, on TV, in schools, and at work. These narratives form everyday behaviors, beliefs, and language that I've coined as white noise because they are pervasive and many times in the backgrounds of people consciousness. 

There’s days the sounds of bias and racism are a low droning and annoying hum in the background of life, and there’s other days where these biases narratives are like crashing symbols of ugly noises that force my attention - when another person of color is harassed while doing everyday activities like walking their dog or murdered while walking/talking/jogging/sleeping/another unreasonable and insane reason, because of the fears and narratives so deeply embedded into the psyche. 

I see the sounds at this point, and have studied their frequency and creation. I’m witnessing people tuning into their frequency and pitch for the first times in their lives, when I’ve been listening and studying their rhythms for 33 years. Welcome to the cacophony.

My awareness of white noise goes back to my growing up in Ogden, Utah. My family moved to Utah from Memphis, TN in the 1950s and 1960s during the Great Migration. Black people make up less than 1% of the population in Utah and I grew up in a modest, single level, four bedroom home my mom proudly saved up to buy in 2000. My family are unknown trailblazers.

I lived there until I was 18 and most of our neighbors ignored us or were actually nice (shout outs to our next door neighbor who shoveled our sidewalk for us with those harsh winters). But we had one neighbor, a white woman who never introduced herself to us, who lived across the street who really didn’t like us living there, particularly because my mother's boyfriend at the time was white, which she had told other neighbors of ours of her dislike of that fact.

I attended Cornell University for college and would travel back home for the holidays. One holiday my mom picked me up from the airport. As we turned onto our block we noticed a police car sitting in front of our house and started to panic. We pulled up into our driveway and quickly found the officer who was sitting in his vehicle to ask what problem happened. We thought maybe someone broke in or worse.

“Ma’am your neighbor reported a disturbance of the peace and loud music coming from your home.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m coming here to address the issue.”

“Did you not...just see us pull up in the driveway??? No one has been home for hours because I was at the airport in Salt Lake City an hour away picking up my daughter. No one is even in the house right now.”

I remember at least 2-3 other scenarios just like this where the police would be called on our home for doing nothing and our neighbor would straight up lie, claiming we were being loud or having parties or disturbing the neighborhood when none of us, my two sisters, myself, or mother, were even home. And better yet why can’t we do that because we pay taxes and live there too?

How Narrative Intelligence Is a Catalyst For Change 

I’ve seen this type of bias, this narrative white noise play out many times as a Black woman: from being followed in stores, having a previous CEO I worked for tell me that the new wave of entrepreneurs who are Black aren’t creating the next Facebook but are mostly hair salons and nail shops, to facilitating deeper conversations with a Global Development non- profit board members as they discovered through my self-reflective facilitation and training how they had never had a woman or person of color as a leader their entire lives, and how it has shaped their narratives of who can be a leader or have power.

White noise is distracting, it’s the barrier between who we are and who we want to be as individuals and as a society. This noise creates hostile work environments, breakdowns in innovation, and disconnection and loneliness in communities. Imagine how much more we could achieve as a society if the ugly sounds died and people’s minds were free from fear anger pain to create and make - the very essence of what it means to be human. 

I founded The New Quo, which is a leadership and inclusion consultancy that uses behavioral-science based communication and storytelling strategies to help organizations and individuals transform behavior and build inclusive communities, to teach the power narrative intelligence as a radical tool of change that everyone can access and leverage for personal transformation, inclusive leadership, and equity. Narrative intelligence is the ability to use story to influence others and to understand how story influences your own behavior. My early experiences in my childhood and other white noise experiences in my work life over the past 10 years motivated me to focus my work on helping people discover the fear based narratives in the way of their potential, to change what they think and do, and then to create a new symphony, that lets people’s genuine talents shine beyond stereotypes and dualities that’s much more beautiful than the relics of white noise we continue to hear from generation to generation.

The science of story shows through narrative transport and neural coupling, stories cognitively drive our beliefs, memory, learning, and individual behavior, and influence our thinking patterns, habits, and biases more deeply than anything else on the planet can. We can improve our habits, biases, decision making, and communication by examining and shifting the dominant societal, familial, and personal stories we believe and share, and by creating new ones that are built on curiosity of difference that moves people to change. 

Improving Narrative Intelligence to create change

From teaching 1500 business leaders across Fortune 500 companies and VC backed startups as well as building large scale education experiences on inclusive moderation for 250k leaders for Nextdoor, I’ve developed a behavioral change process I call the Status Quo Shifting Method, which helps individuals move through the key stages of change and helps them respond to difference with curiosity instead of fear:

The first step is to become aware of the problem of white noise, which requires us to confront the pervasive historical amnesia in our society and the societal stories we adapt about history. I define historical amnesia as a complete lack of historical context and knowledge on identity and racial based policy and its large scale effects on every economic and cultural structure we currently live under. Having historical amnesia while discussing or addressing the white noise of bias is like trying to cure a disease without getting any sort of diagnostic tests and taking a guess that the cure is to pop some vitamin c and take an epsom salt bath, when you really need chemo. There's a reason our education system glosses over white supremacy and institutional bias, how it operates, how it was intentionally created in laws, practice, language and embedded into every aspect of society for centuries. It is not magic and it is not hard to understand. Without that knowledge, people can be comfortable with things staying status quo, even if they are limiting and toxic to everyone of every background. 

To improve your narrative intelligence and awareness of bias, there's tomes of reading about white supremacy online, in the library, at the book store, I encourage you to google or to start here. It is your duty as a citizen to understand our racialized system and how it is an umbrella that many other “isms” were born from (sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, etc) as well intersect and interact with. 

The next steps with this method is accountability and action. Once there’s awareness of the white noise of bias, feeling a personal responsibility to the role we each play in maintaining that white noise, and then taking conscious daily actions by building inclusive habits, drives genuine change. White noise is not about good people and bad people, or seeing this as an issue that is separate and only impacts a few. Improving each person’s accountability and action on white noise requires moving away from the fear-driven narratives, stereotypes and micro-aggressions embedded into each of our thinking, through narrative inquiry, a practice I teach in my inclusive leadership trainings I facilitate for teams and individuals to unpack biased ideology and habit. Take the time write and reflect on a few questions like:

• What is my relationship to power? What power do I have with the various identities I hold? How do I express that power on a daily basis through what I say, what I do, and what I believe I am entitled to?
• What are my values? If I have values around equality how do I express those values? If I am not expressing them through action or intentional behavior, why not? Why is there a gap?
• Who in my life do I give regular passes to when they bring up stereotyped, racist, harmful language and thinking? How often do I not engage in uncomfortable conversations and why? How often do I dismiss, minimize, rationalize away people’s first hand accounts of their own experiences with racism and other biases and why?
• What assumptions have I made or projected onto others based on my experiences of power? What beliefs do I hold about how the world works that are not applicable to people without the same identities that wield power? 
• Where are my points of view formed from? How often do I read the work of or follow, engage with, and have deep conversation or exchanges with people who are not like myself who are not only hired to be in specific roles in my life like my domestic help? 
• How diverse are my networks? What does my inner circle look like? If I have the power to hire and fire people, how many people who do not look like myself have I helped hire/sponsor/develop into a position of genuine leadership and authority? 
• What anti-black beliefs, jokes, stereotypes, and media did I hear and learn growing up? 
• An additional question for a brown person of color -- how do I engage in assimilation and anti-blackness as a brown person? What negative beliefs and stereotypes exist in my immediate circle, community, family about black people?

This work isn’t a trend, a one note concert that you can attend with one black square on Instagram. One anti-racism book read. One Black friend made. It’s a lifetime commitment to tuning in, and taking action on creating a new narrative that drowns out and erases the white noise stifling all of us. Narratives form who we are, and what we will tolerate and pass onto the next generation. The more we can inquire of ourselves and stop relabeling white noise and dusting racism under the rug, the better off we will all be, and the more likely we can find solutions to the human penchant to construct broken systems out of fear. White supremacy is not a genuine purpose or direction in life and never will be, and we all have the power to rewrite our collective story.