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I started my career, literally, as an undergraduate in college. Yep. I’ve basically been doing the exact same work since I was 18 years old. The formal starting point was when I participated in a course called the President’s Leadership Program. I was in the inaugural course and it was being facilitated by a woman named Barb, who I came to know as a preeminent facilitator, voracious learner, and way ahead of her time. Barb designed and facilitated a curriculum that covered interculturalism, leadership, and management, and in ways that connected the three topics. In the early 1990s, leadership, management, and what is now described as equity, diversity and inclusion were approached as wholly separate topics. The program included deep-dive explorations of culture and cultural identity, power and oppression, leadership philosophies, and a lot of self-assessment, role-playing, and simulations. In that year, I came to life intellectually. 

My enthusiastic participation...

"Anywhere where the humanity of people is undermined, anywhere where people are left in the dust, there we will find our cause." 

Desmond Tutu died earlier this week. He was 90 years old. As I look at my office bookshelf, I see his books and think, how did this religious leader who lives on the other side of the planet find his way into my life? How did this man, living under such an oppressive regime, break through the systems of apartheid? How was he able to rise to his position of leadership as the first Black archbishop within the Anglican faith? How has he, despite the conservatism associated with his faith and geography, become such an ally for the LGBTQA++ communities? 

Desmond Tutu has had such a profound impact on me, an outsized impact that goes beyond books and translates into my life. 

• His lifelong dedication to ending oppression in all forms. 
• His deep friendship and support for others, including Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama...

By Molly McInerney, Senior Consultant

We at DeEtta Jones & Associates (DJA) are horrified and heartbroken by the rising rates of hate crimes, racist violence and harassment, and discrimination against members of the Asian Pacific Islander (API) community. We are committed to the racial equity movement for all people of color and condemn racism in any form. We believe stating our support of the API community is a single step on the journey towards solidarity. We honor the API community’s pain, anger, and grief in the wake of Tuesday’s racist attack, which took the lives of eight people, including six Asian/Asian American women working in the greater Atlanta area. 

We are a company known for centering voices from a variety of lived experiences, and we’re sensitive to the negative impact of organizational virtue signaling on the API community and other people of color. This is why we ask ourselves in these critical moments, “what is the best way to...

by Dana Mariani-Lada

People can be in situations, not actively chosen by the individual, where they learn racist behaviors and attitudes. It is my belief that, regardless of where or how we learn about racism, we each have responsibility for identification, acknowledgement and dismantling it. Inherited racism is the term that I use (actually, I think I’m coining it with this post). My definition is informed by my own lenses, my experiences. It is the idea that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race that is consciously or subconsciously transferred from an authority figure to an individual at early stages of life through adulthood. The individual, who receives prejudiced and/or discriminatory communication from an authority figure may, and often, believes these attitudes are appropriate. It is important for individual growth and development to identify what attitudes have permeated your upbringing and make an effort to identify, evaluate, and...

When I was 18 years old, I met a white woman who changed my life. Her name is Barb. She reached out to me as a person, and at a point in my life when I wasn’t yet my best self. She saw my potential, but never treated me like a project--like a black girl to polish up and help be successful in this big university system. She asked for my opinion. She listened when I gave it. Often that opinion was filled with rage against men, white people… She never flinched, and she never left. She heard me and cared about a reality that was not her own lived experience. This is called being an ally. 

Barb modeled for me what I have come to expect from all others who are my friends: a commitment to ending racism and other forms of oppression where they exist, and not just when yet another black person being murdered is the headline. It means that you understand that racism is not about you “feeling like” you're a racist. If you grew up in the United States (and...