Imagine going to an event, where you’re excited to share your ideas about X/X/Z. You arrive, and realise that you’re the only person who looks like you in the room. Maybe it’s the first time it has happened to you, maybe it’s something you are already used to.

What does that feel like?

Gene Demby reflected on this while discussing an interesting interview on NPR. Your first tasks are to listen to the interview, and read the post.

Comedian Wyatt Cenac performs onstage at the Vulture Festival Presents: Comedy Night at The Bell House on May 31 in Brooklyn, New York. Image credit: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images [Header image from Death to the Stock Photo]

Demby writes:

The Stewart-Cenac exchange illustrates what those of us who are often The Only One In The Room tend to know: It sucks. But besides being personally burdensome and annoying, there’s social science that suggests that when people feel isolated as the outlier in a larger group because of their race or gender, it counteracts the benefits their “diversity” was supposed to help achieve in the first place.

While folks are (generally?) more attuned to the idea of tokenism, and building diverse groups of people in an authentic way, but often the goal to make a group more diverse (which is, let’s face it, also more focused on the group itself and its needs and success) comes at the cost of alienating the very same minority people bringing with them the cookie of diversity.

Today, reflect on what that might actually feel like. If you were ‘the only one in the room’

• what would make your transition into the space more comfortable.
• What would you look for in a group welcoming you in?
• What would you look for to stay in such a group?

Write some notes based on your own feelings and imagining yourself in the group, and then try to take that knowledge into the spaces you inhabit where you aren’t the only one in the room. Are there things you can do right now to implement these changes?