Representation matters.
Authentic representations of women matter.
I think that too often, our public representations of women are enveloped in the language of the extraordinary.
The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire: Madam C. J. Walker ...
The dresses of the first ladies of the United States ...
Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to seek the US Democratic party's presidential nomination -- (Applause) As a museum curator, I understand why these stories are so seductive.
Exceptional women are inspiring and aspirational.
But those stories are limiting.
By definition, being extraordinary is nonrepresentative.
It's atypical.
Those stories do not create a broad base for incorporating women's history, and they don't reflect our daily realities.
If we can collectively apply that radical notion that women are people, it becomes easier to show women as people are: familiar, diverse, present.
In everyone's everyday throughout history, women exist positively -- not as a matter of interpretation, but as a matter of fact.
And beyond a more accurate representation of human life, including women considers the quotidian experiences of the almost 3.8 billion people identified as female on this planet.
In this now notorious museum scene from the "Black Panther" movie, a white curator erroneously explains an artifact to Michael B. Jordan's character seen here, an artifact from his own culture.
This fictional scene caused real debates in our museum communities about who is shaping the narratives and the bias that those narratives hold.
Museums are actually rated one of the most trustworthy sources of information in the United States, and with hundreds of millions of visitors from all over the world, we should tell accurate histories, but we don't.
There is a movement from within museums themselves to help combat this bias.
The simple acknowledgment that museums are not neutral.
Museums are didactic.
Through the display of art and artifacts, we can incite creativity and foster inclusion, but we are guilty of historical misrepresentation.
Our male-centered histories have left our herstories hidden.
And there are hard truths about being a woman, especially a woman of color in this industry, that prevents us from centering inclusive examples of women's lives.
Museum leadership: predominantly white and male, despite women comprising some 60 percent of museum staffs.
Pipelines to leadership for women are bleak -- bleakest for women of color.
And the presence of women does not in and of itself guarantee an increase in women's public representation.
Not all women are gender equity allies.
In the words of feminist theorist bell hooks, "Patriarchy has no gender."
Women can support the system of patriarchy just as men can support the fight for gender equity.
And we often downplay the importance of intersectionality.
Marian Anderson was one of the most celebrated voices of the 20th century, and the Smithsonian collected her 1939 outfit.
After the white Daughters of the American Revolution denied her access to sing in Constitution Hall, because she was black, she famously sang instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, to a crowd of over 75,000 people.
And in libraries all over, including museums, you can still find the groundbreaking 1982 anthology, entitled "All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave."
Demands for the increase of women's representation does not automatically include Afro-Latinas like me ...
or immigrant women, or Asian women, or Native women, or trans women, or undocumented women, or women over 65, or girls -- the list can go on and on and on.
So what do we do?
Targeted initiatives have helped incorporate perspectives that should have always been included.
I arrived at the Smithsonian through a Latino curatorial initiative whose hiring of Latinx curators, mostly women, by the way, has raised the profile for Latinx narratives across our institution.
And it served as a model for our much larger Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, which seeks to amplify diverse representations of women in every possible way, so that women show up, not only in the imagery of our contemporary realities, but in our historical representations, because we've always been here.
Right now though, in 2018, I can still walk into professional spaces and be the only -- the only person under 40, the only black person, the only black woman, the only Latina, sometimes, the only woman.
My mother is African-American and my father is Afro-Panamanian.
I am so proudly and inextricably both.
As an Afro-Latina, I'm one of millions.
As an Afro-Latina curator, I'm one of very few.
And bringing my whole self into the professional realm can feel like an act of bravery, and I'll admit to you that I was not always up for that challenge, whether from fear of rejection or self-preservation.
In meetings, I would only speak up when I had a fully developed comment to share.
No audible brainstorming or riffing off of colleagues.
For a long time, I denied myself the joy of wearing my beloved hoop earrings or nameplate necklace to work, thinking that they were too loud or unscholarly or unprofessional.
(Laughter) I wondered how people would react to my natural hair, or if they viewed me as more acceptable or less authentic when I straightened it.
And anyone who has felt outside of mainstream representations understands that there are basic elements just of our everyday being that can make other people uncomfortable.
But because I am passionate about the everyday representation of women as we are, I stopped presenting an inauthentic representation of myself or my work.
And I have been tested.
This is me pointing at my hoop earring in my office -- (Laughter) Just last month, I was invited to keynote a Latino Heritage Month event.
The week of the presentation, the organization expressed concerns.
They called my slides "activist," and they meant that negatively.
(Laughter) (Applause) Two days before the presentation, they requested that I not show a two-minute video affirming natural hair, because "it may create a barrier to the learning process for some of the participants."
(Laughter) That poem, "Hair," was written and performed by Elizabeth Acevedo, a Dominican-American 2018 National Book Award winner, and it appeared in an award-winning Smithsonian exhibit that I curated.
I canceled the talk, explaining to them that their censorship of me and my work made me uncomfortable.
(Applause and cheers) Respectability politics and idealized femininity influence how we display women and which women we choose to display.
And that display has skewed toward successful and extraordinary and reputable and desirable, which maintains the systemic exclusion and marginalization of the everyday, the regular, the underrepresented and usually, the nonwhite.
As a museum curator, I am empowered to change that narrative.
I research, collect and interpret objects and images of significance.
Celia Cruz, the queen of Salsa -- (Cheers) yes -- is significant.
And an Afro-Latina.
The Smithsonian has collected her costumes, her shoes, her portrait, her postage stamp and this reimagining ...
by artist Tony Peralta.
When I collected and displayed this work, it was a victory for symbolic contradictions.
Pride in displaying a dark-skinned Latina, a black woman, whose hair is in large rollers which straighten your hair, perhaps a nod to white beauty standards.
A refined, glamorous woman in oversized, chunky gold jewelry.
When this work was on view, it was one of our most Instagrammed pieces, and visitors told me they connected with the everyday elements of her brown skin or her rollers or her jewelry.
Our collections include Celia Cruz and a rare portrait of a young Harriet Tubman ...
iconic clothing from the incomparable Oprah Winfrey.
But museums can literally change how hundreds of millions of people see women and which women they see.
So rather than always the first or the famous, it's also our responsibility to show a regular Saturday at the beauty salon, the art of door-knocker earrings ...
(Laughter) fashionable sisterhood ...
(Laughter) and cultural pride at all ages.
Stories of everyday women whose stories have been knowingly omitted from our national and global histories.
And oftentimes in museums, you see women represented by clothing or portraits or photography ...
but impactful, life-changing stories from everyday women can also look like this Esmeraldan boat seat.
Esmeraldas, Ecuador was a maroon community.
Its dense rainforest protected indigenous and African populations from Spanish colonizers.
There are roads now, but there are some parts inland that are still only accessible by canoe.
Débora Nazareno frequently traveled those Ecuadorian waterways by canoe, so she had her own boat seat.
Hers personalized with a spiderweb and a spider, representing Anansi, a character in West African folklore.
Débora also sat on this seat at home, telling stories to her grandson, Juan.
And this intangible ritual of love in the form of intergenerational storytelling is common in communities across the African diaspora.
And this everyday act sparked in Juan the desire to collect and preserve over 50,000 documents related to Afro-Indian culture.
In 2005, Juan García Salazar, Débora's grandson, and by now a world-renowned Afro-Ecuadorian scholar, traveled to Washington, D.C.
He met with Lonnie Bunch, the director of the museum where I work, and toward the end of their conversation, Juan reached into his bag and said, "I'd like to give you a present."
On that day, Débora Nazareno's humble wooden boat seat became the very first object donated to the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
It is encased, displayed and has been seen by almost five million visitors from all over the world.
I will continue to collect from extraordinary historymakers.
Their stories are important.
But what drives me to show up today and every day is the simple passion to write our names in history, display them publicly for millions to see and walk in the ever-present light that is woman.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)
So I'm a professional poker player, and today, I want to talk about three things that the game has taught me around decision-making that I find apply to everyday life.
Now the first of these things is about luck.
Now, like poker, life is also a game of skill and luck, and when it comes to the biggest things we care about -- health, wealth and relationships -- these outcomes don't only depend on the quality of our decision-making, but also the roll of life's dice.
For example, we can be perfectly health-conscious and still get unlucky with something like cancer.
Or we can smoke 20 a day and live to a ripe old age, and this kind of ambiguity can make it hard for us to know how good our strategies are, sometimes, especially when we're experiencing a lot of success.
For example, back in 2010, I won a really big poker tournament known as the European Poker Tour.
And because I'd only been playing full-time for about a year, when I won, I assumed I must be rather brilliant.
In fact, I thought I was so brilliant that I not only got rather lazy with studying the game, but I also got more risky, started playing in the biggest tournaments I could against the very best in the world.
And then my profit graph went from a thing of beauty to something kind of sad, with this worrying downhill trend for a long time, until I finally realized that I was overestimating my skill level, and got my act together.
And this kind of reminds me of what we've been seeing in the cryptocurrency space, at least in 2017, where the only thing that's been going up faster than the markets themselves is the number of "senior investment specialists" who have been appearing out of nowhere.
Now I'm not saying it's not possible to have a strategic edge, but at the same time, it's very easy to feel like a genius when you're in a market that's going up so fast that even the worst strategies are making a profit.
So when we're experiencing success, it's important to take a moment to really ask ourselves how much of it is truly down to us, because our egos love to downplay the luck factor when we're winning.
Now, a second thing poker taught me is the importance of quantifying my thinking.
When you're playing, you can't just get away with going, "Eh, they're probably bluffing."
That's just going to lose you a bunch of money, because poker is a game of probabilities and precision, and so you have to train yourself to think in numbers.
So now, whenever I catch myself thinking vaguely about something really important, like, "It's unlikely I'll forget what I want to say in my TED Talk," I now try to estimate it numerically.
(Laughter) Trust me, it helps a lot with the planning process.
And the thing is, almost anything that could possibly happen here today, or at any point in the future, can also be expressed as a probability, too.
(Laughter) So now I also try to speak in numbers as well.
So if someone asks me, "Hey, Liv, do you think you're going to come along to that thing tonight?"
instead of just saying to them, "Yeah, probably," I actually give them my best estimate -- say, 60 percent.
Because -- I know that sounds a little odd -- but the thing is, I ran a poll on Twitter of what people understand the word "probably" to mean, and this was the spread of answers.
Enormous!
So apparently, it's absolutely useless at actually conveying any real information.
So if you guys catch yourselves using these vague words, like "probably" or "sometimes," try, instead, using numbers, because when we speak in numbers, we know what lands in the other person's brain.
Now, the third thing I want to touch on today is intuition.
How often have you seen these kinds of inspirational memes in your Facebook feed?
[Always trust your gut feeling and never second-guess.]
They're nice, right?
It's lovely.
Yes.
"Trust your soul."
Well, they're terrible advice.
These are some of the best poker players in the world right now.
Do they look like people who live purely off feelings and intuitions?
(Laughter) Look at them!
Obviously, these guys are about slow, careful analysis, and that's because the game has outgrown the days where pure street smarts and people-reading can get you to the top.
And that's because our intuitions aren't nearly as perfect as we'd like to believe.
I mean, it'd be great, whenever we're in a tough spot, to just have an answer appear to us from some magical source of inspiration.
But in reality, our gut is extremely vulnerable to all kinds of wishful thinking and biases.
So then, what is our gut good for?
Well, all the studies I've read conclude that it's best-suited for everyday things that we have lots and lots of experience in, like how we just know that our friend is mad at us before we've even said anything to them, or whether we can fit our car into a tight parking spot.
But when it comes to the really big stuff, like what's our career path going to be or who should we marry, why should we assume that our intuitions are better calibrated for these than slow, proper analysis?
I mean, they don't have any data to be based off.
So my third lesson is, while we shouldn't ignore our intuitions, we shouldn't overprivilege them either.
And I'd like to summarize these three lessons today with my own set of memes, with more of a poker-player twist.
"Success is sweetest when you achieve it across a large sample size."
(Laughter) "Your gut is your friend and so is a cost-benefit analysis.
(Laughter) "The future is unknown, but you can damn well try and estimate it."
Thank you.
(Applause)