This week Jean interviews Amri Johnson, CEO of Inclusion Wins, “a global cooperative of product and service providers focused on people-related solutions for organizations of all sizes”. He is the author of Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable.
Reconstructing inclusion
Jean 1:40
What part of inclusion needs to be reconstructed?
Amri 2:09
We're not putting the mirror up to ourselves. With all of our good intentions, are we doing everything we can to help those that we're in partnership with in our organizations?
Amri 4:00
I define inclusion as any action that creates the conditions for people to thrive and for organizations to create more value than just their bottom line. Many times, we've relegated the notion of DEI to just those who are in the so-called marginalized groups.
Marginalized groups
Jean 5:45
Explain your definition of “so-called marginalized groups.”
Amri 5:56
Have I experienced some kind of interpersonal lack of affinity or racism, however, you might call it? I probably have. But it's never been something that I took too seriously, quite honestly. Because I think when people are racist, they're just ignorant.
I saw marginalization. And I've seen it both in predominantly Black communities and I've seen it in poor White communities, both have a sense of marginalization. One is racialized, one isn't. And so, the dynamics are slightly different. But when it comes to poverty and drug abuse, the narratives are not dramatically different.
Jean 18:35
What are DEI professionals doing wrong?
Amri 19:44
We went in with this notion of social justice, but it wasn't really –; it was more about preference of a different group that hasn't had the same level of historical preference than others. And it was a cry to say, "Give us more preference. It was interpreted like that. And it was mostly about representation. It wasn't necessarily about creating the conditions upstream.
Elite institutions weren't really creating opportunity for those who generally wouldn't get it. They were creating opportunity for kids that parents went to school there, that went to other Ivy Leagues that were wealthy, that they went to private schools or had lots of privilege and got into Harvard.
Why couldn't they have started a process of engaging with kids that were not as privileged, putting in money upstream, to get them ready to be able to enter into Harvard?
Jean 24:57
You think elite institutions should invest and “grow their own.”
Amri 26:48
Yes. We reduce everything. It's a reductionist approach when we reduce everything to a single variable, whether that variable is race or gender. But when you reduce anything and all of its complexity to a single variable, you're missing so much information and data that you can't even properly address the problem in a sustainable way.
Agency and finger-pointing
Amri 28:30
After George Floyd, what I think happened for a lot of people is it wasn't in solidarity, it was in opposition. And so it created more of them, versus we, and that's where I think it wasn't a problem to talk about it. It was a problem to make it about one versus the other.
Amri 30:01
Contact theory basically said, when you bring people together as equals, and I'm not talking about economically, but as under the Constitution equals, and you bring them together to solve a common problem or to address a common goal, and you give them time, and so you have them connect with each other over time, and you have some sort of institutional support, prejudice gets reduced significantly.
And that research, along with many hundreds of psychologists telling the courts that segregation harmed Black and White kids, it wasn't just about harming the Black kids. They came together around it, and that science was the other piece to go beyond the moral abhorrence of segregation, and separate but equal.
And so what we did, where we had the opportunity to actually create more contact, we didn't solidify the contact, we just kept hammering at what White people are doing wrong, kind of collectively, and I think it took us from the potential for something transformational to something that was reductionist and, you know, it was getting major blowback.
Jean 31:41
I personally don’t know many DEI professionals with a we-they approach.
Amri 32:34
[People] talk about Kendi's book, [they] talk about DiAngelo's book, both don't necessarily turn me on that much. And then [they] use that to create antiracist people. I just don't see it as a viable long-term solution.
Jean 33:59
Did White Fragility create the backlash?
Amri 34:36
I don't think that DiAngelo's book was the fall of all, but I think some of the mental models that she espouses were followed by a lot of people. It was very difficult for me to read because it felt infantilizing, it felt like Black people had no agency in that the Whites that are fragile had to do better to get us better.
Amri 35:37
If we got into more dialogue and we kind of talked through it, we don't have to agree but perhaps we have a different conversation. And perhaps we create some solutions that actually can be sustained in organizational life that help Black and Brown people, but by their nature, the way they're structured, everybody wins. And that's my firm, Inclusion Wins, we say, "When inclusion wins, everyone wins."
Jean 36:34
Make a distinction between dialogue where White people get hammered and Black people lose agency, and dialogue where the real facts of racism are discussed but everyone gets agency.
Amri 37:40
American history includes chattel slavery. And if we are honest with each other, we have to understand the history of slavery, we have to understand the history of Black freed people.
I can say there's certain communities that do very well at helping one another. These are things that certain communities have done, they happen to be racialized too, but their identity mostly resides in their religion, not their skin color.
How do we create the conditions for everybody to thrive together? Or do we do it where we're blaming the other and saying it's your responsibility to do everything when that's obviously incomplete?
Jean 41:20
To paraphrase: when it’s about “The Man,” it’s finger-pointing, as opposed to a historical analysis.
Rachel Dolezal and grace
Jean 42:22
Let’s talk about Rachel Dolezal.
Amri 49:06
The great Reverend Dr. Howard Thurman talking about the religion of Jesus and the disinherited: the disinherited have grace.
We haven't exercised that grace with Rachel, and that's what probably upsets me is that our whole lives have been about grace. Our whole history has been about grace, yet we didn't want to give her some even when she was trying to do what was natural through who she believes she is.
Jean 49:53
Let’s talk about grace and inclusion.
Amri 50:07
When we are in a place to recognize that we're all connected, we're all interdependent, and that if we help each other get better, everybody can get better. We have a level of grace for each other that allows us to engage, connect, grow, argue, and still have that grace enough that we can respect each other and continue to contribute to each other, even when we are not necessarily feeling so brotherly or sisterly with each other.
The idea of grace is, sometimes it's not going to be comfortable, sometimes it's not going to feel right. But the idea is that we have to keep doing everything we can to create the conditions for each other to thrive.
Summary
Jean 54:37
Summary?
Amri 55:04
Put up your own mirror to find the truth in yourself. If you're a practitioner or a supporter of diversity, equity, and inclusion, do your own work. Look at the system, not just the symptoms, because it's easy to find symptoms.
Know that you can't do this alone. This is a "we" thing. I oftentimes say, you know, Snoop Dogg said it's a "G thing," DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] is a "we" thing, and the "we" as a collective humanity. And if we make humanity our center and our identities a subset of that, we know that we're all kind of a part of that bigger circle of humanity. When we anchor on that more than anchor on a single point, we create something extraordinary.
Amri B. Johnson
CEO/Founder of Inclusion Wins
For more than 20 years, Amri B. Johnson has been instrumental in helping organizations and their people create extraordinary business outcomes.
He is a social capitalist, epidemiologist, entrepreneur, and inclusion strategist. Amri's dialogic approach to engaging all people as leaders and change agents (previously at the research division of Novartis, as Global Head of Cultural Intelligence and Inclusion) has fostered the opening of minds and deepening of skillsets with organizational leaders and citizens enabling them to thrive and optimally contribute to one another and their respective organizations.
As CEO/Founder of Inclusion Wins, Amri and a virtual collective of partners converge organizational purpose to create global impact with a lens of inclusion.
His book, Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable, outlines how organizations can create inclusion-normative cultures and build approaches to DEI that are designed for and with everyone, unambiguously prioritized, and purpose aligned.
Born in Topeka, Kansas, Amri lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife Martina and their three kids.
We are a leadership development firm that helps people and organizations create resilient, sustainable, multicultural, and inclusive settings.
We are a leadership development firm that helps people and organizations create resilient, sustainable, multicultural, and inclusive settings. The ability to lead consciously can help you gain true awareness and earn the respect and trust of others.
It’s the assumptions we have about people’s lives that are the biggest obstacles to growth, awareness, and success. We help you understand how those assumptions are preventing you from becoming the best you can be as an organization, an inclusive leader, and a person.
ChangeMakers Online was developed to teach how to move forward, get unstuck, and remove uncertainties when navigating change in multicultural environments.
Our new book, Conscious Change: How to Navigate Differences and Foster Inclusion in Everyday Relationships, will be published inJuly. We encourage you to pre-order through our website.