Soo Bong Peer - The Essential Diversity Mindset: How to Cultivate a More Inclusive Culture and Environment

With engaging storytelling and actionable practices to implement in your business, Soo Bong Peer's new book is the one that needed to be written for our society.

Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times
bestselling author of Triggers, Mojo, and
What Got You Here Won't Get You There

There has never been a more important time than now for the valuable insights in The Essential Diversity Mindset. This book is a gift for anyone who works with people.

Barbara Mitchell, coauthor of
The Big Book of HR and The Essential HR Handbook

The Essential Diversity Mindset delves into the psychology of diversity and inclusion as a transformative approach to human connection and the dismantling of systemic biases. This book resonated with my drive to increase equitable best practices in workplaces and communities, which spearheaded the launch of the National Diversity Council. I highly recommend this book that will change your perspective on race, ethnicity, and diversity beyond America's mental constructs.

Dennis Kennedy, founder and
chair of the National Diversity Council

In The Essential Diversity Mindset, Soo Bong Peer brings her engaging and provocative voice to the global discussion on equity, inclusion and diversity. She wisely purports that an expanded approachand new mindsetis needed to create organizations and communities where each person can thrive and where new heights of accomplishment are achieved. I highly recommend this book not only for evangelists of equity, diversity, and inclusion but also for anyone who wishes to increase their impact as a leader.

Kristin Colber-Baker, global director of diversity,
equity and inclusion, Mars, Inc.

Soo Bong Peer eloquently weaves lifetime stories of her experiences from around the world to portray a path to bring people together in a rich fabric of diversity. This book should be of interest to leaders, managers, academics, or anyone else who wants to explore alternate ways to thrive in differences.

Deepa Purushothaman, diversity, inclusion, and
equity leader and former Deloitte partner

This book is dedicated to my loved ones
and the countless people I encountered from
all walks of life who helped me to see and grow.

__________________

This edition first published in 2021 by Career Press,
an imprint of
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
With offices at:
65 Parker Street, Suite 7
Newburyport, MA 01950
www.careerpress.com
www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2021 by Soo Bong Peer

Foreword copyright 2021 by Clarence Page

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC . Reviewers may quote brief passages.

ISBN: 978-1-63265-189-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design by Kathryn Sky-Peck
Cover illustration by iStock.com
Interior by Timm Bryson, em em design, LLC
Typeset in Warnock Pro

Printed in Canada
MAR
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

I am amused to think of how little I might seem to have in common with Soo Bong Peer.

I'm a black American journalist, born and raised in a midwestern factory town before I migrated to the big city. She was the daughter of a South Korean army general who became an ambassador to Mexico before she ended up in America. But we met through a classic American way: Our sons were high school buddies.

And we both share a love for this country's proverbial melting pot, although I prefer such modern labels as the salad bowl, the gumbo, or the mulligan stew. After all, the meat and vegetables in a stewpot don't totally melt together. They keep their identities, yet all lend flavor to the stew and receive flavor from it, too. It is that flavor that makes the stew special, like America.

Yet, our diversity is a paradox. We go back and forth as to how much it matters and whether it shouldn't. There was a great sense of relief embedded in the happy talk of a post-racial society after President Barack Obama's election. But no one says that now. One person's post-racial turned out to be someone else's too racial.

New waves of headline-making racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and otherwise xenophobic unrest signal how much more effort is needed to help Americans to live comfortably with our own diversity.

The most important stories in this larger challenge unfold not in the headlines but in the day-to-day lives of ordinary Americans. Great progress has been made to equalize opportunities and sensitize ourselves to our various tribal differences. Yet too many of us continue to harbor unresolved anger, fears, resentments, and suspicions.

In short, we need to talk. Unfortunately, our racial labels and other group identifiers, created to ease interracial dialogue, too often have served instead to pull us apart, sometimes exaggerating differences instead of bridging them.

To help us rebuild those bridges, Soo Bong Peer offers The Essential Diversity Mindset, a rich combination of personal stories, research data, and excellent advice to help us think and talk beyond the limits of labels to see, respect, and appreciate the individuals within.

If anyone knows about labelsor defying themit is Soo Bong Peer. Born the daughter of a South Korean army general who became ambassador to Mexico, she became a writer, a consultant, an executive coach, a motherand an American.

Yet, an early and defining theme in her book is her weariness with racial labels. It is not the use of such labels that troubles her as much as their overuse. When the labels become cages of confusion, confining our perceptions of others into boxes to be checked on a census form, she tells us, they actually impede our ability to appreciate others as individuals.

Her life journey takes us with her to different countries and social contexts, much as her life did, and examines what diversity means in different times and places. Her education into the salad bowl of race, ethnicity, and classand responsibilities and obligationsbecomes our journey, too.

She takes us from the process of indoctrination into various scripts to the special skill sets of cross-cultural agility and pervasive diversity, the point at which we begin to gain maximum appreciation for life beyond the limits of our monolithic comfort zones.

Let us be dissatisfied, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., preached in his last days, until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

In that spirit, I applaud this book. I often have compared race talk to sex talk: Everyone is interested in it, we like to think we're experts at it, yet we're reluctant to discuss it in mixed company or in front of the children.

Instead, we often try to keep the conversation within our own tribe, among people very much like us, which means a lot of dangerous myths and misunderstandings circulate among those of us who are too ignorant to know any betterand the bad news only gets worse.

Reading about Soo's life in this book may remind you, as it constantly reminded me, of your own experiences in America's great gumbo of diversity. Some of these stories are tragic. Others are hilarious, as absurd as our rules of racial etiquette can be in our society.