Cultivating Allyship to Spark Systemic Change with Gary Cooper | Episode 2
Welcome to DEI Leaders by Crescendo. In this series, Sage Franch, CEO of Crescendo, hosts conversations with diversity, equity and inclusion practitioners, sharing valuable insights from their work.
Our latest conversation is with Gary Cooper, Senior DEI Learning and Engagement Leader at Amazon (previously Senior Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Business Partner at Amazon Web Services).
Listen to the podcast or read below for the edited transcript.
Sage: Hello and welcome to today's episode of DEI leaders by Crescendo, where we interview industry leaders and inclusive culture champions about diversity, equity and inclusion in practice. I'm your host Sage Franch and I'm joined today by Gary Cooper, Senior Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Business Partner at Amazon Web Services. Gary, thank you so much for joining us.
Gary: Thanks Sage, appreciate you having me.
(0:32) Sage: Yes, so happy to have you on. We're going to talk about allyship today and especially how to cultivate authentic allyship. So this is a question that we get all the time from our audience, our listeners, who are wondering, what is the role that allyship plays in DEI work and how can I really mobilize these potential allies, and get them and inspire them to be part of the movement? But before we get into that, I'd love to just hear a little bit about your background and how you came into this work. Did DEI work find you or did you always know that you were going to go down this path?
Gary: Yeah Sage, it's a great question. So first and foremost, I think it's important – I’m a straight white cis able-bodied, currently able-bodied man, and I start there nearly from fact that that is the lens through which I start. And when we think about allyship and the practice of it and developing, I have to acknowledge that that's where I start from. And so that has cultivated me, that has shaped me, that has influenced how I navigate this. It also means that there are a number of ways in which I've been afforded an opportunity to navigate those things simply through my identities. And a little bit about the role that I play as an Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Business Partner, our role has evolved over time. But really I think it's to help an organization go deeper. So we partner really closely with HRBPs, Human Resource Business Partners, to follow the trends from a talent lifecycle perspective, from recruiting to onboarding, to growth and development and then at some point, if and when somebody leaves the company, our role is to take that talent lifecycle deeper and look at the ways in which our processes, our systems, our interactions are producing inequitable outcomes and to try and drive systems changes into those.
I think early on, I used the phrase “I just have a passion for this work” and I'm not trying to throw shade or discredit anybody that's still like “I have a passion for DEI work”, but I've come to realize that I don't think that's enough. And so, from a vocation, versus career, versus job standpoint, I think service work has always been in my DNA. And that's largely what I see DEI work as, it's what I see allyship or advocacy as. It's service work. And so I found it at Amazon through deep relationships with people. But if I look back over the course of my time before I got here, you know there were things that I was doing, I just don't know that it would have been called DEI work at the time or I don't know that we had the language at the time to call it what it was. So a little bit of both, but at Amazon I think I sort of sought it out. Trying to figure out what that meant for me as a white guy to be in this space.
(3:37) Sage: Interesting, interesting, and I know a lot of DEI leaders kind of find their way to this work through a real patchwork of different roles and different things where a lot of DEI advocacy that they're doing is almost side-of-desk, before it becomes a full-time opportunity. And I think part of, I'm sure what we'll get into as we dive into allyship, maybe that's how it starts. Maybe a lot of us start out as the allies or aspiring allies and then find our way into this work, as it becomes clearer and more concrete to us and we decide to turn that passion into education and into activism and active work. But what does allyship really mean? We've talked about this before and I think that a lot of folks have kind of adopted it as a bit of a buzzword, but what is the definition of allyship in your point of view?
Gary: Yeah, I mean, you're right. We oftentimes we want to be the good one. We want to be good, and so we send all these signals that we are safe or an ally. But for me, allyship is commitment to eradicating the systems that benefit me. And that’s big and that’s not something that I think I'll ever see happen in my lifetime. And I don't mean to say that like there's a despair or a lack of hope, but quite frankly, white supremacy is at least you know, in the US context, in the European context, white supremacy is a system that is not going away easily. And there's so many ways in which we perpetuate it. I perpetuate it through my actions because I live in a society that is deeply embedded with it.
And so for me, allyship is that commitment to practice, that commitment to deeply inspecting and then acting to change those systems that benefit me. And I think that's oftentimes where it gets really tough for folks and for me, because there's all sorts of ways in which we want to, for our families or our lives, we want to have things, we want to live a comfortable life. We want to sometimes not think about all the ailments of the world. We want to go have fun, we want to have a nice house, we want to have our kids in a good school. And there's all sorts of ways in which those terms get loaded. But it's a question I continue to ask myself, is how am I aligning to or diverging from systems of oppression today?
Sage: Yeah, it's certainly not easy to stand in the face of opportunity and confront how you've had access to that while others haven't.
Gary: That’s right.
(6:14) Sage: And then actually make decisions, right, to say you know, not this time, this time I'm going to do something else and go a different path. When you say that these systems are not going to be dismantled or eradicated within our lifetime, how do you maintain hope and drive to continue even though you and your children might not necessarily see that big systemic change that we’re all trying to work towards?
Gary: Yeah, I don't know what the alternative is. I mean to me, the alternative is sort of self-centered and it's not a way that I want to at least live and try and model for my kids. There are days that are more difficult than others, right? There are days for anyone who's a DEI practitioner, this isn't coming as any groundbreaking information, but there are days where there's a lot of despair, there's days where you want to go do something else. By context, there was a time in my life where I was on a path to going to divinity school and potentially being a minister. And one of my good friends said in a conversation that as he was on his path to being a minister, he was challenged by professors and other ministers that if there's anything else you can do, go do that. And so I did. I went and I tried a lot of other things and I won't say that DEI practitioners are ministers, I think there's a number of ways in which people would find some problematic aspects to that, but it is a way that I see as a service-oriented vocation and I just can't do anything else – I've tried that. So there are little wins that I've learned over the course of the last four years to recharge the battery, to refill the cup and keep moving.
(8:04) Sage: The space requires a lot of self-care and community-care for sure. So let's switch gears a little bit here and talk about not just the experience of being an ally and finding our way into allyship, but for DEI practitioners that are in roles either at organizations or folks who are independent consultants supporting others with this work, how can they encourage people who may not be engaged in this work already or may not even be aware of it really, to interact with allyship and to really start this journey?
Gary: I think that really all depends on what identities you hold. You know at the outset of this, I mentioned a lot of the ways in which I identify. And I think there's a way that DEI practitioners, in specificity to race right, like I take a page out of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, where he talks about how the burden of racism is on the shoulders of white people. And so, the burden of getting people into the allyship practice, the burden of getting people into the space of seeing the collective beyond the individual, I think, should be on the shoulders of those with the most privilege in the community that you're trying to activate. And so what I mean by that is if you are a white practitioner, then how are you activating other white people, and doing so in a way that creates a commitment to that service?
Now Sage, you and I chatted before and I'll be honest, the place that I struggle is that oftentimes a good tool to do that is to show how the practice of allyship benefits the individual. So when we think about encouraging people to interact with or engage with or get into the practice of allyship, oftentimes we have to think about ways that by doing so, it can benefit that individual as an ally. So they either have more moments of recognition or it's going to help them become a better operator in their role or it's going to help them get promoted. And I struggle with that. I have seen it work, I have seen it be a good tool by which people can get people started, and perhaps over time, they become more committed than just the individual outcome. But I worry sometimes that that activation as a self-serving measure, it distorts what allyship is supposed to be doing. But I don't know, I'm curious how you see that Sage, in terms of if this program or this thing is going to help you become, you know, a better engineer or a better salesperson, then let's get you into allyship. Versus, there are inequities around you, there are communities that don't have equal access and we're asking you to right that ship.
Sage: Yeah, it's an interesting kind of thought experiment in a way, like is allyship without altruism really allyship? And the way I view it, I try and think about: what is the desired outcome here? You know, are we trying to get a net positive change in our organization or our community, and if so, does somebody’s intention for the work change that outcome? If somebody is doing this work in a self-serving interest, does that change their ability to actually contribute to a more equitable organization or community? And I think it really depends on a case-by-case basis, there's definitely not a blanket answer for that. But in many cases people who are more center of the privilege wheel, let's just call it that, who are not challenged through their own experiences to be part of this work, they don't necessarily feel that severity. You know when they don't see it reflected in their own life as challenges and that's why you hear people say, oh well, I have a friend who faced this or now that I have children and a daughter and my child came out. Then suddenly it becomes clear to them because they hadn't had to confront that previously.
But I think that those same folks you know, if they had an on-ramp earlier into this work, even if it's a self-serving on-ramp, I think that on-ramp can expose them to concepts and open the door to genuinely care about this and become genuine allies in a non-self-serving way as well. That's kind of how I view it. I would say more often than not, the benefit of getting these folks engaged in this work in some capacity is probably more significant than the cost of them being engaged in this work for self-serving purposes, versus not engaging at all.
Gary: Yeah. In there, I'm really glad that you mentioned on-ramp and again, from a US and European – Western concept, I'll stick to race for a second. There's oftentimes the question around what is the place of a white, and in particular, a white man who is a DEI practitioner. What is the place in this work for us? And that on-ramp, I've used that language in that context. My role if it is useful, should be to be an on-ramp for other white people and actually, to in some capacity provide that challenge that often comes with proximity. So where can I reduce the burden for the communities that I seek to serve by not having to have have them be in proximity with someone who may create more harm in the short-term as they're practicing learning, growing. You mentioned, sometimes some men have a daughter that they are like, woah, I don't want her to be burdened by the barriers that women face, but I was cool with it up until I had a daughter.
Or the phrase that I hear often out in Seattle and other places is, I don't want to live in that neighborhood because it's a bad neighborhood or I don't want my kids to go to that school because it's a bad school. And beyond the, “what do you mean by bad?”, let's further identify it, say the thing out loud. What we're inherently saying though, is we're okay with other kids going to those schools, we're okay with other kids being in those neighborhoods or other families being in those neighborhoods, but not me. I see the activation, like my role should be to bring that narrative to folks who look like me, who identify like me, and be an on-ramp for them to move into the work.
(14:54) Sage: So why do you feel that as a cis white man, you're better positioned to convince other cis white men to become an ally? What is it that makes you more successful in those areas?
Gary: I don't know, I don't know that I’m better positioned. I mean I also, in stereotypical gender norms or whatever, I check other boxes too right? Like I played football in college, I love football, I love sports, I drink beer, I do all these other things that connect in these stereotypical ways. And so I think there's a component of me that can connect with people, they know who I am, like they see themselves in me and then there's just a component of me that doesn't align with the same systemic inequities that we may just blindly sort of navigate through or actively act in accordance with. And so you know, I don't know that I'm any better at it than somebody else, I just think the burden is on me.
I think one of the places where, as I've listened and talked with other people, whether it's at Amazon or in other places, there are a number of times when people will tap my shoulder, my virtual or proverbial shoulder, and say, hey, I'm having a hard time with this person, can you come in and take this over? And so that's a part of what I'm here for. To reduce that burden, to reduce that labor. You know, hopefully over time I've gotten better at it, and I continue to do it in a way that is effective. But I'm not clear that, for those of us who, again with race as the center, those of us who are white, if we've raised our hand to begin this work why we're not taking on the burden of activating allies or getting more people in who look like us.
Sage: Yeah, this is a question that I get a lot. A lot of folks are saying, you know, I care about this and I identify as an ally. I want to engage in this work but I don't know what is my place. And there's a hesitance around taking up too much space – and I think that's wise, we should all be very conscious of the space and energy that we are taking up and dispelling in a room.
But I think what you're kind of hitting on here is that active and educated allies have a real opportunity to capitalize on this in-group bias that we all innately have as humans. Where, we are more likely to respond favorably to people who reflect our own identity. And no matter which identity it is, I think we all have that opportunity to recognize that and that's why the privilege wheel is powerful tool to be able to see, okay, this is where I actually have privilege or power and I can use that. Spend that and connect with others who might see themselves reflected in me and help them along that journey in a really productive way that leads, like you said, as an on-ramp into them taking on a lot of this burden themselves and hopefully spreading it further.
Gary: Yeah, one thing to add in there Sage. For many, I would push on the “I identify as an ally”. I think that's where we start to get problematic, where we think that there's an arrival place, that there's a place by which, like I am now an ally and I don't think that ever exists.
I don't think there's like a banner I can put my yard or a sign or something that I can attach to my badge, no.
Sage: Ally bumper sticker.
Gary: Yeah, I mean some of them are good signals like I get that. I get you need to have some signals, but it really is about what you are doing. It is what you're doing driving towards the intended outcome. Or do you have better intentions than your impact? And one of the things that has helped me tremendously over the years, at the time I think it was Global Digital Citizen Foundation who put out this ultimate cheat sheet for critical thinking. And it goes through the who, what, where, when, why, how questions, right? There's this PDF that I actually continue to have on my screensaver, and I look at every day where it's like in anything that I'm doing, who does this benefit? Where did I learn this information? How do I know this is true? Why is the thing that I'm seeing a problem or a challenge? Who is it a problem for? And those are sort of those refining questions that I continue to do as my own practice to ensure that at the end of the day, whatever impact is happening is driving towards that equity and not just, I have some really good intentions, but that I'm constantly trying to challenge myself around. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who is it for? How do you know that that's what they need? How do you know that that's what's being asked for?
Sage: Yeah, we have a similar resource that we use at Crescendo and that we share with the folks particularly when we loop in senior leaders and do senior leadership workshops that are more centered on a specific department or area. And we're always challenging people to look at: how are you going to debias this decision, or this situation and be conscious to include the groups that have not had an opportunity to be part of this conversation? It goes so far beyond like you said, identifying as an ally. It's like you have to build this into your daily practice and every single person really has to be a part of that. And I think that's part of what we do as DEI practitioners is trying to get people the inspiration to be part of this, the understanding of why it's important, and then the daily practice of okay, now, what tools do I have in my toolkit to actually incorporate this into my day-to-day work? So that it's not just something I think about when we do a training, but it's really something that we think about daily and are constantly challenging ourselves with.
(20:42) On that note, I would love to talk a little bit about one of the questions that we hear a lot, particularly from DEI practitioners and organizations who are under-resourced. Which is a common problem where they're given a fixed budget or a fixed set of resources, whether that’s time, money, etc., and have to choose, when am I going to invest in supporting the underrepresented or marginalized folks here, versus fostering a culture of allyship and investing in the people who have not yet been challenged by and engaged in this work. What would you say about that and how do you build a balance between the two?
Gary: Yeah, it's a great question. So my thinking on this comes from, or rather, it centers a quote, and I'll paraphrase it, that Ijeoma Oluo had a couple of years ago. Essentially it boils down to if your DEI work centers the majority, if it centers white supremacy, if it centers the able-bodied, if it centers men, then it is not equity work. Now, Ijeoma, her quote is quite more prophetic than what I just tried to state, but essentially “who are you centering?” is an important question. And I do understand, you know it's almost this chicken and egg conversation right, like if you don't have allies, how are you going to drive towards your inclusion and equity goals? But if you are centering allies, are you assisting people from underrepresented communities in your organization?
“If your anti-racism work prioritizes the ‘growth’ and ‘enlightenment’ of white America over the dignity and humanity of people of color – it’s not anti-racism work. It’s white supremacy.”
If your work is defined by equity, and I think that your inclusion or the outcome of that should be equity within your organization where budget is limited, where time and resources are limited, you have to prioritize and center the needs, the outcomes for those underrepresented communities. I think if you can get leadership on board with investments into their behavior changes, clear statements of expectations. Their culture work, while you may have some of it that tries to activate allies and engage allies, it's done so because you need a culture that's better for the advancement and growth and development of non-dominant culture folks.
Sage: Yeah, thank you for that perspective on that. I think that quote is really powerful, I think that’s a really good way to look at it. And that's one of the things that a lot of us struggle with when we're trying to get that leadership buy-in is that this work has to really work towards equity. You know, there's still a lot of question about okay, when is it equality, when is it equity, which words are we using now, but we have to look at the outcome. We have to look at: how are these decisions that we're making at this level, affecting different populations within our community differently? And we have to be aware of that, we can't ignore that. And we have to really invest in correcting it even if we don't see it. And this is another challenge. If we don't see it in the three years that we spend with an organization, knowing that we are working towards a bigger goal, is an important thing, and recognizing that it does take time to actually affect that change, especially in large organizations where there are thousands of moving pieces. You know this isn't something that happens overnight and we have to recognize that and it's a marathon. You know, it really has to be continuous.
(24:18) I know we're coming up on time here, so I was going to ask you about what happens when we mobilize potential allies. Did you want to talk a little bit more about that?
Gary: I'm at AWS, I'm at Amazon. And so you know, Amazon has seemingly, infinite resources. Now, internally, we know that that's not entirely true. We know that there's resource constraints, and in ways that colleagues of mine are still fighting for budget, for time, for focus. For those who are at the small, maybe startup mid-level companies, I do think there is a concept of diversity debt and it was talked about a few years ago in respect to Uber. But at some point, I guess I'll wrap it up into this concept. Where in the past and in some ways today, if you are building a physical space, a physical building, and you don't have physical accessibility built in at the design phase. So when you're drawing the blueprints, you're developing what this building is going to look like. You may be told, hey, we may not have that many folks who need accessibility or who have accessibility issues, it's a bit costly right now, it's maybe not in our budget.
I would offer that having to go back and retrofit, post-finishing the build, is much more costly. Both from a monetary standpoint and from a human standpoint, or like who had to endure an inequitable space for that long, that when you're talking about equity culture change, for those of you who are at the precipice of the start of a company or it's at a small to mid-level and it's growing, the more that you can utilize the resources that are out there. And that's where I think Sage, y'all do a really wonderful job at Crescendo. A lot of the offerings that y'all have, take the manual burden off of individuals trying to do this off the side of their desk, and it creates this sort of always-on, this sort of constant lane of DEI topics, as a way to embed it into a day-to-day practice. And if you can get that mobilization of just a day-to-day practice of consuming information, I think in the long term,
you have a culture of people that are more collective-focused and not
individual-focused.
Sage: And then that in turn leads to, we're basically investing in people having the knowledge, awareness and capability to make better, more equitable decisions as they then create new systems, create new organizations and environments, and evolve our current lens.
Gary: That's right.
Sage: Yeah, love that. That’s powerful.
Gary: And as they're making the decision, it's no longer the diversity decision, right? You no longer have to have me in the room. You don't have to have an IDE business partner or a DEI practitioner in the room. You’ve scaled yourself. You've gotten to a place where people are like oh, wait a second, who is that benefiting again? No, that's not the right decision here because of this information that I now have.
(27:32) Sage: Awesome, okay, so as we wrap up here, my last question for you is what is one actionable tip that you have for the DEI practitioners who are tuning in today, who want to start now and are aiming to inspire and engage those potential allies?
Gary: Yeah, it is a place where I fall short often, but for those of us who have privileged identities and we are trying to activate others with similar identities, being able to go into those moments with an amount of grace I think is important. And what I mean by that is, if I have just learned something or if I spent the last couple of years refining, reading, sort of really engaging in a particular topic, the moment that I think that I have a grasp on it and that I need to then challenge folks who are like me with that topic, and get them activated, I can't necessarily beat them over the head with that knowledge in a way that accuses them of not knowing what they don't know. If that makes sense. And that gets tricky because I do think that there's a responsibility to hold people accountable. And there's this tricky balance I think of being able to, with the privileged identities that are ‘like’ in those moments, being able to sit with that individual and provide some space for them to work through their own sort of reactions.
Sage: Yeah, so what I'm picking out from that is meeting people where they are and recognizing where they are on their journey and that will cause them to receive this information in a different way. Is that right?
Gary: I think so. And I will offer that you also have to know where you can afford to do that as a DEI practitioner. And that's why I say where there is a match with privileged identity. So if I’m in a space with another white man, I'm going to engage in that differently because I can afford to have him make some of those mistakes, say some things that may have been hurtful for others. But I have that privilege. I have the ability to kind of take that on because I'm equally matched in terms of our identity privileges.
(29:57) Sage: Yeah, thank you. That is a great note for us to close out on. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we've done a lot of interesting exploration of this complex, you know, more complex beast than many people who are starting this work think it is - complexity of allyship. So thank you again for sharing your experience, and where can our audience connect with you to follow your updates as they kind of digest what we talked about here?
Gary: Yeah, thanks for having me Sage, I appreciate it. And in some capacity, I hope there's a level of vulnerability with how at least difficult I find this at times. There's rarely a single right answer. It's a practice, it's a continued evolution. I'm on LinkedIn, though I haven't updated in a while. Gary W. Cooper is my handle there, that's the same for Twitter. But mostly LinkedIn is where I tend to update.
Sage: Alright perfect, well thank you again and hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
Gary: Thanks Sage, you too.
That wraps up this episode of the DEI Leaders podcast, click below to listen to the audio version. Look forward to more episodes with key insights from DEI practitioners!
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