In this early spring episode, Will’s joy is his local Gallery Night, a festive celebration of local art and artists. Amber’s joy is cherry blossom season in the Pacific Northwest. This episode’s discussion topic is “Intersectionality”, a term that had seen widespread attention and some misunderstanding in recent years. Intersectionality is a framework for understanding how our various identities come together (i.e., intersect) in unique ways. For example, the experiences of a straight Black woman and a gay Black man will have some similarities, but also important differences. We have a better understanding of people’s experiences when we consider their many identities that intersect. This episode’s question dispels misconceptions sometimes raised in rude public discourse that intersectionality is just about “adding up” identities for victimization. In story time, Amber shares a couple of powerful stories about difficult and positive interactions she’s had with police officers, and discusses some of the nuances of being Black and dealing with the police. This month’s habit-breaking skill is to Seek Individuating Information. The more you get to know the unique details that make someone and individual, the less likely it is that stereotypes and biases will try to “fill in the gaps” in your perceptions of that person, leading to discriminatory assumptions or behaviors. Will’s joyful recommendation is the hilarious and fun woman-led musical comedy TV show “Girls5Eva”.

In this new year's episode, Will's joy is cozy winter activities, especially his friend group's weekly movie night. Amber's January joy is birthday celebrations, because her family has a lot of birthday celebrations in January. As she does in all things, Amber brings lots of themed, personalized festivity to birthday celebrations! Connecting to new year's traditions of setting new intentions, this episode's discussion topic focuses on how to be intentional in diversity efforts. We don't want diversity efforts to be something we fall backwards into; diversity and inclusion deserves forethought and intentionality. Continuing that theme, we share stories that exemplify unfortunate diversity attempts and some that are more successful. This episode's question is "How do I ask about someone's identity respectfully?", and we discuss bad ways to ask about identity and offer suggestions for more positive and respectful ways to ask about others' identities. This episode's habit-breaking skill is to Think Ahead. Bias is more likely when we're figuring things out spontaneously, and less likely if we've thought things through ahead of time. Will's media recommendation for this episode is the action-packed period piece, "Prey", which is a wildly entertaining sci-fi action flick that also showcases Comanche history, language, and culture.

For this Trans* Awareness month episode, we bring back special guest Sandy Eichel, who is a transgender nonbinary person themself! We start off addressing notions of tokenism, and specifically discuss the difference between including an underrepresented voice versus tokenizing that person to speak for their whole group. This episode, we share our joy around Will’s costume room, Amber’s holiday sweater collection, and Sandy’s amazing annual Solstice Party! We discuss a variety of trans*-related issues, including pronouns, how to correct yourself if you slip up and misgender someone, and hearing about Sandy’s own journey to understand themself as a transgender and nonbinary person. This month’s habit-breaking skill is learning to Replace Stereotypes, and we learn about using the pneumonic “Detect, Reflect, Reject” as a way to retrain our automatic reactions. Sandy’s joyful media recommendation is the powerful documentary “Paris is Burning”.

To start off, we explain that, even though we both have doctorates, we describe ourselves as “so-called experts” because diversity and inclusion topics are ever-evolving, and there’s always more to learn. Things bringing us joy this episode are Will’s visits to the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Bristol, Wisconsin and Amber learning to make her Italian grandmother’s recipe for long sauce. Our discussion this episode focuses on our own identities and backgrounds, and we each share our stories of how we came to our career paths. As with many folks, our appearances aren’t complete indicators of our racial/ethnic identities — Amber discusses her Black and Italian heritage, and Will talks about being White and Hawaiian, as well as sharing his story about coming out as gay to his religious, Mormon family. Then we reflect on our answers to the question "Is race a social construct?". To work on our bias habit-breaking skills, we learn to watch out for Impression Justification as one way that biases can influence judgments and decision-making. Our joyful recommendation is the delightfully diverse and absolutely hilarious TV show, “Superstore.”