Real Talk From Expert Panelists At Our Diversity & Inclusion Live Briefing
On August 3, a panel of thought leaders in diversity joined the sparks & honey staff to look at culture through the lens of diversity and inclusion for our first special edition live briefing, live-streamed on Facebook.
The conversation topics of the day included, What is the value of diversity and who benefits? What are watch outs and opportunities for organizations, and what are blind spots and grey areas we all should unpack? As the diversity of participants in the panel, our staff, and the audience during Q & A made clear — diversity is an enriching prospect.
Or, as panelist Geraldine Moriba, CEO Moriba Media and WNET Programming Consultant said, paraphrasing Broadway show “Hamilton’s” signature line:
“When diversity’s in the room, it gets the job done.”
Talking about “The Talk”
One cultural signal that garnered heartfelt commentary was P&G’s new spot “The Talk.” It depicts an inside look at conversations black parents (in the case of this spot, black mothers) have to have with their children on how to handle whitewashed standards of beauty or discriminatory — and sometimes deadly — treatment from the authorities with racial bias. In other words, it depicts the reality for many people of color in dealing with a world that can often feel not welcoming and even dangerous.
“When I saw some of those conversations, it brought back some very heavy memories,” said Tiffany R. Warren, Senior VP, Chief Diversity Officer, Omnicom. “A few years ago, it featured talk around, ‘You’re pretty for a black girl.’ These are things you remember being said to you and you’re horrified.”
Geraldine Moriba found the absence of black fathers in the P&G spot concerning. “I would have this conversation with my son,” she said, “but my husband would have the same conversation with him.”
Jim Halloran, Digital Chief Officer, GLAAD, said, “I want to acknowledge my white privilege and that I haven’t had to ever have ‘the talk.’” For many gay people in the closet, he said, it’s the media that can provide representations that feel inclusive, authentic and real, and they have a “responsibility…to tell stories in authentic ways.”
The talk can happen among friends that become your family if you have no other support, as Melissa Sklarz, Director of Development at Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund suggested. “For a lot of young people…It’s amazing to them that as a community, we can create our families of choice.”
For Melissa Sklarz, finding her place meant conforming to the norms set by culture.
“I worked hard to fit into the (gender) binary that does not seem to be in the future. We used to have two genders, now we have 200,” Melissa Sklarz said.
Does inclusivity mean leaving others out?
The conversation moved to ways that inclusivity can make others feel shut out. A salon in Michigan, for example, got into some hot water when an employee put a sign out temporarily banning men from coming in to accommodate a Muslim woman who had taken off her hijab. For some traditional Muslim women who wear the hijab, it’s worn in public and in front of men outside of their immediate family to cover the hair.
The salon owner apologized and the worker who hung the sign up was fired. But the intent raises the question of how to accommodate both the hijab-wearing woman and other customers? One of our strategists, Olivia McLean, asked the question, “Can inclusion mean creating a safe space?”
In addition to various ways people can be discriminated against, one that is gaining visibility is fat phobia. A woman who used to be obese wrote an article in Self magazine about how her endometriosis was undetected for 20 years because doctors would just look at her — without examining what might have caused her severe cramps — and conclude her problems stemmed from her weight.
“Size discrimination isn’t just implicit bias,” said s&h cultural strategist Anna Griggs, “it’s permitted bias.” We as a culture seem to think it’s OK to discriminate against overweight people.
The myth model minority
Bing Chen, Vice Chairman, Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment, raised the issue of how discrimination can work in paradoxical ways, namely, in the myth of “model minority.” This demographic group (stereotypically Asians, East Indians, often) is seen as a monolithic whole and whose members are perceived to achieve a higher degree of socioeconomic success than the population average. It erases the vast differences among people in that group, and it is often used as a way to pit racial and ethnic groups against one another. Ultimately, what it does — as all prejudice and racism does — is uses stereotypes to deny people their unique humanity.
And as Chen said, “One problem with being a (fallacious) model minority is that you’re included but not included, never fully accepted.”
Another fallacious idea is that diversity and inclusion efforts are a one-way street, benefitting only “the included.” A fusion of hip hop and ballet called “hiplet,” for example, is a perfect example of how diversifying the largely white world of ballet helps to evolve and enrich that world.
Investing in diversity
So how can organizations address issues of diversity and inclusion? For Paul Grossinger, Gaingels Founder, one way is through investment.
“Both in terms of funding companies that empower diversity and childhood and further education programs — if you don’t put the capital behind it, and just talk about it, nothing changes.”
“Corporate and social responsibility shouldn’t be separate from your talent initiatives,” said Omnicom’s Tiffany R. Warren. “Diversity makes us better.”
A guest raised a question at the end of the event around the economics of diversity. Diversity and inclusion are not just about empathy, they’re business issues.
“51% of 11-year-olds are now multicultural,” he said. “You have seven or eight years to get it together as a world. Diversity is a business imperative and if you don’t have a multicultural strategy, you don’t have a growth strategy.”
Geraldine Moriba helped us remember that although there’s power of the pocketbook, it’s a limited power. Being in a place to create policy in organizations is also power. “If we are keeping it white,” she said, “and we don’t have access to power, we don’t get to make decisions.”
Diversity, the all-inclusive topic
As the 90-minute conversation around the table evolved, we covered an array of topics: from cultural appropriation to celebrating identities, to the economics and empathy of diversity and inclusion. These areas, and many more, represent the cultural shifts of diversity, and we recognize that this snapshot is only the tip of the iceberg of a much broader conversation. There are many topics that deserved more attention in our discussion. Among them, ageism, which is increasingly important to emerging industries, and as an audience member pointed out, US Hispanic issues were largely absent from the briefing.
The briefing and resulting conversation hopefully illuminated the complexity and richness of diversity and its cultural shifts, and we will be addressing more of these ideas in future live briefings.
Stay tuned.
Curious? Join our Live Daily Culture Briefing, every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Contact us for details on Our Diversity Diagnostics, a three-week research sprint to benchmark your diversity activities and evaluate areas for improvement. Or, explore the future of diversity with our Now, Next workshop, a one-day session that arms you with a baseline knowledge and framework for incorporating diversity into all you do.
