We know organizations spend a lot of effort recruiting diverse talent and measuring retention metrics. But what’s the point of diversity if we are going to require conformance to the status quo? It’s like buying a fruit basket with gorgeous variety and bemoaning the fact that your mangoes 🥭 don’t taste like apples 🍎. They’re not supposed to! A basket full of identical apples is boring.
To mix in some additional metaphors: we shouldn’t be forcing our swans to be ducks 🦆🦆🦆. And for my Ugly Duckling Crew out there: Don’t forget to BE THE SWAN 🦢, (or the peacock, flamingo, owl, or toucan that you were meant to be 🦚🦩🦉🦜).
If you want to explore how to safely show up in ways that feel more authentic, or if you’re a leader trying to foster a more inclusive and welcoming workplace, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re here to support 🙌
DEIBJ Digest
A highlight of what’s going on in the world of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice, including awareness days, weeks, or months to have on your radar.
Disability Pride Month
Disability Pride is celebrated each July to mark the passing of the landmark legislation, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. This legislation
prohibits discrimination based on disability
requires many employers to provide reasonable accommodations for those with disabilities
imposes accessibility requirements for public transport and accommodations.
For more information on Disability Pride, scroll down for further reading.
Minority Mental Health Awareness Month
July is also Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. Designated in 2008 to honor Bebe Moore Campbell’s efforts to break down barriers to mental health support for underserved communities, this month focuses on awareness, resources, and destigmatization. Not only is there a continued gap in access to mental health care that falls along racial and ethnic lines, but we also know that behaviors such as code-switching in the workplace, while still seen as necessary for advancement, result in a steep psychological toll. Research has also shown that racism is bad for mental health and brain circuitry. Who’d have thought?! </sarcasm>
Coming up: National Black Business Month
Looking forward to August, we’ll be celebrating National Black Business Month. Did you know that the Greater Houston Black Chamber (GHBC) has been around since 1935, and is the second oldest Black Chamber of Commerce in the nation? For more information on supporting Black-owned businesses or finding resources and grants focused on supporting Black enterprise, you can check out US Black Chambers or get in touch with your local Black Chamber of Commerce.
What’s In the News
Following a series of recent Supreme Court decisions, including one decision striking down race-conscious admissions to colleges and universities, we’ve received a number of questions from organizations and individuals about the fate of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the workplace.
While we can’t do this discussion justice in a short digest paragraph, we are planning to discuss it in an upcoming article as well as a podcast episode with some distinguished guest experts.
The short answer is that we do not see diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts falling by the wayside because accessing a diverse, representative talent pool is not just ethical, it’s also fundamentally sound business. Offering equitable reward packages and opportunities is part of this formula for sustainable business. Understanding the power of inclusion and belonging to team performance is basic Leadership 101. (And we mean this quite literally: many a first-semester MBA leadership class will discuss the disastrous Mount Everest summer of 1996 and the impact of psychological safety on group decision-making).
In the meantime, you can check out some additional reading here:
What We’re Reading
A curated list of the top books, articles, and insightful threads focused on making the workplace more welcoming and effective for all
You can find our full monthly reading lists on Bookshop.org, where you can select your local bookshop to receive the proceeds of your purchase.
Here’s a selection of highlights:
Further Reading on Disability Pride
So why “Pride” instead of “Awareness”? Disability Pride is not just about education but also about celebration and empowerment. The Disability Rights movement is framed around the social model of disability. In short, this identifies the deficit as being in the environment and systems, as opposed to in the individual. This social model of disability prioritizes destigmatization and the removal of systemic barriers through universal and accessible design, as opposed to putting the onus on disabled individuals to be more like their non-disabled counterparts.
Imagine you are a verbal person who communicates in spoken English. Now imagine meeting a nonverbal person. If only they could speak English, you could communicate, right? Now imagine we move you both to a room full of people in which everyone is communicating using nonverbal methods such as sign language or technology-assisted communication. In this situation, you would be the person lacking the capability to communicate. The deficit was not in the human but rather in the environment.
We see similar shifts within the Autism community, moving away from language that refers to a level of functioning, to instead using language that describes a person’s level of support needs. We’ve also seen pushback against efforts to convert Autistic people into Allistic people, with Autism and disability being seen as inherent parts of many individuals’ identities.
For further reading on this topic, check out our booklist on Bookshop.org.
