Have we really had a reckoning when it comes to racial equity? Is being “woke” enough?

Michele L. Norris, in a December 18, 2020 opinion piece for the Washington Post, challenges all of us to question this. Have the numerous Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and attention we saw in 2020 really constituted a reckoning with regard to racial equity?

In her words:

“It took a particularly heinous act of police brutality — an officer kneeling on a man’s neck for almost nine minutes — to convince a majority of Americans that racism is a problem and a daily reality.

Did that happen in part because we were in a period with no concerts, no vacations, no sports, no travel and no dining out? Because the world was shut in and we had to watch what happened in Minneapolis and absorb the full whoosh of the aftermath?

I think so. As the world slowed down, it was like traveling below the speed limit on life’s highway. The landscape wasn’t a blur. You could “see” travesties on the screens that became our windows to the world. You could not track the spread of the covid-19 virus without also seeing the ways it claimed a disproportionate number of Black and brown lives.

Stuck home during the day, you saw who delivered your packages and your takeout. And when or if you did venture out, you noticed who clocked in during the lockdown — the grocery workers and paramedics. The garbage collectors and nursing home attendants who cleared bedpans and changed sheets. We watched with fewer distractions.

But when life returns to its normal rhythms, will those epiphanies last? Will people do more than acknowledge the scourge of racism? Will they commit to the much harder work of erasing it?”

Racial equity will require us to take the e off of woke and place an r before the k. We cannot just be woke. We must work. And the work is a process. Our epiphanies these past months are a start to wake us up. But a reckoning according to Norris is an action. It’s when we are dealing with an issue, not just recognizing it.

We speculate what our lives will be post pandemic. What will it feel like to return to the pace and scope of the world we knew? Will we be so caught up in resuming what we remember as normal, that we will forget what so many experience, due to inequity, should not be anyone’s normal?

Remember the words of James Baldwin “People can cry much easier than they can change."

Will we commit to work on this and change, not just acknowledge it?

• How exhausted do you feel after videoconferencing?
• How much do you tend to avoid social situations after videoconferencing?
• How emotionally drained do you feel after videoconferencing?

These are a sample of questions used by Stanford researchers to measure how much virtual platform fatigue people are experiencing. The amounts are startling.

Another study from the Human Factors Labs at Microsoft found that brainwave markers associated with overwork and stress are significantly higher in video meetings than non-meeting work like writing emails. Fatigue begins to set in 30-40 minutes into a meeting. Looking at days filled with video meetings, stress begins to set in at about two hours into the day.

Why?

1. Large amounts of eye contact and focusing on the screen is intense. We know people are scared of public speaking yet what are they doing on a virtual platform? Speaking with everyone's eyes on them! The brain interprets the constant and sustained eye contact as well as the focus on the screen as an intense environment, and over time that intensity is tiring.
2. We have to see ourselves and often cannot see others. We are critical of our own image and on virtual platforms we can be confronted with it 100% of the time. That causes stress and can trigger negative emotions. When screens are shared we cannot see the whole group.
3. We are not moving. Movement helps our cognitive processes, and natural movement is inhibited to stay centered on our screen. Taking in information and staying still doesn't create the movement needed to help our neurons connect to ideas so we have to work harder to think.
4. We take in data differently than when in person. The cognitive load is much higher in video chats. Facial expressions, etc. are all enhanced and more acute. Yet some non-verbal cues are reduced and we cannot read the room. That presents a lot our brain has to process and work with compared to in-person discussions.

How will this change us?

Jeff Hancock founding director of Stanford Social Media Lab states "Ridesharing has brought up questions about whether you talk to the driver or not, or whether to get in the back seat or the passenger seat. We had to evolve ways to make it work for us. We're in that era now with videoconferencing and understanding the mechanisms will help us understand the optimal way to do things for different settings, different organizations and different kinds of meetings."

This past year we all have experienced unpredictable elements that cause chaos to a well-planned day, causing us to choose to do work simultaneously or multitask.

Is multitasking the solution?

Stanford University researchers Clifford Nass, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner conducted a 2009 study on multitaskers. The goal of their study was to find out what talents multitaskers have that other people don't. Instead, they found that multitaskers aren't better at anything. Their memories and attention spans suffered as a result of their multitasking because they were unable to filter out any information - even if that information was irrelevant.

Years later, Anthony Wagner returned to studying multitasking and wrote a paper with neuroscientist Melina Uncapher, where they analyzed the research on media multitasking and cognitive abilities. In the paper, they described repeated findings that people who use many types of media at once are far worse at simple memory tasks. Once again, they could not find a single study where heavy multitaskers had better working memories than people who didn't - because they were required to retain information about several tasks, instead of just one.

Wagner also pointed out that none of us are really multitasking when we think we are, because our brains simply cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. Rather than multitasking, we're just rapidly switching from task to task, never giving ourselves enough time to fully focus on any one thing.

Instead of resorting to multitasking when priorities conflict, prepare for the inevitable. One proactive way to prepare for the unpredictable is to analyze how your time gets spent. Begin by keeping a log of how you spend your time. Live your life in 15 minute increments for one or two days to see where your time is spent. With an accurate time log, you will be in a good position to analyze your day which will help you understand what to prioritize when juggling multiple demands.

Then evaluate your log.

• What activities or individuals are demanding the most of your time? Are there patterns?
• What interruptions are you experiencing?
• What time of day are you most and least productive?
• What are your procrastination patterns?

The "fires" consuming time are activities that are both urgent and important. Evaluate the fires you recorded in your time log for patterns. Devise a system to catch them early or prevent them in the future. By attending to important activities before they become urgent, stress decreases, productivity increases, and our commitment not to multitask stays intact.