Mixed Signals
Complex Identity and the Future of Civility at Work: Insights from Multiracial Experience
Overview
Mixed Signals explores how complex identity shapes the way people experience belonging, credibility, and recognition at work.
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Drawing on research, interviews, and lived experience, the book examines the signals people receive about where they fit — and how those signals shape trust, collaboration, and leadership from the inside out.
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These signals often expose hidden fractures in workplace culture. The places where the system works smoothly for some people and quietly costs others far more than it should. When leaders learn to read them, they gain something more useful than awareness: they gain a place to start.
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Mixed Signals approaches workplace culture as a system. Every interaction, decision, and unspoken assumption communicates something about who belongs, who is trusted, and whose contributions are treated as essential. The book makes those communications legible.
Rethinking Civility
At the heart of the book is a different way of thinking about civility.
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Civility is usually treated as politeness — professionalism, decorum, keeping things pleasant. But the word has older roots. It comes from civis, the Latin word for citizen.
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In that original sense, civility isn't about manners. It's about membership. It's the everyday practice of recognizing one another as legitimate participants in a shared community.
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And recognition isn't passive. It's not just noticing someone is there. Recognition is the act of re-knowing — coming to understand someone more fully, and acknowledging their rightful place in the collective.
Workplace cultures communicate this constantly. Whose voice carries weight. Whose presence is treated as essential. Whose ideas are received as contributions versus managed as complications.
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Multiracial experiences offer a particularly clear lens for understanding these dynamics. Because mixed-race individuals often navigate shifting interpretations of identity depending on the context, they become highly attuned to cultural signals that others may move through without registering.
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What they notice reveals patterns that extend far beyond any single identity group — clues about where a culture is strong, where it's fragile, and where repair is not only possible but overdue.