96. Showing Up For DEI In The U.S. and Abroad with Kay Fabella

February 23, 2021 Guest User

Summary

DEI consultants are not a monolith. Erica and her guest, Kay Fabella, a DEI and remote team consultant based in Spain, discuss how personal experience, geographical location, and cultural context influence individual approaches to the work, while highlighting some of the key differences in anti-racism efforts abroad versus those in the US.

In this discussion:

The value of embracing a multi-hyphenate identity
Wholeheartedly engaging in the DEI journey
The importance of contextually appropriate DEI educational materials
Problems inherent to applying a US-centric DEI strategy to global conversations when it comes to language, context, and culturally readiness
Creating safe spaces for people to do the work
Reconsidering your normal for a stronger foundation
Showing up as a DEI practitioner - the personal is professional
Questions to consider before engaging a DEI professional for your business

Keep The Dialogue Going

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Article

The verdict may still be out on 2020, but this year has already provided a shining moment with the inauguration of Kamala Harris, the first woman, the first Black woman, the first South Asian woman as vice president. As for President Joe Biden, while still a politician, Erica welcomes the contrast in tone from the previous administration. “Being able to know that I can turn my TV on and hear somebody put together whole sentences with a capital in the front and some type of punctuation? I'll take that. I'm okay with that right now. Small wins. Small wins.”

Inauguration Day doesn’t magically erase the systemic racism that ultimately led to the insurgency at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021. The coup attempt is proof that DEI work doesn’t stop for those of us leading or engaged in the space - not stateside or overseas. Anti-racism faces different challenges overseas, however. As Erica notes, “I always go back to what I've heard people say in that when the US sneezes, everybody catches a cold.”

The US may set the stage, but it’s not all about us, which prompts another truth: DEI professionals are not a monolith. They don’t all provide the exact same assistance in the exact same manner. Nor do they address the exact same needs. Erica says, “It doesn't just come in one flavor. That's not how this goes.” Before engaging a DEI professional ask yourself: What are you seeking? What do you need?

Meet Kay Fabella

Kay Fabella has spent the last decade honing her perspective and applying her experiences to help companies realize their DEI goals. “I like to joke that immigration is genetic,” she laughs by way of introducing herself. The Los Angeles-born daughter of Filipino immigrants, Kay relocated to Madrid, Spain, 11 years ago and is now married to a Spaniard. She approaches her work as a DEI consultant from an idea of multi-hyphenate inclusion. Like Erica, she points to Kamala Harris as an example. “When I refer to multi-hyphenates, I refer to people who don't necessarily occupy one clean-cut identity box,” she says, adding, “you know, very much like Kamala, like, she is a Black woman. She's a South Asian woman. She is also a second-generation daughter of immigrants like myself.”

The reverence with which she speaks of Kamala’s story mirrors the pride she now has for her own, although it took time for Kay’s self-regard to bloom fully. “I used to, for a long time, really struggle with the fact that my story was non-linear.” To some, she wasn’t entirely Filipino because, as a daughter of immigrants, she hadn’t grown up speaking the language. That fact presented challenges for her whenever the family went back to the Philippines. “Being ABF, an American-born Filipino, some people would call me a Twinkie: yellow on the outside, white on the inside.” Erica sympathizes, recalling how, as a child, she heard others use the term Oreo to describe people deemed Black on the outside, white on the inside. Kay sighs. “We eat our own, don’t we?”

This weaponization of differences into “palatable” taunts is not lost on Erica. “It's a way to try to make it sound like, Oh, it's just kind of funny. It's like, no, that is harmful and problematic AF. We don't do that.”

Kay agrees, adding, “You don't even realize that all of these identity boxes that, you know, outwardly are used to, in theory, promote inclusion and equity within our workplaces and how we report are actually also holding back the very communities that are struggling for that visibility and that equality, because we're using them as standards to judge one another.”

Kay has since embraced and incorporated her multi-hyphenate traits into her work as a DEI consultant. “I know how much more valuable I could be as a human when I was no longer boxed into the identity that somebody assigned to me, whether it was my own community or a majority community.” She has established methods to help clients break free from similar boxes and see others as they wish to be seen. “That's the approach and lens that I bring to this work.”

Wants, Needs, And Nuances

As an American living and working abroad, Kay is uniquely positioned to interpret issues from various angles. Take, for example, the lack of DEI resources available immediately following the death of George Floyd. “We...realized, at least from this side of the pond, kind of the outside of the US looking inward, how many companies were struggling with their own employees wanting to have these conversations about race and inequity, and didn't have the culturally contextual-appropriate materials or resources or facilitators that they needed to have these healing conversations.” From her vantage point, she sees that much more space is necessary so that the conversations’ subtleties and nuances are allowed to deepen throughout 2021.

Erica agrees there are myriad layers to the issue. “At the same time,” she says, “there are these differences of how they're willing to have these conversations or not because the way that that conversation is or is not happening, I think, is a huge part of it.”

While both Erica and Kay primarily connect with different types of businesses - for Erica, it’s individuals and solopreneurs; for Kay, it’s larger companies - Erica hasn’t seen much eagerness from either group to wholeheartedly cultivate a DEI practice. “I think we're both seeing these people that are like, yeah, this is what I'm supposed to do, and part of me even wants to maybe...part of the team does, but, aww man, what's going to happen when you come in here?”

Kay has experienced similar hesitation. “What I found is that, you know, the people who really want to roll up their sleeves and do the work are actually struggling to do so because they're worried about being called out or saying the wrong thing, or even knowing where to start to engage in the conversation.” Kay has also observed that overseas-based folks’ attempts to lead the necessary discussions about race, sexual orientation, or gender were further hindered by US-centric DEI material.

She discussed this in a recent episode of her podcast Inclusion in Progress, in which she compared, in broad strokes, DEI in the US versus Europe.

Among the many differences was acronym usage:

BIPOC used in the US in reference to Black, Indigenous, People Of Color
BAME used in the UK in reference to Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic

In the wake of last year’s reckoning, South Asians in the UK are rejecting BAME as a blanket term because of the country’s history of colonialism. It’s an ongoing debate that serves as a reminder to multinational companies that DEI language doesn’t seamlessly translate from the US to everywhere else around the world.

In addition to language, there are issues of cultural context and cultural readiness. Kay says, “Even within the UK, in addition to the race conversation, it's so intrinsically linked to colonialism and class, and that offers a whole other layer of emotions.”

Naturally, the challenges multiply exponentially as companies extend their global presence. “How are you going to, as a company, meaningfully leverage tools, systems, resources, and opportunities for behavioral change for your team so that they actually connect,” Kay asks, “when you're trying to do this one size fits all idea of let's copy and paste what we know we're already talking about in the US in terms of terminology, and just hope that it sticks when it lands, you know, in other parts of the world?” BIPOC and BAME, for example, may look and feel similar at first glance, but they speak to complexities between what’s culturally recognized on either side of the Atlantic. Additionally, language and acronyms constantly evolve to acknowledge a group/s that might not have been included in the first iteration.

“I think it actually also draws back to the point of where some people struggle,” Erica adds, “because they're like, this is set up, and as soon as it gets set up, I'm now going to get canceled because I'm a week late of realizing that, wait a minute, the finish line got moved again, and I have somehow screwed up.” While the “shifting goalpost” defence is often used as a way to opt-out of DEI work, Erica also sees it as a way of acknowledging the non-linear nature of the DEI journey. “For those that don't really want to do the work and put that effort in to unlearn and relearn and reprogram, these just become roadblocks. They become the speed bumps that you’re like, Oh yeah, I don't have to do it because this is going to be too hard and I'm going to get it wrong. So nevermind.”

Kay agrees. In her experience, the conversations happening within DEI spaces tend to fall to human resources, talent development, or talent acquisition in large companies. “Or,” she says, “a really, sort of compliance-driven, metrics-driven idea of DEI, which is why I think the focus for a long time got stuck on the diversity piece and not the work of inclusion.” DEI necessitates discomfort; DEI necessitates risk-taking - both of which exist in opposition to much of the compliance-driven initiatives that human resources departments oversee.

Studies In Cultural Contrasts

Human resources departments can better spend their time and energy considering how best to incorporate risk and discomfort alongside the traditional concerns under their purview. Of course, the caveat is that there’s no single “right” answer to apply to every issue. “It's more about if DEI is supposed to be creating these spaces for collaboration as well as compassionate collision; what is the new role of HR?” It’s another great question that she’s addressed in her podcast.

DEI work is not a single standardized global practice. Nuances in culture and understanding demand different strategies from one country to the next. Kay draws from her experiences working with organizations in Spain and the UK versus those of the US.

From her conversations, Kay has witnessed a massive gap in the collective European understanding of their role in the origins of systemic racism. While the US can plot specific events along the arc of history, beginning with 1619 and continuing over the next four hundred years, similar correlations are not acknowledged easily overseas. “Friends that I've come to know over the years and my colleagues that I work with have really not made the connection between who had the guns and ships first that could carve up the planet that then led to the systemic racism that we have today,” she says. That much of this historical context is omitted from school discussions (on both sides of the Atlantic) only exacerbates the problem as evidenced by Brexit. Voters simply ignored the events that prompted foreigners to immigrate to the UK, a sovereignty that once boasted the largest empire in the world, in the first place.

Even so, Kay looks to The Crown on Netflix for a glimmer of hope. “The current queen of England went from ruling the largest empire - British empire that covered more than half the globe to, you know, having one of her grandsons marry a biracial woman in her lifetime.” However, the UK and the world are not far removed from the ramifications dealt by Dutch, British and Spanish colonists. Systemic racism, colorism, and disparities in access to power remain deeply entrenched around the globe. Kay has noticed Europeans often view racism as ancient history or as a uniquely US problem, pointing to the multicultural European Union and, by extension, companies that operate within it as the antithesis of America’s past and present issues.

Additionally, she explains racism itself has a different meaning in Europe versus the US. As Black Lives Matter gained support across Spain, conversations powered by the movement had a distinct focus on her side of the pond. “I found that, you know, the way that we define racism because it's so intrinsically linked with colorism in the US, we don't remember that race is, as a social construct, predated in many cases a lot of the conversations that we're having right now about anti-Black racism specifically because, you know, if I talked to my Polish friends or Eastern European friends, they'll describe what they've experienced as racism.”

Learning cultural context to be better able to honor all of the experiences and conversations taking place is an essential aspect of Kay’s work. The Roma people, for instance, continue to experience massive human rights violations. Kay also offered additional examples of southern Europeans who’ve faced more racism than their northern counterparts and the historically poor treatment of Irish immigrants upon their arrival in America 150 years ago. The contextualization has helped Kay reframe US-centric knee-jerk reactions to and minimization towards non-Black experiences of racism while focusing on issues of the current Black Lives Matter reckoning. It’s a practice that requires Kay, as a facilitator of these conversations, to continually recalibrate the lens through which she’s viewing the issues. “I also have to be challenged as someone who's still learning about the history of the place that she lives,” she says.

The last difference that Kay singles out is how both sides talk about diversity. In America, the topic of diversity is front and center; at least it has been since 2020. While the dynamics of how Americans approach workplace conversations originated in white supremacy by way of Europe, Kay says there’s still much more room for advancement in terms of the European DEI journey. “The aperture, maybe over out in the US, is so much wider because it's so, so tangible and so visible, and here, it's minuscule by comparison.” Here again, she refers to the broader challenge of translating the conversation cross-culturally while still honoring the urgency of the problem at hand.

Erica expands on Kay’s point. “History is not a collectively accurate tool to figure out what happened to be able to figure out where we are,” she says. “We have to also understand so we don't keep repeating the same things and not having, you know, consistently and freely, clearly communicated information on what something is and why it is that way and what can be done to change it is a huge piece.”

Question what your normal is important. “When you do this one way, and you have one frame of reference that is yours, and you teach through this one limited lens, and it takes so very little to derail that by somebody giving you something that has screwed up the whole formula the minute that they open their mouths,” Erica says, “that's a fragility of your base that I think is not okay. And there has to be that space of being willing to say, ‘I don't know everything. My goal is not to know everything; my goal is to continue to know more,’ because knowing everything is, is an impossible feat - and there's very few things that I'm going to say that’s impossible.”

Contradictions, Collaboration And Key Differences

Once again, context plays a huge role in approaching DEI work; it’s vital in any job, let alone a practice that seeks to dismantle whole systems and thought processes which prohibit communities from accessing essentials for the well-being of body, mind, and soul. “I think that when that urgency comes up, what can happen is people will miss the fact that, in my opinion, the work that we do can very often be based in contradictions because of the fact it can't be fully one thing at all times for all people,” Erica says. She questions Kay on the conflicts inherent to doing this work, the struggle of honoring all experiences but inevitably noticing someone who’s raised their hand to ask, what about me?

Kay’s answer circles back to the language she uses to self-identify. “I keep coming back to this idea of humans are contradictions. Humans are, you know, multiple hyphens and multiple things,” Kay says and the work is honoring that person’s humanity, which doesn’t mean you agree all the time. “It’s what we do as DEI practitioners, as facilitators, as people who are coming at the work from different, maybe personal entry points, but really with the same goal.” Creating spaces where people value and respond to each other can only be achieved when they feel as safe in a moment of collision as they do in collaboration.

Erica takes this opportunity to ask Kay for key differences in how she works with her clients, noting that the conversations both of them have, even though contextually different, have similar base notes and nuances.

Once again, Kay draws on her personal experience, which allows her to witness and call out both privilege and bias. “I would say for me, there is an intrinsic nature of being in the middle that informs my work.” She explains that this middle existence is born out of her experience as Asian-American, a group often labeled a model minority in the US. “I really dislike that term, but it's just how, you know, we've been set up within American society in terms of how to have the race conversation.” She says this labeling unfairly places her (and other Asian-Americans) on a pedestal in conflict with other groups of color. “And,” she says, “you will end up being, or we end up being or striving for what our colleague, Michelle Kim terms, as you know, white adjacency.” Kay goes on to say that for a very long time she both benefited from white adjacency and strived for it. “I'm very comfortable in moving in majority white spaces because that is how I learned to survive, without realizing that that's what I was doing, until such time as I was made aware of my race.”

As a resident of Spain, living in a country that remained isolated under a dictatorship in the early half of the last century, Kay’s experiences are vastly different from those of her childhood in the US. Immigrants to Spain are boxed into broad categories that aren't necessarily in their favor, she explains. “And so here I'm just Chinese. And you can imagine what that looked like with coronavirus and walking around outside and what I've had to deal with in the street as well.” She is, as she explains, someone with an intimate understanding of privilege having existed in white spaces that operate within a false bubble of meritocracy, spaces where conversations advancing equity don’t have to exist.

Now that she’s older, moved abroad, and working as a DEI practitioner, Kay understands that privileged aspect of her journey differently. “But also [I] know intimately what it's like to be on the other side of somebody judging you for the box that they've placed you in unfairly.” That duality allows her to see where her clients and society are now and how both can change for the better in the future. She’s also proficient at translating messages from one cultural context to another without watering down its crucial points.

Closing Thoughts

Even with all of her impressive multi-hyphenate experience, Kay is aware that she won’t change all minds. ”But if I can insert a lens into how you see others, that isn't necessarily judging them for the first thing that you see, and at the very least acknowledging that we're more than the boxes that we put other people in, then I've done my work.” Whether through large-scale systemic interventions or affecting smaller changes, Kay facilitates whatever journey her clients need to become better leaders, teammates, and professionals.

Erica applauds this response for highlighting the personal as an intrinsic part of the professional. “Who and how we are is absolutely directly and inextricably tied to the way that we show up and choose to do any of our diversity, equity, and inclusion work separately or combined,” Erica says, reiterating the importance of finding a DEI professional with whom you connect as a person as integral to a successful process. DEI work is a relationship, not an ROI endeavor or a standardized business task. When that initial urgency comes up to “do something” or fix what’s out of alignment, many people rush to pick someone, anyone. If you want to wholly engage with the process, however, it requires time to find a practitioner who’ll provide you with what you need.

Kay adds that a client’s honesty and commitment to the process are also important. Slapping your DEI certificate on company branding is a good first step. Beyond that, though, what are the strategies for how you are going to get there? For example, how will your organization create healing spaces to accommodate voices that deserve to be centered? The reality is, your strategy may require separate facilitators to address different issues such as anti-racism or anti-LGBTQIA+ or gender diversity in hiring?

With so many aspects to DEI, Kay likens DEI work to a Swiss Army knife. Erica seconds the metaphor. “All of these tools that do all of these things and some of them do things that they weren't even actually designed to do but that's the perfect thing for that task at that moment in that situation. And that's what people need to understand.”

To assist folks in their search for a DEI partner. Kay offers a few tips.

Decide on a DEI vision that's aligned with your company; what do you would want to achieve within your organization?
Work backwards in terms of decentralizing the overall strategy, looking for ways to break the process down into micro-actions and steps.
Look internally or externally for a consultant, partner, or a facilitator to help you achieve each of those goals bit by bit.

Erica adds this important suggestion:

Know your why. What is your motivation for engaging with DEI work beyond being told you should do so?

“Not having your why, that entire purpose of what all of this is for” cautions Erica, “really does have you just kind of chasing your tail and it will have you putting in effort but, yet, not really understanding why it's not getting you there because there is no clarity on why you want to be there, why it matters.” She adds that clients cannot put an expectation on DEI practitioners to get you to a destination if you have no idea, where you’re going or why you’re taking the trip.

Guest Contact & Bio

Website

Podcast - Inclusion in Progress

Whitepaper - The Future of Work Culture: How Big Tech is Redefining DEI in a Remote World

As a Forbes-featured DEI Consultant & Remote Team Strategist, Kay Fabella has worked with companies like the IMF, Philips, Red Hat, and PepsiCo, to improve inclusive communication between diverse team members, to retain top talent and reduce turnover, and to build a culture of belonging to prepare companies for the future of work.

A Filipina American in Spain since 2010, Kay draws from her lived experiences as a “multihyphenate” woman of color, a daughter of immigrants, and an immigrant herself to build bridges for belonging.

She believes that more inclusive workplace cultures start with psychological safety to share non-linear stories — to embed empathy, expand worldviews, and increase employee engagement and innovation.

While she finalizes her first book on DEI, you can listen to her industry insights and interviews on her 5-star podcast: Inclusion in Progress.

Quoted

KAY FABELLA

I keep coming back to this idea of humans are contradictions. Humans are, you know, multiple hyphens and multiple things.

If I can insert a lens into how you see others that isn't necessarily judging them for the first thing that you see and, at the very least, acknowledging that we're more than the boxes that we put other people in, then I've done my work.

I want you to be able to interact with other people in front of you from whatever background, ability, age, race, culture of origin, language of origin, passport, you know, lived experience, and whether that's a collaborative moment or a collision moment, you feel safe to show up as yourself, as do they.

We’re a Swiss Army knife.

This is a long haul thing and whatever path you decide that's right for you and is aligned with your organization's vision, make sure that you're partnering with the right person at the right time to help you achieve whatever that micro-step is.

ERICA COURDAE

It's not up to you to decide how someone else should feel about the language that you feel comfortable using.

History is not a collectively accurate tool to figure out what happened to be able to figure out where we are.

There has to be that space of being willing to say I don't know everything. My goal is not to know everything. My goal is to continue to know more.

DEI is DEI is DEI is what people would love to think. And it’s not. It is absolutely not.

Who and how we are is absolutely directly and inextricably tied to the way that we show up and choose to do any of our diversity, equity, and inclusion work.