The Person You Mean to Be Book Summary - The Person You Mean to Be Book explained in key points

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The Person You Mean to Be summary

Name: The Person You Mean to Be
Rating: 4.1 (116 reviews)
Author: Dolly Chugh

Dolly Chugh

How Good People Fight Bias

4.1 (116 ratings)

20 mins

Topics

Diversity & Inclusion

Table of Contents

The Person You Mean to Be
Summary of 8 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn the realities of biased thinking and how to free your mind.

At one point or another, you’ve probably questioned your own beliefs about discrimination and equality. But what you may have overlooked is your unconscious biases. No matter how open-minded and progressive you consider yourself to be, like everyone else, you most likely have biases informed by your upbringing and life experience.

Author Dolly Chugh draws from the most cutting-edge psychological studies to present a fascinating picture of what’s informing our instinctual behaviors and decisions. These unconscious biases show – to just give one example – how even the most anti-racist of us can have racist tendencies resting just beneath the surface.

Fortunately, by learning more about ourselves, others and how our minds work, we can start to correct these biases and become more aware of what we’re paying attention to and what we’ve been neglecting.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why Hollywood still lacks equality;
why white people need other white people to tell them they’re racist; and
why you should never say you’re color-blind when it comes to race.

Having a growth mindset means being willing to learn, but prejudices are hard to overcome.

When you’re deciding whether or not to do something, do you prefer to stick with the familiar or are you open to exploring new things?

For documentary filmmaker Perrin Chiles, new things offer an exciting challenge. In the early 2000s, when Chiles was preparing for his next film, he chose the subject of autism, even though he had little first-hand knowledge of the subject. This attitude is a perfect example of what’s known as growth mindset, as it shows a willingness to learn new things. Having a growth mindset can lead to amazing things, and yet, many people have the opposite attitude, known as a fixed mindset.

For example, someone has a fixed mindset if they believe they’re terrible at drawing and would never take an art class. They believe people are either good or bad at something, and no class will ever change that. Someone with growth mindset, however, may admit that their drawing skills are weak now, but acknowledge that with practice and effort their stick figure can one day become a realistic portrait. In other words, those with a growth mentality know that they can improve, and take advantage of opportunities to do so.

For Chiles, his film on autism was an opportunity to learn about people who are different from him. And as ideas coming from a growth mindset often do, it led to great things. In this case, a wonderful documentary called Autism: The Musical. Released in 2007, the film touched millions of people and made significant strides in opening people’s eyes to the realities of autism.

Unfortunately, not everyone is as open-minded as Chiles. Often, fixed mindsets can lead to stubborn prejudices that prevent people from exploring new things. This narrow-mindedness is especially true of Hollywood. If an extraterrestrial being were to make assumptions about human beings based strictly on Hollywood movies, they would likely think that nearly everyone is a straight, white male with no physical disabilities.

In an overview of the highest-grossing films in recent years, only 27 percent of the speaking roles were female. As for the top films of 2015, 48 of them didn’t contain a single black actor in a speaking role. What’s more, only 4 percent of Hollywood’s new movies are directed by women.

The following blinks explore why built-in prejudices like those found in Hollywood are so difficult to overcome.

Unconscious bias can now be measured, and the results are usually disappointing.

The term unconscious bias has become something of a buzzword lately. Essentially, it refers to the fact that people can unintentionally discriminate against others, or have prejudicial beliefs they’re not necessarily aware of. However, since researchers found a way to measure unconscious bias it’s now possible to increase this awareness.

Remarkably, studies have shown that the average person processes around 11 million pieces of information every second. Yet, we only process around 40 of those on a conscious level!

People tend to discount their privileges unless they are given something positive to focus on.

How difficult do you think your childhood was? When considering your personal history, don’t forget that white Americans, for example, generally have a much more privileged upbringing in terms of education, healthcare and standard of living than black Americans.

Now, you might think that a reminder to keep things in perspective would result in more white Americans saying that their childhood wasn’t so bad. However, when this question was posed in just this fashion by Stanford psychologists in 2015, the opposite was true. White Americans actually emphasized the difficulty in their childhood more after being reminded of white privilege.

Unconscious biases are often subtle and pervasive, and it takes work to overcome them.

At this point, you may be wondering what an unconscious bias looks like.

Well, let’s look at the example of Kimberly Davis, an African American executive and friend of the author. Once, when Davis was attending a convention for female executives, she entered a large room full of white women gathered in groups socializing. As Davis made her way around the room, none of the groups opened up to her. Davis didn’t feel like the groups were purposely or consciously rejecting her. She just assumed they didn’t recognize her as a fellow executive since a black businesswoman probably didn’t conform to their expectations.

Privileged people have the greatest power to counter unconscious biases and support minorities.

If you’ve ever overheard a racist comment and assumed it’s not your place to speak up, you may want to think again.

The African-American poet Christopher Owens got fed up with the endless number of messages he received on Facebook from people asking him to address someone else’s racist comments. This shows just how many people think that it’s up to people of color to confront racists. Yet, research shows that this isn’t the best solution.

It takes time to develop racial identity consciousness, and it is important not to give up too soon.

If you follow popular literature, you may have heard of the American author Jodi Picoult. Picoult sees herself as a progressive person, so she was taken aback when her son Kyle and his partner Kevin explained that she was sure to have unconscious racist biases based on her privileged white upbringing.

Prior to this discussion, Picoult equated racism with the behavior of white supremacists. But Kyle and Kevin were eventually able to show Picoult how unconscious bias works. She became so eager to correct this lack of awareness that she enrolled in an anti-racism workshop. It was a lengthy process, but Picoult was able to start recognizing her own biases, and the experience led her to write her 2016 book Small Great Things.

It is not helpful to pretend to be color-blind or to categorize people in any way.

Recently, it’s become increasingly common for people to deflect any suspicion of racism by saying they’re color-blind, or that they don’t see people in terms of color. That may sound laudable, but is this a good thing?

In a 2008 study, Harvard University researchers Evan Apfelbaum and Michael Norton showed that this isn’t a sensible attitude to have. Participants were divided into pairs. Some pairs had two white participants, while others had one black and one white participant. The participants were then asked to choose a piece of paper with a face on it. They then had to ask each other questions until they could guess which face the other person chose.

To foster inclusion in companies, listen to all voices and share credit honestly.

There’s a good chance you’ve had the experience of being distracted while someone is telling you something. This inability to really listen to others is a big problem, and the constant presence of distracting technology is only making it worse. If we hope to make our companies truly inclusive, we need to listen carefully to make sure every voice is heard. Now, statistics show that minority voices are at high risk of being ignored.

In 2006, when the author was researching her PhD on unconscious bias, she went out on the streets of Boston with a container of jelly beans and asked random people to guess how many were in the jar.

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What is The Person You Mean to Be about?

The Person You Mean to Be (2018) offers an accessible guide to the complex world of unconscious biases. Unconscious biases are the assumptions and associations we all have about people who are of a different gender, race, sexual orientation or class than we are. Author Dolly Chugh explains how these unconscious biases work and what we can do to overcome them.

Best quote from The Person You Mean to Be

Our behavior seems most prone to our implicit biases when we are under great time pressure or stress.

—Dolly Chugh

Who should read The Person You Mean to Be?

Students of human behavior and gender studies
Anyone who thinks they aren’t prejudiced
People who want to be more open-minded

About the Author

Dr. Dolly Chugh is a psychologist with a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University. Since earning her degree, she’s worked as a social psychologist at New York University and is an expert on the study of unconscious biases.

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