The path to a new world: Taking ownership of our beliefs, stories and bodies

The path to a new world: Taking ownership of our beliefs, stories and bodies

Written By: Mallory Combemale, Co-Founder at Inheritance Project

You are likely reading this because you care about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). Perhaps it’s part of your formal role at work, and/or a topic that has deep personal significance for you based on your life experiences or those of your loved ones. You may be looking for strategies, tactics and policies that can make positive change in your workplaces and communities. 

While action is important, the real positive impact of policy change in the world will never be realized unless we also change our inner world. Ownership requires introspection, as well as action. 

When faced with the dismal stats on representation in senior leadership and pay inequity across almost all industries, it’s natural to want to jump straight to action. But in order to move forward, we have to look back. If we fail to do this internal, reflective work, the same systems that created mass inequities will continue to live on in different forms. Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” speaks to those perils.

First, we may ask: why do inequities rooted in race, gender, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation exist in the first place? They are a product of our shared history, our shared inheritance, and can be traced back to the economic and political structures underpinning capitalism and colonialism in Europe. It’s impossible to address DEI without looking at the way this history persists in our organizations and within our own bodies and minds.

When you start this process, you may feel overwhelmed by the weight of our collective inheritance. We have all inherited a broken, unjust world that perpetuates violence and rewards colonial ideals.

My mother worked in the Singaporean offices of an American advertising firm in the 1980s, several decades after Singapore became an independent nation. I grew up with her numerous stories about disparities in the pay and treatment of local staff compared to white expats from Europe and the US. Even though the era of British colonization was legally over, the set of beliefs it embedded around the world lives on and shapes the way we all treat one another.

When we realize this, the question then becomes: what beliefs and stories live within me? What have I inherited that may be contributing to injustice? Ownership starts with taking responsibility for the stories you have inherited about who you are and how you fit into the world we share.

Through the process of self-inquiry we share at Inheritance Project, I’ve become aware of so many damaging inherited beliefs that live in me. These are just a few:

• Third-world countries are poor because their leaders are corrupt
• Black neighborhoods are scary
• Your success and worthiness is proportional to your ability to produce
• If you are emotional, you can’t be a good leader

Acknowledging these inherited beliefs can be a challenging process because you may knowingly disagree with, and even hate, the beliefs that you subconsciously perpetuate.  As Bessel van der Kolk teaches in “The Body Keeps the Score”, memory is stored in our body, not our minds. In order to change our beliefs, we need to work with our bodies.

I may desire to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, gender, appearance or other identity markers. My body, however, might disagree. When a black man walks behind me at night in New York City, my body tenses up. My body responds differently in the exact same situation with an Asian-looking woman. I have inherited a pattern of responding to others that plays out subconsciously. Taking ownership of our beliefs means becoming aware of and taking responsibility for the patterns that live in our nervous systems and bodies.

This can be a long journey and requires lifelong commitment to change. Even after years of awareness and intentional practice to shift this pattern, I still notice that it happens occasionally. Resmaa Menakem beautifully explains the journey of transforming our inherited beliefs in his book My Grandmother's Hands, which also provides very practical tools for working with the body.

Inherited stories and belief systems also live in our language. How often have you told people at work that they “killed it” or to  “lead the charge” on a new project? These turns of phrase reflect a culture still rooted in colonial principles like domination and violence. Even the word “ownership” comes from this belief system, meaning “the right of title to property.” The concept of ownership of land and other human beings was of course essential to the colonial paradigm and to slavery as an economic system. Indigenous communities in the Americas before colonization did not carry the same notion of ownership in their cultures and consequently had a vastly different relationship to the land, resources, and one another.

At first, it may feel difficult to acknowledge that you have inherited beliefs you are not proud of and don’t represent who you want to be or the world you wish to create. The scariest and hardest part about transforming a dominant system that holds power is admitting the ways in which it holds power over you. However, in pushing these truths away, we make ourselves powerless. It’s only when we recognize and accept all that we have inherited that we realize our power to change it.

As my co-founder Katya wrote last year, we have all—no matter our color, country, creed, culture or class—inherited the society we were born into. Each and every one of us learned how to live in the world we inherited. That means that each of us, with enough courage and the right tools, has the opportunity to write new stories, and in doing so, bequeath a radically different inheritance to the next generation.

When we own our responsibility, we reclaim our power. The door is open. Cross the threshold. A new world is waiting for you.

Begin the journey of unpacking your inheritance with Inheritance Project’s free online workbook.