US Elections: On Safety and Security

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As America heads to the polls, I am reminded of these two words – safety and security. They are often used interchangeably but mean radically different things. Safety is – I can be here. Security is – I belong here. If this sounds complex, I’ll try to break it down further.

It is very possible to be uncomfortable in a place but still feel safe; but it is not possible to feel unsafe and be comfortable. When people talk about diversity and inclusion, they often make the mistake of focusing on one of the other, but true inclusion carries the two alongside. It is not enough to have a quota for how many minorities you want to hire, the important question is how many of those minorities do you need to create a sense of security? We must aim for security and not just safety. Security brings comfort.

In psychology, there’s something called the magic third and it’s referred to as the number you need to achieve full integration within a group. If you have a third of a specific group, you achieve full integration, more than a third and in a couple of cycles, that group will become the majority so you want to ideally keep things within a third for equilibrium.

America is facing a reckoning, so many people feel safe but not secure and this election is essentially an assessment of what the American society would look like in another 50 years. This election is not about the next four or eight years, it’s about the next 50. It’s about finding enough of a group (the magic third) to achieve full integration. In the early 1900s, Ivy League universities scrambled so hard to limit the number of Jewish students they admitted, they were worried that their colleges would be overran by Jews so they created all sorts of non-academic criteria to target the Jews (who were very good academically) but today, about a century later, the Jews are not seen as outsiders in America, in fact, the Jews are most times not distinguishable from the very people who tried to ban them in 1900s. If you go back even half a century later, it was the Irish who were being avoided. People avoided renting their houses to the “lousy, criminal, drinking” Irish. They were castigated. Today, someone of an Irish descent is the President of the USA and some forty years ago, he was a big supporters for policies that discriminated against blacks. Yet again, in about 100 years, the Irish moved from being seen as outsiders to being mainstream, just like the Jews in America today. Nearly two decades ago, Indra Nooyi was the first woman of Indian Descent to lead a Fortune 500 company. That event was such a monumental shock and in just two decades, when an Indian is hired today to lead a Fortune 500 company, it doesn’t make headlines. It has been normalized. There is a magic number that tilts the balance; it’s the magic third.

Where am I going with this? There is a systematic way of moving from being an outsider to being part of decision makers at the table. Diversity conversations need to move from giving people a seat at the table to making them become part of the decision makers. I think that this election will decide if the decision makers will have new entrants in the next half a century or if the status quo will hold. This election is about how close we get to that magic third; America’s reckoning is at hand.

Vote wisely. Vote for the future. Vote for the magic third. For safety and security.

 

Miracle Roch.

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