Lopez explained that to create a community of belonging, one must embrace one’s authentic self while also making room for other people to be as they are: “We are responsible for creating a community of belonging by embracing our authentic selves and making room for others to belong as their true selves. . . . I would like to focus my message today on how we can foster a community of true belonging through our acceptance of ourselves and others as we are.”
On November 16th, the BYU College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences hosted the annual Hickman Diversity & Inclusion lecture. This year’s lecture was presented by BYU faculty member Dr. Jane Lilly López, who received the 2023-2024 Hickman Diversity, Collaboration, and Inclusion Award. Dr. López entitled her lecture “There Is Room.”
In a past report published in November 2022, editors at The Cougar Chronicle reported on Professor Jane López’s “Revealing Whiteness Activity,” a homework assignment in her BYU sociology class. You can read more of Dr. López and her work here.
After introducing herself, Dr. López began the lecture by sharing a quote from Brené Brown: “Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging . . . doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”
Lopez explained that to create a community of belonging, one must embrace one’s authentic self while also making room for other people to be as they are: “We are responsible for creating a community of belonging by embracing our authentic selves and making room for others to belong as their true selves. . . . I would like to focus my message today on how we can foster a community of true belonging through our acceptance of ourselves and others as we are.”
“Rather than trying to pressure people to fit in by conforming to a specific notion of who or what is good or right,” López argued, “we should welcome difference and celebrate the fact that there are many paths that we can follow in our quest for happiness… while still being a part of this university’s unique community.”
After describing her childhood as a young girl, López stated she “was never truly offered a place to belong.” She spoke of how her peers rejected her and how she felt she was not enough, or, perhaps, “too much.” Dr. López quoted clinical psychologist Dr. Eileen Kennedy-Moore: “Trying to fit in makes us feel anxious and constantly on edge because we sense that if we slip up, we’re out.”
Dr. López then explained that BYU is a lot like her high school, where people feel they are constantly evaluated and measured against an ideal standard; people feel as though they need to conform to a checklist to belong. She said she has rarely met people at BYU who feel as though they “check all of the boxes.” López explained, “Yet we continue to engage in boundary-making and boundary-enforcement that directly limit our own and others’ belonging.”
Dr. López then presented two choices: we can either “expend our energy drawing borders around belonging and enforcing them by making sure some people are never allowed in, or [we can] make room for everyone to belong.”
López continued by describing the problem perfectionism has on belonging by sharing an experience of learning Spanish as a missionary. She struggled to speak with people and had a lot of self-doubt from her perfectionism; once she embraced her imperfection of speaking the language as a missionary, however, she found “belonging, acceptance, and love.”
Dr. López argued that individuals would better flourish by shedding aspects of perfectionism in society. Additionally, López discussed that focusing primarily on grades or other external measures fails to create a place of belonging; students do not need to compete with other students to graduate, and colleagues do not have to compete with other colleagues to keep their jobs.
Towards the end of her lecture, Dr. López shared thoughts from feminist activist Bell Hooks and shared four points on how to create a culture of belonging:
- Learn to communicate honestly with ourselves and others.
- Sacrifice our fears of imperfection, failure, and rejection and be vulnerable to those around us.
- We must value connection over individual achievement and believe there is room for everyone to succeed.
- We must make other’s conditions our own. We must not content ourselves with inequity or injustice or seek our advancement at the cost of our communal well-being.
López concluded, “There is enough love for all of us. There is enough room for all of us. Room for everyone to be different, to be imperfect, to succeed, and to belong. If we lean into this hope and let it take root in our hearts, we will create the community of true belonging that we desperately crave, and we will experience the pure joy of understanding what it truly means to belong.”
Written by: Eliza Andersen and Adam Blake
Contributors at the Cougar Chronicle
The Cougar Chronicle is an independent student-run newspaper and is not affiliated with Brigham Young University or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
If this report is accurate, the teachings in this lecture are completely contrary to the gospel message of repentance, rejection of the natural man, and transformation through following Christ as his disciple.
This is some of the finest academic doublespeak I have heard in a long time. “…we continue to engage in boundary-making and boundary-enforcement that directly limit our own and others’ belonging.” Which means exactly what? It is not diversity and everyone being true to the reality of their own self that makes us strong. Our strength comes from shared values and the shared experience of acting upon those values.