A Brand is a Constellation
The mythical norm, visibility bias, emerging from the margins, and expanding our circle of recognition
How do you get seen in a world that doesn’t see you?
"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," declared US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.
Thank you, sir. You truly are a once-in-a-generation legal mind.
Roberts then held and subsequently reaffirmed in the affirmative action cases of 2023 that any recognition of race as a characteristic associated with different opportunities or levels of access was discriminatory. The Supreme Court ruled that the only legal way to treat different people is to assume they are the same.
In theory, this sounds nice, right? If we know that race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other protected identities are used to justify discrimination, then indeed, we should eliminate our recognition of those identities at all.
But this is a perfect example of what Audre Lorde called "institutionalized rejection of difference." Here is the Chief Justice of the most august institution of the American government literally rejecting difference—rejecting the idea that difference is historically, socially, and economically baked into the system and a person's place in it long before a kid reaches high school.
This is the second installment in a 5-part series on decoding empathy. In the first part, I explored my personal empathy origin story and the concept's roots in aesthetics. I also looked at how practicing empathy requires a recognition of difference rather than an assumption of sameness. And today's installment examines that idea even more closely by asking a couple of critical questions:
How do you get seen in a world that doesn't see you?
How do you get recognized when so many systems are designed to keep you unrecognized?
Whether in college admissions, policing, or hiring practices, institutions often seek to cultivate fairness by rejecting difference. Usually, this looks like dismissing the idea that people might have different experiences or opportunities based on characteristics like race or gender. It can also look like rejecting anyone whose difference cuts against what's deemed acceptable or "normal."
Keep reading or listen on the What Works podcast.
The Mythical Norm
Whether society rejects those who are different or rejects the very idea of difference, the effect is invisibility for anyone who doesn't conform to what Lorde calls "the mythical norm."1 The mythical norm is the person for whom systems, buildings, policies, transportation, products, etc., are built. The mythical norm doesn't exist—but if it did, it would be white, male, cisgender, thin, non-disabled, heterosexual, financially secure, and neurotypical.
The mythical norm acts on us individually, reminding us of how we lack power, visibility, and belonging. "Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness," writes Lorde, "there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows 'that is not me.'" But the mythical norm is also a system of power, the status quo.
For brand scientist and behavioral strategist Chloé Nwangwu, the mythical norm represents the person who is most likely to get noticed. Their effort and expertise is most likely to be recognized. They're capable and dependable—because of course.
The more I resemble the status quo, the more I fit within that system of power and the more easily recognized I am. The more someone else can look at me and clock me as not too far off the mythical norm, the more likely they are to tap me for a promotion, take up my idea in a meeting, or not assume the worst of me when I walk by them on the street.
The less I resemble the status quo, the more invisible or misrecognized I become. The less likely I am to get the job, attract the followers, or be taken seriously. That's where Chloé comes in.
Chloé works with "movement makers and thought-leading brands" who don't benefit from proximity to the mythical norm. They're underrecognized and "looking to emerge from the margins."
Chloé's work centers on recognizing difference. By identifying how someone's intersecting identities make it more difficult for them to be seen, she devises strategies for overcoming invisibility.
Underrepresented Versus Underrecognized
My first encounter with Chloé's work was her excellent Harvard Business Review essay, "Why We Should Stop Saying Underrepresented." In it, she argues that the term "underrepresented" turns the result of systemic bias into a that's just the way it is situation. Recognizing that people from some groups are "underrepresented" implies that "it's through no actual action on any one particular person or group of people's part," explains Chloé.
Instead of “underrepresented,” Chloé suggests the term "underrecognized," which reminds us that a person or institution is doing the underrecognizing. "With underrecognition, we have an active doer," Chloé says, "So that immediately puts the onus on the person who is underrecognizing to actually go ahead and recognize."
Instead of an accepted institutionalized rejection of difference, we get an institutional and personal imperative to recognize difference.
In the institutionalized rejection of difference, that legal or policy fiction of sameness, people who cleave to the mythical norm don't have to expend much energy. Empathy isn't so much an active pursuit as it is a foregone conclusion.
Recognition, however, requires action.
Empathy requires taking an active interest in better understanding a person whose experience differs from your own (which, it should be said, is everyone). Unfortunately, since those who benefit from the mythical norm and status quo power structures aren't used to expending that kind of energy, this requirement feels like an undue burden. The recognized are ignorant of how underrecognized people already go out of their way to understand people in power. Or, as Lorde put it, "Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."
Underrecognition often results in a lack of access to the systems, institutions, and markets that make up society.
Access "is a complex form of perception," argues disability studies scholar Tanya Titchkosky.2 The question of access makes us wonder about who is excluded, through what means, and for what purpose. The question of access also leads us to wonder about who is to be included, how inclusion is accomplished, and what the meaning of that inclusion is.
Access and recognition are interrelated.
There is no access without recognition. And recognition should provoke questions about who has been un- or underrecognized, how that lack of recognition was sustained, and who or what that lack of recognition serves.
Chloé's work confronts how lack of recognition is sustained. Her interventions as a brand strategist empower underrecognized individuals by exposing the visibility bias they're subjected to and the visibility taxes that they pay.
Visibility Bias and Invisibility Taxes
"Visibility biases and the invisibility tax are two sides of the underrecognition coin," explains Chloé. Visibility bias is a form of cognitive bias—that is, a sort of mental shortcut that leads to false conclusions. "Underrecognition is a behavioral challenge," she notes. The recognizer must interrupt the bias in order to have a truer judgment of reality, the same way we have to interrupt confirmation bias to make better decisions.
Chloé points to a specific type of visibility bias: the racial attention deficit. Researchers Sheen Levine, Charlotte Reypens, and David Stark investigated whether race affected the perception of someone's credibility and input. This 2021 study found that white Americans were 33% more likely to overlook input from Black peers than white peers—even when they were incentivized to pay attention. The study's findings show that white Americans "rate Black peers as less competent than White ones and are less likely to follow their example as a guide to making a better decision."3
When white study participants were given information about their Black peers' credentials or accomplishments, the racial attention deficit persisted—although the gap did close. It wasn't until the white study participants were able to experience the competency of their Black peers that the deficit closed completely.
That's the problem with rejecting difference. It creates a double bind. If people who traditionally hold power have to experience working alongside peers who are different from them in order to judge them equally competent, then we won't fix discrimination, prejudice, and underrecognition without putting people in the same room. But, underrecognized people are far less likely to get put in the same room as people who traditionally hold power.
The only way to fix that is to actively diversify access by recognizing difference and accounting for it.
"On the flip side of the underrecognition coin, we have the invisibility tax," explains Chloé. The invisibility tax is a "literal tax on resources, be it time, attention, money, energy, [etc.] ... It is the extra amount of those resources that underrecognized folks are asked by society to pay in order to be visible." Chloé even tells her clients that the brand work they're doing is "tax evasion, baby!"
The ambition penalty is an example of an invisibility tax. The ambition penalty, coined by Stefanie O'Connell Rodriguez, is the "tax" people who aren't traditionally perceived as ambitious pay as a result of their ambition. Rodriguez's work focuses on the ambition penalty for women and girls, but Chloé sees corollaries across marginalized identities.
The ambition penalty has often been interpreted as a "confidence gap." But Chloé says what might seem like a confidence gap is really women and underrecognized people "appropriately assessing the situation and understanding that, if they come off as ambitious and try to present themselves in the same way that some of their peers with greater [privilege do], then they'll be penalized for it. So instead, they hold off, because it is safer." Again, the invisibility tax creates a double bind.
The cost of the invisibility tax is not trivial.
In her essay "Eye to Eye," Audre Lorde writes about the anger she constantly negotiates as a result of existing in a world that hates her, that either renders her invisible or labels her in ways she can't possibly recognize as hers. She writes: "Black women give our children forth into a hatred that seared our own young days with bewilderment, hoping we have taught them something they can use to fashion their own new and less costly pathways to survival."
Those costly pathways to survival are part of the invisibility tax as much as aphorisms about being twice as good or working twice as hard to gain the same recognition as a mediocre white man. Reflecting on Lorde's essay, Tanya Titchkosky turns to recognition: "...recognition brings us face-to-face with the wondrous complexity of perception, of which and to which we are all subject in many different ways." She continues, "The many-sidedness of recognition resides in the complexity of and between every word."
The complexity of and between every word can be a lot to navigate—whether you've been excluded or ignored or whether you're trying to unwind the ways you overlook and underrecognize people who are different from you. But the complexity of and between every word is also an opportunity. We can make those spaces fertile with meaning and possibility.
And that's exactly what Chloé does when she practices brand strategy.
A Brand is a Constellation
"There are as many definitions of what a brand is as there are people to define it," Chloé jokes. But the definition she uses is beautiful. Chloé suggests thinking of a brand as a constellation of stars—each star is a memory that shapes how we see that brand. Importantly, a constellation isn't a scientific truth. It's a construction of imagination and meaning.
And so that's how Chloé sees a brand, too. A brand is a formation of memories that evokes a greater meaning—which, importantly, is designed to influence behavior. In other words, a brand takes a set of memories and directs them in a certain way—recognition, esteem, value, influence, trust.
Chloé offers an intriguing and unexpected example of how this works:
The best illustration that I can give of this actually comes from some previous experience in my life, back when I was working in the international conflict resolution space. I was brought on as a junior member of a team that was working on the civil war in Yemen. And, I didn't know this at the time, but the group that had brought us in weren't actually a part of the UN peace process. And so as far as the UN and other actors were concerned, [this group] was not involved, even though they were a pretty sizable chunk of the population ethnically. ... In this scenario, I was presented with a situation where a group that really should have been at the table in order for the peace settlement to actually be sustainable—to last beyond five, ten years—wasn't even making it in the door. And so we had to figure out how we were going to get them in the door. [So] I was like, 'okay, well, why aren't they even in the door? What is the thing that allows folks to have access versus not, right?
This is what Tanya Titchkosky calls a "politics of wonder." Instead of taking for granted that the group Chloé was working with would be excluded from negotiations, she wondered why they were being excluded, how is access (or lack there of) sustained, and who benefits from the group's exclusion. Only by actively wondering about these questions could she or her team design an intervention.
Chloé continues:
It's not only the biggest actors who get into some of these rooms, right? It's the folks that you cannot afford to ignore. And after a lot of research, I realized, 'oh, duh, brands. That's what it is. It's their brand.' A brand, ultimately, teaches others how to treat you.
And so, every nation-state, every sub-actor has a brand.That's why you don't make certain moves in the geopolitical space againstn France, or Germany, or even the United States. Because you know how they will respond. That is part of their brand. And so, when I had that realization that, 'Oh, okay, the brand is the thing that's doing this,' this then allowed me, at least from my own mental framework, to organize how I was going to work on this issue.
Understanding who is excluded, how they're excluded, and why they're excluded certainly illuminates a bad situation. But it also provides a star map for recognition. Yes, it'll take work that shouldn't need to be done—but the end result is a seat at the table.
By the time Chloé separated from the project, the group she was working with was part of the peace process. They were in the door and sitting at the table. "When I say that a brand is a system of ideas that influences the behavior of others, this is what I mean," she explains.
A brand can help make the excluded includable. It can help draw a bigger circle around those who are recognized.
The Circle of Recognition
Where do we draw the boundary around recognition, and who has a right to it?
Chloé references a recent speech by actor Angela Bassett in which she talks about the "circle of recognition" that's made it hard for Black women—among many others—to win appreciation for their achievements. Bassett declares:
What I hope this moment means is that we are taking the necessary steps toward a future in which it is the norm, not the exception, to see and embrace one another's full humanity, stories, and perspectives. This must be our goal and to always remember that there is room for us all.
The circle of recognition has long been too small, too impermeable.
Expertise, talent, creativity, and innovation have been lost because society hasn't been able to recognize them in the package they came in. Socially and politically, our circle of recognition has deemed many groups of people excludable. For those excluded, the only way to cross the boundary into inclusion is to shed those excludable identities.
Many underrecognized people have fought their way into the circle of recognition by hiding certain identities, molding their speech and mannerisms, and contorting their presentation to get closer to the mythical norm.
Becoming includable has meant erasing or flattening your own differences.
No one should have to do that. "Context matters. And the lives that different people have led lead to different experiences. And those aren't things that folks can or should turn off," adds Chloé.
Chloé explains that the flattening of difference accomplishes (at least) three goals. First, it ensures that people already in the circle of recognition (those who most closely resemble the mythical norm) don't have to work hard to recognize others. Recall the double empathy problem.
Second, it ensures that acceptance into the circle of recognition is conditional. "As long as you assimilate in just the right way," she says, "you remain within that circle of recognition. Again, [that puts] the onus on the underrecognized person to assimilate in that way."
Finally, the expectation that others will erase their differences gives people already within the circle of recognition justification for excluding those who don't.
The solution is intentionally growing the circle of recognition to include—and celebrate—the full range of human differences.
To do that, we need expansive, norm-defying empathy.
My conversation with Chloé was about recognition and branding—but at its core, it was a conversation about empathy. We just used a different vocabulary. Chloé's vocabulary for talking about recognition, equity, visibility bias, and the pains of invisibility offers a new framework for applying empathy at work. She gives us a practical language that inspires action and imagination.
Or, as Audre Lorde put it:
Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic ... Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
Learn more about N. Chloé Nwangwu, the work she does through her brand consultancy, NobiWorks, and the theory behind her practice.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, New York, Ten Speed Press, 1984.
Titchkosky, Tanya. The Question of Access: Disability, Space, Meaning. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2011.
Levine, Sheen S., et al. “Racial Attention Deficit.” Science Advances, vol. 7, no. 38, 17 Sept. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg9508. Accessed 28 Feb. 2024.
This is such an interesting way of defining “brand.” I love thinking of brand as a “constellation of memories." I would add “…and of impressions.” A brand is not only about what we remember but what we perceive in the present moment.
No kidding! At first, I thought, really? Then I thought, exactly! Brands as microsystems within a larger universe. And the idea that brands are made up of memories and moments. Great brands provoke an emotional/personal response -- and this is why!