s01e13 - The Disparity Trap

I'm originally from the Northwest, Portland, Oregon, then went to the University of Washington, Seattle, and that's where I did pre med and microbiology for four years. And then on my last year, I decided to change my whole plan and stay for a fifth year and do drama. And my parents, you can imagine were ecstatic about that.

And in my mind, it felt like I was growing up in a household and in a community where passions are hobbies and hobbies are what you do on the side. That's what you have time outside of your career and careers are what pay. And so you need to focus on. Something that pays you money. So that's why I didn't connect my desire for creativity and storytelling as a full time job or as a career opportunity.

And so I stayed a fifth year, did my major in drama and one year, two years after graduating undergrad, I went back to the university of Washington, and I got my master's in acting in 2017 when I finished my MBA, I went straight into entrepreneurship.

And around that same time, around 2019, this idea for the board game came to me. The person who was speaking was a white man who just didn't understand why people, especially those of color, couldn't just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, so to speak, or they couldn't just make it work like he could do it. Why can't someone else do it. And I had so many answers for him, but it wasn't my conversation so I got the chance to still observe and listen.

It was someone else who was talking to him. And I thought, I wonder if this guy. had like a Freaky Friday or whatever, you can snap your fingers, like, but you're in somebody else's body. I wonder how his life would have turned out. I wonder, I wasn't judging him in that sense, like he couldn't do it. I was just wondering, I wonder if he would be as successful in his mind as he is today.

I had a dream about playing Monopoly, and in the game Monopoly, all the dice rolls were correlated to real life statistics of my probability of winning that property, or getting that property, or the chances of me actually buying that property. And I was like, that is a and I played the whole game with somebody like that, and I was like, that's so cool, and I woke up Thinking I might've saw a commercial somewhere, like some like flash of advertising.

And then I started Googling it because I thought maybe, you know, Hasbro jumped on that and no, I don't think they did. They definitely would not put no money into that. So I was like, that would just be a cool idea for a game. And from that moment, I just started thinking about what is a way to make that happen.

So I just started collecting statistics, jail conviction, statistics, statistics in education, statistics in business, just statistics all around that were based off of, you know, Research journals or independent studies. I literally did that for a couple of years, almost two to three years straight. I was just collecting statistics and then COVID hit. I had nothing to do, like a lot of people. Either you had too many things or you had nothing.

And for me, it hit both because in performing arts, everything shut down because nobody was acting, nobody was doing, shooting anything. When I turned off, closed my laptop, it was the first time I didn't have something creative to do. It was the first time I didn't have something to work on, to go to, to do something with performing arts. And I think my body and subconscious just knew this was the time to look into that game again and just seeing what I could do to make this happen.

I wanted to do something different.

And I made that, and that was fine, but it was getting complex, and the rules were kind of ... I'm honestly not a big board gamer. My life journeys have shifted in so many drastic ways, and you're like, where did that come from, if you knew me beforehand? So I had to learn a lot about board games. My roommate, thank God, is a huge board gamer, has a ton of board games in the living room. So we played a lot of board games, and I realized that I kind of wanted to go more to the conventional route.

I kind of wanted to lean on games that were familiar with, like, Monopoly or the Game of Life. And your goal is just to get through it. And each level of the board is like a tier, a financial tier, almost like a economic class or a tax bracket. If you want to think of it that way. I feel like this has to be a game where it's one you, you have to play in someone else's shoes. So basically I had to get statistics about a lot of different groups.

I had to get statistics on different ethnic groups, racial groups, and then allow that to be a path for everyone to choose which one best fits them. But you can imagine with statistics and so many different racial groups, it got really complicated really quick.

And that's when the biggest part of the story is when I brought in my mother's work. So my mother, Dr. Deborah Jenkins, her research and experience is based in multicultural development.

Early childhood development and psychology, She's currently the dean of psychology at the community college back in my hometown, Clark College, and she has had a business consulting business for about 20 years now where she, you know, helps people with a whole array of things from title nines to literally going in when there's a racial or a traumatic instance at an institution or college, and basically sit with every single student.

Come up with a plan for the university and a, and its next steps and try to help people heal and, and recover from those traumas. And she has a theory. Her paradigm is called IST of an ISM. There is a systemically dominant group and a systemically non-dominant group in every system of oppression. With gender, there's a dominant group and a non-dominant. Men are the dominant group. Women and trans and non binary are non-dominant. In America, whites are dominant.

And then people of color are non-dominant. She mentioned it to me, she was like, you know, maybe you can lean on thinking about, you know, my paradigm to help you with the complexities of the races. And I was like, no one knows what non-dominant, dominant means. I kind of shut her down. I was like, nobody knows. That's too long to say. Systemically non-dominant just is a lot of, a lot of words. It's gonna, this game has to be, has to be simple and easy.

And so after a while of me just hitting the wall, I was like, let me just play test it with her words. And so I play tested it with a group and everybody was like, I was like, do you know what these words mean before I even defined them? They were like, yeah, it's systemically non-dominant. I mean, it's kind of just, it's intuitive for them. like, oh, okay. Okay, so it's a little more intuitive than I thought. I'm just like too close to it because I know my mom.

So let me just try to lean towards it and it really opened up the game so much. And so basically now there's two identities you play, two positions we call them.

There's a non-dominant and there's a dominant. The statistics is all correlated to those and you'll pull a card and the card will have both a non-dominant role and a not and a dominant role and based on who you are you will roll that. That range and your goal is to hit within the range to succeed. And the ranges are just, there's a disparity between the ranges and that's where the disparity comes in to the game. You're kind of going through the board.

And every time you hit an end of a tier, you're like trying to get a job, then you're trying to buy a house, then you're trying to start a business, then you're trying to like jump into real estate. I chose real estate as the last thing, because I wanted something that was like. Big investment energy. I mean, a lot of people want to lean towards their own net worth. How do you grow your net worth, your stocks and investment? Those are two big ones. It's still, I did do a stock version.

The stocks got too complicated, so I just pared it down. So like, there's been a lot of versions of this and all the way through those pieces, there's board game spaces like tax space and justice space. And if you land on those spaces, you pull a justice card or a tax card correspondingly and play that. And so a tax card, you, the more you have, the more you pay in taxes, so to speak, unless you have, you get maybe some return.

So that's kind of an advantage or help to those who are really having struggling, trying to go through. But when it comes to the justice, it just says as officer strolls by and you kind of roll the dice to see if you get stopped. and arrested and if you're convicted and sentenced and that could lead to as much as you paying. more, or like skipping a turn because you're in jail so to speak throughout this you're earning privilege It's kind of like currency. It's acquired. It's earned. It's given.

It's bestowed. It's inherited It's all these things it's transactional so you not only just can win by going beating the first one around the board but you can have a What's called a collaborative win, a cooperative win by helping everyone get to a certain stage of the game before a single person gets to the end. And therefore everybody wins.

Decide how do you want to play the game, this game of life, so to speak, do you want to play by yourself and just fight for your own, or do you want to help others try and succeed and get to, you know, a certain stage in life and that's where the privilege tokens play in part. Cause you can either use your privilege to help others, or you can hoard your privilege for yourself and use it to help yourself.

Usually, we have people play a different position than their own, and surprisingly, you'll see people of color playing the position of the dominant group, and their behaviors are things that we see, and maybe a lot of people complain about seeing in the dominant group in terms of not considering the non-dominants. And they're like, checking themselves. They're like, oh man, I really don't want to help this person right now because I'm doing so good.

And like, I really could use this privilege for myself, but I know what it's like being non-dominant.

I know what it's like needing help, same for the exchange, those who are in a dominant in their life are playing this in a non-dominant position and getting very frustrated, which for a game is not always the best experience you want to give people in a board game, it's frustration, there's a reason for that, it's an educational board game for that reason, and that's to have them go through the frustration of being like, oh wait, I'm trying, I'm doing my

best, I'm using my brain that I think is set to succeed if I pulled myself up in the bootstraps, but unfortunately there's so many other factors, That play into my success that is not just all in my hands. And that's kind of a lesson I really wanted people to understand. It's not just about them. It's about the system. This institution that we're in is really having a huge impact on individual successes.

And if we work together to combat the institution, rather than an individual combating an institution, then maybe we can fix that institution. And so the biggest part of it that I like about this game is that you can vote to change the rules. And that's ultimately a big key to the game. You can actually use your privilege and vote and remove the disparities on specific cards as you go along if you want to. Or you can just leave the world as it is. Leave the institution as it is.

But it's your choice if you want to use your privilege to help make things better for everyone. Or make, you can actually use your privilege to make things harder. You can change the vote. If somebody passed the vote to make it easier, if somebody wants to be a, Oh, I hope I can say butthole,

Even if you were a person of color, you can live in a dominant position and see what it's like. And, and that was one of the best things is that it helped so many people of color that I did play testing would say, wow, I never thought of it as this way of how easy it is to just move forward and think about yours, your little box, you know, because you're in a dominant position. You're not really concerned about others and things are coming to you much more easily that you are able to.

move quickly and you just with the flow, it's like, it's not even intentional that they're trying not to help. It's just that everyone has their own problems. Everyone has their own life. People of color have privileges too. And so that's why the game makes sure everyone has privileges. It's just the disparity is significant enough that it actually leads to a difference in the pace of the game. And that's kind of how we feel. Like, I feel like life is, you know, everyone has privilege.

I have privilege, you know, dominance is not just black or white. So to speak, it's like, there's a lot, it's a lot of intersectionality.

So like, if you have a relationship that makes you shut off and not wanting more connection, then it's probably not growth fostering. Right?

And as they took a breath and they came back, they could breathe, they came back. And they already started doing the work. They're like, Okay, I'm really realizing that I Am not enjoying this because I was so frustrated with me not getting what I expected out of the out of my experience Like I knew I could do good with this.

I knew what the rules were I knew how to play the game and still it wasn't giving me what I thought I wanted and I got really frustrated And then I I had to add this because he was in a place where he was at peace with it He understood it.

He was ready to go back in, you know, what's so interesting about this experience It's not something you didn't do anything wrong But I want you to also acknowledge that because you you're not living a non-dominant life in real world And you were only doing it in a board game. You had the advantage and the privilege to get up and walk away back into your dominance and escape the non-dominance experience for a bit. That was a privilege you got to live. You get to do that anytime you want.

You get a chance to literally walk out of the uncomfortable situations and go find some comfort when a lot of non-dominant groups do not.

And you're like, dang, fourth time. No one's gonna help me? No one's gonna like use their, There's such thing called a power token in the advanced game where you can use your power to just literally dismiss cards or like block cards and their actions. And that's like having something of a position of power because power is different from privilege, which is different from influence.

So I was kind of hoping, trying to hope that people wants is of these different ways that you can use your power when you have it or your influence when you have it or your privilege when you have it to help others. Like people know people who could help somebody. That's an influence that you have. And you just, you, you, do you, how often do you use that to help someone else?

So I do this with the, with companies. I do workshops, DEI workshops with companies, the virtual version of the board game. We basically do no more than five employees per room. And so I have co facilitators who will jump into breakout rooms and we all do it simultaneously. And then we come back together for a full, you know, recap. Kevin, you were in my, were you in my group?

And even with people helping out, You know, you still are needing to roll, and the rolls don't always go well. So it, it, it really was a sort of a visceral experience that in a game was really, really powerful to connect it with your life. You know, the game said that I couldn't do this thing, and remembering that I did go to school, it was really a well done experience, and I enjoyed doing that with other people.

I want people to see that the opportunity to learn from that body, that full versatile body experience that some have because it's happening to others and In some ways, we all have experienced it in just different facets, you know, we all can tell, we all can speak up a time, maybe we were a child, maybe we were, we just didn't have the power or the influence or the strength or the advantage to do something we wanted to do.

And it's basically patterns of behavior that people use to protect themselves from vulnerability that could come with a deeper, more authentic connection. So like, people pleasing, or conflict avoidance, or someone who seeks out conflict really quickly so that they know when it's going to happen.

When you were talking about your friend playing the game, and stepping out and then coming back in, I just kept thinking how, how really cool it was to hear someone like, fully experience their strategies of disconnection around this. And be able to like connect with you enough to push through it. I think that's really amazing.

Or at least how much that impact is. I wanted to show people and educate people how much research has shown the institution impacts. I wanted to educate on that. This is because the disconnect. Because people detach from wanting to accept those facts. It's easy to dismiss anecdotal things. It's like, oh, that was your experience. My experience has been why. You kind of said like, you know, there's a tokenism, there's a version of that, you know. Oh, I have a Black friend.

So obviously it can't be racist. It's like, okay, so you have a wife doesn't mean you can't be sexist. Like it just, some people just don't get that just because, you know, somebody doesn't mean that you are automatically absolved of some kind of experience. I wanted to prevent people one from thinking, oh, this is anecdotal. So I can dismiss it.

I also wanted to prevent people engaging into, into attack and pointing at somebody across the table from them, because it's not about the person across the table from you. That the reason why we have this institution, it's a history of things. And we all could come together. We're all actually playing this game together. So we're already started. Working on the same path, so to speak, even if we didn't know it, we all actually are on the same path right now.

And we could actually join forces and make this better. We don't have to attack each other or run from the system. We can actually work together to beat it. And the whole goal of this game, it doesn't say it anywhere in the rules, but the game, the point of the game is to beat the game, not beat each other.

I don't get what this means. I don't know why it's important. I can't, I can't take it personally. You know, they had their own place. They had their own path. They'll learn eventually down their own path. And maybe this wasn't the path for them to learn.

And I was like, well, you learned something, and you learned what it's like in someone else's shoes, and you might not want to come back and do that again. But again, I kind of say, I'm like, well, people live that every day. Some people don't want to step outside in non-dominant shoes, but they have to.

To help them succeed because they didn't you know, not every role is going to be a success for dominance either You know, so they were like here here's some privilege for a re roll and i'm like in my mind I'm, like you need that hold on to your privilege because you don't have much non-dominant person But she really just wanted to help. It's so interesting to see how humanity works.

And was edited for this podcast by Kevin Makice theme music, lovingly sampled from positive thinking and serpentine by Vlad Kalushenko follow Bloomington center for connection on Facebook and other social media platforms.