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Mark Ferraro-Hauck's avatar

This essay, and the podcast, recall a recent experience I had in my journey of inclusion. In the spring of 2020, weeks after the murder of George Floyd, I was doing a certification program in Equity and Inclusion from a major "Ivy League" caliber US university. Being in the early days of the Covid restrictions the cohort was very international. I was one of 6 white Americans out of 32 students, and over half of the students were outside the US. One of the assigned books was "White Fragility", which was de rigueur in all my professional circles at the time. When we gathered for our class discussion (a shifting Zoom meeting to accommodate international time zones) I was stunned to hear the three black women and two black men in the cohort, who were all born and raised on the African continent (Western and South central Africa countries), demand to know why we were reading a colonialist apologetic. They spent 45 minutes critiquing the book as an extension of reductivist views of African culture and history rooted in white supremacy. Many of us sat in stunned silence. It was a book that was, at the moment, beyond questioning. (I do think it brings some uniquely American perspectives and critiques, but my subsequent work on international coaching teams has reinforced the views expressed by my fellow student cohorts). Humans are complex. Our histories are complex (much of modern Western math has roots in what are now African and middle Eastern countries, so a "mathematical view" is not inherently European, contrary to many white, progressive conversations around race). Reducing us to soundbites and snippets is a tactic of power that we have inherited from empire. It is endemic, and it does not comport with a progressive and open worldview. We are still struggling to shed the history of power, reductivism, and bias, even in our attempts at equity and inclusion.

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Craig Johnson's avatar

Good, good, all good. I've just finished listening to 4 episodes of the podcast and found it surprisingly broad-ranging, often about changing social dynamics in the age of the internet as it is about JK Rowling.

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