Season 01, episode 07 April 13, 2025
Originally recorded on January 28, 2025
SPEAKERS
Dayna Del Val & Dr Gena Cox
SUMMARY
In this conversation, Dayna and Dr Gena Cox explore the themes of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), emphasizing the critical role of respect in fostering genuine connections. Gena shares her personal journey, highlighting how tragic events like the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd motivated her to advocate for a more inclusive environment. They discuss the importance of understanding the difference between respect and inclusion, and how subtle acts of exclusion can impact individuals in professional settings. Through personal anecdotes, Gena illustrates the challenges faced by marginalized groups and the need for a foundational respect to create a truly inclusive culture. In this conversation, Dayna and Gena explore the themes of inclusion, respect and the emotional toll of advocating for diversity in a polarized society. They discuss the coping mechanisms of marginalized individuals, the importance of respect as a universal value and the current challenges facing DEI initiatives. Gena shares her personal experiences and insights on how to foster change at the community level, emphasizing the need for open dialogue and education.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Diversity, equity, inclusion, respect, middle ground, psychological perspective, nonviolent communication, Gulf of Mexico, subtle acts of exclusion, business case, affirmative action, economic disparities, emotional toll, community dialogue, personal accountability.
Takeaways
- Middle ground is essential for bridging gaps in society.
- Human differences should be embraced, not criticized.
- Respect is foundational for effective communication.
- Inclusion must precede diversity in organizational efforts.
- Subtle acts of exclusion can have profound impacts.
- Personal experiences shape our understanding of inclusion.
- Respect is about feeling seen, heard, and valued.
- The DEI conversation needs to include respect as a core element.
- Tragic events can catalyze important conversations about inclusion.
- Building a culture of respect requires ongoing effort and commitment. People respond differently to exclusion based on their unique personalities.
- Coping mechanisms vary, with some resorting to education and hard work.
- Respect is a fundamental value that benefits everyone.
- The business case for diversity often overlooks human experiences.
- Current DEI initiatives are facing significant challenges.
- The emotional toll of advocacy can be heavy for individuals of color.
- Teaching children about respect can shape future leaders.
- Community conversations are essential for fostering understanding.
- People should be cautious about speaking out in a polarized environment.
- Normalizing discussions about diversity and inclusion is crucial.
Dayna Del Val 00:01
Gena, welcome to Brave Middle Ground.
Gena Cox 00:04
This is going to be fun. I have a feeling this conversation, or maybe it’s just a fantasy and a dream and a hope, like this conversation is going to feel like if I was meeting you for coffee at a neighborhood, you know, place, and we were just kind of sitting down in an old wooden chair and having a chat. So thank you for making it feel that way.
Dayna Del Val 00:21
Boy, that’s what I hope for, too, because I think in so many ways, that’s what has to happen with a conversation as potentially fraught as one around diversity, equity and inclusion.
So I want to start with my first standard question, and then I want to go back to diversity, equity and inclusion, because you have a letter and a word before that that I think is an absolute game changer. So my first question, Gena, is, what does middle ground mean to you from your perspective or your professional or personal experience?
Gena Cox 01:03
Yeah. So first of all, middle ground, I’m going to tell you all the connotations, and then, you know, we’ll play with it. The primary connotation for our conversation with you in America in 2025, wow, is that it has the positive connotation of sort of bridging gaps, bringing people together, finding ways to be together, because we I have a sense that if we don’t have a middle ground, we are pulling the carpet out from under each other, and so we have nothing to stand on. You know, we’re sort of just being fragmented and so on. So at a community level. To me, that’s the value of middle ground and all of the connotations are positive.
And if I think about that from even from a professional psychology perspective, it would still be the same thing in that, you know, what psychology has taught us is that when we have differences, and human differences seem to be the one thing we have in common, right? No two of us is the same, and therefore, if you extrapolate that to the you know to all of us on the planet or all of us in the city or the country, we know we are different. So why is it so hard to accept that?
But what psychology has taught us is that you don’t get to connect if you spend your time pointing out the differences, or looking for the differences, or refusing to deal with the differences, or criticizing the differences, or any of those things, you’ve got to always come together and find a way to have a dialog which is very different than a debate or a discourse even, you know. A dialog is what we’re having right now, which I would say has a very high trust component to it, because I don’t have any predetermined outcome of what I want to get from the conversation. I just know that I can be with you and we can talk about some things. There’s a chance we might not even agree about all the things we talk about because we haven’t scripted this, but we kind of go into that.
So psychology has taught us that that’s what we need. One of my favorite books is a book called Nonviolent Communication. And I’m sure you’ve if you haven’t heard about this book, you should read it. But this is a book that has been around since, like, the 1970s. It’s an old book written by a person that I didn’t know him, or don’t know him didn’t I’m not sure if he’s still with us, but I would say he probably was a tree hugger and probably more tie dye, if I had to guess, right? But he was also a scholar. And what he explained is that even communication can be part of the problem. And you don’t want to have violent communication, you want nonviolent communication. So middle ground is all of that.
And I’ll tell you the second middle thing that made me smile, though, when I when you said middle ground, which has absolutely nothing with what we just described, to do with what we just discussed, which is that here in Florida, we have a part of the ocean that we got, the Gulf of Mexico, that we call the middle grounds. And the middle grounds, I don’t know all of the biology of this, because I’m not a fisher-person, but it is, it seems to be a part where the ocean is deep enough that we have fish available in that area. So like when people have grouper in Florida, it probably comes from that a bit further out from the coast, from the middle grounds. And so fisher-people talk about the middle grounds, and they sort of revere it. This is a place where things and people, where the oceans and the currents and the fish come together, and everybody is happy, because we got a little bit of fish. The fish are on their journey to wherever they’re going, because these fish keep moving. And even there, the kind of the understanding is that it’s something that requires the effort for us to come together, and then all the things that come out of it are positive.
Dayna Del Val 04:53
I love that. And because I have never been to Florida, I don’t know anything about that. I am also not a fisher-person, you can hardly live further from salt water than where I live, and so I…certainly there are many, many people who fish here, but it’s a different kind of fishing. But I love that idea that even in an ecosystem the size and scale and scope of the ocean, there’s a middle ground where people are, people and ideas and things are coming together, and what comes out of it is, hopefully something richer for the entire ecosystem.
Gena Cox 05:29
Yes, yeah. It’s richer for all of the people who go there. Because first of all, you have to go with the expectation that you don’t control the ocean. You don’t control the fish, even when even going on, even going fishing, is itself, you know, sort of an exercise in hope, because you can be the most sophisticated and talented fisher-person. You know fully well that you’re not in control, but you’re kind of going into this situation with hope and optimism, and often you get rewarded for that?
Dayna Del Val 06:01
I love that. Yeah, I really, really love that. I also just want to double down on the Gulf of Mexico. I say, if we don’t give in to changes that make no sense, then there’s something to be said, there’s a little bit of civil disobedience in continuing to call it what it should be called. So that’s my own little plug, and you don’t need to weigh in on that at all, Gena. You can rise above that fray, if you would like to.
Gena Cox 06:29
I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t think about that because I haven’t been thinking about that, and since you brought it up, I’m not going to rise above it. Well, I am not going to, I’m not going to not rise above above it. What I am going to is point out something I read in the news today, which is that Google has decided that they will now be using this new language.
So when we are using apps that are provided by a private sector organization, that we use every day to get things done, built into that app will now be an instruction to get to a place or to understand a place that is not respectful of all the other people whose lives are contributed to, you know, whose lives are affected by that place, or who could even say that they, that the Gulf is theirs. But as you say, this is not the conversation for today, but it is certainly relevant as it’s one of those issues that are that brought us here, for sure.
Dayna Del Val 07:24
Well, yes, absolutely, and I guess we’ll just leave it at that, because I don’t want to go down that path. I want to be sure that we have the conversation about your expertise for my benefit and the benefit of my audience.
So Gena, I’ve known you casually, I guess I would say, for about five years, and when I first met you through this online group called Recognized Experts, you were, I believe, just starting to think about this book, because I joined April of 2020, and then we didn’t meet until that summer. So I feel like and please correct me if I’m wrong, but this beautiful book, Leading Inclusion Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel, seems to me to really have been motivated and prompted by the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020.
Gena Cox 08:18
You’re partially true.
Dayna Del Val 08:20
Okay.
Gena Cox 08:20
George Floyd’s murder had a whole lot to do with it, but the germ of the idea the precipitating event actually occurred two months prior to that, on March 13, 2020, when Brianna Taylor was killed in Lexington in Kentucky,
Dayna Del Val 08:38
Okay.
Gena Cox 08:39
By police officers in her home, and I was working in a company. I had a job as doing normal kinds of things. And when that happened, I had sort of a, I’m gonna call it a nervous breakdown for want of the better word, because in that moment, I thought she could have been my daughter, and I didn’t know how a person who, like a person’s life could end that way, if the people on the other side could see that person as a human. And so I got obsessed with this idea that maybe the police officers didn’t think of the people in that house that they shot into as humans.
And as I was processing all of this, I said, “Well, how can I be a part of the solution? How can I help? Where maybe we could I can minimize this risk in the future?”
And I concluded that the issue was something that had to do with respect, or the lack thereof. You know, respect in the way psychologists would define it. You know, we think of two kinds of respect. There’s a kind of respect that a person is given by virtue of their accomplishments and their achievements. You know, they’re a big kahuna. They get respect. And we call that, you know, earned respect. We call that sort of very, you know, a special kind of respect.
But the other kind of respect is just what we call the old respect, which is the respect that we think every human is entitled to as he or she shows up in wherever he or she shows up. That you would just say, “Oh, that’s a human. Respect.” Well, I. Hmm, some respect, and then you would expect that it would be reciprocated. So I felt like they did not have that level or kind of respect for the people in that home.
And just as I was processing all of that, George Floyd was killed a couple of months later, and George Floyd’s murder was the thing that made me say, “I absolutely have to do some must do something.” That was the point at which I decided that I would write the book, that I would change my work situation so I could talk more freely about the things that were on my mind and so on. So I thank you for remembering that context. I just added another data point, because it’s the piece that for me was truly, you know, the origin,
Dayna Del Val 10:35
Yes, thank you for that. And I, as soon as you said it, I remembered that you reference both Brianna Taylor and and him as well.
So you have this idea that there is more to there’s another word missing in this DEI conversation, and I will just say as some context, because George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and Minneapolis is the big city in my region of the world, it sort of made it different somehow than all the other equally tragic, equally unacceptable, equally inappropriate deaths that had been occurring leading up to that moment.
But something about that really changed, I think, I don’t know, like the zeitgeist of the of the country. And so even at the time, I was the CEO of a small arts nonprofit, even in my little arts nonprofit, we decided, “Well, we need to be having these conversations as well.” Despite the fact that it’s fairly homogeneous on the great plains of North Dakota, and I could not point to a specific person or instance, and say, “Boy, this was mishandled in my community or in my workplace.”
I couldn’t do that, but I I knew enough to say, “Well, just because I can’t point to that doesn’t mean someone else can’t. And so then let’s start these conversations.”
So we began a DEI committee. We had a faculty person who was on my board, who was leading the conversation; it’s her area of expertise. And we really earnestly began this work. But we did not do overtly, what you do, which is to add the letter R, which stands for respect. So it’s not DEI, it’s REDI. So can you talk about the importance and the foundational value of starting from that place of human respect for all people being absolutely the tenant from where this begins?
Gena Cox 13:04
So for the benefit of your audience, let me just quickly say, because there has been so much miscommunication at this point about what DEI is, I feel compelled to even just talk specifically about some of these terms, because they really are very important and have great value to both the organizations and to the people that they’re meant to benefit. You know, which is to say, all, all people to make our places or communities and our workplaces more inclusive.
So when I say diversity, I’m talking about just sort of like, you know, that numerical thing that has to do with the representation of people from some with some particular characteristic in comparison to their representation in the broader population. So when I thought, when I used the word diversity, that’s all I’m talking about.
When I use the word equity, I’m talking about providing, making it possible, let’s say, in an organization, for people to have access, you know, fair access to what I to, what I call the organizational goodies, right? Equity is about access to the organizational goodies. And the organizational goodies are these: They’re things like equal pay promotion, you know, knowing that a job is becoming available so I can apply for it, having access to high visibility jobs, or to high net worth clients who bring in the big bucks, being a rain maker in the organization. All of these kinds of roles that are that have traditionally not been held by people who are who come from underrepresented and marginalized groups. So when I talk about equity, that’s what I’m talking about.
And when I talk about inclusion, the I, All I’m talking about is, what is the day to day experience of a person within the business ecosystem? And a business ecosystem is comprised not just of that person, their co-workers, their bosses, but also the customers, the clients, the patients, the suppliers, everyone with whom a person interacts in order to get their job done. Inclusion is about whether that that in those interactions are lubricated, or whether they’re barriers and hindrances put in the way by members of the ecosystem that make it hard to just perform and be your best.
So those words have meaning, they have value and also they are used to convey that with regard to these three ideas, often, those things have not been handled well. That’s great, but I like to say that inclusion tops diversity. And by that, I simply mean that, you know, as organizations and people in communities think about this challenge, they often think about, “Well, let’s hire more square people, or more rectangular shaped people or more round people.”
Bless your heart. Do that. That is wonderful, because if you see a problem, you want to address it, wonderful. The problem is that focusing on Diversity before you think about inclusion, creates a situation where you end up with some of those square and round people coming into the organization and feeling like the 11th guest at a dinner table that’s set for 10.
They’re like, well, where’s my fork? And where’s my knife? And, you know, I don’t have a plate and don’t have a chair. And by the way, boss, you hired me, didn’t you know I was coming? Why is everybody looking at me like I shouldn’t be here? All of that.
So this idea of inclusion is always core to what I talk about, because I’d like to encourage people, regardless of whether we’re talking about communities or business places, to just think about, well, what is that day to day experience like for people that you bring in, right? So if you can lay a carpet of inclusion first, you have a better chance that the number one, they’ll come. Number two, they’ll stay. Number three, they’ll perform highly. That’s great.
But remember, as you pointed out, I had also had this insight that in order to get to that level of inclusion, everybody has to have the ability to sort of see everybody else, and I noticed that that was not always possible. And I think the reason for that in our country has a lot to do with history and segregation. I don’t think it’s that people just say, “Okay, well, I don’t want to see these other people.”
I just think it’s an unfortunate artifact of how we were all raised. And so that’s why I say you can’t get Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, unless you first have respect, right? So I put respect first. It’s the R. And if you have to have an acronym, you already have the EDI, equity, diversity and inclusion. I put the R in front because I always say respect first anyhow. So that all works out very nicely. So yeah, I do focus on respect. And at this point I have come to define respect very simply as degree to which a person feels seen, heard or valued in their interactions with anyone else in the ecosystem, whether that’s a community, a church, a workplace, whatever.
Dayna Del Val 17:36
Thank you for the definitions, because I think you’re right. There’s it, I feel like America did what America always does, which is say, “Oh my gosh, we have a problem. We need to fix this now.”
And suddenly, everybody was hiring chief development officers, and everybody was gung ho about DEI without necessarily understanding the long-term game, which is a big piece of this book. Is you talking about, you need some short-term wins, and then you need some long-term investments. Because this work doesn’t just happen in a two-hour workshop, and suddenly there’s no more you know, no more racism, no more lack of acknowledgement, all those things. So I really appreciate you helping us sort of get a common language.
One of the things that I wondered as I was listening to you talk is, how do you differentiate between respect and inclusion?
Gena Cox 18:38
Well, respect from a psychological perspective, there’s a lot of research about it. And so, as I said, before, respect has, we’ve landed as psychology as a science, really, on these two clear ideas that respect is that that way that a person sort of chooses to interact with another person, or automatically interacts with another person through some sort of interpersonal exchange that communicates just a positive regard for that person. Sort of like giving them the benefit of the doubt just by virtue of one single qualification. And the qualification is that the person is a human right? That’s just that. Just that is sufficient. So that’s what respect is really about.
Now inclusion, as to be sort of like a measurable thing that we use in organizations. I’m arguing that inclusion has to start with some aspect, some understanding of this concept of respect, because if it’s not present, then there’s no way a person will behave in a way that is inclusive. And being inclusive, of course, includes starting off with a respect, but it has more specific behaviors. Being inclusive has to do with all of those little things that would make a person understand that it’s okay to be here.
So I’ll give you an example of this, one of the common experiences that I have, unfortunately to this day, and this is not because of the color of my skin. It could be because of the color of my skin, but it is something that humans do, and I just happen to know that I see it happen all the time. This is an example. So the opposite of inclusion is exclusion, right? And so often, people who don’t have respect for the other person will exhibit behaviors that clearly communicate that they’re not really tuned into that person. They’re not considering them; they’re not thinking about them as they’re doing whatever they’re doing.
So inclusion, the example I wanted to share with you was about there are people that I know that I would will encounter at this point, often primarily digitally on Zoom like, you know, like we’re doing in front of a camera, or sometimes by telephone or by email. You know, I’m having these conversations with people all over the place, and everybody’s very friendly and blah, blah, blah. And then I will meet those same people in person at a conference or at some kind of an event like that, and all of a sudden, all of that sort of warmth and all of that the equity, that warmth equity, that interpersonal equity that I thought I had built up with that person, when I get to see them in person, I will notice sometimes that they will do things like averting their eyes, sort of avoiding me across the room. Not having the same kind of, we might have had conversations virtually that were quite intimate, but, you know, they were quite specific, and all of a sudden, I realize the person doesn’t really want to talk to me.
These are just real specific examples of things that, of course, I’m sensitive to, because I’m remembering them and I’m telling them to you. And what that feels like is it feels like exclusion. It happened to me just last week. That’s probably why it’s so top of mind that I’m talking about this kind of thing. And so it’s very strange, because when it happened to me last week, the next thing that happened was I had that experience with the person in person, and then two days later, they sent me an email inviting me to another conference event. And now all of a sudden, I’m like, Oh, wow. Whereas before I would have been like, gung ho, I want to go, No, I’m like, you know, I just didn’t like the way I was treated on that day. That’s a real, specific Gena-specific example of what exclusion feels like.
So I would say that the interplay between respect and inclusion, there’s obviously an interplay there. But that inclusion, I think, goes to the next level, where you’re what you’re seeing the behaviors that the person is actually manifesting, and you’re sort of, I have a there’s an author that has written a book called Subtle Acts of Exclusion. She doesn’t use the word microaggressions, and I don’t use the word microaggressions myself. I use her term, subtle acts of exclusion. Because these are behaviors that are not or sometimes not intentional, but they’re almost automatic, and they happen, and the person who is the receiver is very much aware of what happens.
Dayna Del Val 23:16
I am shocked by this, and one of the things that I tried to think about coming into this conversation, Gena, was imagining the kinds of specific stories you were going to give me that would shock me, because I live in a very, not an exclusively homogenized community, but a much more homogenized world than many other parts of the United States. And I now work for myself, so I’m often at home, you know, for days on end. I see my husband and very few other people. So while I used to have a very public facing job that has really gone away. And so I really wanted to not be gobsmacked every single time you told me a story that is in 2025 almost unbelievable to me to hear.
And yet, as prepared as I tried to be, I am gobsmacked by that story. If only because one of the things that I find so interesting about my relationship with you, and really, I think this is the fourth time we’ve ever talked. But I’m not saying to you, “Gena, I don’t see color. I don’t notice that you’re a black woman.” I do notice that you’re a black woman. I do see color.
But what I really think about, when I think about you is, “Oh, she has one child. I have one child. She has a. A very devoted partner. I have a very, very devoted partner.”
I find all of these things, and that is really how I think of you. And then on top of that, I add this overlay of, “And her professional experience is in this area that I am really interested in talking about because I know there are so many things I just have never been exposed to.” But I don’t think of you first as a woman of color. And so now I’m wondering, well, what am I going to do? What will happen if we ever meet? I mean, now I have this story, so I believe that won’t happen, but what if that would have happened?
So okay, all of that set up, Gena, is to say, can you tell me, very anecdotally, how often does this happen to you, that you think you have this collegial relationship with someone and it’s very awkward in person?
Gena Cox 26:01
Well, it happens, and I will tell you, though, that it doesn’t happen all the time. And I would also tell you it tells me more about the person. It tells you something about the person that I did not want to know, right?
Dayna Del Val 26:12
Yeah.
Gena Cox 26:12
It’s not like I’m looking for this, but when it happens, it’s usually so clear that I’m disappointed. Is what I feel. I don’t have any more negative things to ascribe to the person other than I’m just disappointed because I was like, “Oh, that’s gonna be my friend or whatever. But now I don’t know where to go with this and stuff.”
It happens. And because I also talk to a lot of people from all kinds of walks of life, I hear stories. The story I told you, I think this anecdote, the story, is actually quite benign. It’s like, you just, like, put on your poker face, and you keep doing the thing that you came to do, and you do the thing, and then you leave. So it doesn’t profoundly impact my life, but it is an example of the kind of, sort of daily, I don’t know daily sort of well, subtle acts of exclusion, is what the author would say, that I do think people from marginalized groups and underrepresented groups experience regularly, and so you kind of after a while, get a sense of, Well, I know who the people are that I can really kind of say are in my corner, not even in my corner to advocate for me, but just like to be around in a positive way, and the ones that I’ll just sort of avoid. I do think that is what happens in the reality of those kinds of situations.
And in the workplace, it is one of those things where it’s unfortunate to say, but sometimes the person that you’re trying to understand in this way might be your boss. And you’re having these experiences. And I’ve had that experience where I have had a boss that, you know, treated me in a way that made me feel as if they didn’t see me, right? So I’ll give you an example of that story where I had this boss, and I should have never taken the job, right? The job was a great job, but the reason I should not have taken the job, as I knew he didn’t respect me from day one. And how did I know that? Is because I was 15 minutes early for my interview. The interview was being held at a big hotel downtown in the city, and I sat there, and I was early, and I sat at a place where my he came down, because he was staring there, I would know where to look, and everything. Had it all figured out.
And then I realized time kept going by, and the bottom line was he was like, 30 minutes late coming down for the interview. And when he came down, he didn’t apologize, he didn’t explain, he didn’t say, Oh, something came up. He just was like, “Oh, Gena, thank you. Let’s go have some breakfast. The restaurant is over here.” And I’m watching him, and I’m waiting for him to do something that would fall into the category of just some, you know, in this case, a little courtesy, but also just some acknowledgement that you’re dealing with someone here who has some skin in this game and some feelings. It never happened.
Anyhow, after multiple interviews, I did take the job and yet, a couple of years later. But you know, so many things happened that let me know that my initial impression was correct. And then one Christmas, we had a Christmas party, and I walked into the event. And when he saw me, he came up to me and he said, “Gena, have you seen X?”
He didn’t say, Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Hi, Gena. Was it hard getting here? He said he asked me about this other person who was on the team, and that was to me. That was like, perfect. That was like, yes. I mean, you keep proving over and over that you’re not seeing me. That story that I just told, though, is relevant. And the reason I told it was such specificity is that that was one of the stories, and that was an experience that I had that actually helped to refine for me the idea that the problem that I was solving for as a woman of color was respect, because he didn’t even if he didn’t like me, I would be okay with it, as long as I felt like he respected me, but he didn’t. So that was my that was why I focused on respect so much.
Dayna Del Val 30:14
So, from my vantage point, which is different, certainly than yours. A) I’ve never worked in the size and scale of business that you have worked in. I was born here. I know that you were born outside of America, so you came here at a later point in time. I am clearly white, so my experience is just different in many, many ways. But I think, without trying to minimize your experience, I think about some of those really hard moments in, say, junior high, where you feel maybe insecure about fill in the blank on any number of areas. And you show up at the lunchroom, and you look around hoping someone will make eye contact with you and give you the sort of, “Come and sit with me, indicator.”
And when that doesn’t happen, the way that it takes what can often be a very fragile sense of self already, and erodes it for the really, for the rest of your life. I mean, you can work through it. You can, you can sort of develop some compassion and empathy for the people around you. You can do all those things, but it, you never let go of feeling like you did not belong.
So you said during the telling of that story that, I can’t exactly remember what you said, but you indicated that it didn’t ruin your life. It didn’t, you know, cause you to fall apart. But Gena, how in the world do people who don’t find inclusion, and that’s a lot of people who are not afforded the respect, the equity, the inclusion that they deserve simply by being humans; let alone how often they’re also hyper qualified to be in the roles that they’re in and all of those things. How do people bear up under that pretty consistent erosion of being seen, being made to believe that they belong, being invited to the “cool kids table?” I put in quotation marks,
Gena Cox 32:42
Yeah. Well, you know that is definitely an individual difference in terms of how people respond, because each of us, no matter how we look, we each have the different, our own unique personality. We each have our own unique, you know, emotional thresholds and all of that. And I know you’re not suggesting otherwise. I’m not suggesting that you think everybody reacts the same, but I want to make the point that I’ve seen people who can cope with this, and I’ve seen people who cannot, right? And then there’s everybody in between.
So because I didn’t grow up in the United States, I learned these skills almost like learning Spanish or math. I kind of learned these skills after I turned age 21, and that is how to be a black woman in America and still survive and move forward. Because what I learned is that if I had grown up in the United States from day one, some my parents would be saying, “Okay, Gena, here are places you don’t go, here things you don’t do. Here are people you don’t talk to. Here are risks you don’t take. Here’s how you don’t talk back. Here’s what you do if so and so happens.” Like there are all these rules that people that a black mother and father would teach a black daughter who had grown up here.
I hadn’t heard those rules because I grew up in a different in a different place, but when I came here, I like to say I became the avatar of black woman, meaning the America reacted to me as if I had been here all along. So I had to figure out how to function. And so it partially answers your question, because I discovered that I did need to know what those rules are, and not just because I needed to be able to see when there was risk, but also because I needed to protect myself. I needed to figure that out.
So for example, just as in the story that you told about the cafeteria and so on, I can relate to that. I think we all can. One of the things that I recognized is that in our in this culture, there isn’t as much emphasis placed on this idea of respect as there was in the place that I came from, right? There’s a big cultural difference right off the bat that I noticed, because where I grew up, you don’t walk into a room without saying and maybe you can call this civility, because respect and civility are not the same, but it’s something that helps you don’t walk in. The room without saying, “Good morning! Good evening!” You don’t walk down the sidewalk without making eye contact with the person who’s coming in the other direction. Even if that, you don’t have to say anything, but at least that they’re just certain rules, right?
In the United States, it’s more very individualistic, and so people are kind of, you know, they’ve got their eyes forward, and they’re doing whatever they’re doing, and that’s okay.
But back to the question, how do people deal with that? I do think some people suffer from what is called the psychological trauma of dealing with it every day. And the common manifestations of that, if you look at it over time, has been that there has been a disproportionate use of drugs and alcohol and other aids that were meant to sort of take away some of the pain of day-to-day experiences; that has been a problem. I’m not saying that people of color all are drinking too much and taking drugs, but I am saying that sometimes what some people have had to do was resort to finding something to just let them, help them, get through the day. That’s one way people have coped.
But in terms of more effective ways that people have coped, I don’t know if you realize this, but I think if I look at black women in America, I see that one way that we have coped, and I agree with this 100% is to say, “Look, I’m going to get all the education I can get. I’m going to work as hard as I can get. I’m going to be as smart as I can be. I’m going to excel and all. And I’m doing this for me now. I’m doing this for me. And I’ll take this and I’ll apply for the jobs, and I’ll try to be, you know, the first woman on the Supreme Court, or whatever it is that I aspire to be. But even if I didn’t get to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, you can’t take this away from me. I’m going to take care of myself in the ways that you wouldn’t take care of me.”
I think that’s one of the primary ways that people deal with it. But you know, one of the reasons I focus on respect is I’m not naive. I don’t think we can go through life saying, “Well, oh, here comes a black woman. She’s probably suffered many acts of discrimination. Let’s see. You know, we got to make her life better.”
“Oh, here comes this white woman. That woman has probably never suffered any acts of exclusion, so we don’t need to think about her problems.”
I don’t I know that’s never number one, that’s not true. Number two is never going to work right. One of the reasons I focus on respect is because respect is a universal value. If we had 100 people in a room, and they were from all the races in America, and some were LGBTQ+ identifying and, you know, and some were Native American, and some were from different religions, if we had these 100 people in a room, right? And we said, “We don’t care what else you do, but we want to insist that we have respectful interactions” Everybody in the room would benefit, including the brown people, the square people, the triangle shaped people, the cuboids. And that’s why I like to focus on respect, because there is no negative of that for anybody else. But it actually provides the vitamin that people who have been overlooked for a very long time are craving. And still everybody else benefits.
Dayna Del Val 38:11
Yeah. One of the things I think your book does really beautifully is makes it clear that that paying attention to respect, equity, inclusion and diversity lifts everybody’s boat. It’s not about, I mean, just to be kind of blunt, it’s not straight white men and everybody else, and as everybody else rises, straight white men sink. Everybody rises because a diversity of thinking, a diversity of approach and philosophy, a diversity of spending habits and values and all those things makes everybody better.
Everybody. There’s no downside to it. So I want to read a quick section in the book, because I think I reached out to you—you were on my list when I first started thinking about the podcast in November of last year, but I reached out to very specifically in January, when the current administration just sort of systematically said, “DEI is dead. We don’t care about it.”
And so many people kind of stepped up and said, “Oh yeah, we don’t care about it either.”
Not everybody. Lots of businesses are doing the right thing, but so I want to read this because I think it speaks to the idea of respect is not a zero sum game. Respect improves everything. So you say, I’m on page 134
Gena Cox
Thank you.
Dayna Del Val
You say, “Over my many years of consulting, leaders often asked for a business case for diversity. Is it any wonder that I concluded that the denial and avoidance of REDI issues I regularly observed were focused inappropriately on money? Executives seldom mentioned anything else as often. I now have a stock response to any leader who asks me about the business case for REDI.”
And you say, “You can ask me for the business case if you want to know how I determined my consulting fee, but do not ask me about the business case. If we are talking about enhancing the experience of people of color at work, that question suggests people of color must pay to play, that you will only treat us fairly and equitably if we can show you that there is a financial payoff to doing so that is a pull no punches response that I think gets to the heart of the matter.”
Okay, so again, I think for the audience listening who may or may not be actively involved in the business sector, this is a business book, but, but, but, but, but! It’s so much more than that. Your examples are in the business sector, but it’s ultimately a case of, “Why don’t we just build REDI into the world?”
So in the instance of the book and this business argument now, more than ever, since, since DEI has become this new mode, which for about five years, we were really focused on, and now seem to have a different direction from the top down. How do you…what can you say to respond to that point? Because it really struck me the audacity of somebody looking at you and saying, “Well, what’s the what’s the bottom dollar? How much money am I going to make by wasting my time on this work?” Is essentially what I heard them saying to you.
Gena Cox 39:14
Yeah, and you know, there’s been more research done since I made that statement, not because of my statement, but that issue has been explored even more research. And just yesterday, I was writing up an article in which I was quoting some of the new research. There are two things that the research has clearly shown. The first is that when leaders say they focus on the business case, strangely enough, it causes the leaders in their own organizations to be less likely to hire people from underrepresented and marginalized groups. Because the leaders interpret it the same way I do, they’re like, “Yeah, this doesn’t really matter to my leaders. They’re talking about the business case. They don’t really care. So if I don’t hire these people, they don’t care.”
And in fact, it helps make the point that it doesn’t matter anyway, that it doesn’t work out that is not impactful. And then the second thing that the research has shown is that when people from underrepresented and marginalized groups hear leaders talking about the business case, if they already work in the organization, or even if their candidates are considering working in the organization, it makes them feel dehumanized, which is exactly the point I was making. Because it’s you’re not talking about, “Well, what is Gena experiencing?” You’re talking about, “Does Gena coming here make me more money? Less money?” It’s such a strange way of talking about a human experience.
So the research is very clear, but that is also the reason why this conversation that is happening right now on the national level is absolutely so misguided, or whatever the right word is.
So we’re trying to get to middle ground, as you say, right? But we first have to start with some facts about whatever it is that we’re trying to get to middle ground on. And first, one of the reasons I defined all of that terminology was that you would notice the way that I define that terminology, in no way is, at least not from my perspective, intended that it should harm anybody. I mean, it’s certainly not intended to be any of that. But that is certainly the way that it is discussed for those who are against it.
The other problem with all of this, however, is that, ironically, after George Floyd was killed, and for he was killed in 2020, so by 2021 and 2022 and in half of 2023, so we’re like about two and a half years, leaders were talking about DEI in this way, strategic way, for the very first time in the history of the country. So we’re talking about two and a half to three years in our history.
Then in June or July of 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in college admissions. It had nothing to do with anything else. And automatically, all those people who didn’t want to support DEI in the first place were like, “Oh, good. Now we don’t have to do this anymore.”
And so they used this anti-affirmative action ruling, which was very specific to say, “Well, all DEI stuff is bad. It’s woke, it’s horrible, and it’s reverse discrimination, and we got to get rid of it.” And so on.
But ironically, even in those two and a half years, nothing had really changed. Sure we have a black Supreme Court President, sure we have a black woman who ran to be Vice President of the United States. But at this point in time, if you look around corporate workplaces, if you look around organizations in any kind of context, what you find is the leadership of the organizations are still disproportionately white males. More women have gone to space than have ever than have ever run a fortune. 500 company. Women of all types, of all races, still have this broken rung problem that Lean In has been documented now for 10 years, which is to say, women and men get hired into organizations at approximately the same rate, but then the men just keeps moving up. And the women just get stalled at this supervisory level. They can’t even get into the track to become leaders in the organizations. We still have under representation in STEM careers, even though everybody understands that STEM is the future of the world. So the problems haven’t been solved. We still have all the economic disparities.
People have been reacting to DEI not only as if it is reverse-discrimination, but as if, in those two and a half years, somehow doors were shut on them, and now everything was now given to people like me, and now they’re suffering. It’s a falsehood, number one. But this is one that, if you market it well, and people believe it, causes them to look at me now as the bad guy. And so it’s, actually, this is a scary time.
Dayna Del Val 46:42
I imagine that it is. I mean, I feel some fear, and I have a different lived experience than you do. And I kind of can’t believe that our lack of humanity would be the thing that derails our ability to rise together. And you’d have to wonder why I would be surprised by that. I mean, we have an entire history. In fact, America has no history that isn’t about dehumanizing somebody. I mean, it’s just, you know, you can go down the line and one group is disenfranchised and then becomes accepted, and so then we find the next group, and then the next group, and it’s, it’s so…
Gena Cox 47:43
The one thing I want to qualify about what you just said is not everybody is like that. I mean, you know that; you weren’t suggesting that they were. But I want to use this as an opportunity for the optimism to remind ourselves and anybody who’s listening to this that not everybody believes those lies. Not everybody has a desire to resegregate, I call it…
Dayna Del Val 48:10
Yeah.
Gena Cox 48:11
Not everybody looks at a person who doesn’t look like them and assumes ill of them. Not everybody thinks that violence in the street is acceptable. I mean, so I constantly remind myself that at least half of the voting population in this country recognizes that this is a problem. This is not a solution. This is not a good thing. We’re not going in the right direction.
And that is important to say, because even during slavery, there were abolitionists, right? And even during the, you know, the there, you know, when people were saying that, when there was heightened, heightened ideas about communism and fears about communism, or when people were afraid of the Japanese, they’re always people who say there’s always somebody who stands up in a pulpit and says that Christianity, for example, because it’d be any religion. But let’s just say Christianity, or Episcopalian view of Christianity, in this moment, is still fundamentally…we all recognize that there is value in having mercy. We all recognize that there’s value in just seeing another human and understanding that not everybody has walked the same path. So you might not understand. So I haven’t given up on any of it, not that you have either. But I try to say it because, if anything, when it when I think about common ground, I’m trying to find those people and hold hands as much as I can.
Dayna Del Val 49:49
I appreciate that course correction. Thank you. But I wonder what’s the emotional toll that it takes on, let’s just keep it about you. What’s the emotional toll that you pay by not only absorbing the rhetoric that we’re all hearing, but also the I think pretty legitimate fear that it’s not a physically safe time to be a person of color in this country? Again, not that everybody’s going to attack you, but it feels very much like the most dangerous time for people of color in my lifetime, because I was born after the Civil Rights peak.
Gena Cox 50:40
Well, you know it feels the way you describe it. Definitely feels that way. I am so good at the porker face, I have become such an American over the years I’ve lived here that I’m really good at the poker face, and so I can’t. I also have never felt like I could go through like just thinking about these things.
Number one, it would get in the way of my productivity.
And number two is “Womp, womp!” and all of that.
So I’ve never dwelled on it, even though I might be thinking it in the moment. I always, you know, do the poker face, but this is one of those moments where the poker face is hard. And I’ll tell you, I have to work every day not to look at the headlines, not to…I’ve moved away from some very specific pieces. I’m not on Facebook and Instagram anymore. I mean, I enjoy them like every other person, but I worry about what they’re doing to me and other people. And I also worry about, how empowering people whose actions appear to be contrary to my personal value? So there’s all of that.
I’m also affected this by this at a very practical level, because last year, I lost about 50% of my potential revenue, simply put, from organizations that were willing me to give talks and do things. And all of a sudden, the word inclusion is taboo. Nobody wants to talk about it. We don’t need to have that session anymore. We’re not going to bother. We’ll put it off. And now here we are. It’s January of this year, and now we see a new reality that’s even worse. My business is going to suffer this year some more, and so I have to decide how to deal with that.
And yet, as I said earlier, the problems that I’m trying to solve for, the problems still remain. It’s not like we’ve solved the problems. So the emotional toll for me is there’s the worry about physical safety. I’m a parent. I worry about physical safety. I worry about opportunity safety for my daughter and her career and so on. I think about these things every day. So it definitely takes a toll.
I’m going to be really frank with you about another kind of toll that it takes on me, which is that because of the way that we have been talking about the election, and the way that everybody is so polarized, there are people that I have who are friends, they’re friends of mine, that I’m pretty sure voted in a way that’s contrary to the way I voted. Now I’m not going to go up to them and ask them if they voted that way, and that’s not helpful with regard to this whole notion of all living together. But there’s a certain level of like psychic pain of knowing that right and saying, “How could you listen and know and still do that, and then say the reason was economic reasons, right?”
Because this economy that we’re all battling is a global economic This is a global economic problem. I hear the same thing when I go to Barbados. I hear the same thing when I go to London. I mean, it’s not as if America is suffering in some unique way by virtue of its brown people or whatever.
So what pains me is that we’re not doing our self-reflection and enough taking enough personal accountability for our decisions that actually are going to hurt ourselves. But maybe we don’t think about them much because we know they hurt other people, but we don’t think about that too much because right now, it isn’t hurting us, but it is going to hurt us all. And so actually, when I think about the pain that I feel, that is probably the aspect of it that is the most painful for me.
Dayna Del Val 54:16
So as a listening audience and as the host of this show, it would be easy to just say “It’s too big a problem to try to tackle. We better just put our heads down and hope that in three and a half years, things are improved.”
That’s not a solution. That is not a path that I’m interested in taking. But I also want to be smart and sensitive and cognizant of all the things that I absolutely do not know because I’ve not experienced them, and I’ve not been with people who’ve experienced them. So in addition to reading your book, which really, Leading Inclusion Drive Change Your Employees Can See and Feel, if you don’t have employees, there is still a reason to read this beautiful book. So get the book.
But in addition to that, Gena, what are some things that we can do, regardless of the kinds of communities that we live and work and play in, whether there’s a lot of diversity or little diversity? What would you like to see those of us who don’t agree with the way things are going do to try to make it better in our own little corner of the world?
Gena Cox 54:30
Well, I think it starts at home. So, you know, think about the dialogue you have with your children. I’m not saying that you should bring the weight of the world’s problems on your children’s shoulders, but I do think that you should expose them to books and movies and things that are outside of the narrow box, because if you just depend on Netflix to curate what your children see, and if you only depend on a particular teacher to curate what your children read, they’re going to get a very narrow slice of life. You’ve got to seek out the content that you want them to have and recognize that, for example, Black History doesn’t get taught the United States, in general, to the degree it should be. And then, more specifically, ever since the anti-woke movement, which has been reinforced by the governor of the state of Florida, where I live, there are actually things that get banned that your child would never normally get would not get to read. So I want people to start thinking about, what are you reading? What are you watching? What are your children reading? What are your children watching?
What do you say at home? What do you talk about in your home with regard to, you know, peace and love and harmony? No, but seriously, I mean that what values or do you inculcate? Because if you teach a child about respect when they’re very small, that person could become a CEO of a company X years from now, that and I my daughter, granddaughter or somebody could be an employee in that company, and their leadership actions will be governed by these fundamental values that they hold dear. Because I think when people have values of the site, they can’t, they don’t discriminate in the same they don’t intentionally discriminate, right? They just, they may not understand everything, but they don’t go looking for people to victimize, right?
So there’s all of that. But I do think that, you know, in a in a community, people ought to be talking about these issues. For example, even if you have no people who don’t look like you know your community, you ought to be talking about, well, what’s going on in our country right now? Is it the right direction? What can we do to let the world know, or to let beyond our community, let people understand that we don’t think it’s the right thing? What is the right thing? What do we think is the right thing? What can’t you know, let’s have, at least have conversations about these things so that we can start sharing that with other people.
You know, it’s it is a scary time. So the one thing I do not think people are going to do at this moment, it’s too soon. I don’t think people are going to just stick their heads out and say, you know, “Is this an oligarchy for real? Are we now in an era of fascism for real?”
I think people are going to be very cautious, because what and they should be. So even though I want people to do would want people to do what they can, I don’t think that anybody at this moment should put themselves in a position where this grievance army that I think is being festered in the country is given an excuse to use you as a target for its this hate because I think there’s going to be more hate crimes. I think people are going to be targeted and so on. And I can’t even believe these words are coming out of my mouth. So I think we just have to do these things at the level of the twos and the threes and the fours and the fives, and not try to do anything on a grand scale at the moment, unless, of course, we have an organization that’s set up to do that. I just think we have to stay abreast of this, and give people who do want to talk about it the opportunity to say what they have to say, so we can understand what their experience is, even if we’re not having it.
Dayna Del Val 59:14
Oh, Gena, this has been such a beautiful conversation. I so appreciate you. I appreciate you doing this work. I can imagine that it is not easy to advocate for something that A) is your lived experience, and B) many people are quite comfortable saying, “I don’t see a reason for it.”
I mean, it’s a pretty shocking thing to have someone dismiss you to your face. So I really appreciate that you’re doing the work, but I even more appreciate that you were willing to come on and we could discuss some pieces of it. There are so many other areas to explore and to talk about, so I hope we can do this again as we move further down the path.
Sometimes in very, very rare instances, what happens is enough grassroots people respond against the power and things change from the bottom up. Maybe we will start to see some of that as more and more of us get together in groups of twos and threes and fours and say, “This doesn’t feel right.”
I think we have to find other groups of twos and threes and fours and get brave, and know that we were on the right side of history, or know that we were on the right side of humanity. So I look forward to talking with you again as things hopefully improve, but also as things probably devolve as well. There’s so much work to be done, and I just, I really, really appreciate your time and your thoughts and your work.
Gena Cox 1:01:03
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Second of all, thank you for being brave enough to have me. Because I guess I should say that the best thing that we can all do is to not pretend that these things aren’t happening and normalize them by not talking about them. So even this conversation makes me feel very hopeful, because it’s the first conversation that I have been invited to have that has given me the opportunity to say these kinds of things that I’ve been thinking but have not had a space to share.
But you know, I appreciate that in the end, you know, knowing somebody like you, and you having a show called Middle Ground means, I think it’s sort of it just, I’m going to choose to think it just validates everything I have ever believed, which is, I believe that there are a lot of people in our country who understand the difference between right and wrong. I still I believe that; I have to believe that, but you have helped to reinforce that for me, and I appreciate you, Dayna. Thank you so very much for having me on.
Dayna Del Val 1:02:04
Well, Gena, I hope that it accomplished for you what it did for me, which was to make it feel like we were sitting down across from each other in person in a coffee shop, enjoying some lovely drink and having a conversation between friends.
Gena Cox 1:02:18
Yeah, it feels fantastic. Thank you.
Dayna Del Val 1:02:20
Thank you. And to everyone else, we’ll talk soon.
