How Our Neurology Impacts Our Diversity and Justice Work w/ Dr. Jerome Lubbe

Episode Summary:  In episode 13 of The Diversity Gap Podcast, Bethaney sits down with functional neurologist Dr. Jerome Lubbe. They discuss a few of the neurological processes that impact our ability to navigate the terrain of multi-racial community. If you've ever wondered why its hard to talk about race, or why its difficult to understand a perspective outside of your own, listen in. You'll learn a bit more about how we are hardwired to respond to conflict, and you'll hear some insights to help you navigate this space better.

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, conversation, understand, experience, jerome, talking, happening, brain, question, diversity, person, migraines, race, bias, thought, book, lived, gap, space, enneagram

SPEAKERS

Bethaney Wilkinson, Jerome Lubbe

Bethaney Wilkinson  00:00

If you've listened to this podcast for any period of time, you've probably heard me mention, or tell different stories where I end up crying or getting overwhelmed. And I feel it in my body before I say something out loud. And, yeah, this happens to me all the time, it probably happens to a lot of you who are listening. But it's super interesting to consider that sometimes our our bodies are brains that they are wired to respond to things that are happening in our environment, before we even have the ability to understand what's going on. I can't think of a more common phenomenon than to have your heart or your mind or your body be triggered in a way when it comes to conversations on race and justice and diversity and all these things. And so wouldn't it be super interesting if we could understand some of the neurology and science that's going on behind the veil. Welcome to The Diversity Gap podcast where we are exploring the gap between good intentions and good impact as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion. My name is Bethaney Wilkinson, and I am your host. Hi, welcome to another episode of The Diversity Gap podcast. I am super glad you're here super honored that you take the time to listen to these conversations, to journey with me as I even learned the art of podcasting. And yeah, to just be present to what diversity, equity inclusion, what they mean for you and your life and your leadership. This is really fun work. And it's a huge privilege and honor to be a part of your story in a small way. So today, I'm really excited to share with you an episode or a conversation that I had with Dr. Jerome Lubbe. Dr. Jerome, he's my friend. But he is also a functional neurologist, which I'd never heard of before until I met this person. He is the CEO of his own practice, which is called Thrive Neuro Health located in Atlanta, Georgia. And he, in his practice, and I'll talk about it a little bit in this conversation. He partners with entrepreneurs and creatives and leaders and communities and families just with people who want to achieve optimize brain and body function. And so you might be wondering, why is there a neurologist on a podcast about diversity and race? Interestingly, I was sitting in a, like a lunch and learn session with Jerome a few months ago. And we were talking about identity and, and he just shared some super rich insights about what happens in our brains when we feel afraid. And when we can't tell the difference between perception and reality. And he just had all of these thoughts about what happens when people from different backgrounds and cultures try to come around a table to understand issues related to race and identity. And I don't know, it just like blew my mind, honestly. And I was like, wow, this is a critical piece of our work. Like we're talking about race, we're talking about justice. And we're talking about the systems that need to be transformed. But at the end of the day, the systems are LED and created and, and designed by people. And as humans, we have ways that we're wired. And so I just think it's super cool and interesting to consider how our brains literal wiring impacts our ability to listen, to learn to understand and to change directions, when we are dealing with such difficult topics. And so, this is a great conversation. I'm super pumped to share it with you, I hope you enjoy. Um, well, welcome to The Diversity Gap podcast. Yeah, of course, I'm really excited because, um, so for our listeners, I'm going to have Jerome share who he is and what he does. But I guess this was a few months ago, maybe at the beginning of the summer, you were doing like a really abridged version of some of your work around the Enneagram. With our intern team at Plywood. Yeah. And there were some things in that conversation that really illuminated some of the challenges we face in communities when we try to talk about race. And so that's why Jerome is here. I'm excited to unpack some of that. But Jerome, before we get into, like, who you are, and what you do, I start every conversation asking people, when did you first become aware of your race? Yeah, or ethnic identity?

Jerome Lubbe  04:34

Sure. I love that question, because, and we'll get into kind of who I am and my background, but specifically because that conversation and that question is very different for me than my counterparts. So if people see me from an outside aesthetic perspective, I'm six to 270 pounds. A white guy with a beard and the beard is red and the hair is brown and I just look like a typical everyday person. But my origins face is I was born in South Africa immigrated to the states on asylum status as refugees with my family in the early 90s in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we came over with $100.02 suitcases of bipolar grandmother and a parrot it was it was a start to a really strange movie or a bad joke. But what happened was we moved quickly from Knoxville into a very, very rural part of Northeast Tennessee called Mohawk, which was about 30 minutes outside of Morris town. And we lived 10 minutes down a gravel road and a house built in 1912 that we put in our own plumbing his eight year olds, and we worked in my dad's foundry and we cut our own firewood from the forest to heat the house, it was a very Oregon Trail kind of experience. And when we were going to the schools that we went to those schools didn't have any body of ethnic background that was diverse. They had no foreigners had no immigrants had no people of color, they had no indigenous, they were about as homogenous as you could get. And as an eight year old, walking into those environments in a school with an identical twin brother. I had no idea the differentiation in belief around color around race, until I got to the States. Because my dad spoke 13 tribal languages spoke for dialects of Swahili. We were raised in very different spaces and my eight year old counterparts. And to answer your question, the first time that I became aware of my race was when I would be sitting in a lunchroom with other kids who were mocking my brother and I, and saying that they wanted to mail us back to go back where you came from, to have the conversation around, you need to speak English. That's what we do around here. You need to speak with the accent that we have. And the the bullying proceeded from, from our first introduction as eight year olds, even to the point that we had to change high schools, when we were sophomores because of the amount of bigotry and just the amount of unacceptance that we had for being immigrant kids. And from the outside, if you took a photo of us, you wouldn't be able to tell which one was local and which one was foreign. But being an immigrant kid, especially someone who was very poor, I had no concept of the difference in race until I sat down and started being bullied for not being the type of white person that grew up in the Northeast Tennessee area. It was it was really enlightening as a young kid.

Bethaney Wilkinson  07:21

Yeah. Wow. Gosh, there's so many things in that, that I want to lean into. But the the first question that comes to mind is how have your ideas about race and even racism? Or I think the word maybe xenophobia? Is that like fear of the other fear of the immigrant? How have those things changed as you as you become an adult? And like you no longer live there? Like when you look back on those experiences? What thoughts or observations or reflections Do you have?

Jerome Lubbe  07:50

You know, I think there's, there's two main things that come to mind. For me. One is, I should say three things. One, I was inundated in a space growing up that was culturally diverse, from language to belief to background. So I, I wasn't aware of the benefit that I had of being raised in a household that didn't have so much bias, and didn't have so much segregation, or kind of mindsets. But I also didn't understand the second point of how different the experience was for the kids that I was growing up with in terms of their lack of travel, and their lack of their lack of diversity in terms of people, groups and communities. And I didn't understand the contrast between us except for the fact that it came across as me being the target of someone else's frustration and bullying. But as that transitioned into adulthood, I think the thing that really struck me in this, there's a, an experience that comes to mind for me is I started in my early 20s, especially when everybody wants to kind of differentiate, being really kind of self righteous, and a little bit of fain who humility and, you know, being awake to the conversation. I think I overestimated my understanding of how much I understood about racism because of my immigrant status because of my my ability to say I carry four passports, I'm a citizen in three countries and, and a resident in the US, I thought I was more educated than I was sure. And an example of this was even becoming more and more aware of that my confirmation bias on my end led me to believe I was more informed than I was about my own space where I may or may not be exercising intrinsic or, or kind of insipid racism. And I would never communicate that or say that about myself. And an example that I give of becoming more conscientious and more intentional about where do I have some bias? And is it showing up in ways that I didn't anticipate and an example of that was, I'm in the Living School with Richard Rohr at the moment, which is one of the most enjoyable things that I'm doing. And on one of the flights to Albuquerque, going, coming back to the States or coming back to Atlanta from out querque I sat in the very back row of the plane, and a black gentleman sat next to me and we both were next to each other in the aisle. And he pulled out a Michio Kaku book, which is a physicist, and he started reading the book on the physicist, the future of mankind. And the very first thought that I had was, huh, as black dude read and read in a physics book. And as soon as I said it to myself, I went that that wasn't cool. Because my initial thought was, for some reason, there was some part of my brain that automatically went, That's a book above his pay grade academically, that was the initial response. And for me to think that out loud, I ended up for the hour and a half of the rest of the flight because we were doing a transfer to Dallas. I was thinking through, what about my conversation in my own confirmation bias is leading me to believe if I see a black man reading a physics book, that that is strange, or that's uncharacteristic, right? Knowing that I have plenty of friends that are at Morehouse, and they're at all of the HBCUs, you know, or HBCUs, and all these places and going, but my initial thought was, that's, that's interesting. And what ended up happening is I actually leaned over to him, and I said, have you read some of cockys other books? And he goes, Yeah, I'm actually a physics professor in Tokyo. And this is one of the books that I'm reading to catch up on what we're doing for the syllabus. And then what automatically happened, especially because I'm a lover of academics, I'm a lover of, of knowledge and education, very, very quickly moved into a position where I knew that this guy was well above me in terms of academic prowess. But my initial response was almost this. Gosh, I think it was it's I'm trying to articulate the word that I have, but it was almost, um, it was patronizing. Like, the very first thing that I thought when I saw him with a book, my initial knee jerk reaction was, oh, that's, that's cute. That's an ending up having that dialogue. So to answer your question, I think part of it was I had such a heavy duty, full force, deep end experience with knowing that I wasn't like the other white kids that I was like. And I think that gave me a little bit of overconfidence, about knowing how much I understood about racism. But then the thing that's happened in my adulthood is going, I want to be as quick as possible to catch when my confirmation bias is not appropriate around race, and about anything that is related to me assuming that I have a hierarchy, or some sort of privilege over somebody else, especially in things that we don't normally talk about, like academia versus, you know, all of the other things that are a part of the conversation.

Bethaney Wilkinson  12:34

Okay, so here is a huge diversity gap. Well, I say they're all huge. So maybe that's not true. But this is, this is definitely one of them. I think that if you are a white person listening to this podcast, it can be really tempting to think that because you have people of color in your life that you love, whether you're married to them or their friends or their kids, it can be really tempting to think that you don't have any biases, because you have a person or multiple people, multiple people in your life who come from that background or identity. And, unfortunately, and honestly, that's just probably not the case. Having bias is a human experience. And it's not always informed by the close relationships that you have. It's informed by factors beyond that. And so if you're tempted to say, Oh, well, I can't be biased because I have people of color in my life. Just know that that's probably not true. And having people of color in your life that you love, isn't really a pass on doing the work of naming your biases, naming where racism may or may not be functioning in the space as you spend your time and doing the work to unpack and dismantle those things. So I just wanted to highlight that because I hear it a lot, either directly or indirectly. And I really think Jerome's approach to it, especially if you're a person who is white or white passing his approach, I think is super helpful and wise, like, just didn't know the importance of taking pause and considering, like, what are the biases I'm carrying? Yes, maybe I've had these experiences, but at the end of the day, still live in a country that's highly racialized. And, and yeah, there's work to be done to unpack and and dismantle the biases that we carry, no matter who you're in close relationship with. So just wanted to shed a little extra light on that. Okay, back to the conversation. Absolutely. I gosh, I thank you for that story. And um, it's interesting, because I think that for people who are for white people who either they have an immigrant experience or they're white passing, or maybe they are white person who's married cross culturally or cross racially or they're a white person who has children from a different race than them. I think that is a sneaky temptation to believe that Oh, because of This thing, then I don't have any bias or I don't have any, I don't believe any of the narratives about racism. And I think it's super helpful for you to tell that story because it I think it resonates with the experience of a lot of people. 

Jerome Lubbe  15:13

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, you know, it's one of the things where I mentioned, we taught in a similar space last year for the grace dialogues. And one of the questions that was asked of me, I'm the only white person in a room of 65, black people talking about fear, as it relates to African American and black culture. And I'm, I'm the white guy standing over the front, but I'm talking about the brain science behind it. And one of the things that I communicated was based on my lived experience, I know what the lived experience of poverty is, I know what the lived experience of losing parents in high school is, I know what the lived experience of an immigrant refugee kid fleeing the country in the middle of a night and leaving every I know all of those experiences. But no matter how connected I am, to any of the spaces that from a demographic and from an experience lead standpoint, correlate with people of other colors, and indigenous people. I've never woken up black, I've never woken up a person of color, I've never woken up an indigenous person. So I can correlate my experience empathetically from different kind of different cross cultural pieces that are lived experience. But I can't do that from an ethnic or racial perspective. And the more and more than I'm having that conversation that goes, I can appropriate those faces. And I can experience those faces, I can sit with someone and I can experience the same emotion of fear, or disheartened meant or abandonment or not belonging, I can connect with the emotion. But I can't say that I know what that lived experience is like, unless they're connecting to I know what feeling abandoned feels like I know what being bullied feels like. So I think one of the things that I've had to learn is, am I connection? Am I connecting with a with a common core lived emotion? Or am I trying to connect with the Common Core lived experience? Because if I connect with the live experience, I'm going to overestimate my understanding of what's happening, because it's not possible. So it makes sense.

Bethaney Wilkinson  16:59

It makes really good sense. And it's an invitation to just walk with so much more humility, to and just I even the thought even the fact that you were able to pause in that moment on the plane and interrogate that I know, that's something that you you practice, and that you do, for sure. Um, but even that, that decision to pause is so helpful. I think I think we would all learn so much more about Yeah, is this an emotion I'm connecting, or is this an experience I'm connecting? And how can? I don't know, I'd be more helpful situation?

Jerome Lubbe  17:30

Absolutely. And it's, you know, one of my favorite quotes, which is in the book that I released last month about the brain based model of the Enneagram. Is this really beautiful, there's a longer version of it by Mark Twain, but there's this paraphrased version that says, travel is the antidote to prejudice. And I think one of the things when you talk about what's that practice of me evaluating that, I think a lot of folks think that the travel is just an external process. But when you're doing inner work, you're traveling around your own landscape, discovering what have I, hidden, locked up forgotten to check in with just kind of abdicated responsibility to because for me to have that initial thought, it's not a conversation and be going, I need to be more well traveled, I need to have more dialogues with people of, of different backgrounds and different demographics have had more of that, in the 36 years I've been on the planet, the most of my counterparts will have in a room full of 100 people. So it isn't an external process. It is an external experience. And I think for me, a lot of the times with folks who look like me fit my mold, even the ones that are more awake or are more educated to the conversations around diversity. There's a very different experience for being externally travelled to reduce prejudice, and internally traveled around my own landscape to understand what is it about my own experience that I am prejudging not only someone else, but also the conversations around what I feel about, you know, we have really interesting conversations or if anybody's read about internal racism or bias around what we kind of prejudge with ourselves. I don't, I don't care what background you come from. Everybody's got their own process around how they judge their own response, sometimes not effectively enough, sometimes too excessively. So that travel is the antidote to prejudice is something that I've been thinking about a lot over the last three years and actually more So internally than externally.

Bethaney Wilkinson  19:20

So I that's kind of a good segue. I'd love for you to share with us. What do you do? How did you get into it? Because you're the only functional neurologist I've ever met in my life. Yeah.

Jerome Lubbe  19:36

Well, I'll give you I'll give you a very high level bullet point. I started having migraines when I was 17. As a senior in high school, got run over by a car when I was eight to head injuries in high school, hit by two separate drunk drivers before I was 21. My body in my head it had some some things happen to it. Well, over the course of nine years, went to 21 specialists Just to get a diagnosis that no one even knew how to treat or barely even pronounce is called a Chiari malformation. And I have compression on four sides of my brainstem due to some of those injuries. And that basically is like plugging the opening to a hosepipe. The problem is, the fluid coming out is going into my brain. And as a result of the reduced flow, or the the the increased pressure on pressure washing my brain by by plugging that space. So what ended up happening is I went to every provider that I could find and spent over $100,000, in the first five years of a young marriage, only to find out that the traditional community is very good at triage and damage control and, and figuring out how to keep you above ground. But they max out at certain points in terms of physical therapy and occupational therapy and recovery. Go to the alternative side incredibly gifted at wholeness and wellness and making sure that everything stays well if it is well. But the short story is no one really knew how to rehab a complex case to full recovery or make that attempt. So being that patient my undergrad is in digital animation and film and I used to do music full time with my brother. So I never intended to go into healthcare, I definitely don't look like a doctor. What I ended up doing was saying I really love the approach of the alternative community from a philosophical standpoint, but not their capacity from an academic standpoint, to understand how to deal with complex cases and rehab them. So I went and got my doctorate in chiropractic, but at the same time as doing the doctorate in chiropractic, I did about five times the required amount during school of the classes that are required to become board certified in functional neurology, you have to take 300 hours most people do it postgraduate I did 1100 hours concurrently before I graduated because that was my passion. I wanted to figure out how to take care of unresolved complex cases like myself. So I chase down the neurology and what it means when you do functional neurology is basically you're you're doing personal training for the brain. If you went to a personal trainer, and you're in the best shape possible, they're going to do a baseline and figure out what your strengths are to reinforce what your weaknesses are, in terms of opportunities. If you're in the worst shape possible, they're doing the same thing and going on how do we make this work? I'm doing that but with things like stroke, nonverbal, autism, pediatric brain injury, things like effects have downstream consequences from PTSD. And just moving into spaces of going if you're above ground, and we want your brain to work better, can we do that with non invasive, empirically driven, research driven evidence based practices that can actually not do that much different than fine tuning a guitar, you know, just seeing if they, if Fortunately, it's like an orchestra, there's a, there's tons of systems. So if you know how to evaluate them, and you know how to tune them individually, and specifically, it's pretty amazing what you can do, that you can always do with with things like prescriptions and general, protocol based PT and OT. So,

Bethaney Wilkinson  22:52

So when I heard you do your workshop thing on the Enneagram, we may or may not touch the Enneagram at some point in the conversation, but you broke down for me or for our group, kind of this, I think it was like the stages, it was connected to fear, anxiety, safety, all of these things. Can you talk to us about what's happening in our brains? And it might be different based on racial background, but what might be happening in our brains when we begin to talk about race, especially cross culturally?

Jerome Lubbe  23:19

Gotcha. That's a that's a monster question. I appreciate it. Let me let me answer it first by what's happening in everybody's brain that produces a basic survival strategy great, and how that would be different based on race and be different based on cultural bias of, of generations of previous experience. But every human being across the board 100% of the experiences that they have in their brain are going to start with a three step process. It's all subconscious. So before I even have a conscious thought of answering your question, there has been a very quick protocol that goes through and I'm over generalizing, but a very quick protocol of, am I going to survive this space? Is it life threatening? If I quickly realize it's not a survival a situation to what degree Am I safe? Because I may not be in a life threatening situation, but I may not feel comfortable. If I quickly evaluate that go, Okay, I'm not in an unsafe space. The third step is to go what degree of gratification am I going to have what how self gratifying is this? And interestingly enough, this is a huge piece around the racial conversation and bias and community and relationship engagement is gratification is a twofold piece on a continuum. It's not simply making yourself feel good, are moving towards things that are pleasurable. It's actually to the degree that you can avoid things that are uncomfortable or painful. So I go is am I surviving? Am I safe? Is this gratifying? If I'm trying to do something gratifying? Am I mitigating and minimizing pain? Or am I increasing pleasure? All of that is happening subconsciously, and out of 100% of what happens to us on a daily basis. 95 to 97% is subconscious. It has to be for a survival strategy and an efficiency standpoint. You don't need a CEO On the front of manufacturing on the factory floor, overseeing every device being built, it's inefficient. But when you talk about that EMI surviving, am I safe is this gratifying. You can move in those gratification places in different ways, like I could move towards pure reward and just do things that feel good. But as a migraine patient as somebody who's had a history of 100 plus migraines per year for 18 years, if I go from 2017, at 117, migraines, and four days without a headache, to 2018, with 25, migraines and 18 days without a headache, if you look at the statistics for people who experienced migraines, a year with 250, headaches, and 25 migraines is not an enjoyable year. But in comparison to 100 migrants, because I've minimized the degree of pain that I've experienced, it is more pleasurable by contrast. So you're talking about this dynamic of saying, okay, even before I step into the room, my brain is evaluating is this going to eat me? Am I going to need to eat it? Am I going to be safe? For how long am I going to be safe? And if I'm long enough, if I'm here for long enough to be safe, can I engage in something that reduces pain and increases pleasure, all subconsciously on autopilot? So when you move into that and go, Okay, well, how in the world am I going to apply that to a racial conversation? A very easy example that we talked about grace dialogues is the difference in what happens to somebody physiologically and in their body when they get pulled over. If I don't have a bias of my cultural experience, my background, everybody in my family communicating the appropriate ways to behave when you get pulled over. That's not something that as a white person, when I get pulled over my intrinsic fear is this could be painful. And if it is going to be painful, my degree of concern about the pain may be tied to a ticket, not to a not to a terminal situation not to not to a death sentence, right? So and these are the hard conversations that have to be had for somebody to go, I don't understand how somebody could be so biased to think that just getting pulled over could be life threatening. Well, is there anything in my Is there anything in my lived experience? That communicates to me, it could be if the last five years haven't communicated that to you, you're asleep, right? But then you look at what is the confirmation bias that says, and do I have a higher probability of being treated disproportionately as a result of being a different color? When I get pulled over? Yes, statistically, if you're not looking at the evidence, you're also asleep, right? So if you take in all of this information and say, generation after generation has communicated that there's a cultural bias, that there's a race bias. Now we're talking about a power bias and something like getting pulled over. And now we're talking about the lived experience of knowing that if you get pulled over, it could be life threatening and life ending. And when people go, Well, no one's ever had that happen to them. Why would they be afraid? The easy example that I give is how many people know where they were when 911 happened. But the thing is, how many people were in New York when 911 happened? So why is it that most people can tell you where they were, what time of day, it was, who they were, with what they were wearing, and possibly even what they were eating, because it was a breakfast time. And the reason being is not because you had a real proximal possible injury that was going to happen. But your brain is watching that and to a degree until it's told otherwise thinks that's happening to you. So what happens when somebody who is a single black mom with three kids is watching somebody get choked out, or somebody's getting shot in a car, and they're watching it on the TV, and they're communicating to their kids. This is the process that you go through to try and avoid that happening to you. So when somebody is in a car at 17 years old, and they get pulled over for the first time, their brain is going to automatically start going through all of the process and protocol to go, I need to reduce pain, there's no way that this is going to be enjoyable. Am I safe? Probably not. Could this be life threatening? Definitely. And then all of those things are happening. And if I don't understand as a white person that that particular experience is not a lived experience for me either culturally, or as a race or as an individual, but it is for other people. And I have to understand that it doesn't mean it's had to have happened to you, your brain just has to have seen it. In order to go, I know what that would feel like. And another easy example where people are like, I don't think that it's as probable for it to be that powerful just to visualize it. If you've ever gone to a comedy and laughed, if you've ever gone to a horror film and got scared, if you've ever listened to a song and gotten emotional, your brain is processing that it doesn't know the difference between perception and reality. Because as soon as you have that emotional response, your brain thinks the movie, the song, or the experience on the TV is happening to you until told otherwise. And if we don't know that's part of the way that our brains work and we're built. We don't have enough grace and compassion to understand that you've got an A race of people. Everybody falls under a bipoc umbrella that has been inundated with trauma, generationally, and culturally, every single day of the week compared to as a white person. I have had the experience of travel and I've had the experience of and when I say travel as an immigrant kid, I know the trauma of coming to the States with Nothing. But that was a singular event that had impact downstream that affected our lives for the nine years, it took us to get our green cards. But at some point it ended. Right, my experience ended. And I think for folks who aren't in the spaces where they either haven't processed the experience, or they don't live through the experience, there's a really easy kind of three step factor to understand why this is so different for different places. And it's tied to the things that create attachments or associations for us what's called the limbic attachment. 911 is a limbic attachment for a negative experience, having your first guess, if it was really enjoyable, positive limbic experience for me not so great. It wasn't great. So very negative experience. Well, I can't smell wintergreen gum ever, because it's just not. It's not like this, the smell of it just triggers of the 14 year old version of me that's just like that. That was a that was an utter fail, right? I say this to be light hearted. But what happens when you form really positive, powerful connections, like the day you got married? Or when somebody passes away? And you remember that grief? What's happening is there's three factors of intensity, frequency and duration, meaning, how strong is it? How often does it happen? And how long does it last?

Bethaney Wilkinson  31:12

Alright, so this is so good. I really love how Jerome breaks down. How when we are going through our days, on a subconscious level, we are always asking, Is this server? Is this safe? Will I survive it? And is this pleasurable? I'm not sure if I have it in the right order, survival, safety gratification, maybe that's the correct order. And so when we show up to dialogues, or conversations on race, especially in the workplace, it's really helpful for me to consider that our brains as humans, are questioning, hey, will I survive this? Because for a lot of us, having constructive cross cultural racial conversations isn't always something that we do feel like we can survive. So A will I survive this B? Is this a safe interaction? Can I make it safe? What does it take to create safety? And then lastly, is this gratifying? I have had, I can't really think of many cross racial conversations, especially in the workplace that feel gratifying, you know, like, maybe we learn a lot, maybe it's constructive, but it doesn't always feel good. And so and I know there's like a whole world of thought out there. I'm pleasure activism and making activism feel good. And I'm here for that. I think that's great. But it's really helpful also to consider like, if we are leading this work in our organizations, and on our teams, people are asking, like, am I going to survive? Is this safe? And then lastly, will this feel good? And so? I don't know, that's just really, it's helpful for me to consider that there are these very human instincts in the room that get in the way, maybe they're not on the way but they're at work, as we are trying to do our diversity work. And it makes me wonder what can we be doing on our teams to create atmospheres and environments where we can ensure a degree of safety and maybe even make the experience gratifying to some extent. I also wanted to throw in here at this point that you'll hear Jerome use the phrase bipoc A lot. That is by POC, bi POC, it's an acronym for black indigenous people of color. This is a term that I outline in the diversity gap conversation Guide, which you can find on the website. Okay, that's all I have in my notes. Let's get back to the conversation.

Jerome Lubbe  33:31

Well, if you look at 9/11, 9/11 from a frequency standpoint, technically happened once the intensity was profound. But what most people don't think about? What was the frequency of the News, the news coverage? And how long did that news coverage last? So you take a profoundly intense singular events, and you make it a six month endeavor that never relents, and everybody gets a limbic attachment in that connection and that association globally, right? Well, what happens if, as a white kid growing up in a Tennessee town, I got bullied, but at some point that stopped happening? I got out of high school, and I didn't experience that in college, I found ways to reframe, make light of it and make it an enjoyable joke that I'm the white African American guy named Jerome. That's a rarity, right? That's the technical experience that I've had. But you compare that to folks who are in bipoc spaces who are going through the trauma that's happened generally, generationally every single day, and you ask them, Do you have an experience? This is exactly what was both the the really heart wrenching, but really profoundly honest and transparent piece at the end of Tallahassee Coates book between the world of me, he's saying, I have hope, but I also understand that I'm not naive enough to think that there's an end to all of this. And I think at all of that conversation, where it's like that, that dark kind of hope and that space of going I'm really I'm expressing and connecting to the reality of pragmatically what this is, but not being naive to the fact that for you, it may be a one time event You showed up at a nonprofit event and you gave a donation to the people that you feel are suffering, patronizing them, like the person on the plane reading the book. And you think that that's the if the endeavor to end racism and to connect cultural places. But what you're not realizing is once you leave and you go home, and the experience of trauma has ended for you, it hasn't for other people. Yeah. And if the intensity is there every day, and the frequency is there every day and multiple times a day and multiple times an hour, because it's running through the subconscious, that somebody is constantly on high alert to go, what is the next possible thing that I will say, Where's the tone, there was a video that came out just last month of it felt like I was watching the the mid 50s, again, of a young black man who was outside of a restaurant and who was being accosted by a couple of people for looking at a white woman, Mike, this is this is not the mid 50s. Right, this is 2019. But if you don't understand that somebody's constantly cataloged in all of the ways that they have to protect themselves, because of the belief and the perception that is rooted in actual experiences, even for them for other people that they see as themselves, you don't understand that the intensity, the frequency, and the duration, how strong it is, how often it is, and how long it lasts, is not an individual event, it's a lifetime. And until we honor that conversation and realize that that fear is really, really legitimate every day of the week, yeah, then you start to get resentful as a white person trying to do effective social justice and entrepreneurship work, that you think your impact should have mitigated the issue, you haven't done enough impact and mitigate centuries of issues that are flowing through people's experiences that are being relived. And it's a bigger conversation on how you, you improve the health and quality of that. But I think first is, especially as a clinician, there is no way in hell, I'm going to be able to figure out how to comprehensively treat somebody, if I don't comprehensively understand their issue, I have to holistically see it, rather than trivializing it as an individual silo experience, because people are allowed to have more than one problem. They're also allowed to have more than one solution. But if I don't start the conversation by going God, this is freaking huge. This is a constellation of things, a universe of issues, that if I have the ego and the bravado and the hubris to think that I'm going to step in and solve this, because I did a one year endeavor and social enterprise I'm going to I'm going to do is reinforce toxic charity, and it's not going to be helpful.

Bethaney Wilkinson  37:20

Yeah. Wow, gosh, you unpack so much helpful stuff there. And I have a couple of questions as offshoots from that I think my first thought is about just how we bring all of that to the work took literally to work every day. And we create these like diversity and inclusion strategies, which, on one hand, I'm here for it like I actually I believe, we need to create metrics, and we need to have better hiring pipelines and all these different things. But then like, once everyone gets in the room, do we have the skill set to wade through what you just described? Not only, like, well, not only externally, but internally, like in our internal landscape space. And so I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that, like, what can teams or even just like, I don't know, friends who are from different racial backgrounds who work together? Is there anything that we can do to be better about, quote, unquote, diversity work in light of what you just described?

Jerome Lubbe  38:27

Yeah, I mean, the again, that's a, there's a lot of factors in that. But if you're talking about and this is kind of the way I have to think when I work with patients, it's great to do a 20 hour intensive with somebody, like that child that I talked about who's run over by a dump truck, I'm doing 20 hours of work with that individual person in a week. That doesn't work statistically for everybody. And also that mom is not going to be able to go home and do more than 20 minutes of at home exercises a day. So how do we translate that gap? Because that's a monster gap. You're talking about diversity gaps, but we're also talking about practical application gaps when you leave the boardroom or you leave the workplace. Yeah, that that implementation gap is very, very significant. So the first thing that comes to mind for me is Sue, I think it leaves more foolproof, or at least more more likely to succeed in terms of effective seed planting. Because what we're talking about here, I think, is most people having a conversation around harvest, when most people should be having a conversation around seed planting. You're trying to say that the fruit needs to show up and you haven't done the work to take the years that it takes to even cultivate the soil before you even plant the sow. Right. So there's a very big difference between going I expect something to change. But what is the length of time because if you birth something prematurely, it will be on life support forever.

Bethaney Wilkinson  39:39

Yeah. All right. Wow. I am so challenged by that metaphor that Jerome just shared. Just that there are so many of us out here looking for the harvest. You want to see the fruit. We want to see the gift of being in diverse and inclusive communities. And yeah, We haven't sown the seeds. I mean, this really challenged me because I do think of my work like this podcast and other things that I do as sowing seeds, you know, trying to drop out questions and conversation starters to get the work going. And yet, when I'm called in to support an organization on this level, a lot of our talk is around outcomes. It is around how do we diversify our team? And how do we get the right people in the room? And, and these sorts of really important questions, but I'd never considered that. Those questions are our outcome harvest questions, when really we need to be talking about the soil, we need to be talking about cultivation, we need to be talking about what is the work that we are doing so that in 3, 5, 15, 20 years, this place looks the way the way we hope I say all the time that diversity is a culture, you create an ecosystem that you cultivate. And yeah, I hadn't considered the fact that some of the outcomes we're looking for, they just take a long, long time. So I love I love that metaphor. It's super helpful. So my my last question to you, and this is, I asked everyone this question, when you look at society, what are the biggest diversity gaps that you see? You can define it however you want to? And then how can we close them?

Jerome Lubbe  41:37

Gosh, what a great question. Even though I've heard it, because I've listened to all your podcast I specifically don't manufacture. So like I, I left myself a blank slate, I should have seen that coming. I think you know, the interesting thing for me, I think, probably the largest gap. And it's because of my lived experience as a patient. It's my lived experience growing up being bullied, being an immigrant kid, being a twin, that was 85 pounds heavier than my identical twin brother when I graduated high school. So many other things. I think probably the biggest diversity gap, not only internally, but externally is in compassion. And compassion, by definition is suffering with someone. And I think most of us if we're honest, have never really sat with someone else when they're suffering and understood that the depth of it, and especially understood the contrast of the fact that we have never suffered to that degree. So I can't empathize with you. I can be with you and suffer with you and actually see what it looks like to model in the mirror and say encounter that, but not try and own it. But then on the other side of that there's so many people that I work with that have never sat down and gone. Do you understand that your all of your survival strategies and all of the ways that you've formed an identity or protective mechanisms around what hurt a lot for you? And do you understand that in your own relative way, not comparing or contrasting to another person, based on your margin and your threshold, you have suffering that there is a high probability has not been reconciled, addressed or even talk to. And I think until individuals start to really be able to sit with what their own personal lives trauma is, and not compare it because comparison kills creativity, right? If I compare my trauma, this happens all the time with migrants, people come in and go I had the worst headache of my life, but it's not your migraines. I had two migraines this year, but it's not your migraines, I have developed a different degree of stamina and efficiency. And my threshold is significantly different. I've got 55 migraines this year, it's it's more than doubled last year, and it sucks, still better than the previous 17 years. So when I look at 55, migraines this year, and three days without a headache, it's still a ton of margin for me. I'm not at threshold, the highest I've ever had is 117 in a year. So I'm still halfway. So what my highest level has been. So when I talk to somebody who's had to, I can't tell them you haven't heard the way I've heard, I communicate to them and said, based on your lived experience, you exceeded your own threshold. What does it look like for you to figure out how to be healthy as a result of that experience? And then going because of my amount of suffering? Am I uncompassionate? Or do I have a lack of compassion to someone who's suffering because they haven't suffered to the degree that I have, but I haven't recognized that threshold is different. So I think for me the biggest gap and this is so heavily because when I answer your question, I want to answer it in something that has more of an origin space conversation that has a larger sphere of influence, then academic understanding or educational encounters or, you know the opportunity to sit with people on a daily basis. I'm talking about the wellspring piece of if I stop If I stopped poisoning the well at the well source, I don't have to keep filtering everything I do downstream, I have changed the quality of what is coming out of me as a human being by default. And I think if everybody starts to understand from a compassionate standpoint, we have to have self compassion and self love, which is still a very strange term for people to say, but to love yourself is not a negative, to be compassionate towards yourself and self advocate and agency are not negatives. But we're doing that externally so much that we forget to do it internally. And if we understand our own suffering, and we reconcile it, and we can hold it, I think it's so much easier for us to connect with other people that are suffering in ways that we go, man, I don't know what that's like, but I know what that feels like when you have that particular connection with being overwhelmed, burned out or over your threshold. I know what feeling like exceeding my I know what exceeding my threshold feels. So can I can I hold that space? And if I can be more compassionate to myself and other people, I think every other space that people are walking in, you naturally draw the purse strings together and bring everything closer to actually have the conversation of going, what do we do about this? Because the first question has to be Who are we in all of this individually and recognizing other people is subject to subject rather than the other?

Bethaney Wilkinson  46:17

Right? Yeah. Wow. Jerome, thank you.

Jerome Lubbe  46:22

My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Yes. 

Bethaney Wilkinson  46:25

And sharing your story and pulling out all the metaphors to help us understand has been such a gift.

Jerome Lubbe  46:32

It's such a pleasure and an honor. I really appreciate that. Thank you.

Bethaney Wilkinson  46:44

Thank you for listening to The Diversity Gap podcast. If you've been challenged or inspired by what you've heard, please rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. If you have thoughts or questions I'd love to hear from you connect with me at thediversitygap.com or on Instagram at The Diversity Gap. This episode was produced by DJ opdiggy for Soul Graffiti Productions.