I am from Boston colonists who traded in Black bodies. I am from the dishonesty that is America's founding promise. I am from the contradiction of my Kentucky slaveholders and my Quaker slave runners. I am from a military father who sailed the oceans in big ships that smelled of oil, exercizing our dominion in the air, land, and sea. I am from the 1950s repression that smashed into the 1960s revolution yet still manages to cling to my core. I am from a widowed mother who deal

The events of three momentous Wednesdays in January 2021 shook us to our core - the insurrection, the impeachment, and the inauguration. And now, in the painful aftermath, comes the important task of connection-making. What do these three events all have in common? The shared quality accompanying each of these three events is a deep political polarization. This divide has been developing ever since the 60s when the two parties split over segregation. The nearly 50/50 national

By Executive Order 13950, the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping, federal entities are now barred from using federal funds for workplace diversity trainings, anti-racism trainings, and scholarship. The irony within this Executive Order states, ”This ideology is rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country, that people, simply on account of their sex or race are oppressors.” The EO restricts what can b

There was a time when Americans, specifically white Americans such as myself, eagerly supported government entitlement programs and had relatively no issue having a social safety net in place. Many of us from the suburbs like to think we got to where we are today by virtue of our merit, hard work, intelligence, pluck, and maybe a little luck. But it was America’s investment after World War II that created FHA home programs and later the Veterans Administration (VA), which bac

Many of my friends in the nonprofit sector are asking how to make a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). If your organization is ready to be held accountable, it’s time to codify DEI values and principles in your Bylaws. Here are the steps to take: · Value Statement – add a DEI value statement in the Bylaws to codify the organization’s commitment to operating within those values; · Board Composition – Create a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and t

My Guest Column in the Los Angeles Free Press July 2020: An open mind is said by some to be a virtue that corrects errors in judgment. Others find an open mind a signal of indecisiveness, being wishy-washy, or an inability to think for oneself.  Either way, it’s likely very few, if any, of us would want to admit to having a closed mind. In truth, it is likely we all are, at any given time, somewhere on the continuum between having an open and a closed mind and it varies by da