July 8, 2020

Intermittent Racism and Societal Gaslighting, with Sara Taylor

Episode 53:

Sara Taylor earned a master’s degree in Diversity and Organizational Development from the University of Minnesota. She served as a leadership and diversity specialist at the University of Minnesota for five years and as director of diversity and inclusion for Ramsey County, Minnesota for three years.

Sara is the founder and president of deepSEE Consulting and has worked with companies as large as Coca-Cola, General Mills, 3M Company, AARP, and numerous others. She has a new book, “Filter Shift: How Effective People See the World,” that explores how our unconscious is actually making choices and decisions for us, all without our knowing — and how to change that.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

  • Sara discusses the impact of a recent post listing the names of Black individuals who were killed or experienced racism during everyday activities like walking home
  • How Sara’s pain, frustration, and anger after George Floyd was murdered caused her to feel a rawness that her family’s loved ones didn’t understand the pain they were experiencing
  • How Sara’s unique perspective as a white woman married to a black man with a mixed-race family has shown her two distinct worlds, with privilege and advantage when she is alone and a world of racism when she is with her family
  • Sara shares her own list of the places and situations in which she has experienced bias and racial discrimination with her family
  • How Sara’s own son was stopped and questioned by police simply for walking, on an almost weekly basis
  • Why the fact that it isn’t every walk makes systemic racism all the more insidious and traumatic and make it easy for outsiders to dismiss and victims to second-guess themselves
  • Why there are distinct parallels between systemic racism and familial dysfunction, and why gaslighting plays a major role in both
  • Sara shares the definition of gaslighting from Wikipedia and explains why it applies both to disfunction within families and racial disfunction in society
  • Why recognizing racism and acknowledging that it happens is the key to fighting back against the collective gaslighting

Additional resources: