February: Permission to Believe in Better
When I ponder the name, “Next Gen Service Corp”, I interpret it as saying this is the core group of people that will serve as the next generation of activists changing the world for the better. And as someone who loves being of service to others, it is literally a dream come true to be standing here addressing this group. Spreading anti-racism is my passion, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t intimidating. And I want to thank each of you, as the memories of your faces will serve as reason not to succumb to fear.
Special shout out to the LQBTQIA+ committee for inviting me to speak. And I want everyone to know Marysa Gomez is the reason I’m here today. Sys, you made this happen. Today’s speech is titled, “Permission to Believe In Better”. I aim to speak in a way that urges everyone to form a deeper connection with their emotions. I will illustrate that vulnerability is a gift you grant yourself, not something you give to someone else. Learning to decipher emotions and to be comfortable with vulnerability will maximize your potential to serve the world.
So, who is Evan Moss? Above all I’m a father of two sons—ages five and three. Secondly, I’m a husband, and I’m proud to celebrate my 6th wedding anniversary in a few weeks. And third—before being an uncle or a Carnegie Mellon graduate or an Apple employee—I am an activist. That’s not a hat that I put on when the moment suits me. Activism a lifestyle that I aim to live out in every moment of every day. It’s been about 4-years since I first garnered enough conviction to act on my activist intuition. And it’s amazing how now, when I imagine the future, everything that excites me is somehow tied to my activist journey.
I focus on anti-racism because race is the aspect of my identity that is attacked the most, but my strategies for using emotions and vulnerability to diminish social bigotry can be applied to whichever “ism” or “phobia” matters to you. Social problems like racism, heterosexism, or ableism are products of individuals being more willing to use our differences as justification to disconnect instead of motivation to engage. The more comfortable you are with challenging your own understanding on how deeply you can connect with another, the more capable you will be at inspiring a more harmonious society.
Gil Scott-Heron was the great American poet and singer that popularized the phrase, “The revolution will not be televised.” He wasn’t suggesting that TV networks wouldn’t broadcast the content. He was saying that before the world can experience a revolution, change has to first happen in places that cameras can’t see. For a society to experience a revolution, change has to happen in the hearts and minds of its individuals.
Given how obvious the world problems are, it’s amazing how allergic people are to the word “change”. Every time I tell someone I’m an activist, it’s like they’re compelled to word-vomit all of their reminders that change is always slow, all of their excuses for believing activism is too hard, all of their justification for being silent . It’s easy to align with popular perspectives like these until you realize that the reality you live is a direct product of the perspectives you choose. It is a life skill to be able to shift your perspective until you find one that empowers and enables you. The more you hone this skill, the more you’ll be able to exercise control over your own life. Unlike gifts, though, skills have to be intentionally developed over time. Instead of dwelling on the times when change was slow and costly, I prioritize focusing on the times in my life when meaningful, lasting change took place quickly and sometimes painlessly.
I often revisit a conversation I had a few years back with Layla, my gay brother-in-law’s lesbian best friend. I had shared with her that while I felt very strongly that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, I couldn’t defend a stance for or against same-sex couples raising children together. Layla paused for maybe two seconds and calmly asked, “If one woman can raise a son to be a man, why can’t two?” Whereas she could have been defensive or argumentative, her emotional awareness and willingness to be vulnerable helped me understand an experience I will never live. Having been raised by a single-mother, the truth of her words destroyed the barriers within my mind, freeing my awareness to discover other simple truths about life and love that now serve as justification for behaving differently. For voting differently. For protesting differently.
My anti-racism platform is named, “Let’s Talk About Race”, despite the fact that I spent the first 30 years of my life refusing to do exactly that. I used to be the one saying, “I don’t talk about race with white folks.” But on May 25th, 2020—while trying not to catch COVID, while raising a 2-year old with no childcare, while trying to manage my career while supporting my wife’s career and during our second pregnancy —the news of George Floyd’s demise broke me in a way that I had never experienced. For my whole life it had been fine for the not-Black people around me to not understand my Black experiences. I had long accepted that a part of my existence would always be invisible to the white family I had married. But the possibility of my kids being unseen by the people they loved the most—that was too much. Upon realizing this, I came to understand that silence is complicity.
I haven’t been the same since my wife broke the news with three simple words—“They killed him.” For the first few weeks, it didn’t matter if I was discussing dinner options with her or reading my toddler a bedtime story or answering a technical question on a work call—if I let too many words leave my mouth without pausing to brace my torso, I simply doubled over and dissolved into tears. Whereas I usually took pride in my emotional stability, my emotions were so big and so uncontrollable that nothing felt stable. Joy and guilt became synonymous, and the intensity of my emotions battered me into a numbed silence.
I haunted the house for several days before my wife pulled me aside and asked, “Why are you behaving like this?” As I struggled to answer, I began to understand the true detriment of willfully agreeing not to talk about my otherness for so long. Not talking about race hadn’t spared me from experiencing racism, but instead had spared me from learning to effectively express my racial thoughts through words.
In the same way that your perspective limits your reality, awareness limits your ability to be creative and innovative. And it is almost impossible to have meaningful awareness regarding things you don’t discuss openly. “It is hard to be what you cannot see” is a perspective that exemplifies the importance of representation. Similarly, the phrase “It is hard to say words you have never heard” exemplifies the importance of conversation. Failing to have dialogue about a given subject only limits how many words you can utilize when it’s you that needs to talk. This is true not just for conversations you have with others but also the ones you have with yourself. Let’s talk—about race, about , about everything. Not because it is the right thing to do, but because expanding your awareness opens you to experience more of life’s beautify.
I spent my whole life believing emotions should either be controlled and diminished or avoided all together until my emotions were so unavoidably disruptive and so mentally engulfing that I felt diminished. I had never used words like panicky or anxious or disheartened to describe myself, and in the midst of everything happening in 2020 my surface-level understanding of the emotions flooding my mind left me incapable of using words to escape the isolation of silence.
I realized all of this, to some degree, while standing there in my kitchen staring into my wife’s green eyes. Her lack of melanin was no longer a valid excuse for believing she couldn’t understand my human experience. I locked myself in my bedroom, stared at a wall, and meditated on the question “What do you feel” until I heard the most honest, most vulnerable story I'd ever allowed myself to tell. When I shared it with my wife, instead of responding with the typical “I don’t understand, but I’m here to support”, she hugged me and said, “That makes perfect sense.” And we cried together.
My home-life was on the path to recovery, but I was still struggling at work. So with my wife’s help, I turned my deeply personal reflections into a 45-minute Keynote presentation and invited my manager plus 7 other co-workers to video conference. What do you call a meeting where plan to share the most emotion-filled story you’ve ever told to the people who manage your career? “Let’s Talk About Race”. Here’s what I’ve learned since I started taking my own advice.
Silence is complicity, and it is critical that everyone learns to use their natural gifts and abilities to protest in their own personalized, specialized way. I expected that first hour-long meeting with 8 people to cost me my job. But when I realized releasing my story into the world relieved the pressure I felt within, I blindly decided to present “Let’s Talk About Race” every Wednesday and Friday during my lunch. What I thought would be a one-time thing turned into my own personal protest.
You can never know the value of a story until you allow it to be heard. Everyone knows that most powerful stories come from the heart, but we tend to ignore this when our heart needs to be heard. I devalued my own story so much that I struggled to share it with my wife—until I chose the perspective that there is value in our shared humanity, and sought to define this value for myself by sharing my story as widely as possible.
In the first 3 months at least 4,000 unique logins joined my bi-weekly video conferences—this included vice presidents from Apple, students in Brazil, engineers in London, church groups in Ohio. And now, the only part of my story that I struggle to explain is how freeing it is to see myself in the reflection of everyone around me.
Now I understand that at their root, emotions are data that deserve your time and attention. The answers to your life’s questions might be hiding in the emotions you haven’t processed. For example, I didn’t value sadness until I realized it indicates areas of my life that need more attention. Anger was strictly a negative experience until I realized it highlights personal boundaries that I wasn’t aware of. Emotions are the non-physical part of you expressing itself through your body. Learning to decipher these signals from the Universe will help you move through the world as a more complete and whole version of yourself.
Most people have an incomplete understanding of what vulnerability offers and often assume emotions follow logic. Such beliefs cause us to mislabel unexpected outcomes as proof that we shouldn’t have been vulnerable. Learning to sit with your discomfort long enough for it to teach you something is how you translate life’s surprises into truths about your reality—truths that enable you to be more intentional in your pursuit of success, whatever that may be.
The first time I experienced racism in the workplace, I didn’t have the emotional stamina to advocate for myself. And now I fly around the country facilitating conversations about race for hundreds of people at a time. I thought I was doing this to protect my kids or to benefit the world. But when I realized that connecting with dissimilar people diminishes my own limiting beliefs, activism became a way for me to regain the freedom being stolen by the perspectives I used to choose.
Before you consider yourself exempt from a social issue or too different from someone to connect, consider a reality where the problem is as bad as the stereotypes suggest or one where someone else’s truth is your own. Before you celebrate a hero or condemn a villain, ask yourself what would trigger you to do what they’ve done. This is how you shift from thinking you need to live someone else’s experience to understanding the value of our shared humanity.
Before you decide there’s nothing you can do, consider this. Everything I’ve shared with you comes from countless hours of self-reflection. I have no formal training on public speaking. I didn’t study history or culture in college. And yet I know for a fact that my words have been used to inspire many companies to improve their hiring practice and update their codes of conduct. Last February, the Oakland Rotary Club concluded our conversation workshop by pledging a $10,000 scholarship for local minority students. This week, I celebrated the 150th member joining a Black employee resource group I created at Apple. That same employee resource group celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday by announcing that for the second year in a row we’re giving out 30,000 dollars to send students to this year’s National Society of Black Engineers conference. Today, I’m in Arizona. This summer, I’m delivering a keynote speech at a Juneteenth Conference in Chicago. While I will never truly quantify the impact I’ve made, I know for certain it exceeds my wildest expectations. And with that in mind, how much could we accomplish if everyone decided to believe in better?
