The Power of Privilege: Tiffany Jana at TEDxRVAWomen

[audience clapping]

Woman in audience: Woo! Tiffany Jana!

Tiffany Jana: So as you just heard,
I'd like to talk to you today

about privilege, diversity,
and giving back.

But honestly, when I hear
introductions like that,

they make people
sound so spectacular,

so I'd like to offer another
possible introduction for me.

"Tiffany Jana started college
when she was 15 years old.

She dropped out at age 18,
got married way too young,

survived a teenage pregnancy at 19,
was on food stamps

while surviving domestic violence,
so she finished college online,

started her first business,
tanked that business,

got divorced not once -- but twice --
and married three times,

let's welcome her to the stage!"

[audience clapping and cheering]

That paints a very different picture,
but that is reality.

That is the truth of who I am,
and I am nothing without my failures.

It's part of my invisible diversity.

So I've survived a lot
of really difficult things

with help from some
really amazing women,

and it has taken me a
long time to get here,

to the point where I'm standing on a stage
at a TEDx event speaking to all of you.

But for a long time I was fixated
on all of the injustices

that had happened to me,
and the injustices in our society.

Now I don't know if you guys know this,
but I'm going to let you in on something:

I'm a black woman.

I know, right, a bunch of you
don't even see color,

so you didn't even notice,
but I'm just saying!

[Audience laughing]

So I was frustrated that some people in
our society had more privilege than I did.

I was frustrated that when
I walked into a job interview,

I had to deal with the stereotypes
and assumptions that

other people had of me
before I even walked in the door,

that I had to work twice as hard
to be seen as equally competent,

that when I travel, airport security
searches through my hair!

I was frustrated that our society
has bought into a belief system

that some human beings
have more value than others,

that some people are perceived
as more intelligent than others

simply because they have
a different skin color,

or that some people are seen
as more natural leaders

because of their height,
or their gender.

I mean, come on!

The more I thought about what
other people thought of me,

and what other people had done to me,
the less I was able to believe

in my full potential, and that's
one of the problems with privilege.

When society tells you that you
are worth less than somebody else,

it's easy to start believing that.

All of that started to change for me
when I learned the story of

one of Richmond's most remarkable women,
Maggie Lena Walker.

Maggie Walker had every reason
to focus on the injustices of her day

and to fixate and complain on
the privilege that she didn't have.

By contemporary standards,
she didn't have very many advantages.

She was born a servant, the near descendant
of enslaved Africans, and a woman.

But even in her day,
she had some privilege.

She was literate, well educated,
highly respected, employed,

and, as strange as it sounds,
she was fair-skinned in a society

that devalued dark skin,
and that was a privilege.

Maggie Walker became a teacher,
a wonderfully acceptable occupation

for a young lady in her day.

Then she became a
social enterprise executive,

defying all of the
normal conventions.

As a social enterprise executive,
she created hundreds of jobs,

through a 20-state insurance cooperative,
and a department store through

a fraternal order called St. Luke's.

As if that wasn't enough,
this woman chartered a bank.

Alright, no small feat
for a black woman in 1902!

Maggie Walker did not allow
the obstacles that society put

in her path to prevent her
from achieving greatness.

Instead, she used the privilege
she had to become

the first female bank president
in the United States of America.

What's more important,
and more impressive,

is that she didn't use
her privilege to simply

gain notoriety and wealth for herself;
she used it to improve conditions

for the men, women, and children
in her community and across the country.

Now, I have had the distinct privilege
and honor of sharing Maggie Walker's story

with thousands of people
through a one-woman play

called The Penny Executive by Foster
Solomon at the Science Museum of Virginia.

Maggie Walker's story changed my life.

It inspired me and it gave me resillience
when I was at the lowest point in my life.

So you can imagine how my heart
grew three sizes when I found out

a few weeks ago that Maggie Walker
was my great-great-aunt twice removed.

[Jana laughing]
[audience clapping]

Not exactly blood relation, but I would
have been invited to the family reunion

and eating the same potato salad,
and that is good enough for me!

So I have other relatives
who survived the odds

despite all of the things that were
sort of working against them.

A gentleman by the name of
John Groves was a literate Virginia slave.

He was my great-great-grandfather,
and he joined the Union Army

when the troops marched
through the South.

Literacy was a privilege during slavery,
and my family only had it because

John's white father
was also his owner,

and he chose to educate
his half-black son.

A white slave master used his privilege
to break the law and help mitigate

the effects of racism on his offspring
because he knew that his skin color

would be a liability
for the rest of his life.

That one small act
of sharing privilege

helped me land on this stage
generations later.

The gentleman in the far right-hand side
of this photograph is my grandfather,

and John Groves's grandson.

His name was Harry Groves, and person--
he was just accomplished beyond belief.

I honestly don't have time
to tell you all of the

amazing things that my grandfather did.

I will tell you he was a
very accomplished attorney,

and one of the ways he
used his privilege

was to help fight for the
rights of senior citizens

in the United States of America.

Now, does anybody notice anything
about this picture in particular?

Do you recognize anybody?
Anything look familiar?

Go ahead, say it, don't be shy.

Martin Luther King, Jr.,
yes -- you're fine!

That doesn't just look like
Martin Luther King, Jr.--

that actually is him!
You're good, it's okay! [laughing]

So I put this up here to show you
that I have had this picture for ages,

and I never noticed the father
of the American Civil Rights Movement

in the center of that picture
because all I could see

was my granddaddy,
my family member, okay?

I-I, literally, was
completely blind to that.

So my question for you is:

What are you missing
that is right in front of you?

Sometimes you have to change
your frame to really see people.

I changed my frame
by telling Maggie Walker's story

and by learning about the obstacles
that my family overcame,

and in doing so,
I was able to see some things

that I had been missing
that were right in front of me.

I was so fixated on the
privilege that I didn't have

that I missed much of the
privilege that I do have.

I missed the fact that being an Army brat
and having international experience,

and being multilingual,
and having a great education,

and a mom with a PhD
and a dad with an MD

all gave me plenty of
opportunities for success,

and that's one of the traps
our society lays for us.

We think of privilege as something
that you either have, or you don't have.

It's like a switch;
either it's on or it's off.

And if we allow ourselves to focus
on the privileges that we don't have,

then it's really easy for us to
become blind to the ones we do have.

And privilege can blind
those of us who have it!

At least, that's what
my husband tells me.

My husband is a white male
heterosexual Christian

who grew up in a wealthy suburb
with a great public school system.

That guy had a lot of privilege.

And what he tells me is that some people
who have privilege can't even see it.

Some don't even want to
acknowledge that it exists,

because why should they?

You don't need to see it to survive
if you have enough of it.

But the thing is, if you excelled
in college, were offered a great job,

and are working your way up
towards that corner office,

then the idea that even a
small amount of your privilege

might have come from the fact
that you have a certain skin color

or a certain gender or were
born in a certain country--

that might shed a little bit of doubt
on the cause of your success,

and that's a difficult pill to swallow.

Privilege also does not necessarily mean
that you are guaranteed a perfect life.

You can have abundant privilege and be
completely unfulfilled, completely empty.

So I'm sure that here are a bunch of you
who are sitting in your seat right now,

maybe looking at your program
and hoping that the next speaker

will be a lot funnier, maybe a little bit
more inspiring-- [laughing]

maybe talk about something
less uncomfortable!

But the fact of the matter is,
sometimes we need to be

a little bit uncomfortable in order
to understand the power that we have

to effect a change on our lives, and
to effect a change on the lives of others.

Now I've got a question: How many
millennials do I have in the audience?

Are there any Millennials?
Woohoo, Millennials!

[Single cheer from audience]

Gen-X-ers?
Got any Gen-X-ers out there?

Alright, excellent, I'm not telling you
which generation I'm in,

but it's one of those, um, so...
[laughing]

So I know that a lot the
Gen-Xers and Millennials

have a hard time understanding
why we're still focusing on diversity,

because guys,
things are so much better now,

and it's true,
they really are so much better.

We only read about the horrors that
surrounded the Civil Rights Movement;

we don't have to live through them.

But the other thing
I know about our generations

is that we are very passionate about
making the world a better place,

and we can't do that if we don't
deal with the legacy of diversity

and understand how decades of
institutional bias continue to

affect our society in ways that
benefit some people more than others.

Whether we like it or not, whether
we did it on purpose or not,

the fact of the matter is white families
still have six times the wealth

of black and Latino families,
and that gap is getting wider.

It's not getting better.

The Great Recession had a
much larger impact

on Hispanic and Black fam-- workers,
than it did on white workers.

We have mountains of literature
that tell us that men and women

are still being treated differently
in the workplace,

from income disparities
to board representation.

A famous Yale study sent out
two copies of identical resumes

to science professors
across the country.

The only difference between the resumes
was the name and the gender of that name.

The fictitious male applicants were
offered more job opportunities,

higher starting salaries,
and seen as more competent

than their female counterparts
with the exact same resumes.

So why am I being a Debbie Downer
and telling you all of this?

[Laughing]
I'm telling you all of this

because race still matters.
Gender still matters.

Society still suffers from the fallacy
of the hierarchy of human value.

Privilege still dictates
who get job interviews,

who gets hired, and
who gets promoted.

So for those of us who want
to make the world a better place,

we simply cannot achieve that
without dealing with the legacy

of diversity and privilege.

I had my a-ha moment when I finally
decided to embrace my privilege,

and release the grip that
loss and lack had on my life,

when I recognized that I had the skills
and the resources and the role models

to become a social enterprise
entrepreneur, my whole life changed.

I could have taken my privilege
and stuck it in a little corner

and used it all for me,
but I learned about this

social enterprise movement and I decided
to start a Viriginia benefit corporation,

and become part of the
global B-Corp movement,

so that I could use the power of business
to help solve complex social problems

like the ones we've been talking about,
like racism and inequality.

The bottom line, folks,
is that we all have privilege.

So I invite you and I challenge you
to look into your areas of privilege,

figure out what they are,
and use them for good.

Acknowledge the advantages
that you have,

and use them to restore equity
wherever you see bias.

You are not powerless against
institutional bias, or unconscious bias.

You have power to make
a difference in this world.

I want you to remember the humanity
of the people around you,

the people you work with,
the people on the street.

In my line of business,
the vast majority of the challenges

that I help deal with in workplaces
and in society all come back to the fact

that we forget that we are all human,
that we are all in this together.

Remember people's humanity.

Change your frame and see people as
part of your extended family.

You don't have to like them all!
Heaven knows we all

have family members that drive us nuts,
but that is part of being human.

So I just want to leave you

with the notion that if
you're a little uncomfortable,

or any of these ideas
might have challenged you,

no one in this room,
none of us here,

and arguably none of us on the planet
at this time, created this mess.

We're all stuck with it, though, and it is
going to take all of us to make it better.

[Audience clapping and cheering]