Amri Johnson has a few provocative things to say about the current state of efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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.
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.
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.
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Questions to ask yourself
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