Eloise Tan (’00): Starting a Conversation is the Ultimate Risk
As a celebration of the Loran Scholars Foundation’s core values of character, service, and leadership, and its challenge to scholars to take meaningful risks in service of others, we have asked members of our community to reflect on meaningful risks and what constitutes #RisksForGood. Eloise Tan (’00), a Senior Research Advisor at Employment and Social Development Canada, submitted the following reflection as part of the series.
The first thing I did when I was invited to write about #RisksForGood was take out my notebook and jot down, “Risks for whose good?” Then I double-underlined “whose,” closed my notebook, and had many conversations with myself in my head about whether I saw myself as a risk-taker, what risk is, and the use of framing decisions as risk.
For some of us, risk is not a choice or option, but rather a fact of life. Risk is embedded within the daily realities for those who come from equity-denied communities. For racialized folks, risk lives within the colour of our skin and it is written into the histories of our families. Risk doesn’t gently call to us, politely offering rewards if we are willing to take the first step. It isn’t a choice ahead of us; rather, risk is the context in which we live. It is inescapable and ever-present in our personal and professional lives.
I’m a cisgender Filipina and was raised by a single mother immigrant. The intersections of my identity have given me a particular perspective of what risk is, what I believe is worth risking, and what I am never willing to risk. I’ve learned from my mom and my extended Filipino family that the immigrant experience is itself a risk for good; it is a risk for hoped for good. To immigrate is to risk everything you have. It is to dream of futures yet built, and to sacrifice what many of us spend our entire lives seeking — belonging — and to trust that we will somehow find our way to belonging once again.
Here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to write about risk as a linear transaction. I’m not going to share stories of how I took X risk and received Y reward because that’s not my story. My story is one of negotiating the tension between silence as a strategy for survival/assimilation and speaking up as a prerequisite for dignity/belonging.
I have many memories growing up when elders in my family suggested silence as a strategy in the face of racism, sexism, classism, or xenophobia. I understand the perceived and real value of silence, blending into the background, taking up little or no space in order to survive. However, I began to realize early on that I had access to opportunities, network, social and cultural capital that my family did not have when they came here from the Philippines. These opportunities granted me privileges and I could not ignore that I had them and must do something for others with them.
The Loran Scholars Foundation afforded me financial privileges as a scholar. Quite literally, it granted me access to postsecondary education. Let’s pause here. Given that Loran is merit-based, we might take it for granted that all Loran alumni would have gone to school anyway, but this isn’t necessarily true. Yes, the foundation also allowed me access to networks and learning opportunities, but to be honest, for many years I didn’t have the confidence to really take up those spaces in any meaningful way. What the foundation really did for me was repeatedly tell me very consistently, in very different ways, that I mattered, that I was going to matter, that I was not only going to be somebody but that I was somebody. And if I was somebody that mattered to this respected group of people at the foundation, then I began to understand that being silent was becoming a greater risk than speaking out.
I’m going to share two stories of taking the risk to start a conversation. I frame these stories as “starting a conversation” rather than “speaking up” or “speaking out” because conversations necessitate two things: there must be more than one participant, and there must be a sharing of ideas. To enter into a dialogue with one or more people is to be vulnerable and to be hopeful. Starting a conversation is the ultimate risk.
- Starting a conversation that I didn’t see happening:
When I was on my second maternity leave, I was tired, I felt disconnected from others, and I was spending a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to raise my kids. I’ve worn many professional hats — equity educator, lecturer, researcher, policy advisor — but whatever the role, I always approached the job from a lens of equity and intersectionality. With my “motherhood” hat, I knew I wanted to approach raising our kids with the same lens. There were many spaces for mothers to connect, but I couldn’t find one that centred social justice conversations.
I wanted to talk to others about how to teach kids about race, how to talk to kids in Canada about colonialism, how to navigate gender fluidity, and more. I wanted to talk, to connect, to learn. I couldn’t find an existing space; so I created one. I opened an Instagram and Facebook account called Mama Stay Woke. I asked for free space from a children’s consignment shop in the community that offered free space for community events, and I posted about how I wanted to have conversations about social justice and parenting.
I wanted to talk, to connect, to learn. I couldn’t find an existing space; so I created one.
I sent a virtual invitation via social media to invite others to join me to talk about social justice and parenting: “Bring your kids! Bring your green tea/coffee/lemon water!” And they came, and they talked, and our kids played, and we listened to each other’s stories about how to navigate all kinds of situations as a parent through a social justice perspective. Every week, I posted an invitation through Facebook and Instagram and every week, I showed up and didn’t know who would come and what would happen. But I knew if I didn’t start this conversation, I would lose something within me and I needed to let the world know that this is a conversation worth having and one that we want to have.
I don’t think of myself as a social innovator—I’m not even sure I know what makes one such—but I know I created something for a moment in time that let others know that they weren’t alone. Over time, people would reach out and ask if I could host a conversation in other Toronto neighbourhoods. Local news outlets wrote about the group and I was even asked if I would consider developing an app. I replied to every parent who wrote to me and said, “I can’t”—I was still a very tired mother of two—“but you can.” You don’t need a social media presence to start a conversation in real life.
2. Starting a conversation in the workplace:
I have asked versions of this question close to 10 times now in job interviews and been met with different responses, but the essence is similar: “Could you tell me about how your organization values/understands/promotes equity, inclusion, and diversity in the workplace?”
To be honest, sometimes I don’t want to ask. Sometimes everything in my body is telling me, “Don’t do it! You got this in the bag! You’ll scare them away!” Often I’m the only racialized person in the room, sometimes I’ve been the only woman in the room. In those cases, I used to have to steel myself to get the words out. I could feel my palms get sweaty and I would will myself to maintain eye contact while asking. But I have to ask. Somewhere along the line it became a risk not to ask rather than to say silent.
When I am working on a team, my question shifts to variations of the original. I still feel nervous sometimes, but it is worth it. It’s now more like a muscle I’ve gotten used to flexing: “Why isn’t our team more diverse?” “Whose knowledge do we value/ignore in our research?” “Whose stories are we telling?” “Who is missing from the decision-making table?” “How can we meet people where they are?”
It can be a scary thing to be the person who mentions race, anti-racism, anti-Black racism, colonialism, heteronormativity or xenophobia in a meeting when it hasn’t come up yet. But it is not as scary as the consequences of sitting in the room with privilege and not bringing the persistent inequities of our systems into the conversation.
Somewhere along the line it became a risk not to ask rather than to say silent.
I mentioned that a conversation is an invitation and in my experience, it almost happens that when I start these conversations in the workplace, someone finds a way to respond to that invitation. It is usually a racialized person, and pre-Covid it used to happen in hallways, in the washroom, in those liminal spaces that go unmonitored and feel clandestine.
Now, these conversations find me over on social media, but they remain the same — they’re head nods that say:
“I see you. I hear you. Let’s do this together.”
