Issue 220 — January 30, 2023
I recall a car ride where a male professional colleague and I bantered about our different perspectives on a serious issue. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I can’t forget his closing argument. “Estrogen logic!” he declared, as a way of diminishing me and my point of view.
Read MoreIssue 190 — February 7, 2022
Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project said it like this: “At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you, when you’ve proven you can compete and excel at the highest level, you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in,” she writes in her statement explaining why she left the University of North Carolina after an acrimonious but ultimately successful tenure battle to take the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University.
Read More“What we don’t see, what we don’t hear, we cannot humanize,” says Nakisha M. Lewis, the new president and CEO of Breakthrough, a global nonprofit that uses the power of media, technology and popular culture to transform systems around gender, race, sexuality and immigrant rights.
Read MoreCalling someone strong is supposed to be a compliment. For generations of Black women, expecting and demanding they always be strong—and silent—no matter what, is cause for concern.
Dr. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, licensed clinical psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, is out to change all of the stigmas, misconceptions and invisibility of Black women and redefine what it means to be a strong Black woman.
Read MoreIn academics, economics, business, finance, law, and practically all other spheres, Black people are under-represented. It has started a revolution of sorts as protests take place across the U.S. for equality.
Black Lives Matter is affecting the world in a profound way, bringing the plight of African Americans into the limelight. Its effects are far-reaching, and it is occurring in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic to make it even more difficult to run a successful business, but there are strategies to fill these gaps.
Read MoreIssue 132 — June 22, 2020
I first learned about the power of organizing to make change when I was about 15 years old. In the small town of Stamford, Texas, where I lived at the time, there were two short order restaurants in town. One was called Son’s City Pig and it had indoor tables with juke boxes where we kids could sit and kibitz, as teenagers do. And as teenagers were inclined to do, we created various fads. One was eating our French Fries with mustard. OK, I admit I started that one.
The owner of Son’s became annoyed that we were consuming so much mustard. He began charging us two cents for each little paper cup of mustard. We decided this was terrible injustice. Most of us just groused about it.
Read MoreIt’s better to do good than to just look good. Non-optical allyship is the goal.
The protests, violence and disruptions of the past weeks after the murder of George Lloyd --whose name is added to the perpetual roster of Black men and women killed in this country as a result of racism-- are symptomatic of the larger systems and infrastructures that must change in business and far beyond.
Read MoreIssue 129 — June 1, 2020
We are in a profoundly disruptive time. A time when just a week ago, I could see many opportunities to reshape a better world post-pandemic. That’s until another pandemic, a pandemic of racism was laid so bare that layered on top of COVID it feels like a leaden blanket we’ll never be able to throw off.
As New York Times contributing editor Roxane Gay says, “Eventually, doctors will find a coronavirus vaccine, but black people will continue to wait, despite the futility of hope, for a cure for racism.”
Yet however difficult the task, we must seek a cure to stop the kind of violence that took the life of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many others.
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