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Tools for Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People to Address Discrimination - Transgender Law Center

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Tools for Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People to Address Discrimination - Transgender Law Center

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Tools for Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming People to Address Discrimination

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It’s Taylor but …shows diversity

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Nikki Haley declares her Presidential candidacy 

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Nikki Haley declares her Presidential candidacy 

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First GOP woman to face Trump

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Ms. Haley, for now the only well-known Republican to challenge Donald Trump for president, made history as South Carolina governor, and was a face of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy as his U.N. ambassador.

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The College Board’s Rocky Path, Through Florida, to the A.P. Black Studies Course

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AP Black History course

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The College Board’s Rocky Path, Through Florida, to the A.P. Black Studies Course

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The nonprofit met with Governor DeSantis’s state officials, who asked whether the course was “trying to advance Black Panther thinking.”

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When Working for Racial Justice Means Taking Black History Month Off

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Challenges of Diversity Equity & Inclusion work

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Challenges of Diversity Equity & Inclusion work

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The period when firms are ordinarily flooded with requests instead became a reminder, for clients, that this work should persist all throughout the year.

Lesley Brown Rawlings and Rhonda J. Broussard completing written exercises during Beloved Community's sabbatical preparation at River Inn of Harbor Town in Memphis. Credit... Anthony Merriweather for The New York Times

Rhonda Broussard spent two decades performing with West African dance groups in her free time. She would wait around all year for gigs - until February when her calendar was jammed.

"In Black History Month you get all the calls," she said.

Now Ms. Broussard runs a diversity, equity and inclusion organization, in New Orleans, called Beloved Community. Starting last year, she has insisted her staff take February as a paid month off. As Beloved has been inundated with work, Ms. Broussard has been focused on giving her own team the time to rest.

Like so many diversity, equity and inclusion organizations - whose activities might include teaching workshops, writing corporate communications and rethinking hiring strategies - Beloved received an outpouring of client requests in the summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the wave of Black Lives Matter protests that followed it nationwide.

"We were getting national calls from folks who were like, 'Our equity work is on fire and we need to do something to help,'" Ms. Broussard said. "There were calls on Tuesday to do facilitations on Friday because people were feeling this pressure, this urgency. But we actually don't do that. We never have and we never will. We don't do crisis management. We don't become the face of equity for your organization."

Her team's breaking point came when a grocery store group in New Orleans facing charges of racial discrimination called on Beloved for its services.

"That is what actually forced us to sit down and say, 'Are we going to start responding to these performative cries for help?'" Ms. Broussard recalled. "Our answer was literally 'keep Beloved's name out of your mouth.'"

The last two years have seen a rapid expansion of the D.E.I. field, which U.S. businesses were spending $8 billion on in the early 2000s (when the last calculation was done). Hiring for most D.E.I.-related roles grew more in 2020 than it had in the previous five years combined, according to the labor analytics firm Emsi Burning Glass. Glassdoor, a career site, saw a 54 percent increase in D.E.I. job postings from levels before the pandemic.

Major consulting firms scrambled to react, with Bain starting a new D.E.I. practice in August 2020 and McKinsey creating the Institute for Black Economic Mobility four months later. Meanwhile a spreadsheet circulated online highlighting over 500 Black-owned D.E.I. firms.

Beloved, which was on that list, expanded rapidly, but on its own terms: The staff went from half a dozen people to over 20, and their client count rose to 223 last year from 65 in 2020. The budget is projected to climb this year to $5 million from just over $3.3 million.

Amid that growth, Ms. Broussard decided last year that her employees would get February off. That period in which D.E.I. firms are ordinarily flooded instead became a reminder, for clients, that their drive should persist throughout the year.

This month Ms. Broussard is taking midday Brazilian dance classes and cooking gumbo. Carla Melaco, the research coordinator, is flying to Cancun with her mom. Nicole Caridad Ralston, the head of education and programming, is waking each morning and asking herself: What does she need from the day? Sometimes the answer is to paint, or pay taxes. Other times she climbs into the bathtub to drink champagne.

Ms. Broussard knows that when she and her team step back to their laptops in March, the work will be waiting.

"Our country took 400 years to get here," she said. "We're not going to fix things in the next four weeks."

From left, Faith R. Kares, Ms. Broussard, Nicole Caridad Ralston and Lesley Brown Rawlings during Beloved Community's sabbatical preparation. Credit... Anthony Merriweather for The New York Times

Like so many in the diversity and inclusion sector, Ms. Broussard has dedicated her life to fighting for equity. Earlier in her career, that meant teaching. But after the fatal shooting of the 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. in 2014, just miles from the charter school Ms. Broussard had founded in St. Louis, she decided to broaden the focus of her work beyond education.

Three years later she founded Beloved, naming it for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a "beloved community."

Beloved's consulting arm advises organizations on equity strategy - for example, how to recruit a more diverse work force and close pay gaps - and conducts "audits" that help clients understand how prepared they are to lead their own diversity trainings. Its education arm facilitates programming in schools and workplaces, covering topics like the psychology of bias and recognizing personal privilege. Its research arm publishes reports on its impact.

The organization used to generate all of its funds from clients, who heard about Beloved mostly through word of mouth, but since 2020 its budget has shifted to about two-thirds philanthropic contributions and one-third client revenue. That has allowed the group to remain strategic in choosing its clients, with a list that includes groups in hospitality, retail and entertainment.

The influx of more than 100 requests that Beloved got in the summer of 2020 necessitated the creation of a formal intake system, in which the organization's vice president, Lesley Brown Rawlings, conducted 20-minute screening calls with potential clients. The surge of interest helped the staff to clarify the type of work that they would refuse to take on as they grew.

Beloved will not partner with an organization unless its senior leaders are engaged, because they know that without that commitment the efforts could easily get sidelined. Beloved's employees also turn a sharp eye to the resources that potential clients are willing to invest.

"We talk about love and the politics of care, yada yada yada, but we also talk about money," Faith Kares, senior director of research and impact, said.

Dr. Kares was skeptical as she watched dozens of corporations appoint new diversity and inclusion directors in 2020. "Giving $60,000 to these positions is nothing," she said. "It's a slap in the face. What's going to happen in five years when it's not on trend anymore?"

Many of Beloved's staff members said that they had spent their careers in offices where they saw diversity, equity and inclusion undercut and undervalued.

Ileana Ortiz, Beloved's associate director for equity at work, was frustrated with the approach to diversity at a previous employer, where Mx. Ortiz co-led the internal D.E.I. task force and even drafted a public statement on racial justice, though this effort wasn't compensated. Mx. Ortiz was hesitant to leave the responsibility to human resources, feeling they didn't have the training to lead diversity initiatives.

"When D.E.I. is left to H.R.," Mx. Ortiz said, "that's when D.E.I. goes to die."

Mx. Ortiz saw the need for an internal task force on D.E.I. at a previous job and, despite there being no compsenation for it, cocreated one. Credit... Anthony Merriweather for The New York Times

Mx. Ortiz felt an immediate sense of kinship with Beloved's team after interviewing for a position at the organization last year. The first video interview was with Kevin Lewis, associate director for equity at work, who was wearing a sweatshirt that said "Black Women Aren't Here To Save You."

Then came the delight of hearing about the February sabbatical. Mx. Ortiz's one plan for the month is to get a tattoo with a quote from John Lewis, the civil rights leader and former congressman: "Good trouble."

Four weeks of February baths, daiquiris and afternoon dance parties is a jarring proposition for a team of people acutely aware of their work's urgency. One of Beloved's staff members, Dr. Kares, had even gone into last year's sabbatical with a secret scheme to log back on a week earlier than the rest of her colleagues to get a head-start before spring.

Cognizant of the mental block Beloved's employees might encounter as they tried to unplug, Ms. Broussard decided to hire a rest coach. The coach and staff convened in Memphis in late January this year to strategize, both for their year of work and month of rest ahead, spending the week in a sunlit hotel conference room overlooking the Mississippi River.

Beloved's rest coach, Jackie Oselen, or Jackie O as everyone calls her, introduced herself to the group with a photo collage of her sources of joy: Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, seafood and sweets. She showed off pictures of her three sons, noting that when she visited them at college people mistook her for their sister. She wore an ankle-length tie-dye dress, maroon Converse and colorful thick rimmed glasses, and carried under her arm the book "Chakra Healing."

Despite the warmth in her yoga teacher voice, she approached Beloved's sabbatical preparation with the zeal of a football coach readying the team to make the state championships.

"You have permission to do what?" Jackie O called out to the room.

"Rest!" Beloved's team shouted back.

"To do what?"

"Rest!"

"To rest," Jackie O repeated with an appreciative nod. "Not to strategize and plan."

Some of Beloved's staff members know firsthand, from their past experiences in equity groups, the consequences of forging ahead with work without listening to their bodies' needs.

Mr. Lewis spent years facilitating workshops on racial injustice for young people in New Orleans, most of whom were white. He recalled having to lead classes where he suppressed his own rage and trauma while making space for the emotions of his students, mostly their white guilt. His sense of fatigue grew as he kept teaching in the months after the killing of Mr. Floyd. He realized that he would need to move to a different organization if he were to continue the work long term.

Beloved has given him a space to express his anger. It has also allowed him the joy that he realized is essential to his survival.

"In February we could have done the whole 'How do we put on a bunch of programs?' but sometimes celebration is labor," Mr. Lewis reflected. "Sabbatical allows us to center ourselves in a world that tells us that our worth is our labor."

Jackie O amplified that sentiment. "It feels appropriate," she told the room, "to let the church say amen."

Jackie Oselen, a holistic life coach, leading a meditation at Beloved Community's retreat. Credit... Anthony Merriweather for The New York Times

Across the country, hundreds of organizations are emerging from the last few years of crisis by reimagining what diversity, equity and inclusion should look like.

Like Beloved, many have articulated the projects they won't take on, even as their inboxes are flooded. Liz Nicolas, who founded the firm Black Amethyst, declines to contract with clients that use forced arbitration clauses in their employment contracts. Aja Taylor and Nicole Newman, who run Two Brown Girls, a consulting group, ensure their clients are comfortable using language like "white supremacy" and are clear on how they label their efforts, which they don't consider to have the corporate leanings of D.E.I.

"This isn't diversity, equity and inclusion," Ms. Taylor said. "This is antiracism work."

"No shade," said Ms. Newman. "I have a lot of respect for people who do D.E.I. work. It's not the work we feel called to do."

To leaders in the field, there's an understanding that the work they need to do has a much longer time frame than any corporations and H.R. teams fully comprehend.

Al Vivian runs Basic Diversity, a 48-year-old D.E.I. firm founded by his father, an activist who was arrested alongside Representative John Lewis. Mr. Vivian recalled the short-lived focus on racial equity initiatives in 1991 after the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police.

"I saw white America say 'this is a big issue' and they were all excited and engaged for three months, and then it went back to normal," Mr. Vivian said. "I've seen this before."

And once again today, D.E.I. groups like his and Beloved have visions that extend far beyond the tepid commitments from corporate executives. But first comes the rest.

"Beloved Community will be closed in February for our annual sabbatical where we rest and recharge," read one staff member's email auto-reply. "Any pending matters will be continued in March."

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When Working for Racial Justice Means Taking Black History Month Off

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The period when firms are ordinarily flooded with requests instead became a reminder, for clients, that this work should persist all throughout the year. Rhonda Broussard spent two decades performing with West African dance groups in her free time. She would wait around all year for gigs - until February when her calendar was jammed.

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Artwork from the Black Lives Matter memorial has a new home: the Library of Congress

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BLM Artwork is being preserved

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The fence that once stood between protesters and the White House at Lafayette Park during the summer of 2020 (also known as the Black Lives Matter memorial), displayed hundreds of signs, posters and artwork left by protesters following the murder of George Floyd.

While authorities took down the fence in early 2021, activists made it their mission to preserve every artifact - knowing that each sign represents a part of the nation's history.

Now, thanks to the help of activists and archivists, the pieces of artwork that once served as a memorial of the movement are being displayed in a new online exhibit on the Library of Congress' website.

According to the Library, more than 30 pieces of artwork are now available online.

"[The Library] wants people to see those signs, the messages and contextualize them with other parts of our collection that talk about similar issues," said Aliza Leventhal, head of technical services for the prints and photography division of the Library of Congress.

The collection was a team effort from activists and archivists

Leventhal, who spearheaded the Library's collection efforts of artwork and signs from the fence, worked alongside the fence's de facto curator Nadine Seiler and others to make the digital collection come to life.

Leventhal says she visited the fence daily for eight months, becoming intrigued with what she saw each time.

"Every day new signs were showing up, another person sharing their story and adding valuable layers to the ongoing conversation on the fence," she said.

As the artwork began to cover the fence until its dismantling in early 2021, Leventhal began to document the experience on her own - keeping track of the emotions and experiences brought on by the display.

"The signs ranged from crafted works of art either brought from home or created on the site, as well as scrap pieces of paper with hastily written messages," Leventhal said.

As the fence was dismantled, volunteers took down more than 800 pieces of artwork, signs and banners - preserving each one in hopes of their being archived.

Activists spent months watching over the fence and its artwork

Protesters came to Lafayette Park next to the White House after Floyd's murder in May 2020, as federal authorities quickly put up metal barricades to block off various entrances to the square around the park. The fencing went up on June 4, 2020, and came down on Jan. 30, 2021.

Seiler and activist Karen Irwin from New York had spent long hours at the fence on what is now called Black Lives Matter Plaza as the two worked to preserve the hundreds of pieces created by protesters.

"Whether it was going to rain, snow or ice, we lived at the fence," Seiler said. "There was somebody on that fence or within a few feet of the fence, wherever the police pushed us."

As Seiler and others guarded the fence, its artwork became a symbol for the movement, a place where people stopped and took pictures - honoring what the fence and its signs stood for.

But the drive to save the artwork was inspired on Oct. 26 when demonstrators saw counter protesters tearing down signs from the fence.

"Because people would come by and vandalize this stuff, part of me felt disrespected," Seiler says. "I made sure the stuff wasn't going to get torn down."

Some signs have been distributed across the nation

When volunteers removed the 800-plus signs, Seiler made it her mission to preserve as many signs as she could.

The signs are being housed in a storage unit in Washington, D.C., as they await to be scanned by archivists at Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, a joint project with the D.C. Public Library.

A small collection of signs were exhibited in Tulsa, Okla., last year as part of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a number of them were also collected by Howard University.

Following the story published by NPR last October, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., and the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Archive database also expressed interest in receiving pieces of artwork for exhibits and archival purposes.

Once all 800-plus items have been scanned, Seiler says the gifting process for the artwork will officially begin.

Ideally, she says organizers with the D.C. chapter of Black Lives Matter would like for the pieces to stay in the hands of Black organizations. But, Seiler said that wherever the pieces might land, she hopes people would recognize their worth and the messages behind them.

"I don't know what it's going to take, but whoever takes some has to agree to care for them," Seiler said.

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Artwork from the Black Lives Matter memorial has a new home: the Library of Congress

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The fence that once stood between protesters and the White House at Lafayette Park during the summer of 2020 (also known as the Black Lives Matter memorial), displayed hundreds of signs, posters and artwork left by protesters following the murder of George Floyd.

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Example Padlet

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Discussion of Privilege

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Your fine Dimensions Post

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What are the purposes and use?

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the worst moments in our lives...

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Andrew Solomon: How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are

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Writer Andrew Solomon has spent his career telling stories of the hardships of others. Now he turns inward, bringing us into a childhood of adversity, while also spinning tales of the courageous people he's met in the years since.

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Plenty of Useful resources online in Bb; now a rubric for your review

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Cirlces of My Multicultural Self Handout

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Place your name in the center circle of the structure below. Write an important aspect of your identity in each of the satellite circles -- an identifier or descriptor that you feel is important in defining you. This can include anything: Asian American, female, mother, athlete, educator, Taoist, scientist, or any descriptor with which you identify.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5f8GuNuGQ&feature=youtu.be

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Always check Blackboard (Bb)

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Privilege List attached

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Related elements, now a rubric for your review

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Discussing your Multicultural Self Background

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Discussing your Multicultural Self Background

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Who Am I Starter

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Using Padlet & Inspiration

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Agenda- Your Multicultural Self,

Who Am I