Michael Fosberg, a Chicago native is an author-activist who launched a one-man autobiographical play Incognito in 2001. Thereafter, he has worked to create a national dialogue on race and identity, using his unique presentation, along with engaging interactive training sessions and speeches to embrace diversity in an effort to change corporate and organizational cultures.

He has been a frequent guest in the media, traveled across the country facilitating meaningful conversations at educational institutions, corporations, government agencies, and military bases.

Michael’s work with organizations such as United Way Worldwide, the FBI, The Boeing Company and others, is reshaping the way they converse about race, identity, and diversity. He has also formed a partnership with Diversity & Inclusion stalwart.

His highly praised memoir; Incognito: An American Odyssey of Race and Self Discovery was published in 2011 and his second book, Nobody Wants to Talk About It: Race, Identity and the Difficulties in Forging Meaningful Conversations in 2020 represent the footwork he continues to own and live.

I am honored to shine a light on my dear friend Michael as my first interview in the Boldly Build Stories series. His powerful work never fades and is a testament for the need to continue to use his voice, own and leverage his story: the uncovering of a hidden family secret shortly after stepping into adulthood that he was born bi-racial. In our conversation we cover the blossoming of the core of his gifts, and the beauty of how his history has fueled his storytelling.

Highlighted topics:

• sharing story across population
• the need to speak up vs stay silent
• the power of past helps us become comfortable in our skin
• diversity inclusion is about owning yourself
• weaving story into profession is walking the talk
• keep serving up truth to make connection and open amazing doors

Key Words:

Storytelling, prejudice, reset, momentum, diversity, inclusion, connection, impact

Ways to connect with Michael:

• https://incognitotheplay.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-fosberg-670b216/

Stephanie C
Okay, so the Department of Treasury?

Michael F
I do a lot of work with the Department of Homeland Security with Ice, with the Department of Energy, the IRS. I did work with the Federal Reserve Banks all around the country. I’m doing work right now for Pfizer. I land in all these multinational companies, government agencies, performing a one man play.

SC
You’re performing for each one of these operations?

Sharing Story Across Populations

MF
The most requested thing for me is to come in and perform the play. And then facilitate a conversation. I’m using a principle which I came into contact with, maybe six or seven years ago, and it resonated with me because it really translates what we call storytelling. What it’s called in academics is intergroup contact theory or contact hypothesis. It was put out by a Harvard psychologist by the name of Gordon Alport, who wrote a seminal book in the 1950s, called The Nature of Prejudice, his studies and research proved that by sharing our personal stories across majority and minority populations, we can break down the prejudices that exists between us because we discover we have a lot more in common than we have different. His research proved this theory.

Basically, that’s what I’m doing. I’m telling my story. And although not many people come up to me afterwards and say, oh, I found out I’m half black, too, they open up and tell me their stories.

I’ve had transgender people tell me their stories, had people tell me stories about race issues in their families, had people tell me stories about their uncle being their father or, all kinds of stories because it opens people up. We find we have these amazing commonalities. That is the thing that I’ve used as the premise of my work in this intergroup contact theory.

SC
I love it.

MF
It’s what you’re doing.

Why Own Story?

SC
I’ve started this series of interviews, about individuals who have successfully built powerful personal story, because they’ve owned it. I know the premise of your story. You’ve now gone on a very long journey with it. After all this time what made you choose to own your story? When you found out the truth of your secret history you could have kept it inside, I’m sure you did for a while, but what made you choose to own it.

MF
A couple of things I could say, first of all, I’m not sure I chose. I think it chose to own me.

Once I made the discovery and went on the journey, I couldn’t fight it. Joseph Campbell talks a lot about The Power of Myth. He talks a lot about our personal journeys and about the mythic quality of going on that journey. He says that we are all on a personal quest to find out who we are and where we fit in. And for some of us, we choose to shield ourselves or to not want to open our eyes to it or not embrace it. And for others, that’s not a choice, it just becomes something that you are forced into doing.

To some degree, a door opens and you are shoved through it. You may kick and shout and try to go back, but there’s something more powerful pulling you forward. In my case, I believe that to be true. For instance, my story has to do with owning blackness. Sometimes, and this is crazy, I just had this happen recently: people question, why would you want to own being black?

And that’s like – Wow!

SC
Thank God you’re having that conversation with them.

The Need to Speak Up

MF
Right? Do you realize what you just said? Out loud? I guess the bigger thing is, why wouldn’t I?

I say it like this, it’s a broken record of mine. Silence gives consent. If we are silent, we are complicit. If I don’t speak up, I’m complicit with what’s been happening all along for hundreds of years. We all need to speak up, we all need to get involved, get engaged. The George Floyd murder proved beyond a doubt that we needed that. And that seems, to some degree, to have subsided. What will it take?

I guess that’s the answer to the question: I don’t feel like I really had a choice, it just kept pulling me forward and I couldn’t resist it. Whereas, some people are in resistance to go there.

SC
Exactly. I use the word choose, that you chose to own it, because people have moments in their life that are eye-opening. Moments of realization. And, they often keep their secret in the closet, like a gay person. Ash Beckham is a famous Ted speaker, from Boulder. She’s a lesbian and gave a talk stating that everybody has a closet, because we do. You have a closet as well, you could have stayed in yours yet you didn’t. That’s interesting, because you felt that you didn’t have a choice, that it kept pulling at you.

MF
I often say that my story is not so much about race as it is about family secrets and what family doesn’t have the secret?

SC
Yeah, for sure.

MF
I hear those secrets all the time after I tell my story.

SC
I can imagine. Before you decided to own your story, or before it was really tugging and pulling at you, how did it affect you? You speak about this in the play, when it was sort of your personal secret that you kind of knew.

MF
I started talking about it right away. I don’t remember a point when I had learned about it and wasn’t talking about it. Now I also have to say I was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was going to meetings, almost daily. It’s a place where you talk about your stuff but it’s like everybody’s talking. There’s a great line in the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, if you only go half assed about this, you won’t get the benefits of it. And so, I took that seriously. I think almost immediately I was at a meeting, raising my hand, and it was almost instantaneous. It wasn’t like, I was saying, oh, I’ve got this secret. I’m not telling someone.

The Power of the Past

SC
I remember you talking about this in the play, that there were moments as a kid you had questions that bubbled up in you, and how they were affecting you.

MF
I’d always felt sort of a deep connection to African American people, African American culture, but I could never explain why it was. There wasn’t anything in my family to suggest that I was anything but what they were, I didn’t know my father. But it never occurred to me that he could be black. And that I think, is a benefit of having white privilege. It’s not thinking outside the box that my dad could be black. I had a picture of me with the big Afro in the show.

SC
Yes! I remember in the play you talking about high school, wondering, hey, what’s going on with my hair?

MF
Exactly. All kinds of people in high school and so on, were like, you must have some black in you. I’ve written two books, “Nobody wants to talk about it,” and my first one, a memoir, Incognito, an American odyssey of race and self-discovery. I had gone to Missouri and did the play in a trendy, cool area in Kansas City. A friend and I were walking down the street, and she asked me questions about my life and how could I not have known I was half black and did people know?

I said, people used to always think I was black, but I didn’t understand why. While we’re having that conversation, there were two brothers standing on the corner. One guy went, yo-yo brother. I’m talking to you, yo, and I’m like, what? I look over at him and he goes, I like the way you dress. So good, Brother. You look so fine. And I’m looking at my friend and we’re looking at him and her jaws drops. Like, how does he know? How does he know you’re black?

SC
Because your head is in a certain headspace and your physicality is in a different space.

MF
Yes, absolutely. I jokingly referred to it as having black-dar like people have gay-dar. The guy had black-dar, knew I was black of course! Ha, ha!

I went back to a high school class reunion. I had been on my high school basketball team and I was one of only two white guys on the team. But of course, I didn’t know that I was black or only partway. I saw guys at my class reunion, black guys, and I went up to them and I’m like, yo, what’s happening?

Hey, you guys are never gonna believe what happened to me. And they’re like, what? I tell them the story and they’re like, oh, man, we always knew it. Yeah, wake up. We all knew it. We did tell you. (Lot’s of laughter.)

So, I mean, there are lots of sides to the story.

SC
But it’s not like it was this heavy weight for you in the end.

Being Comfortable in Our Skin

MF
No, yet maybe this is a part of the owning piece that we could talk about. I never really felt completely comfortable in my own skin until I went on this journey.

What’s weird is, I’ve been an actor my whole life. And could only get up on stage, recite lines and fully be in character. But once I stepped off stage, I was like, really uninhibited, asking people things or being an extrovert. I wasn’t an introvert, but I was more hesitant and shyer. Now I don’t care. Ever since I’ve gone on this journey and been doing this work, I can talk to anyone.

SC
You have 1,000% openness now.

MF
Yes, I’m totally open.

SC
What are the benefits of the openness? Is it that when you became open and you shared your story, and thereafter you launched? Yes, it took some time, but at the right time, you launched your story. And it has become your life’s journey. Absolutely owning it you have fully gotten into your comfort zone. I would say it has been a reset of momentum for you.

MC
Yeah, absolutely! One of the things that’s happened over the course of doing this work was about five or six years ago, I met with the diversity director for Walgreens.

Weirdly, he looked a lot like my biological father. Fortunately, he was very open to me and invited me to come talk with him. He said, you should come up to 10 things you’ve learned or 10 rules to live by. When I started thinking about that piece of advice it made a lot of sense to me.

I’ve been doing this for 15 years now traveling around engaging with people in these conversations via using the play and the arts, my personal story intergroup contact theory. I’ve also put together seven tools that apply to diversity inclusion, yet they actually apply to a broader range of things. One tool is an acting axiom that we used teaching improv, to get comfortable being uncomfortable. It sounds crazy, why would I want to be comfortable being uncomfortable?

There’s a moment in every day and one in our lives every day, when there’s discomfort. We work through it and get through it. I find myself in very seriously uncomfortable situations, because people talking about race is extremely uncomfortable. I’ve been in some seriously uncomfortable conversations. I feel it come up in me and I can feel it in the room. And I’ve been able to sit in it.

I’ve been able to go, okay. Bring it on, let’s go. This is terrible. I hate this. I hate it inside. But I’m just going to go with it. Owning myself. Owning my story and feeling utterly comfortable.

SC
That’s the gift.

MC
Yeah, that’s a huge, huge gift of this.

SC
You’re so comfortable and open. That’s what owning your story is about. Being comfortable with the uncomfortableness.

Weaving Story into Profession

SC
When you take that into the very high corporate level, how is that received?

MF
They’re not all the same, corporations are not a monolith. But there are some that actually walk the talk. And those that do are really special organizations that are interested in moving beyond what they think they’re capable of.

SC
Would you say that it truly does create movement?

MF
Absolutely. I’ve had debates with different trainers, it’s very difficult to measure that change when you’re talking about emotional things.

Keep Serving Up Truth

SC
I fully get that, but you still have a sense of the experience. You can feel the change and that matters incredibly. That speaks to why we have to keep putting it out there.

We have to keep serving up our stories in order to inch closer to a better place. We may not have full data and sometimes the data that comes through is not exactly right, but we do know that we have to keep putting our truth out there.

MF
The last time I went to the Treasury in person I landed in the Ulysses S Grant room or something like it, an ornate and historic space that was all set up, a stage and a backdrop and all these chairs around it. Then they took me into another room and brought in a guy who is extremely conservative. My contact warned me that he thought that diversity inclusive work was divisive, and that he’s very much against it.

When she told me this, the first thing I thought was, I’m going to find something in common with him. I am going to find out what his story is. I know we will have a connection.

He comes into the room and starts telling me about his story and about where he got his start. A hedge fund guy, he lived in Los Angeles, in Santa Monica. I say, I lived in Santa Monica, where did you live, and then we make this connection. We talk about Los Angeles, right away we’ve connected on something. We keep talking, we find some other commonalities.

He was supposed to do the introduction then leave yet he decided he’s going to stay. He says, I’m just gonna sit in the back of the room, if I have to leave, I’ll go quietly.

I do the play and get a standing ovation from 150 some people. He stands up, and we do this amazing dialogue afterwards, incredible conversation with everybody. And then he kind of motions like he needs to leave. He gets up and does some closing remarks and says to the whole group, this was one of the most amazing programs. This was also one of the most amazing stories for all of us. Michael, one thing that we have in common, and he holds up his phone, you and I both had. He doesn’t know if he should say it or not but I’m looking at the photo, and he had an afro, he had a Jew-fro.

I say out loud: Oh, you had a Jew-fro. And the audience goes nuts. Then I give him a soul handshake. And the audience loses it again, and he loses it. He thanks me then leaves. Four days later, I get an email from my contact. She tells me the next day, at a senior level staff meeting, this guy gets up in front of the whole room and talks about what an amazing program he had been a part of and how it changed his life.

SC
There you go!

MF
Telling your story is about making connections.

SC
Yes, there’s the benefit and there’s the impact.

MC
Yeah, exactly.

SC
I am so thankful for this, it is what I want to shine a light on. I love that you’re doing this work, I’m loving that you’re telling your story. It means a lot.

When people own their story, that’s when they launch and that is when it becomes powerful. It becomes lucrative not just from a money standpoint, although yes, we want that, but on a bigger range than that. It’s what is happening right here, with you!

MF
I don’t know if this is the right word, but in business it’s kind of antithetical to tell your personal business in your business life. And yet, we find that when we do that, it opens up amazing doors.

SC
At the same time, we may not share all of it. There are different categories of individuals so you must decide what you’re going to cherry pick and share to make that connection. But the most important thing is that you’re grounded with it.

MF
Right. Yeah.