We All Have bricks We Can Use to Build or Destroy
so three times
i went down to the black lives matter
protest
i’m 66 years old so i’ve been to many
many demonstrations over the years but
this
one was really different
there were all these people hundreds of
people chanting black lives matter
holding signs and placards and with
black lives matter on their t-shirts and
face masks
all these white people around me all of
that energy
and i must say it was surreal in a way
it was a little bit
disconcerting i
at one point in the distance saw a young
white woman
and on her back were the words if
they open fire stand behind me
and i saw that and i felt emotional
and i actually thought of my young
grandson
who’s always been a bigger boy even at
12 13
he was six feet tall and then
as now i worried that someone might
see his clowning around or his
horse play as menacing or
threatening and what i know about
america
is that even being an unarmed innocent
child is not enough to protect him
so when i saw that woman with those
words on her
t-shirt on the back i felt a kind of
connection with her but i also wondered
could i trust her could i trust her to
stand with me
in the fight against anti-black racism
not just at that protest but between
the protest i wondered if that
fervor that led her to put those words
on her back
didn’t come with analysis
or would it fade when the excitement
around the protest wore off
could i trust her or would she get race
fatigue
when she understood that we would be
fighting for racial justice
not just now but next year and the year
after that would she be
with me when she realized that there are
no quick fixes
to centuries of black enslavement
and decades of government sanctioned
race discrimination so
it raised in our conversation uh
terry what does it mean to be a good
ally
and i when i saw that woman i wondered
would this be someone who would be
willing to stand with me uh
in the long term because that’s what
this fight is going to require
we did talk about what makes a good ally
and we
um i think that’s difficult for a number
of us
who think that we have good intentions
and we’re certainly trying hard but
we’re also making missteps
um you and i had talked about a lot of
the
the pushback and the verbiage around all
lives matter
as opposed to black lives matter and i i
think i get it but is there a way a
better way i can explain it
to people that i know and you gave me
that great analogy about the woman on
the beach
would you share that so what i said is
a mother’s on the beach with her four
children and they’re all in the water
and she notices that one of them is
really struggling
and so she focuses on that child
and it’s not that she doesn’t love her
other three
children she loves and adores her other
three children
it’s just her attention right now
is focused on the child that is
struggling
and i think that when we talked about
that and you looked at it that way
that was a way for you to uh
understand what it means when people say
black lives matter
it’s it’s a great way it’s a great story
and i did um
donna reference that i also write and i
did steal that but
with your permission and stuck it in a
column so that i could
adjust that story um we talked a bit too
about what real change looks like it’s
one thing
to say we want to make sure that we’re
more inclusive in our non-profit board
in our events in uh those things that we
do
so that there are more people at the
table but you were great to explain to
me it’s not enough to be at the table
why don’t you explain that a little
better one of the
expressions i always struggle with a
little bit
is uh diversity and inclusion and what
does
inclusion really mean and i think often
what it means
is if you behave you will be
invited into the circle and once you’re
in the circle
the expectation is that you’re there to
maintain the status quo
and when that happens then i think we
often don’t have
true diversity because the people who
are
there are there under certain conditions
and those conditions are made very clear
you’ll hear in certain interviews or we
didn’t think so and so was a good
fit that’s that’s often what that means
and so i think to make
real progress here that we have to think
about
allowing people to come into the circle
with their whole
self because in the end
if we’re just there if i’m just there as
decoration
um then the benefit of having those
diverse
voices are there and i think the other
piece of it is
when you invite people into the circle
who are not like you the outcomes
are going to change i think very often
when people
think of diversity and inclusion
and they bring they make the circle more
colorful
they don’t really expect anything to
change in terms of priorities what’s
important etc
and if you really want those
new voices to inform the future to
inform
outcomes in the future it has to be
allowed that they speak
with their full self
we talked about using an example for
that so that it became more
tangible and i come from a
background where we put on lots of
fundraisers like any non-profit
and you and i talked about what would
that fundraiser look like
if it really was authentically changing
and i said well you know we used to have
this big fundraiser it was
at a fancy hotel the saint regis they
helped us with food and beverage
we had a certain price ticket we had
someone do the lovely flowers on the
lovely tables
and we did a say a 150 ticket
so let’s talk about how that event would
be different if it was going to be
authentically inclusive so
it invites people to think about how
that event is going to be
because often what happens the uh
new person comes into the circle and
maybe has some different ideas about the
venue
maybe has some different ideas about the
music
or different ideas about the caterer and
what typically happens
because the people in the circle are
smart people and they’re
you know in the world experienced they
will talk
the new person out of the caterer that
they might recommend because of course
the caterer that they’ve always been
using
has been carefully considered embedded
and the same with the venue and the same
with the music
and in the end nothing changes and
that’s what i mean
by if you have new
people in the circle and you listen to
them
it’s gonna be a different party uh
there’s no
um there’s no value to you
if it’s going to be the same party no
matter who’s in the room
we also touched on um something that i
really hadn’t given
enough thought to which was it’s one
thing to say
that the first black judge the first
black
general and what it means to be in the
room where it happens
but you made me look at what is the cost
to be in the room where it happens
yeah and this is when i was saying
making the point about
what inclusion means
and that we are often asked the price
of being in some of these rooms
is to not come in with our whole selves
and one of the things that’s
interesting about this moment you now
hear
generals black generals or you hear very
senior black
executives feeling that they can speak
more candidly
about their journey up the ladder
and the times that they had to be silent
when maybe they didn’t want to be silent
or things that
they saw that they couldn’t speak
out about so there’s a price for this
conformity there’s a price for
not allowing people to come with
all of their full experience
so what does that mean so to me that
means
you don’t during this black lives matter
period
walk down to your senior black executive
and say bob can you do a
two-page memo on this for me that for me
is not
a serious effort not that bob should not
be part of the conversation but i’d like
to see companies
approach this like they would any other
big strategic initiative so
there’s a budget there’s staff
there are metrics there’s a timetable
it’s reporting to the ceo and
it is not just you know a small
project a beautifully crafted
corporate statement on black lives
matter
you have a book club you’ve you’ve
talked to me a bit about your book club
and um who’s reading what
and two books have come up um white
fragility
and white rage give us a little bit more
a few more
titles that we ought to be reading
paying attention to and then if you’re
comfortable
tell me a little bit about your book
club and what transpired lately
so i’m gonna focus actually on
white rage so if you’re if you’re gonna
read anything right now i’m gonna say
that’s the book to read
the reason that i say that is that
we don’t really understand
our history so when i look at uh what
does it mean to be a good ally
one of the things for me it means is to
be proactively
anti-racist and that
you get versus i’m a nice person i’m not
raises what’s for me to do
there’s that posture and then there’s
proactively anti-racist
the people who are there they get there
through a process
and part of that process is
self-reflection
they look at their own unconscious bias
they look at
how they came up their family etc
but they also take an unflinching
look at this enterprise that is america
and they look at our shared history on
race we talked about um i’m going to go
backwards for a second
about inclusion and about corporate
inclusion
and we talked about the commitment of
putting products on the shelf for
example
talk a little bit about that black
products on the shelf so
there’s a pledge right now
where uh companies are being asked
to uh set aside 15
of their shelf space for black owned
products
if you are a company that is signing
this 15
pledge you also have to
be involved in the operational
part of it how are these companies going
to successfully
deliver on that pledge who where are
they going to get the financing
how is your procurement department going
to work with them
a procurement department that typically
is working with
asian companies they’re negotiating on
price in a really aggressive way
a small black-owned business
may need help ramping up to get to that
15
so companies i don’t want them to just
sign the pledge
without considering some of these other
things or what will happen is three
years from now
when we don’t reach that goal everyone
would be you know what we really
tried and you know we just couldn’t get
the products
you know as a retailer
what it takes to deal with you what it
takes
to be able to serve
a multi-store national chain
so it’s going to require that you
work closely with these companies
to ensure that they’re successful or if
you don’t work with them you help
them or you identify a partner who can
work with them
otherwise these sorts of pledges are
performative
from my point of view i want you to tell
me
right now tonight what are you worried
about
i worry that we’re gonna squander this
moment
26 million people hit the streets
multi-racial multi-ethnic
multi-generational in the middle of a
pandemic
we’re morally called to come out
and we have an
opportunity here to create
a moral and just america
we have an opportunity to
create a highly functioning
multi-racial multi-ethnic society
where race and zip code
don’t determine life outcomes
and i see a lot of things that are
performative
i see companies coming out with
beautifully crafted statements
i see i don’t see the
uh the heft behind
some of the programs
that i’m hearing them talk about and i’m
someone who i do think
symbolism is important but it’s not the
only thing that’s important so i worry
that we will either
squander the moment
because we don’t understand
the urgency that’s required or we don’t
understand fully the magnitude
of what we’re addressing and that people
may not have the commitment to be
in this in a sustained way this is going
to be
both a straight vertical lift
parts of it will be a slog but parts of
it are also going to be an adventure
you know i like to say that
momentous change requires
both creation and destruction
there are systems that are going to have
to be
taken down and there are systems that
are going to require
all of our talent and creativity to
build
and to do that
we’re going to have to be in this
for the long term and i
worry that we might not
have the uh what it takes to do that
so then the flip side of that coin what
are you hopeful
about right now what i’m hopeful
about is everybody who knows me
knows i love tik tok and they groan
because i’m sending them
tick tocks at two in the morning i guess
you are you too terry and she knows how
to do it
what i love about young people
and is that so i think part of it is
this
when you look at the demographics of
people over
65 it’s like 80 of them are white and 20
or something else when you look at
zoomers or generation z it’s pretty much
50 50. so whereas in general
75 of white people have no contact with
anybody
black at all they don’t know anybody in
their network
they don’t have anybody with these young
kids they know each other
i go into friends homes
and when i look at the grandchildren
it’s almost like a mini you in
in there so what gives me hope is that
as this proximity where
these younger people are actually seeing
what’s happening to their friends it’s
not remote for them
that that will lead
to a different outcome and
the you know more than half the people
who took to the streets
uh were people under 25 so that gives me
hope
you