Then, in October 2021, Netflix released a new Dave Chappelle stand-up special named The Closer. Chappelle is one of the world’s most popular comedians, known for biting commentaries on race, gender, and sexuality. In The Closer, he joked about being “tricked” into calling a trans woman beautiful. He said that “gender is a fact”—seen by many as delegitimizing the trans community—and lampooned survivors of sexual violence. He lamented society’s treatment of the rapper DaBaby, who was embraced after he murdered another man, but became a pariah after making homophobic comments.

  GLAAD, an organization that monitors media for bias against the LGBTQ community, said the special was “ridiculing trans people and other marginalized communities.” One Netflix employee complained on Twitter that the special “attacks the trans community, and the very validity of transness.” Protests by outside groups were planned and boycotts proposed.

  The outcry prompted Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, to publicly defend the program and argue in an email sent to all employees that “we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.” He noted that The Closer “is our most watched, stickiest and most award winning stand-up special to date.” That inspired even more criticism. Websites and newspapers jumped on the controversy, publishing more than two thousand articles in just two months. When demonstrators marched on Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters to protest the Chapelle special, counterprotesters showed up and scuffles broke out.

  To the outside world, it once again seemed like Netflix was at war with itself. But inside the firm, employees saw things differently. Only a small number of those picketing were Netflix employees. “We didn’t need to do that,” said one employee who had lodged a formal complaint with executives about the Chappelle special. There were multiple internal town hall meetings where workers had the opportunity to voice their complaints and anger. Executives were confronted with questions; petitions were circulated suggesting reforms. Internal criticisms were widely shared—and the company had procedures in place for listening and responding. “We knew how to get heard,” the employee told me. “There was a system to make sure everyone knew how we felt.”

  There were still disagreements, of course: The company’s trans employee resource group urged executives to put a disclaimer on the special or edit the most offensive parts; executives declined and said they were devoted to artistic expression, even when it was offensive. A few workers, disappointed by executives’ responses, left the company.

  But even employees who complained about the special told me that, when tense discussions occurred, the tone was generally empathetic, structured to give everyone a voice. A few days after publicly defending the special, Sarandos approached The Hollywood Reporter with a mea culpa. “I screwed up,” he said. He acknowledged failing to listen to employees’ concerns. “I should have first and foremost acknowledged in those emails that a group of our employees were in pain, and they were really feeling hurt…. I’d say those emails lacked humanity.” Since then, he continued, he’d been focused on “just listening to folks and hearing out how they’re feeling.”

  One of the employees who helped organize internal petitions about the Chappelle special told me that “these kinds of conversations always have a lot of heated emotions,” but that Netflix has learned how to have them. “We had a big town hall after all this started, and the rules were made clear at the beginning: Everyone was allowed to talk, but no shaming or blaming or attacks. You had to think before you spoke. You had to contribute, rather than just criticize.” During that meeting, people critiqued the company’s leadership to their faces, “and trans employees talked about what they had experienced at the company and what needed to change,” the employee said. “And there were other people saying, ‘I don’t agree with you on everything, but thank you, I understand you’re hurting and I’m committed to having this conversation.’ It felt like a real dialogue.”

  Companies, like societies, will always have disagreements. Compromise is not always possible, or sometimes even the goal. Often the best we can hope for is understanding. It is through understanding, and dialogue, that a community, and a democracy, thrives. When we create space to discuss conflicting beliefs, we make connection more likely.

  Netflix, of course, has not solved issues such as racism and prejudice. “Those are big, structural problems, and there’s no silver bullet,” Myers told me. Real change requires shifts in not only how Netflix hires, promotes, and supports employees, but society at large. “But if you don’t teach people how to have these kinds of conversations, then you don’t give them a chance to hear each other,” Myers said. “That isn’t the solution, but it’s the first step.”

  The Who Are We? conversation may be hard, but it is also vital. “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity,” John F. Kennedy told students at American University in 1963, five months before he was assassinated. “In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

  Commonalities are what allow us to learn from each other, to bridge differences, to begin talking, understanding, and working together. Conversations about identity are what reveal these connections and allow us to share our full selves.

  Skip Notes

  *1 Friedland, who had a long career before joining Netflix, in an interview with me expressed contrition: “I understand why I was fired,” he told me. “Was I tone-deaf? Yeah. I didn’t understand how that word would be heard, and I shouldn’t have said it. But what’s painful is that this is one small moment in a long career, and I’m not sure it’s fair to judge anyone by one mistake.”

  *2 Within Netflix, as within society, there are some limits on questions. “This happens a lot with trans and nonbinary people,” Myers told me. “People ask them about their bodies, and that’s inappropriate. We would never ask cisgender people these kinds of questions. And so we tell everyone, check your motivations. Are you asking just because you’re personally curious, or because knowing the answer will help everyone succeed?”

  *3 These workshops are just one facet of the work Myers and her team have pursued at Netflix. For details on other aspects, please see the endnotes.

  *4 It is important to note that, alongside encouraging such questions, guidelines must also allow people to decline to answer. This is critical because, historically, individuals from marginalized communities have been asked to do an outsized amount of work describing their lives. For more on this, please see the endnotes.

  A GUIDE TO USING THESE IDEAS

  PART IV

  Making Hard Conversations Easier

  Difficult conversations happen all the time. Sometimes they are centered on issues such as race, ethnicity, or gender. Just as frequently, they are challenging in other ways: An employee has performance problems and needs to hear some blunt feedback; a boss is underpaying you and needs to understand your complaints; a spouse has got to change if a relationship is going to survive; an uncle is drinking too much, and you are worried.

  These kinds of conversations are hard because they can threaten someone’s sense of self: Our discussion with an employee about their performance might seem, to them, like criticisms of their work ethic, intelligence, or personality. Telling a boss that you deserve a bigger paycheck could sound, to the boss herself, as if you are accusing her of being uncaring. Asking a spouse to change can sometimes come off as an attack on who they are. An uncle is likely to hear your concerns about his alcohol consumption as a criticism of how he lives.

  But these conversations are not just essential, they are unavoidable. So it is important that we are mindful of the last rule for a learning conversation.

  This rule tells us to consider our actions during three distinct periods: before a discussion, at the beginning of the discussion, and as the discussion unfolds.

  BEFORE THE DISCUSSION

  Before a word is spoken in a Who Are We? conversation, there are some questions you should consider. The goal of this exercise is to nudge yourself to think about how you hope a conversation will unfold, and what you hope will be said.

  Ask yourself:

  What do you hope to accomplish? What do you most want to say? What do you hope to learn? What do you think others hope to say and learn? If we have elucidated goals before a discussion, we’re more likely to achieve them.

  How will this conversation start? How will you ensure that everyone has a voice and feels they can participate? What is needed to draw everyone in?

  What obstacles might emerge? Will people get angry? Withdrawn? Will a hesitancy to say something controversial prevent us from saying what’s necessary? How can we make it safer for everyone to air their thoughts?

  When those obstacles appear, what’s the plan? Research shows that being preemptively aware of situations that make us anxious or fearful can lower the impact of those concerns. How will you calm yourself and others if the conversation gets tense, or encourage someone who has gone quiet to participate more?

  Finally, what are the benefits of this dialogue? Are they worth the risks? (The answer usually is yes.) When people get angry or upset, or it’s easier to walk away, how will you remind yourself and others why this dialogue is so important?

  AT THE BEGINNING OF THE DISCUSSION

  Tough conversations frequently begin on uncertain footing. Particularly when we’re discussing Who Are We?, we’re usually anxious we’ll say the wrong thing, or tense about what we might hear.

  We can lessen those anxieties by addressing a few things right away.

  As a conversation begins:

  First, establish guidelines. It is useful to make clear the norms—for instance, no one is allowed to blame, shame, or attack others. The goal is to share our feelings, not litigate who is at fault. It is also helpful to define if asking questions is okay, and if there are some kinds of inquiries—about, say, very personal topics, or particularly sensitive issues—that require some forethought. We should affirm that everyone is encouraged to speak, that everyone belongs in this discussion, and perhaps identify someone to serve as a moderator to make sure everyone is given space. Finally, it is useful to ask people to speak about their own experiences and describe their own stories. Don’t generalize. Don’t solve or diminish others’ problems, unless they ask for help. When a colleague describes something painful, listen, and tell them you’re sorry it happened. Acknowledge what they felt.

  Second, draw out everyone’s goals. You likely have some aims in mind. Share them. Then, ask others what they hope to get out of this discussion. Identify emotional goals (“I want to make sure we stay friends” or “I need to get something off my chest”); and practical goals (“I’d like to walk away from this with a plan”); as well as group goals (“It’s important to me that we all show compassion for each other”).

  Finally, acknowledge, and keep acknowledging, that discomfort is natural—and useful. We will misspeak. We will ask naïve questions. We will say things we didn’t realize were offensive. When these discomforts emerge, rather than shutting down, we should use them as opportunities to learn.

  AS THE DISCUSSION UNFOLDS

  Once we’ve prepared for a hard conversation, and have discussed guidelines and goals, we should remember to:

  Draw out multiple identities. Ask people about their backgrounds, communities, the organizations and causes they support, and where they come from. Share your identities in return. We all contain multiple selves; none of us are one-dimensional. It helps to be reminded of that.

  Work to ensure everyone is on an equal footing. Who Are We? discussions work best when everyone has an equal voice and the ability to speak. Focus on welcoming everyone’s perspective. Don’t trumpet your wealth or connections, your privilege or seniority, your expertise. Seek to frame topics so everyone is an expert, or everyone a novice. (This, in fact, is why discussing experiences is so powerful: We’re all experts in what we’ve seen and felt.)

  Acknowledge people’s experiences and look for genuine similarities. Ask people about their identities and build on what you have in common. (“You went to Valley High? So did I!”) But remember: Similarities must be genuine. And connections become more meaningful when we push them a bit further, and use them to understand each other better. (“High school was tough for me. What was it like for you?”) Even if we don’t have similarities, simply acknowledging others’ experiences—showing you have heard them—can create a sense of togetherness.

  Manage your environment. Social identities gain and lose power based on their salience and the environment where a conversation occurs. Sometimes a simple shift—moving a discussion from a group setting to something more personal; talking away from the workplace; starting a meeting by discussing the weekend before getting to business—can shift what feels safe, and who feels welcomed. (And, by the same token, when an environment makes someone feel left out, it can undermine our sense of safety.)

  This can seem like a lot. Hard conversations, even with the most meticulous and thoughtful planning, can veer off in directions we haven’t foreseen. But when we’re aware of harmful influences such as identity threat and stereotype threat, when we have a plan and are prepared for obstacles, when we know that things will get uncomfortable and that’s okay, it becomes a bit easier to discuss difficult things.

  AFTERWORD

  In the spring of 1937, a chain store magnate named Billy Grant approached Harvard University with a proposition. Grant had dropped out of high school decades earlier, but had gone on to make a fortune selling kitchen supplies and household wares at “25 Cent Stores” across the nation. Now, at the age of sixty-one, he had announced that he wanted to give back to society through a large donation—and, he told Harvard’s administrators, also achieve a secondary, more practical goal: He oversaw a growing empire and was hiring rapidly. His executives needed research, data, and scientific insights to assist them in choosing the best store managers and the smartest employees. So Grant offered to give a small fortune to the university to fund the school’s general research—as long as their scholars might consider his matter and offer some advice.

  Harvard’s administrators thought the request was a bit crass. But a donation is a donation, and they already knew how they would use the money, so they said yes. For years, faculty in the medical school had wanted to conduct a long-term, longitudinal study of, as they put it, “healthy young men.” In particular, they wanted to recruit hundreds of Harvard undergraduates and follow them for decades, examining such issues as “the problem of nature vs. nurture; connections between personality and health; whether mental and physical illnesses can be predicted; how constitutional considerations might influence career choice.” The plan, essentially, was to take Grant’s money and—in addition to trying to figure out what made someone good at selling spatulas—collect data on people’s fitness, families, schooling, work, emotional impulses, and physical characteristics. The participants would undergo extensive on-campus medical exams and psychological interviews, and then be asked to fill out detailed surveys, delivered via the mail and home visits by researchers, for the rest of their lives. Once all that data started rolling in, the researchers would look for patterns that explained why some participants became happy, gainfully employed, healthy adults, while others did not.

  The project initially was known as the Grant Study, and over the following years it slowly expanded. Eventually, a group of teens from South Boston’s tenements were enrolled, and then, as various participants married and had children, many of their spouses and offspring were included as well. Over time, more than two thousand men and women were poked, prodded, interviewed, and psychologically analyzed. Today the Harvard Study of Adult Development is one of the largest, longest, and most famous studies in the world.

  Among the first of the participants to be interviewed were two young men who had enrolled at Harvard in the years leading up to World War II. The first was an undergraduate who, researchers eventually determined, was a neurotic hypochondriac. Godfrey Camille, one researcher wrote (not too kindly), “was a disaster.” He had been raised away from other families and children because his parents were “pathologically suspicious.” When a researcher interviewed Camille’s mother, he deemed her “one of the most nervous people I have ever met,” and a psychologist determined that Camille had one of “the bleakest childhoods I have ever seen.” Camille arrived at Harvard in 1938 and almost instantly seemed overwhelmed. He visited the infirmary regularly, complaining of so many mysterious illnesses that one physician noted in his file that “this boy is turning into a regular psychoneurotic.” He was skinny, physically weak, and struggled to make friends. When America entered the war, Camille, like most Harvard men, enlisted in the military. But whereas many of his classmates were commissioned as officers and returned home with ribbons and medals, Camille was still a private when he was honorably discharged, with no significant accomplishments to speak of. He then attended medical school, but shortly after graduation attempted suicide, which made him a pariah in Boston’s medical community. He grew so distant from his family that, when his sister and mother died, he hardly mentioned their deaths in his follow-up surveys. At age thirty-five, he was hospitalized for fourteen months for pulmonary tuberculosis. “I was glad to be sick,” he later told a researcher. “I can go to bed for a year.”