July 13, 2023 • 47 mins
Beyond the Margins: Resisting the Deliberate Erasure of DEI and Inclusion
In a world where the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are under siege, it's crucial to illuminate the deliberate efforts to stifle these essential values. So brace yourself for an empowering and unfiltered conversation as our fearless host, Margaret Spence, takes center stage to confront the all-out war on DEI, immigrants, women, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community.
Prepare to be inspired as Margaret fearlessly tackles the challenges faced by communities living in this war zone, exposing the insidious tactics employed to erode the progress we have fought so hard to achieve. Through engaging discussions and insightful stories of resilience, this episode will bring to light the harsh realities faced by individuals and groups affected by deliberate attempts to erase their presence and experiences.
Join us for this pivotal episode of "Inclusion Unscripted," where we rally against the forces that seek to sideline DEI and inclusion. Together, we will ignite a movement for change, champion inclusivity, and propel these essential values from the fringes to the very heart of mainstream dialogue.
Tune in live on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube Podcast, and remember to catch the episode on your favorite podcast app afterward. This is an unmissable conversation that has the power to shape perspectives, inspire action, and create a more inclusive world for all.
Inclusion Unscripted, where we're not just talking about diversity and inclusion, we're living it. The Inclusion Unscripted Live Weekly Podcast, hosted by Margaret Spence, is unapologetically honest about diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Sponsored by The Inclusion Learning Lab - https://inclusionlearninglab.com
Intro Music Credit (Canva Pro) The Winner by Tape Machine Epidemic Sound
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
You are like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound.
And when a fall, you tied a rope to me, you, me, of every day I was down with an illusion, like a sparrow with broken wings.
(00:24):
But now shine.
Will your reflection on.
Hi everyone.
Welcome to Inclusion unscripted.
We are back after a couple weeks of hiatus.
My name is Margaret Spence and I am the host of inclusion unscripted, where we are not just building diversity, we are living it every day.
(00:50):
So today's hot topic is one that I have sat on for a couple weeks.
I decided that today was the day to bring this forward.
I wanna talk today about the systematic erasure or the attempt to erase people of color, women books.
(01:17):
You know, the Holocaust, black education, African American history the LGBTQ plus community the women, all the things that are being, that are on the list to be erased.
They're rewriting our history.
They're telling us what we should or shouldn't hear.
(01:37):
I mean, for crying out loud, Amanda Gorman's poetry that was so eloquent and well said has now been banned here in the state of Florida.
I live in this state and we are navigating this.
I got into a spirited discussion with someone on LinkedIn this week about boycotting Florida.
(02:06):
And how that lays out.
So here's the thing, from the margins to the mainstream, we have brought forward what is clearly a racist agenda.
I can call it that as a person of color, I could say it that way because if you want to tell me what I should think, what I should feel, How I should feel it, how I should show up and navigate this world.
(02:39):
Then you are basically saying to me that you individually, as a person who is totally capable of making your decisions in life, your decisions don't matter.
But here's what we're gonna really dive into today.
We're gonna talk through diversity and inclusion as a broader subset.
(03:02):
As a broad subset, and I'm gonna really dive a little bit into the corporate structure, that on one hand says to your employees, we want diversity and inclusion.
We want this for you.
We, we absolutely embrace diversity and inclusion in our four walls.
(03:25):
We wanna build these powerful diversity programs.
We wanna make sure that they exist.
But at the same time, you support the individuals who want to wipe us off the map and erase our history.
And so on one hand, the corporate social responsibility says, I am going to be a diverse employer.
(03:50):
The corporate social responsibility says I'm going to bring diversity to the forefront, but behind the scenes, the lobbyist, The people that you fund, the money that is given, the money that is distributed actually goes against the communities that are a part of your employment base.
(04:12):
It goes against the communities that you serve as a customer base.
It goes against the vendor community.
So how do you as a corporation, in a corporate, social, responsible way, Say to me on one hand, miss employee, you are included.
(04:32):
I wanna build programs for you.
I wanna support you effectively.
But on the quiet hand, in the quiet corners, Your donations and your support supports and empowers the people who want to put an eraser to my history, to my present day, and they wanna wipe out the future for my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.
(04:59):
They wanna rewrite the history.
They don't want us to talk about our history.
They don't want us to delve and dive into our own history.
They wanna pretend as I heard a woman on one of the social platforms saying slavery was a choice, the slaves were treated well.
(05:19):
So you get to rewrite that history and we are supposed to sit here like docile people and allow you to rewrite our history.
This is not the first program that I've done on this.
This is not gonna be the last program I do on it.
And I am vocal today because at the end of the day, the ability for someone to erase us is significant.
(05:49):
The ability for us to be erased and rewritten in a different language as if we don't exist and we don't have a platform is problematic for all of us.
And so we may think, and, and here's the lens.
Diversity and inclusion programs have been wiped virtually off the map here in Florida.
(06:12):
But here's how diversity and inclusion plays out in the real world.
The real world, because many of you who are on the margins who are thinking I'm on the margins of.
What I believe about diversity and inclusion, but I'm willing to support this mainstream war on inclusion.
(06:34):
Whether I'm supporting it vocally or I'm supporting it physically, or I'm supporting it in the quiet, you are supporting the mainstream war on inclusion.
But here's the thing, inclusion comes for all of us at some point.
Right.
You may think that inclusion doesn't include you as a white man or woman.
(06:59):
You may think that us as the people of color and the marginalized communities and the communities who have been excluded historically, that we are taking up space in your world, we don't.
We haven't earned the right to stand here.
(07:20):
We, we still need your permission to decide what part of ourselves we should bring forward, but here's the thing.
This system will come for you too.
This system that is being built against black people, against immigrants, against the LGBTQ plus community, against the people of color, this system that is being built against us.
(07:49):
Will be coming for you next.
It's coming for you.
Because the reality is the people who are fostering this and pushing this own the arena, they own the stadium, they own the land, they own the process, and if they can get us all fighting against us, then we miss what they're really doing to you.
(08:18):
So welcome to Inclusion Unscripted, where we appear on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube on Fridays at 2:00 PM when I am not on a hiatus, and we are back this week to talk about systemic erasure of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
(08:40):
The stymied process of watering down D N I.
The process of pretending that diversity is not necessary, the process of trying to create no inclusion, the process of saying one half of us is better than the rest of us.
(09:01):
And oh by the way, black person colored person, people of color, cuz y'all still want to go back to calling us that.
Let's be real.
The, the, the, the drumbeat to go back to the past to make America great again is the process of going back to calling us the N word.
(09:23):
The process of going back to doing all the things that you did to us in the past, but somehow all of you have forgotten.
One simple thing, the internet exists now.
People are more vocal.
We have opportunity, we have a voice, and we are willing to use it.
So let's level set today.
(09:44):
Let's have the discussion.
Let's talk about this beautiful state of Florida, and let's start with immigration.
Let me start there.
I'm an immigrant.
My children are American.
I was born in the beautiful country of Jamaica.
The land that I absolutely love, and every so often when the pressures of America hit my brain to the point where I think y'all are gonna fry my head, I have to get on a plane and go to Jamaica and retune myself to who I am, because the pressure to be a diverse person in the United States of America is hard.
(10:31):
The pressure to keep your sanity and your psychological safety in this space that we occupy is hard.
The ability to do the work of inclusion in workspaces and organizations is difficult.
(10:52):
It is the work that I have chosen to do.
It is the work that I have done for the last 23 years.
And so I have to start with immigrant because I think that's my first identifier.
I'm not gonna identify as a woman of color.
First, I'm gonna identify as an immigrant.
So let's start there.
(11:13):
So Florida has enacted one of the most draconian immigration laws in the planet because honestly, it's the first method of saying to people of color that we don't want you here.
That's really what it's saying.
It's saying, we don't want you here in our land because you're coming to take our opportunity, but let's get damn real today.
(11:38):
There ain't no white blooded American, black American, any other American going down to the farms in homestead.
Going down to the farms in Imma, going down to the farms in, in Myakka city and Plant City and all the other places in Florida where fruit is grown.
There ain't one red-blooded American going into those fields to pick fruit for 2 cents a barrel and putting it on their shoulder and getting up and climbing into a truck and throwing that shit into a basket.
(12:11):
There ain't no American willing to do that job.
So let me give you history.
I have been the HR leader for a lot of farm operations in the state of Florida.
Tons of them.
I did risk management in HR for some of the largest farm operations in Miami, in Homestead, in Imma, out in the glads, the tomato farms, the lettuce farms, the avocado farms.
(12:41):
The cucumber farms, the, you want a salad, you want peppers, you want all of that.
There is a person of color, a Hispanic person in that field picking that fruit so that you can sit on your high horse and decide that immigrants aren't important.
There is a person of color picking that fruit.
(13:03):
There is a person of color.
Going into that field with the snakes, with the scorpions, with the heat, with the sun, with the rain, with the port conditions, with the toilet out in the field, there is a person of color, a Hispanic person going into that field to pick your vegetables that you want, clean on a platter that you get to eat, and there ain't no not a one American.
(13:34):
Born in this country, going into that field to pick that fruit, not a one of y'all.
Let me tell you what we did.
When I was working for one of the large tomato farms in Homestead, we put out an ad in the newspaper.
We put out an ad at the workforce office.
We put out an ad at the unemployment office.
(13:54):
We even on one occasion, decided to use prison labor to pick the fruit when we couldn't find migrant labor.
And you know what happened? They, within an hour, they stomped the field.
The tomato plants were dead and we had to replant the field because they didn't understand what they were doing.
(14:16):
So the racism of immigration needs to be in check cuz y'all gonna starve.
See if the immigrants don't come to this country and pick y'all fruit, you're gonna starve.
But you wanna be racist against immigrants.
You wanna be racist against us because I'm an immigrant.
(14:40):
I'm a US citizen by naturalization.
My children were born here.
They get to say American.
I get to say Jamaican.
That's what I get to say.
See everything I have, even my US passport says place of birth.
Jamaica doesn't say the United States.
You're still identifying me as an immigrant.
(15:02):
The immigration process in the United States is broken.
We need labor.
I was driving through Sarasota, Florida a couple months ago, and when we got to Sarasota, I decided to go to a Chipotle in Sarasota to get a meal on the highway to Tampa.
And in that, Little visit, there was a sign on the door.
(15:25):
We have no employees to serve.
You order the food on the app.
It's a two hour wait because we only have one employee who's also taking the order off the computer and making the order and packaging it, and you can get your order in two hours.
That's what the lack of labor looks like, but the lack of labor from the immigrant labor in this country.
(15:52):
And in this state of Florida is stark.
There's over a million people in this state, undocumented, but they're doing work that none of y'all wanna do.
And here's the kicker.
The same people who are fighting and railing against immigrants will hire these same immigrants to clean your house, groom your dogs, cut your lawn, trim your trees, and pick your fruit.
(16:23):
And you will pretend that they're the good immigrants because they're doing the work that you will not do for yourself.
So let's check and talk about immigrants first, cuz this is gonna be a long show today.
Margaret has a long list of stuff to talk through, right? You cannot create a law that says, if I am here in this country illegally.
(16:48):
And I am in the midst of a heart attack that I should die instead of going to a hospital to get care.
Because if I go to the hospital to get care, the immigration will be called and I will be strapped to the bed and deported across the border.
That is inhumane and if any of you think that that's okay, that's good.
(17:08):
That's what it is, then you are missing an opportunity to to be a human, period.
To be a human first.
Nobody leaves their country to come to America because they want to be a criminal in this country.
Maybe there is a slim 0.0
0.01%
(17:30):
that does that.
Let me give you guys some facts and education today.
The gun violence that is erupting in the Caribbean.
In South America, in Central America in Mexico is because of America's gun laws.
The reason why people are marching to the borders of America is because we have a gun problem.
(17:55):
Let's talk it the way it is.
We have a gun problem.
The guns go across the border.
They create criminal activity in these small countries, my own country included, of Jamaica, where every day there is a murder of somebody.
And when they trace those guns back, they trace them to Texas and Philadelphia, and Virginia, and Florida, and all the places where guns are easily accessible because none of these countries make guns.
(18:24):
So if you wanna talk about true systemic issues, It's the systemic issues that we create, but we don't wanna talk about those.
We wanna pretend that we are the good people and the bad people are at the border trying to come over the border.
(18:45):
No, it's the system that has caused this to happen.
The systemic system.
They are running from violence caused by guns that they don't produce.
That is the truth.
And half of you HR people don't even understand the immigration process, that if you apply for legal immigration, it could take 15 years for you to even get an interview.
(19:15):
My mother came to this country in 1964 to clean houses as a housekeeper on a housekeeper program that guaranteed her a green card at the end of six months of working in the United States in 1964.
I was a year old when she immigrated to this country, and it took her three years for, for to apply and get my dad and I here.
(19:44):
In the sixties, that whole process now would take 10 years.
That's what we're dealing with.
That's the reality.
That's the immigrant reality.
People contribute.
Let me give you the other part that you all don't know.
As an HR leader in the farming community, if a person doesn't have a social security number and they give you a fake one, right? Because it happens, let's be real, and you pay Social Security for them up to a year.
(20:18):
The social security is paid into the system, and at the end of a year you get a letter saying, this is a bad social security number, but we're not sending your money back to you.
We're keeping it in the system.
And Johnny tomato picker or corn picker has now paid into the US Social Security System.
(20:40):
They will never get a dollar back from that system.
Never.
Let me give you some more immigration history so you all know, okay.
My aunt who has died years now, okay? She came to the United States from London.
And when she came, she applied for her visa.
(21:03):
She got a temporary one, so she started working and she had a good social security number and she continued to work.
But when she got ready to retire and she had paid into the system for 40 years and she got ready to retire, they said, oh wait, you don't have legal status.
We can't pay you a dollar back of all that money you paid into the into the social security system.
(21:26):
Have a good life.
Go die somewhere.
So we benefit from the immigrants paying into the system that we call our perfections of systems, social Security.
But somehow in this process, we have lost our way when we are okay with taking, pretending that these people are not human beings.
(21:56):
So let's start there.
Let's go to book Banning.
So now, My grandchild, who's 16, 17 months old now when he enters school in three to four years and he starts kindergarten.
Half the books that I read that includes my history has now been banned by white people who don't think that my child should be taught the history because you are uncomfortable.
(22:24):
But damn it, we've been uncomfortable our whole life in this system.
So you decide, one parent in this state gets to decide that they don't like the book till the book gets banned.
So the only history that's taught is European white history, that the native people didn't have a history and their history shouldn't be taught either.
(22:48):
The Hispanic history shouldn't be taught, the Asian history shouldn't be taught the black history shouldn't be taught.
Nobody's history should be taught.
Only the European history should be taught, and we are creating an inclusive group of people who are gonna show up in our organizations and our work processes and be ready to work and ready to do things in our work.
(23:15):
We expect that this is okay and we plan to be silent.
This is the part that gets me.
If half of you were out there during the pandemic, after George Floyd protesting in the streets, you were blocking traffic.
You were saying you were going to be our advocate and our champions.
(23:38):
Yet now you are watching us being oppressed and you don't think you need to get in the street and protest anymore.
So the reality is your paper Tiger Allies, you were never our allies.
You were never our friends.
You have watched the lgbtq plus community get annihilated week and day and hour after hour as we enter June and enter Pride Month, and many of your organizations will put out pride statements.
(24:12):
But you won't stand up for anybody in your organization who is lgbtq plus.
You won't do it because you are afraid of the backlash to your brand.
So you are not willing to stand up for the community.
That's the truth.
That is the reality, but you're not willing to stand up for black people.
(24:34):
So here's a, here's an interesting take, and I'm going after everybody.
Today I got into a tit tat with somebody on LinkedIn.
Our illustrious human that is trying to run the world right now decided that he was going to ban Holocaust education in the schools in Florida.
He was going after the Jewish community.
(24:58):
Okay.
But suddenly now, this individual wanted to protest the state of Florida.
But when he went after the African-American Studies weeks ago, we didn't hear from anyone.
Nobody said, oh, that's a bad thing because you're going after black history.
Only black people's voices were in that arena.
(25:22):
There weren't any other voices in the arena.
They were silent.
So now they've come and they went after.
Now the lgbtq plus community.
And people still stayed silent.
Now they're going after the Jewish community, and now voices are coming to the table.
And then they went after the Latin community, and then they tried to pit the Asian community against the rest of us, and we stayed silent.
(25:54):
So the, the reality was the Asian community, their history can be taught.
But the rest of your history can't be taught.
Wow.
But you say silent, right? Do we invest in inclusion? I want to, as my T-shirt says right here, I want to not just survive in this system.
(26:24):
I wanna grow and thrive, and in order for me to grow and thrive as a human being, I have to show up fully as myself.
You cannot erase who I am at a core.
You cannot go after the immigrant community and expect the rest of us who are immigrants to stay silent.
The reality is there are all immigrants in this United States.
(26:50):
Every single person who is not a Native American, who is not an indigenous person, arrived here on a boat.
Some of us arrived here without consent on that boat.
That's my generation, my family, my history.
(27:12):
But the rest of you left oppression in Europe.
Your forefathers left oppression in Europe to come to the United States, but now you can't see oppression in anyone else.
Give us your tired, your poor, you're hungry.
No, don't give us that because we want to be only for ourselves.
(27:37):
How do we get here? How do we as human beings get to this place? How do we get here? How do we systematically stop seeing people as humans? How do we get here? I don't understand.
I cannot do this work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and quality, thriving, belonging, all of this stuff without raising my voice in the arena.
(28:07):
I cannot afford to sit silently while all of you pretend to invest in inclusion when you're truly not invested, invested in us, the the underserved, underrepresented population in this country.
And so let's talk about this word woke.
(28:30):
Damn it, I'm woke.
I woke up every day with the fact that half of you don't like me.
The other half of you wanna wipe us out.
The rest of the half of you wanna be the Karens.
The half of the half of the half want to be the Kens and Karens of the world who wanna cry after you try to wipe us out.
(28:52):
And then there are our allies and supporters who we depend on to keep us engaged and keep us going.
Somebody asked me the other day, why do I do this work? Let me tell you why I do this work.
Let me, let me give you historic context.
(29:13):
When my dad arrived in this country as a seasoned contractor, he was basically relegated to a fence and begging for a job in New York because the.
Italians who controlled the unions, didn't want black people in the unions.
Let's be real.
(29:34):
There's always been subsets and subclasses that have been against the next subclass that comes, but he thrived and he survived, and he built a thriving business in New York.
My mother was a housekeeper.
She was a trained seamstress, but when she immigrated to the United States, she became a c a housekeeper.
(29:56):
She came here for one reason, to give me the opportunity to sit where I'm sitting right now.
Did she know that this was the vision? No.
She didn't know what was possible for me, but she came on a dream to make something possible for me, and I stood in that my entire life.
(30:19):
I stood in that with my two sons and now my grandson.
I do this work because I think we need to put the human back in hr.
I don't think that we serve people well if we do not humanize the work that we do.
I gave a talk last week at the Association for Training and Development on D E N I data storytelling, and I said to the group that came to my session that diversity and inclusion is not a numbers game.
(30:54):
There are real people, real human beings, having experiences inside of the systems that we create.
They are having bad experiences inside of the systems that we create.
They are having psychologically unsafe experiences inside of the systems we create.
(31:14):
They are struggling to survive inside of the brutal repressive processes that we call leaders and leadership acumen.
The people who should never have been leaders who are leading human beings and psychologically torturing them every day.
And half of those people don't wanna be in your workplace, but they have families to feed, they have generations to take care of.
(31:39):
They need the paycheck.
So they put up with your nonsense.
I do this work for them because for me, most of you don't have to hire me to help you.
But I do this work because I wanna empower the people who work for you to understand their own value, to understand that if you include us, if you spend, think about this, think about this for a second.
(32:13):
You know, China is running and doing the Silk Road Project.
They're running all over the world, building infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Caribbean.
All of these places, they're figuring out ways to empower and disempower countries across the world.
(32:36):
But we on the other hand, are spending our time trying to take this country back to 1920.
We are stripping away women's rights to choose autonomy for their bodies.
We are removing the rights to vote effectively for who we want.
We are attacking immigrants who want to work and grow in this.
(32:59):
Country.
We are attacking books because we don't think anybody should read them.
We are spending time attacking whole communities.
You know, the indigenous community, the black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBTQ plus community.
We're going after everybody.
If we took the all the energy, That we are putting into woke shit and put it into building this country effectively so that we all show up at the table at the same time with the same opportunities.
(33:32):
This country would be more phenomenal than it is right now.
It would be, but instead we are spending our time, we're spending the precious moments of our life.
We're spending, what is possible for us trying to reengage a system that doesn't serve any of us, that doesn't serve white people.
(33:59):
It doesn't serve black people.
It doesn't serve Hispanic people.
It doesn't serve native people.
It doesn't serve Asian people.
It doesn't serve the LGBTQ plus community.
It serves no one.
We are spending all of our time and energy.
Trying to erase people instead of spending our time and energy making the United States the beacon on the hill that it should be.
(34:25):
And we think that this is okay.
And the reality is we have lost our purpose and we have lost our way.
And that is the truth.
We have lost our purpose and our way.
But here's what I know, you cannot erase us.
You cannot erase our history or who we are.
(34:47):
This is a season.
This is a season, and as the Bible says, there's a season as all of the good books out there.
Say there is a season.
But what I want you to know as people in hr, in talent, in diversity and inclusion, in equity and equality, all of you doing the work to build inclusion in organizations, we must stay the course.
(35:16):
We cannot allow ourselves to be erased.
We cannot be fearful of raising our voice.
Let me talk specifically to my black brothers and sisters.
Our forefathers endured hell so that we could sit where we are now.
It's time for us to stand up.
(35:38):
It's time for us to use our voice without fear.
It's time for us to understand that if they erase us, if they succeed in erasing us as a people, if they succeed in dividing us into the labels that we want to occupy.
(35:58):
If they succeed in putting labels on us and putting us in categories that can be erased, and if they succeed in dividing us so that we don't think that we need to be together in this fight, then they win.
They win.
(36:18):
Florida is a test tube.
We are the Petri dish of hell that could be put on the rest of this country and the world.
And if you think I am not telling you the truth, rest assured this is ground.
Experiment, the experiment on rolling us back in time.
(36:43):
It's fascist, it's racist, it's deliberate.
It is erasure.
It is the beginning of what others would love to be our end.
But here's the thing.
My forefathers, our forefathers, our foremothers did not stand in what they stood in for us to come to 2023 to be erased.
(37:11):
So we better get ourselves in order.
We, we need to understand that these outward facing diversity initiatives that we put on and this outright pretend that most of us who do this work of de and I have the pretend that the work we're doing is meaningful enough to make significant advances.
(37:37):
That outward lie that we tell ourselves every day that de and I and the work we're doing is substantive.
We need to stop diluting ourselves and start asking organizations to step up their game because we have no option but to expect the corporate structure to be socially responsible around us.
(38:06):
The diverse people in this world, corporations cannot be silent.
You all wanted to be in this arena.
You chose to be in this arena when George Floyd was murdered.
You put out your statements about diversity and inclusion when George Floyd was murdered.
(38:27):
Dust your statements off.
Take a good look at those mission and visions that you created back in 2020 and 2021.
And 2022, look at those statements and recognize that if you as a brand don't take a social responsible position, they will come for you.
(38:50):
Next i e target Budweiser, and now Chick-fil-A because the plan is to erase all dissent.
So if you stay silent, And you allow this vocal minority, this vocal minority, to take over the spaces that we occupy, that we will regret our silence in the future, we will regret our silence.
(39:23):
We will regret our inaction.
We will regret that we did not raise our voice effectively.
To support diversity, equity, and inclusion outside of our walls.
See, Disney raised their voice in the arena.
They're fighting for their brand sustenance.
(39:43):
But here's the thing.
Disney has now made an economic shift here in Florida that people will feel for years to come.
They will feel it for years to come.
So if you think your brand can be socially responsibly silent about the erasing of De and I, the attack on immigrants, the attack on the black community, the attack on the Latin community, the attack on the LGBTQ plus community, if you think you can stay silent there.
(40:22):
They are, we, they will come for you eventually.
So if you made these grandi statements on d e I and you plan to invest in inclusion, dust off your investment and make sure that when you invest anywhere that you keep the people of color and the marginalized, underserved communities within your workforce, top of mind.
(40:50):
Because you can't say on one hand that you support us internally while you support the erasing of our history and our process and who we are and who we love, and who we wanna be.
You support that erasure through your political donations.
(41:13):
So if you support the erasure through your political donations, you are hypocritically supporting us internally in your de and i efforts.
And you can't be a hypocrite here.
This is when we can't afford for organizations to stand in the middle of the street pretending that what's happening to us is not happening.
(41:36):
It's happening to us.
Your employees don't feel safe.
Your employees are worried about their own safety, and if you have an office in Texas or Florida, your employees are worried about their safety, their psychological safety, and honestly, I don't know how, as a person of color, we get up every day to do this torture.
(42:00):
I don't know how we do it.
I was looking at Tina Turner's videos since she passed away, and in one of her videos she says, I don't think I can ever return to the United States.
I don't think I can do that.
I asked myself every day, as a person of color, as a immigrant, as a woman, as a black woman, how do we survive this onslaught? When we can't be sure if our allies have our back, because what was said in the margins about diversity, what was said in the margins about inclusion is now mainstream.
(42:44):
And you are coming after every single one of us, and all of you who are silent are complicit in your silence.
Because you truly don't support us if you can't find a way to put your voice in this arena.
So today's topic was erasing us from the margins to the mainstream war on inclusion.
(43:11):
It's a social and a corporate imperative that we get this right, and if you are doing the work of D e I.
It's imperative that you put your fear in your purse or in your bag and you stand up.
Put your big panties on.
Your big underwear on and stand up and ask these organizations, what are you going to do about this? Because we cannot do this work pretending that this is not affecting us.
(43:45):
We cannot do this work pretending that our psychological safety is not at risk, and we cannot do this work in silence where we come home stressed out about what is going on around us, and we go back to the organization the next day and pretend that we're doing D n I.
(44:06):
Effectively, we cannot do this.
This is too hard for us to lift on our own.
The Civil Rights Movement required courageous white people to get involved.
This movement of erasure requires courageous white people to get involved.
(44:27):
Find your courage, to use your voice.
We, the people of color, the underserved and marginalized, must depend on you.
To support our existence because if not, we will be erased.
(44:48):
It's a chipping away of the brick.
See, because what's really happening, what's really happening is the majority realizes that they are the minority and they want to stay the majority, and it's not.
The women, it is the men, the white men who control the purse strings, who wanna stay in the majority, who are supporting and fueling this.
(45:21):
And they want us divided and they want us pitted against each other.
So my call to action, find your voice, find your actions, support us fully now.
Not when it's too late and you sit back and say, we should have, could or would've, didn't.
(45:42):
We need you cuz we cannot fight this alone.
That is inclusion unscripted this week.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for joining me.
For all of you that joined live, thank you for hearing me.
And thank you for supporting inclusion unscripted.
(46:03):
We have a webinar coming up on June 21st where we're gonna talk about employment practices liability and d e I, and we have a couple programs that we're working through that we will be bringing forward.
I will be back next week if I feel psychologically good about doing another one of these.
And that's where I am.
(46:23):
I'm taking these two o'clock lives one week at a time.
One week at a time.
So thank you again for joining.
I appreciate all of you.
Have a wonderful week ahead and a great weekend.
Take care.
You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound.
(46:46):
And when a fall you tied a rope to me.
You listen me every day.
I was down with like a sparrow with broken wings, but now shine.
Will your reflection on me.
(47:06):
Take care everyone.
See you next week.
Maybe take care.
You are like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound.
And when a fall, you tied a rope to me, you, me, of every day I was down with an illusion, like a sparrow with broken wings.
(00:24):
But now shine.
Will your reflection on.
Hi everyone.
Welcome to Inclusion unscripted.
We are back after a couple weeks of hiatus.
My name is Margaret Spence and I am the host of inclusion unscripted, where we are not just building diversity, we are living it every day.
(00:50):
So today's hot topic is one that I have sat on for a couple weeks.
I decided that today was the day to bring this forward.
I wanna talk today about the systematic erasure or the attempt to erase people of color, women books.
(01:17):
You know, the Holocaust, black education, African American history the LGBTQ plus community the women, all the things that are being, that are on the list to be erased.
They're rewriting our history.
They're telling us what we should or shouldn't hear.
(01:37):
I mean, for crying out loud, Amanda Gorman's poetry that was so eloquent and well said has now been banned here in the state of Florida.
I live in this state and we are navigating this.
I got into a spirited discussion with someone on LinkedIn this week about boycotting Florida.
(02:06):
And how that lays out.
So here's the thing, from the margins to the mainstream, we have brought forward what is clearly a racist agenda.
I can call it that as a person of color, I could say it that way because if you want to tell me what I should think, what I should feel, How I should feel it, how I should show up and navigate this world.
(02:39):
Then you are basically saying to me that you individually, as a person who is totally capable of making your decisions in life, your decisions don't matter.
But here's what we're gonna really dive into today.
We're gonna talk through diversity and inclusion as a broader subset.
(03:02):
As a broad subset, and I'm gonna really dive a little bit into the corporate structure, that on one hand says to your employees, we want diversity and inclusion.
We want this for you.
We, we absolutely embrace diversity and inclusion in our four walls.
(03:25):
We wanna build these powerful diversity programs.
We wanna make sure that they exist.
But at the same time, you support the individuals who want to wipe us off the map and erase our history.
And so on one hand, the corporate social responsibility says, I am going to be a diverse employer.
(03:50):
The corporate social responsibility says I'm going to bring diversity to the forefront, but behind the scenes, the lobbyist, The people that you fund, the money that is given, the money that is distributed actually goes against the communities that are a part of your employment base.
(04:12):
It goes against the communities that you serve as a customer base.
It goes against the vendor community.
So how do you as a corporation, in a corporate, social, responsible way, Say to me on one hand, miss employee, you are included.
(04:32):
I wanna build programs for you.
I wanna support you effectively.
But on the quiet hand, in the quiet corners, Your donations and your support supports and empowers the people who want to put an eraser to my history, to my present day, and they wanna wipe out the future for my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.
(04:59):
They wanna rewrite the history.
They don't want us to talk about our history.
They don't want us to delve and dive into our own history.
They wanna pretend as I heard a woman on one of the social platforms saying slavery was a choice, the slaves were treated well.
(05:19):
So you get to rewrite that history and we are supposed to sit here like docile people and allow you to rewrite our history.
This is not the first program that I've done on this.
This is not gonna be the last program I do on it.
And I am vocal today because at the end of the day, the ability for someone to erase us is significant.
(05:49):
The ability for us to be erased and rewritten in a different language as if we don't exist and we don't have a platform is problematic for all of us.
And so we may think, and, and here's the lens.
Diversity and inclusion programs have been wiped virtually off the map here in Florida.
(06:12):
But here's how diversity and inclusion plays out in the real world.
The real world, because many of you who are on the margins who are thinking I'm on the margins of.
What I believe about diversity and inclusion, but I'm willing to support this mainstream war on inclusion.
(06:34):
Whether I'm supporting it vocally or I'm supporting it physically, or I'm supporting it in the quiet, you are supporting the mainstream war on inclusion.
But here's the thing, inclusion comes for all of us at some point.
Right.
You may think that inclusion doesn't include you as a white man or woman.
(06:59):
You may think that us as the people of color and the marginalized communities and the communities who have been excluded historically, that we are taking up space in your world, we don't.
We haven't earned the right to stand here.
(07:20):
We, we still need your permission to decide what part of ourselves we should bring forward, but here's the thing.
This system will come for you too.
This system that is being built against black people, against immigrants, against the LGBTQ plus community, against the people of color, this system that is being built against us.
(07:49):
Will be coming for you next.
It's coming for you.
Because the reality is the people who are fostering this and pushing this own the arena, they own the stadium, they own the land, they own the process, and if they can get us all fighting against us, then we miss what they're really doing to you.
(08:18):
So welcome to Inclusion Unscripted, where we appear on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube on Fridays at 2:00 PM when I am not on a hiatus, and we are back this week to talk about systemic erasure of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
(08:40):
The stymied process of watering down D N I.
The process of pretending that diversity is not necessary, the process of trying to create no inclusion, the process of saying one half of us is better than the rest of us.
(09:01):
And oh by the way, black person colored person, people of color, cuz y'all still want to go back to calling us that.
Let's be real.
The, the, the, the drumbeat to go back to the past to make America great again is the process of going back to calling us the N word.
(09:23):
The process of going back to doing all the things that you did to us in the past, but somehow all of you have forgotten.
One simple thing, the internet exists now.
People are more vocal.
We have opportunity, we have a voice, and we are willing to use it.
So let's level set today.
(09:44):
Let's have the discussion.
Let's talk about this beautiful state of Florida, and let's start with immigration.
Let me start there.
I'm an immigrant.
My children are American.
I was born in the beautiful country of Jamaica.
The land that I absolutely love, and every so often when the pressures of America hit my brain to the point where I think y'all are gonna fry my head, I have to get on a plane and go to Jamaica and retune myself to who I am, because the pressure to be a diverse person in the United States of America is hard.
(10:31):
The pressure to keep your sanity and your psychological safety in this space that we occupy is hard.
The ability to do the work of inclusion in workspaces and organizations is difficult.
(10:52):
It is the work that I have chosen to do.
It is the work that I have done for the last 23 years.
And so I have to start with immigrant because I think that's my first identifier.
I'm not gonna identify as a woman of color.
First, I'm gonna identify as an immigrant.
So let's start there.
(11:13):
So Florida has enacted one of the most draconian immigration laws in the planet because honestly, it's the first method of saying to people of color that we don't want you here.
That's really what it's saying.
It's saying, we don't want you here in our land because you're coming to take our opportunity, but let's get damn real today.
(11:38):
There ain't no white blooded American, black American, any other American going down to the farms in homestead.
Going down to the farms in Imma, going down to the farms in, in Myakka city and Plant City and all the other places in Florida where fruit is grown.
There ain't one red-blooded American going into those fields to pick fruit for 2 cents a barrel and putting it on their shoulder and getting up and climbing into a truck and throwing that shit into a basket.
(12:11):
There ain't no American willing to do that job.
So let me give you history.
I have been the HR leader for a lot of farm operations in the state of Florida.
Tons of them.
I did risk management in HR for some of the largest farm operations in Miami, in Homestead, in Imma, out in the glads, the tomato farms, the lettuce farms, the avocado farms.
(12:41):
The cucumber farms, the, you want a salad, you want peppers, you want all of that.
There is a person of color, a Hispanic person in that field picking that fruit so that you can sit on your high horse and decide that immigrants aren't important.
There is a person of color picking that fruit.
(13:03):
There is a person of color.
Going into that field with the snakes, with the scorpions, with the heat, with the sun, with the rain, with the port conditions, with the toilet out in the field, there is a person of color, a Hispanic person going into that field to pick your vegetables that you want, clean on a platter that you get to eat, and there ain't no not a one American.
(13:34):
Born in this country, going into that field to pick that fruit, not a one of y'all.
Let me tell you what we did.
When I was working for one of the large tomato farms in Homestead, we put out an ad in the newspaper.
We put out an ad at the workforce office.
We put out an ad at the unemployment office.
(13:54):
We even on one occasion, decided to use prison labor to pick the fruit when we couldn't find migrant labor.
And you know what happened? They, within an hour, they stomped the field.
The tomato plants were dead and we had to replant the field because they didn't understand what they were doing.
(14:16):
So the racism of immigration needs to be in check cuz y'all gonna starve.
See if the immigrants don't come to this country and pick y'all fruit, you're gonna starve.
But you wanna be racist against immigrants.
You wanna be racist against us because I'm an immigrant.
(14:40):
I'm a US citizen by naturalization.
My children were born here.
They get to say American.
I get to say Jamaican.
That's what I get to say.
See everything I have, even my US passport says place of birth.
Jamaica doesn't say the United States.
You're still identifying me as an immigrant.
(15:02):
The immigration process in the United States is broken.
We need labor.
I was driving through Sarasota, Florida a couple months ago, and when we got to Sarasota, I decided to go to a Chipotle in Sarasota to get a meal on the highway to Tampa.
And in that, Little visit, there was a sign on the door.
(15:25):
We have no employees to serve.
You order the food on the app.
It's a two hour wait because we only have one employee who's also taking the order off the computer and making the order and packaging it, and you can get your order in two hours.
That's what the lack of labor looks like, but the lack of labor from the immigrant labor in this country.
(15:52):
And in this state of Florida is stark.
There's over a million people in this state, undocumented, but they're doing work that none of y'all wanna do.
And here's the kicker.
The same people who are fighting and railing against immigrants will hire these same immigrants to clean your house, groom your dogs, cut your lawn, trim your trees, and pick your fruit.
(16:23):
And you will pretend that they're the good immigrants because they're doing the work that you will not do for yourself.
So let's check and talk about immigrants first, cuz this is gonna be a long show today.
Margaret has a long list of stuff to talk through, right? You cannot create a law that says, if I am here in this country illegally.
(16:48):
And I am in the midst of a heart attack that I should die instead of going to a hospital to get care.
Because if I go to the hospital to get care, the immigration will be called and I will be strapped to the bed and deported across the border.
That is inhumane and if any of you think that that's okay, that's good.
(17:08):
That's what it is, then you are missing an opportunity to to be a human, period.
To be a human first.
Nobody leaves their country to come to America because they want to be a criminal in this country.
Maybe there is a slim 0.0
0.01%
(17:30):
that does that.
Let me give you guys some facts and education today.
The gun violence that is erupting in the Caribbean.
In South America, in Central America in Mexico is because of America's gun laws.
The reason why people are marching to the borders of America is because we have a gun problem.
(17:55):
Let's talk it the way it is.
We have a gun problem.
The guns go across the border.
They create criminal activity in these small countries, my own country included, of Jamaica, where every day there is a murder of somebody.
And when they trace those guns back, they trace them to Texas and Philadelphia, and Virginia, and Florida, and all the places where guns are easily accessible because none of these countries make guns.
(18:24):
So if you wanna talk about true systemic issues, It's the systemic issues that we create, but we don't wanna talk about those.
We wanna pretend that we are the good people and the bad people are at the border trying to come over the border.
(18:45):
No, it's the system that has caused this to happen.
The systemic system.
They are running from violence caused by guns that they don't produce.
That is the truth.
And half of you HR people don't even understand the immigration process, that if you apply for legal immigration, it could take 15 years for you to even get an interview.
(19:15):
My mother came to this country in 1964 to clean houses as a housekeeper on a housekeeper program that guaranteed her a green card at the end of six months of working in the United States in 1964.
I was a year old when she immigrated to this country, and it took her three years for, for to apply and get my dad and I here.
(19:44):
In the sixties, that whole process now would take 10 years.
That's what we're dealing with.
That's the reality.
That's the immigrant reality.
People contribute.
Let me give you the other part that you all don't know.
As an HR leader in the farming community, if a person doesn't have a social security number and they give you a fake one, right? Because it happens, let's be real, and you pay Social Security for them up to a year.
(20:18):
The social security is paid into the system, and at the end of a year you get a letter saying, this is a bad social security number, but we're not sending your money back to you.
We're keeping it in the system.
And Johnny tomato picker or corn picker has now paid into the US Social Security System.
(20:40):
They will never get a dollar back from that system.
Never.
Let me give you some more immigration history so you all know, okay.
My aunt who has died years now, okay? She came to the United States from London.
And when she came, she applied for her visa.
(21:03):
She got a temporary one, so she started working and she had a good social security number and she continued to work.
But when she got ready to retire and she had paid into the system for 40 years and she got ready to retire, they said, oh wait, you don't have legal status.
We can't pay you a dollar back of all that money you paid into the into the social security system.
(21:26):
Have a good life.
Go die somewhere.
So we benefit from the immigrants paying into the system that we call our perfections of systems, social Security.
But somehow in this process, we have lost our way when we are okay with taking, pretending that these people are not human beings.
(21:56):
So let's start there.
Let's go to book Banning.
So now, My grandchild, who's 16, 17 months old now when he enters school in three to four years and he starts kindergarten.
Half the books that I read that includes my history has now been banned by white people who don't think that my child should be taught the history because you are uncomfortable.
(22:24):
But damn it, we've been uncomfortable our whole life in this system.
So you decide, one parent in this state gets to decide that they don't like the book till the book gets banned.
So the only history that's taught is European white history, that the native people didn't have a history and their history shouldn't be taught either.
(22:48):
The Hispanic history shouldn't be taught, the Asian history shouldn't be taught the black history shouldn't be taught.
Nobody's history should be taught.
Only the European history should be taught, and we are creating an inclusive group of people who are gonna show up in our organizations and our work processes and be ready to work and ready to do things in our work.
(23:15):
We expect that this is okay and we plan to be silent.
This is the part that gets me.
If half of you were out there during the pandemic, after George Floyd protesting in the streets, you were blocking traffic.
You were saying you were going to be our advocate and our champions.
(23:38):
Yet now you are watching us being oppressed and you don't think you need to get in the street and protest anymore.
So the reality is your paper Tiger Allies, you were never our allies.
You were never our friends.
You have watched the lgbtq plus community get annihilated week and day and hour after hour as we enter June and enter Pride Month, and many of your organizations will put out pride statements.
(24:12):
But you won't stand up for anybody in your organization who is lgbtq plus.
You won't do it because you are afraid of the backlash to your brand.
So you are not willing to stand up for the community.
That's the truth.
That is the reality, but you're not willing to stand up for black people.
(24:34):
So here's a, here's an interesting take, and I'm going after everybody.
Today I got into a tit tat with somebody on LinkedIn.
Our illustrious human that is trying to run the world right now decided that he was going to ban Holocaust education in the schools in Florida.
He was going after the Jewish community.
(24:58):
Okay.
But suddenly now, this individual wanted to protest the state of Florida.
But when he went after the African-American Studies weeks ago, we didn't hear from anyone.
Nobody said, oh, that's a bad thing because you're going after black history.
Only black people's voices were in that arena.
(25:22):
There weren't any other voices in the arena.
They were silent.
So now they've come and they went after.
Now the lgbtq plus community.
And people still stayed silent.
Now they're going after the Jewish community, and now voices are coming to the table.
And then they went after the Latin community, and then they tried to pit the Asian community against the rest of us, and we stayed silent.
(25:54):
So the, the reality was the Asian community, their history can be taught.
But the rest of your history can't be taught.
Wow.
But you say silent, right? Do we invest in inclusion? I want to, as my T-shirt says right here, I want to not just survive in this system.
(26:24):
I wanna grow and thrive, and in order for me to grow and thrive as a human being, I have to show up fully as myself.
You cannot erase who I am at a core.
You cannot go after the immigrant community and expect the rest of us who are immigrants to stay silent.
The reality is there are all immigrants in this United States.
(26:50):
Every single person who is not a Native American, who is not an indigenous person, arrived here on a boat.
Some of us arrived here without consent on that boat.
That's my generation, my family, my history.
(27:12):
But the rest of you left oppression in Europe.
Your forefathers left oppression in Europe to come to the United States, but now you can't see oppression in anyone else.
Give us your tired, your poor, you're hungry.
No, don't give us that because we want to be only for ourselves.
(27:37):
How do we get here? How do we as human beings get to this place? How do we get here? How do we systematically stop seeing people as humans? How do we get here? I don't understand.
I cannot do this work of diversity, equity, inclusion, and quality, thriving, belonging, all of this stuff without raising my voice in the arena.
(28:07):
I cannot afford to sit silently while all of you pretend to invest in inclusion when you're truly not invested, invested in us, the the underserved, underrepresented population in this country.
And so let's talk about this word woke.
(28:30):
Damn it, I'm woke.
I woke up every day with the fact that half of you don't like me.
The other half of you wanna wipe us out.
The rest of the half of you wanna be the Karens.
The half of the half of the half want to be the Kens and Karens of the world who wanna cry after you try to wipe us out.
(28:52):
And then there are our allies and supporters who we depend on to keep us engaged and keep us going.
Somebody asked me the other day, why do I do this work? Let me tell you why I do this work.
Let me, let me give you historic context.
(29:13):
When my dad arrived in this country as a seasoned contractor, he was basically relegated to a fence and begging for a job in New York because the.
Italians who controlled the unions, didn't want black people in the unions.
Let's be real.
(29:34):
There's always been subsets and subclasses that have been against the next subclass that comes, but he thrived and he survived, and he built a thriving business in New York.
My mother was a housekeeper.
She was a trained seamstress, but when she immigrated to the United States, she became a c a housekeeper.
(29:56):
She came here for one reason, to give me the opportunity to sit where I'm sitting right now.
Did she know that this was the vision? No.
She didn't know what was possible for me, but she came on a dream to make something possible for me, and I stood in that my entire life.
(30:19):
I stood in that with my two sons and now my grandson.
I do this work because I think we need to put the human back in hr.
I don't think that we serve people well if we do not humanize the work that we do.
I gave a talk last week at the Association for Training and Development on D E N I data storytelling, and I said to the group that came to my session that diversity and inclusion is not a numbers game.
(30:54):
There are real people, real human beings, having experiences inside of the systems that we create.
They are having bad experiences inside of the systems that we create.
They are having psychologically unsafe experiences inside of the systems we create.
(31:14):
They are struggling to survive inside of the brutal repressive processes that we call leaders and leadership acumen.
The people who should never have been leaders who are leading human beings and psychologically torturing them every day.
And half of those people don't wanna be in your workplace, but they have families to feed, they have generations to take care of.
(31:39):
They need the paycheck.
So they put up with your nonsense.
I do this work for them because for me, most of you don't have to hire me to help you.
But I do this work because I wanna empower the people who work for you to understand their own value, to understand that if you include us, if you spend, think about this, think about this for a second.
(32:13):
You know, China is running and doing the Silk Road Project.
They're running all over the world, building infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the Caribbean.
All of these places, they're figuring out ways to empower and disempower countries across the world.
(32:36):
But we on the other hand, are spending our time trying to take this country back to 1920.
We are stripping away women's rights to choose autonomy for their bodies.
We are removing the rights to vote effectively for who we want.
We are attacking immigrants who want to work and grow in this.
(32:59):
Country.
We are attacking books because we don't think anybody should read them.
We are spending time attacking whole communities.
You know, the indigenous community, the black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBTQ plus community.
We're going after everybody.
If we took the all the energy, That we are putting into woke shit and put it into building this country effectively so that we all show up at the table at the same time with the same opportunities.
(33:32):
This country would be more phenomenal than it is right now.
It would be, but instead we are spending our time, we're spending the precious moments of our life.
We're spending, what is possible for us trying to reengage a system that doesn't serve any of us, that doesn't serve white people.
(33:59):
It doesn't serve black people.
It doesn't serve Hispanic people.
It doesn't serve native people.
It doesn't serve Asian people.
It doesn't serve the LGBTQ plus community.
It serves no one.
We are spending all of our time and energy.
Trying to erase people instead of spending our time and energy making the United States the beacon on the hill that it should be.
(34:25):
And we think that this is okay.
And the reality is we have lost our purpose and we have lost our way.
And that is the truth.
We have lost our purpose and our way.
But here's what I know, you cannot erase us.
You cannot erase our history or who we are.
(34:47):
This is a season.
This is a season, and as the Bible says, there's a season as all of the good books out there.
Say there is a season.
But what I want you to know as people in hr, in talent, in diversity and inclusion, in equity and equality, all of you doing the work to build inclusion in organizations, we must stay the course.
(35:16):
We cannot allow ourselves to be erased.
We cannot be fearful of raising our voice.
Let me talk specifically to my black brothers and sisters.
Our forefathers endured hell so that we could sit where we are now.
It's time for us to stand up.
(35:38):
It's time for us to use our voice without fear.
It's time for us to understand that if they erase us, if they succeed in erasing us as a people, if they succeed in dividing us into the labels that we want to occupy.
(35:58):
If they succeed in putting labels on us and putting us in categories that can be erased, and if they succeed in dividing us so that we don't think that we need to be together in this fight, then they win.
They win.
(36:18):
Florida is a test tube.
We are the Petri dish of hell that could be put on the rest of this country and the world.
And if you think I am not telling you the truth, rest assured this is ground.
Experiment, the experiment on rolling us back in time.
(36:43):
It's fascist, it's racist, it's deliberate.
It is erasure.
It is the beginning of what others would love to be our end.
But here's the thing.
My forefathers, our forefathers, our foremothers did not stand in what they stood in for us to come to 2023 to be erased.
(37:11):
So we better get ourselves in order.
We, we need to understand that these outward facing diversity initiatives that we put on and this outright pretend that most of us who do this work of de and I have the pretend that the work we're doing is meaningful enough to make significant advances.
(37:37):
That outward lie that we tell ourselves every day that de and I and the work we're doing is substantive.
We need to stop diluting ourselves and start asking organizations to step up their game because we have no option but to expect the corporate structure to be socially responsible around us.
(38:06):
The diverse people in this world, corporations cannot be silent.
You all wanted to be in this arena.
You chose to be in this arena when George Floyd was murdered.
You put out your statements about diversity and inclusion when George Floyd was murdered.
(38:27):
Dust your statements off.
Take a good look at those mission and visions that you created back in 2020 and 2021.
And 2022, look at those statements and recognize that if you as a brand don't take a social responsible position, they will come for you.
(38:50):
Next i e target Budweiser, and now Chick-fil-A because the plan is to erase all dissent.
So if you stay silent, And you allow this vocal minority, this vocal minority, to take over the spaces that we occupy, that we will regret our silence in the future, we will regret our silence.
(39:23):
We will regret our inaction.
We will regret that we did not raise our voice effectively.
To support diversity, equity, and inclusion outside of our walls.
See, Disney raised their voice in the arena.
They're fighting for their brand sustenance.
(39:43):
But here's the thing.
Disney has now made an economic shift here in Florida that people will feel for years to come.
They will feel it for years to come.
So if you think your brand can be socially responsibly silent about the erasing of De and I, the attack on immigrants, the attack on the black community, the attack on the Latin community, the attack on the LGBTQ plus community, if you think you can stay silent there.
(40:22):
They are, we, they will come for you eventually.
So if you made these grandi statements on d e I and you plan to invest in inclusion, dust off your investment and make sure that when you invest anywhere that you keep the people of color and the marginalized, underserved communities within your workforce, top of mind.
(40:50):
Because you can't say on one hand that you support us internally while you support the erasing of our history and our process and who we are and who we love, and who we wanna be.
You support that erasure through your political donations.
(41:13):
So if you support the erasure through your political donations, you are hypocritically supporting us internally in your de and i efforts.
And you can't be a hypocrite here.
This is when we can't afford for organizations to stand in the middle of the street pretending that what's happening to us is not happening.
(41:36):
It's happening to us.
Your employees don't feel safe.
Your employees are worried about their own safety, and if you have an office in Texas or Florida, your employees are worried about their safety, their psychological safety, and honestly, I don't know how, as a person of color, we get up every day to do this torture.
(42:00):
I don't know how we do it.
I was looking at Tina Turner's videos since she passed away, and in one of her videos she says, I don't think I can ever return to the United States.
I don't think I can do that.
I asked myself every day, as a person of color, as a immigrant, as a woman, as a black woman, how do we survive this onslaught? When we can't be sure if our allies have our back, because what was said in the margins about diversity, what was said in the margins about inclusion is now mainstream.
(42:44):
And you are coming after every single one of us, and all of you who are silent are complicit in your silence.
Because you truly don't support us if you can't find a way to put your voice in this arena.
So today's topic was erasing us from the margins to the mainstream war on inclusion.
(43:11):
It's a social and a corporate imperative that we get this right, and if you are doing the work of D e I.
It's imperative that you put your fear in your purse or in your bag and you stand up.
Put your big panties on.
Your big underwear on and stand up and ask these organizations, what are you going to do about this? Because we cannot do this work pretending that this is not affecting us.
(43:45):
We cannot do this work pretending that our psychological safety is not at risk, and we cannot do this work in silence where we come home stressed out about what is going on around us, and we go back to the organization the next day and pretend that we're doing D n I.
(44:06):
Effectively, we cannot do this.
This is too hard for us to lift on our own.
The Civil Rights Movement required courageous white people to get involved.
This movement of erasure requires courageous white people to get involved.
(44:27):
Find your courage, to use your voice.
We, the people of color, the underserved and marginalized, must depend on you.
To support our existence because if not, we will be erased.
(44:48):
It's a chipping away of the brick.
See, because what's really happening, what's really happening is the majority realizes that they are the minority and they want to stay the majority, and it's not.
The women, it is the men, the white men who control the purse strings, who wanna stay in the majority, who are supporting and fueling this.
(45:21):
And they want us divided and they want us pitted against each other.
So my call to action, find your voice, find your actions, support us fully now.
Not when it's too late and you sit back and say, we should have, could or would've, didn't.
(45:42):
We need you cuz we cannot fight this alone.
That is inclusion unscripted this week.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you for joining me.
For all of you that joined live, thank you for hearing me.
And thank you for supporting inclusion unscripted.
(46:03):
We have a webinar coming up on June 21st where we're gonna talk about employment practices liability and d e I, and we have a couple programs that we're working through that we will be bringing forward.
I will be back next week if I feel psychologically good about doing another one of these.
And that's where I am.
(46:23):
I'm taking these two o'clock lives one week at a time.
One week at a time.
So thank you again for joining.
I appreciate all of you.
Have a wonderful week ahead and a great weekend.
Take care.
You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound.
(46:46):
And when a fall you tied a rope to me.
You listen me every day.
I was down with like a sparrow with broken wings, but now shine.
Will your reflection on me.
(47:06):
Take care everyone.
See you next week.
Maybe take care.
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