So, Let’s Actually Talk about The Equity Gap w/ Xavier Ramey

Episode Summary: In this episode of The Diversity Gap podcast, Bethaney sits down with CEO and Lead Strategist of Justice Informed, Xavier Ramey. In this conversation Xavier discusses corporate social responsibility and what to do when you realize your programs are not equitable. Xavier also provides insight on what it takes to refrain from stalling out in DEI work. 

Xavier Ramey is the CEO of Justice Informed, LLC, a social impact consulting firm based in Chicago, IL. Combining his background in economics, extensive management & social impact experience, & direct action campaigning in the Black Lives Matter movement, Xavier leads a company that brings a wealth of experience & network to clients seeking catalyzed strategies for inclusion, philanthropy, CSR, & community engagement.

Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, diversity, dni, question, chicago, equity, stall, xavier, talking, identity, justice, strategy, work, person, gap, conversation, called, created, race, philanthropy

SPEAKERS

Bethaney Wilkinson, Xavier Ramey

Bethaney Wilkinson  00:00

One of my mentors, the Reverend Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil, she, when I first started working with her getting to know her, she challenged me with this statement me and this other group of women that we were we were learning together and she says, the wrong question will always lead to the wrong answer. The Wrong question will always lead to the wrong answer. I hope one day to have her on this podcast so that she can flesh that, that statement out for you. But as I've gotten into my research and into these conversations, that's just so true. So many of us start with the wrong question like, how do we get more people of color on our team? Or how do we diversify our board? And those are really important questions. They are like they're a part of the work, but fundamentally foundationally I think we have to ask better questions about who we are, what we're doing, why we're doing it. And we have to decide is our diversity work, really about optics and messaging and marketing? Or is our diversity work about? I don't know a fundamental reordering of society, where all people are honored and dignified and and given the opportunity to become who they're meant to be? I don't know. What's the right question for you. Welcome to The Diversity Gap podcast, where we are exploring the gap between good intentions and good impact as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion. My name is Bethaney Wilkinson and I am your host. Hey, welcome to another episode of The Diversity Gap podcast. For today's conversation, we get to learn from Xavier Ramey, the founder of Justice Informed. Justice Informed or JI is a social impact consulting firm based in Chicago. Through his work, Xavier combines his experience and economics, management, social impact and institutional change, to support corporations and teams who want to do inclusion and equity work differently. He has served as the lead of the social innovation and philanthropy strategy, and the University of Chicago's Office of Civic Engagement. He's managed multi million dollar philanthropic portfolios. He has worked as a nonprofit director in North Lawndale. He's consulted for institutions and people across the world, mostly in the US. And in Africa. He's done a lot of things, he has a ton of wisdom. And he brings a lot of new insights on diversity and inclusion work to light in this conversation. So I can't wait for you to hear it and to learn from Xavier. Enjoy. Okay, so my first question, and I asked everyone this is when did you first learn that you have a race or ethnic identity?

Xavier Ramey  03:02

I mean, I grew up in a house that was you know, my parents were very upfront about teaching those things. I grew up in a house that was like a library. So I've always, as long as I've known, been aware of race, when did it become a salient point for reflection, that's different. When it became a point for reflection was when I started to go into predominantly white educational spaces when I got into. So I was one of those kids that back in the 90s, when we were always talking about busing programs, and like, we need to like, integrate this other area and bring the kids over and yada yada yada, and stuff like that. So I got into a lot of those like gifted programs. And, and so I would get bused out. And the one thing about those busing programs is they assumed that not just busing, but just in general, the whole like, forced educational integration without ensuring a an appropriate on ramp for cultural education. They assume that the white children know how to respond and engage with non white children and that they won't be micro aggressive and elitist as hell and that the ways in which they communicate amongst themselves are oftentimes really damaging and isolating to people of color. And there's so little accountability around kids. And parents. It's an unfortunate reality that many I think many white parents believe that the best racial education is none. And are too many that I've met believe that the best racial education is no racial education. And their kids show up and become just complete. Just I'm not going to use the language but yeah, yeah. So when I met those kids, that was when I knew I was black. It was also when I knew I was poor, because I hadn't really known people who had money before because I grew up in the hood. Nobody had money. and even the people that made fun of you because you didn't have money, they were only like, marginally less broke. So, you know, so is but when I started to meet white students when I was in sixth grade, and, you know, it was very clear that we were different that our parents had different things. And they were very, very upfront about making sure that I knew that every day.

Bethaney Wilkinson  05:22

So when did you make the shift from race being a part of your identity and a salient point of reflection to use your words? When did it shift from being a part of just being a part of your story to being a part of the work that you do in the world? Because it seems to me like that's another point of decision.

Xavier Ramey  05:41

Yeah, I mean, everyone, I mean, every person of color, every person of minoritized, identity doesn't necessarily take on the work of one intellectually deconstructing that for themselves, to intellectually engaging it in the world, and three, setting their life ambitions around the limits, and the possibilities of a race, or gender or other type of identity forward. Engagement in life. And so, you know, when you start with race, you limit your opportunities in many spaces, at least that's the, the, the the word on the street, you know, you should start with production, that's usually the other side of it, you know, D identification of a person requires a prioritization of production. And so you no longer focus on the producer, you focus on what they produce. And that's, that's the beginning of, of identity extraction. And it's also I think, the foundation for institutional harm. When we stop focusing on people and start focusing on only what they can do for us. I made that leap. I think partly because, again, it goes back to my parents, like, you know, my dad was working on these things. My mom was was writing about these things as a poet. You know, my grandmother talked about these things as a pastor, my, my neighborhood was this thing where I got into Whitney Young, it's a really good school in Chicago, high school. It was very clear that there, this is the this is the bifurcation within minority identities. It's like the big conversation with like Jay Z, Beyonce versus a Cornel West, right is liberation through capitalization, or is liberation, through the the creation of an environment where a person is sentient, regardless of their production, I've been really ruminating on this thought of what it means to be liberated. And as opposed to becoming a master. And I think about a plantation. And I think, you know, it's not the point is not to own a plantation, I'm sorry, I just don't think it is. That's a choice that people have to make, that my I do not want to own a plantation. I want to own an enterprise, that where, and this is a fight I'm having right now with some of my capitalist friends. Profit is a reward. It's not a return, it's a reward for acting sustainably, it is not a return for just doing something and making sure your costs were low. If your costs were low, you could have screwed 50 people over in a way that wasn't illegal, though it is immoral, and you produce harm in the world, and you can still run a profit. And so instead of when you think about dei and corporate practice, and the personal side, and myself is a black man, and you know, the question of how do we get us free? We're at this interesting point now where it's the question of, do we get free by owning the whip? Or do we get free by changing what it means to be together?

Bethaney Wilkinson  08:36

Okay, so I love that you name that specific question. I find that in my own work, so I work at the intersection of racial equity, and then social entrepreneurship. And a question I've been wondering, that is similar, is like, how do we know what we like? Do we know what we mean, when we say that we want to build wealth? And how aware are we of who we're becoming in the process? And are we being critical? Are we being thoughtful about what we mean? Do we have the tools to be thoughtful about this? That's something I've been wondering,

Xavier Ramey  09:07

I think one of the challenges is people run up against the question of do we have the time to be thoughtful, you know, expedience experiences is very dangerous. It's really as the alternate we sacrifice justice on all the time. But we can't focus on it. We got to get there. So we got to get there quickly. I know it's important, but we got to start somewhere. You know, I was reflecting because I was at an art exhibit by Mahmoud Daoud Last Night at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, here in Chicago, and it was on Birmingham after the 16th Street bombing, the next day, the police and Bull Connor and such and I'm looking at the photography, and I was reflecting on a picture of Martin Luther King sitting in the back of a police wagon behind these bars. And as you're flipping on how I was just wondering, I'm like how many black and brown folks how many white folks would say I need to sit With that, man, if that man is going to jail, I need to be on the other side of these bars. And we always love a good martyr, but we always kill a good profit. And that's the problem. Probably the question of time and timing, and should we be the ones who have to make the sacrifice in our time? Or can we just get this money man and build up that wall of fortress around us and protect ourselves with lawyers and protect ourselves with bar gas and hope that our children can hopefully figure out this whole sustainability thing later, black people? And I'm just talking about black folks, because we have a specific history in the US we are, we are the one of the few few imported people we're not immigrants. And so as an important people, we've been in the state of resistance for 400 years. So time is always of the essence for us. And it's this big question around when, you know, why not me? Why not me now? Why can't I get it now? Why can't I just do the same thing? But now I get to be the winner. Right? Like, there's that that question of how much how arrogantly? Can we look at the production cycle and still attempt to hold a valid morality at the same time? Yeah, it's a real existential question.

Bethaney Wilkinson  11:15

But yeah, it is existential. I mean, these are really big questions. So I'm wondering, well, I was wondering a lot of things. Um, number one, I want to know more about justice informed and the enterprise that you lead. But before we get there, I also want to ask, so when a company or corporation comes to you, and they say, Hey, we want to be more diverse For these reasons, given the reality of expediency and the focus on the production cycle, how do you get these teams or these leaders to slow down? Or do you just say, like, hey, we can't work with you. Because what I find in my work is that when people approached me with this desire to be more diverse, they're, it's like, they're normally starting with all the wrong questions. And we have to go back and do the education piece. And then there's the self awareness piece. And if you can keep a person's attention for any period of time, if they're not practiced at using this muscle to engage these topics of race or racism or identity, then it's like they kind of just give up because they're tired, especially if they don't have to do this work.

Xavier Ramey  12:20

Well, I mean, right now, it is an option, there is no have to do it. And there's no law that says you have to do a DNI practice. And so, you know, right now we've got a person on our team who's doing some research looking at small and mid size for profit companies and looking for demonstrated, as well as just stay there even just stated not even demonstrated, but just stated, corporate social responsibility. Guidelines and, and engagement practices. And I know just from dealing with, you know, large companies and small companies, like most small companies don't think about this stuff as much primarily because there's a lack of regulation around smaller companies, particularly privately held ones like my own, like justice warm, doesn't have to run a DNI campaign. We don't have to take that lens. Larger companies that are public have to protect shareholder value, it is a potential reputational hazard or credibility risks that could impact the bottom line than they actually legally must run a DNI strategy. But that's not the case when you own your own company. And the majority of Americans work in small and midsize businesses, which means that the majority of Americans are working in workplaces that may not have these efforts as entrenched. And I think big companies get a lot of attention, because people are always assuming that it's the big corporations that are the problem. But the reality is that most people don't work at a big corporation. Real DNI is not about a corporate practice. It's about an individual mandate. It's about saying that look, even if my company, even if your company could have the best DNI strategy in the world, you can take every dollar you make from them and go home and segregate the city. That's your choice, that will do more to under to undermine and to de leverage the financial investments that your company makes that you probably like me, we have to do diversity is important. And then like, you look at your Facebook friends and half your team members, and there's no diversity in what you're choosing in your life, when you're choosing where you weren't being forced or told what to do you chose segregation. And, yeah, well, we get someone who comes and says, hey, it's aviary justify, and we're interested in potentially either starting or interested in looking at so in evaluation of, or we're interested in really supercharging our DNI strategy. The first thing that I want to map out is fears and ambitions. And then I want to see where there's clarity. So we do simple intake up front, just we send them a list of like, it'll turn into like four pages of questions. But it's to see whether they've actually thought through the things that are necessary, whether they've actually moved the the structures within their institution to create a space where someone like myself or someone on my team who we are not looking to engage with anyone who isn't looking to really do this. They won't waste our time and we won't waste theirs. They won't waste our budget, we won't waste there's the reason why it's called justice informed is to keep people away who can't even say the word justice. Right? If you can't, if you can't deal with that, you cannot deal with half the strategies we would build. You know, that's like, oh, that's, that's very radical. There's somebody else out there for you. I really hope you find them, I really hope that they wake up to.

Bethaney Wilkinson  15:38

Okay, so tell us about Justice Informed. What's the origin story?

Xavier Ramey  15:43

Justice Informed was created, primarily because I had this entrepreneurial edge. And I had been hopping around to different industries within the broad, broad term of social impact. And I'd worked in the private sector, I'd worked in a nonprofit, small nonprofit, I'd worked as, you know, a program officer sort of philanthropic Lee giving away money. I'd worked at a university and academia, teaching and studying social justice as a practice. And I just kept getting asked by people, Hey, can you come in and help us with this issue? Hey, can you come and talk to our team? Hey, can you do yada yada, yada. And I had already been doing a lot of keynotes and keynotes are usually what, especially corporations they use to test the waters, you know, they'll bill, they'll throw good keynote in there and never do an actual strategy and be like, we had it, the engagement was the talk. It's not the engagement, but that's usually because they don't feel that they can have the conversation inside. And so there is validity, and bringing in a speaker, but there is not an endurance effect, usually. So I was really just gonna be like, you know, I'm just gonna go around the world and talk about these issues. I'm gonna write books, and I'm gonna, yeah, one of my friends was like, You can't do that. I was like, What do you mean, he was like, you actually want to get the work done, you're gonna have to stick around, it's like, you're gonna have to be there to help build that thing, you're not going to be surprised, like Xavier, I promise you, you're not going to be satisfied. If you're just out there talking about it, you're a doer, I've known you, you can't, you won't be satisfied. And I thought about it when he was right. And so then it, you know, going to the drawing board and saying, Okay, what, how do I manifest the skills that I bring? How do I look at what the market needs right now? How do I understand where there's a gap right now in service delivery, or perhaps in the nuance of the services that are being delivered? And how do I create an enterprise around that? And so that's really what justice informed was born out of that history. And then out of that reflection, and then out of that market need lining up with a personal capacity. And so I started out with our four service areas, when I you know, sort of looking at how to social impact happen in an institution. And it usually happens in one of four ways. It happens through a CSR strategy. It happens through DNI, which is internal CSR external, it happens through philanthropy, which is the returns from corporate practice, usually, or it happens through direct community engagement. And so those created the four pillars of justice and formed and then it was the question of what types of work actually line up within each of those pillars? And then do we How would I build the capacity to actually service those lines of engagement? And so that's where the whole actually building the business comes in.

Bethaney Wilkinson  18:32

Alright, so you are based in Chicago, and Chicago is home for you. And I'm wondering what role the place of Chicago plays in your work with justice informed and just your racial equity, social justice work in general, can you riff on that for a moment?

Xavier Ramey  18:50

Chicago is one of the most extreme cities I've ever known. I've traveled internationally, I've traveled domestically, I traveled a lot. Chicago is one of the most extreme cities I've ever known. And I didn't know that until I started leaving and realizing everybody doesn't live like this. When you're talking about what good hearted liberals are willing to tolerate in terms of injustice across town, Chicago is extreme. They're willing to tolerate a lot when you're talking about the disproportionate use of domestic militaries to control communities of color. Chicago does not seem to have a big problem with that. They will send in the gas they will send in the batons they will send in the tasers. And that's okay, Chicago is an extreme city when you're talking about housing, and is it permissible to literally tear down the homes of 20,000 people, predominantly people of color, just because the land is sitting on is valuable to the people that haven't even come yet. And then exporting them out into south suburbs and fracturing gangs and driving up, you know, homicide rates and these types of things and then blaming it on the people themselves and the kids. Chicago's willing to tolerate It is an extreme city, that extreme ism has shaped my perception of what humans are capable of traveling outside of Chicago. And, you know, I worked in like the slums in Kibera in Kenya and, you know, and up in the mountain mountainous regions in Ethiopia, and, you know, down in Haiti after the the earthquake, and it's not the same. And it's, it's partly not the same because of the level of access and resource that we have in America, and then microcosmic Lee here in Chicago. And so were to whom much is given, much is required. We look at that and say, To whom much is given much is sheltered. There's a lot of hoarding that happens in Chicago. Seeing that, and then growing up as a child of philanthropy. I was in those nonprofit programs, right? It shapes the way you see what people are capable of when they think about your body politic, your your sentience as a human when they think about you. And that fuels, the aggression, I'll call it that I go about my work with that fuels, the demand that's often in my voice, because I know that people will stall, they will stall this stuff out. They will philanthropy this stuff for 20 years. You know, they'll they'll DNI speaker this thing for three more years, they will I mean, they will stall this stuff out. And so I'm always i It shaped how I look for the people that work with me. And for the clients that we engage, I am only looking for people who are looking to be a model in the world. That is it. I am only looking for people who see their time is the time to do it. I am only looking for clients who are willing to confront what they are afraid of, as well as what they are so ambitious about and what they really want that we really need in this world. That's what I'm looking for. We are not building this for everybody. I know that this message is a sharp one, I know that it is a hurried one. And we've had a lot of traction and growth with people who are really serious. And they've seen what can happen when you get serious and you stop hiding behind fragilities, and you stop hiding behind traditions that block empathy. And you step into, you know, relationship. And as we say, just as form relationship is fundamentally about specificity. And so we get specific, we get specific about who's been hurt, we get specific about how much has been taken, we get specific about what it takes, we get specific. And that gives me in my identity as a black man. A lot of joy, because it's a rebuke against the people who say, no one wants to move that fast. No white person wants to deal with race and racism. I know a bunch. Right? So I know who you're talking to. But how many? I got friends like them, you know, and I know CEOs are gonna take this seriously. Yes, they will. There are people who are ready, and I am waiting and ready for them. And Jay, I was created perfectly just for them.

Bethaney Wilkinson  23:15

Okay, so here's what I'm wondering now, how do people so how do people go from stalling to being I don't know transformed or being agents of change? I mean, I know it doesn't happen overnight. But I'm thinking about people who are listening right now. And they're thinking to themselves, like, I want to be the kind of leader who doesn't stall out or I want to be the CEO who pushes things forward. But they aren't even aware of the things inside themselves that will cause them to stall out like what do you what do you say to that?

Xavier Ramey  23:47

No stalling stalling happens because of a couple of things. One, it happens because you embrace fear. Stalling is a form of procrastination when you're talking about institutions stalling as violence. And and in the same way that for your professional life. Procrastination is a form of violence against your future. There is no there is no point in time where acting as if time doesn't exist, is a valuable thing. And so whether you're talking about moving the social order forward, or you're talking about, you know, corporate legislation or regulation or whether you're talking about pressing snooze at 715 in the morning, to get that 718 Wake up. You are you are you are taking a bet on the future, you will find more safety and doing nothing than you will and doing what is required. And, and so when I think about what it takes in a person to move past that, it really is the question of are they willing to change their habits and are they willing to change their ambitions? Many people who stall I find as it relates to these things around identity, the companies and the people that stall it's usually not because of how much they care about the people that need protection or the Need inclusion, it's because of how much they are afraid of the people who would say something against it. That fear, from an executive level from a leadership perspective is intolerable to me. Because when you get to the point of taking on leadership, it is not about whether you're afraid of moving forward, it's about whether you have built the capacity through preparation to move forward. It's not that people care, I just care so much about this, and I just wanted to, it should change, I can't believe we're still talking about racial issues, I just can't I care so much about it, it just frustrates me, really, oh, you're not prepared. Like you can talk about to talk about these things, you can build these types of strategies and structures, you have no preparation or training. And there's so little accountability within yourself and within the marketplace, that you've gone on all this time and risen to the rank of an executive who does not have a capacity to move this type of stuff forward. And now you're in sitting in the space of accountability, and you're feeling less than, and the only thing you can do is either move through that. Or you can try to shoot the messengers. That's it. You go to school for all those things, the stuff that creates war, who goes to school for that, to prevent that who go who goes to school to understand how to prevent conflict? Who goes like, who chooses that everything that that is about identity is usually an elective? And those are the things that are holding up our institutions. Now, the question is, do we have to create financial incentives around that? Because that's the capitalist response, right? Well, you unless you incentivize the slaves twice a day, then they won't feed. You know, that's the whole business case for diversity thing that drives me nuts. You know, this chattel diversity definition of like, we have to monetize the human being before we can care, we have to have financial incentive, before we take on the responsibilities of protecting because of how much we have. There's this quote, I forget who says it says there's no such thing as a measure of human dignity. You either respect the person and you don't just don't measure here, either respect to me don't. You know, and the question is, Who are you prioritizing right now? The people who are safe for the people who are uncomfortable, or unsafe, or the people who are uncomfortable? That's part of that that challenge? Yeah.

Bethaney Wilkinson  27:13

So when you think about stories of success, or and that's kind of a weird way to put it, maybe stories of progress? What does that look like? Like? Have you interacted with anyone? And had, I don't know moments with leaders that have shifted direction or change things? Can you cast some vision for us about what progress looks like in this work?

Xavier Ramey  27:34

I was just, I was just reflecting one of the executive directors of a nonprofit we were working with, they specifically reached out to us, because I had a conversation with this. She was a new executive director at the time, she'd been in the job for about three months. And she found me on LinkedIn taught me, you know, front of my mouth about DNI and social issues, and you're not supposed to talk about social issues on LinkedIn, it's professionals place and I'm like, watch this. She saw me running my mouth. And she reached out proactively say, Hey, can I get you lunch? Sure. Hey, you know, it's my name. And I just started this new role. And, you know, wondering what we need to do, and I was like reading the riot act. I'm like, here's, here's what I'm seeing already. Even in the name of your organization. So she goes out, proactively find some money to create a budget to bring justice informed in. And she is like, she's, she's a she's a white woman. And she's like, I specifically only want to talk about how our organization deals with racial inequity. That's it. I'm not looking to do DTI. I'm not looking to do gender. I'm not looking to do anything. The sociological trends and the data shows if you start with race, you get the rest. I want to start with race. like who is this person? Where Where did she come from? That's not what I hear from older executives. Why don't start with my gender? Start with race? Wow. Yeah, that's right. So I already knew I was dealing with a differently minded person. So I'm starting to get all excited, right? I'm like, Oh, we got one of the ready people. All the ready people, this is great. So we go in, and it was probably a month into what has been a year long engagement with with their organization. And she got she got an email from a person of color who led another organization who publicly called out there programming as being fundamentally racist. And so she's like, like, oh, you know, my organization's getting called out. She calls me up. She was like, Xavier, what do you think I should do? How do I handle this? And so I was like, I you know, give me some info and we're looking at data look at it through and I find my said, you know, what, you're you're positioning your organization to be an expert in a field where other people have expertise. You're also selling that expertise. But you don't have that is wrong, wow, you should be prioritizing the voices of people whose identities actually inform their expertise. And if you're going to be going through this engagement with me, this is the type of stuff that you need to turn around that guy's right. And what I expected her to do was to say, okay, you know, this, this, what he's calling out is a budget line item, we get revenue from this, right, this is earned income, there's no hit our money if we don't do this, if we stop, what I expected her to do was to go to our board and talk it through and maybe slow it down, or maybe send out a different messaging about the service and like, try to reframe it or something. She sent me an email two days later, she said, Xavier has a good conversation. I shut the program down while you watch. I'm like you should that's money. She's like, Yeah, no, it's not, it's not worth it. We got to do this, right. And I was sitting there like, one I'm so proud to I'm in all three, I'm like, and it should have been done before. He cried, it shouldn't even have been a issue. But, you know, it's those times where people invite you in to be a thinking partner and an emotional partner, and a psychological partner with you on this road to equity. And they not only take your advice as a consultant, but they take it quickly. They match the urgency that you have. And that is so honouring, encouraging. It's what makes me want to wake up the next day again, when we got all the other stuff going on. It is so beautiful. But yeah, that was that was I got I got a ton of those types of things. But that was one that has always stood out to me that the how quickly, she decided what was worth it.

Bethaney Wilkinson  31:54

Wow, that is so powerful. When are you going to write the book, because we need more of these stories. I'm serious I because I'm aware of these leaders who are in my orbit, and some of them are ready to make the changes and they're ready to move quickly. And then others are totally stalled out. And I feel like it would give them courage to hear more stories of people who changed course, survived and ultimately made the world a better place because of it. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so now I want to know, I want to know a little bit more about your self care does, does this work ever get to you?

Xavier Ramey  32:32

Of course it does. Of course, it does. You know, it wasn't I mean, this, this is hyper emotional work. You know, one of the things that I tell like some of our committee consultants, and there are a couple sort of mantras that I have about our work, one of them is that we're changing the face of expertise. Another that we have to learn how to hold people as they thrash and they're learning, right our job as consultants in the space in the world of moving a social order. We, if I think about our role, sort of like as doctors, we cannot be in the operating room, like blood came out when I opened it, we are operating room is the boardroom, our operating room is the meeting room, our operating room, or the our clients offices, and if we are in there, like I cannot believe that white man said that. That is the doctor saying blood, you have to be emotionally not only ready available, our hearts are have to be provisioned for others. And so your question is well founded and it's it's I understand where it's coming from, how then do we refill a cup that was literally created to be poured out? Because it needs to be refilled? And so I'm still learning how to do that. And you know, it's a point of honesty. Last year, I crashed. I totally crashed the end of last year and the first three months of this year, you know, we did no business I did. I shut down business development. Right now we're like, oh my gosh, you know, cash flow is a thing. But that was just because I was so emotionally drained. And you know, running a business is tough that not just the emotional work of doing dei and CSR and philanthropy and equity work. You're also running a business, I got to deal with the accountants I got to deal with the IRS. I got to deal with our employee man, I got to I got to deal with all the W twos I got to deal with, you know what I mean? Like this. Right? There's still the work of running a business and so there's an added operational pressure and requirement on top of the emotional and psychological requirement and pressure that is is compounded in a way that for people who make widgets so like you make software you make whatever like it's not the same, right? You're not holding people as they you're not holding people as they awaken to the things they didn't know were violent, that they are complicit in, you're not. You're not there for that type. type of work. You're not making people try to, you know, who are literally thinking like, Why did my parents not tell me this? And they have to reorganize what they think about that.

Bethaney Wilkinson  35:13

All right, so Oh, gosh, this has been so good. Here's the last question I have for you. And then the last question I asked everyone, when you look at corporations, and maybe even society, what is the biggest diversity gap that you see? And you can define that however you see fit? What is the biggest diversity gap? You see? And then how do we close it?

Xavier Ramey  35:36

I don't think the biggest gap is a diversity gap. I think it's an equity gap. And those are different things, right? Equity, institutional perspective is a company taking on the the externalized costs of their operations and practices. That's what I'm talking about. When I say social costs. It's an equity issue. You know, an equity also is something that moves through time, right? The call for equity is a historical mandate. It's someone saying on the basis of time itself, and the effect of time on people, we declare that this is required to move forward for us to be included. And it's usually a form of saying some format of redistribution or allocation of resources. That's where companies and people don't want to go, they diversity. Inclusion is great, right? Include your voices. You're sitting at the table, man, you know, but you don't own the means of production. You know, that's the gap. That's the gap. Right? That what else I'm out with real estate like, because I believe that housing is ground zero for injustice in America. I use that example. But the equity is not even a word that you really hear in these conversations right now. And it's I know it maybe it's not it's time, right? Diversity wasn't a word 30 years ago, and institutions like DNI who said that totally new field. I think there's an equity gap. There's an equity gap, there's, there's a gap in understanding of what the difference is. There's a gap and understanding what the specific types of strategies are that promote equity versus that promote diversity. So for instance, a lot of people approached diversity strategies through the lens of talent acquisitions and recruitment. And so they're trying to get more butts in seats, it's all representative diversity focused. The challenge with that is the downstream impacts, rather than the upstream issues, that are creating a lack of what some companies are calling qualified talent into their pipelines has more to do with the societal impacts of education, housing, wage disparities, etc, than it does, you know, black and brown people don't want to work here. And so equity requires that you look at those things that are upstream, and to leverage your company resources and impacts to shift those things. But if that's not part of your conversation, and you're just looking at the thing right in front of you, which is like, it's sort of like a person who's hungry, right, it's like, I need a sandwich. It's like you need to organize a farm. You understand that food comes from a place, and that place has to be organized. And it requires a level of work and effort and intentionality, and ambition and time and etc, you're going to have to do that. And even if you did get a sandwich, you bring it into a body that probably couldn't even digest it so that you're gonna have a retention issue. Because you're not gonna leave, you know, is that is the rushing, they're rushing, they're rushing, and they're deflecting, and stalling.

Bethaney Wilkinson  38:38

So I actually recorded this episode back in June, and it was one of the earlier conversations I had for the podcast. And so honestly, I'm super thankful that I got to speak to Xavier, so early on in this project, because even though I understood, at least theoretically, the difference between diversity and equity, something about the way he framed the whole conversation has really helped me think about those two things differently. So for example, diversity, the question of diversity, my ask how do we get more people from an underrepresented minority group to join our team? But equity might be asking, what are the bigger systemic barriers that keep people from certain underrepresented minority groups from even having access to these opportunities we've created? And so diversity and equity, they're not asking the same questions and, and so the strategies to see them happen are very, very different. And so for you, I'm wondering, as you're thinking about your organization, or your team or your community, how might you design your diversity programs differently? What would it look like to incorporate or even to prioritize equity in that process? And this isn't something that happens quickly. Like I said, I talked to Xavier about this months ago, and I'm still figuring out what that means for The Diversity Gap and for Plywood. For a variety of the communities that I'm connected to, so, food for thought. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation and I'll catch you next week Thank you for listening to The Diversity Gap podcast. If you've been challenged or inspired by what you've heard, please rate and review the show. You can also subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode. If you have thoughts or questions I'd love to hear from you connect with me at thediversitygap.com or on Instagram at The Diversity Gap. This episode was produced by DJ opdiggy for Soul Graffiti Productions.