Category Archives: Inclusion

Diversity and Inclusion

Advisors, Authors A-H, Gender

Diversity and Speech Part 44: Generations of Gender Talk – by Carlos Cortés

Keeping up with the ongoing changes in diversity language has become a matter of lifelong learning.  For a near-nonagenarian  (I turn 90 on April 6), this means continuous learning as well as relentless unlearning.  That is, trying to unlearn old uses of language that decades of repetition have deeply wired into my brain.

Take gender.  Growing up in 1940’s Kansas City, Missouri, I learned that men were men and women were women.  I inhabited a world of man talk and woman talk, men’s jobs and women’s jobs, men’s clothes and women’s clothes.  It wasn’t much different in college during the 1950’s.   We were men and women, not cisgender or transgender men and women. 

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Advisors, Authors A-H, Generational, Politics

Why not a “Sully” Sullenberger for President? – by Terry Howard

“Some voters are burned out on outrage!” 

That’s the recent headline in a national publication. That outrage? The eyebrow raising rancor, silliness and general awfulness surrounding the upcoming presidential election.

And the truth is that if we strike out the first four letters in the word “outrage” what’s left are three letters many voters are particularly burned out on…. age…as in President Joe Biden’s age! Count yours truly among them. Shucks, if I had a dollar for every time Biden’s age is cited in the news, I could purchase a luxurious mansion in Miami, Malibu (or, eh, Mar-a-Lago). 

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Groundbreakers storytelling, Levine articles, Women in STEM

STEM Women Storytellers – by Deborah Levine

Women GroundBreakers Storytelling

STEM storytellersThe push to attract women to STEM education and careers is gaining steam, but the impact is questionable. Young women have ample cause to be discouraged given the decrease of the number of women professionals in many STEM fields. Bucking the trend, efforts to encourage women to embrace STEM have increased dramatically. Those efforts span the country, including in Tennessee where Chattanooga’s Women GroundBreakers Storytelling featuring women in STEM.

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Advisors, Authors A-H, Race & Ethnicity

“Mrs. Good Trouble”: Amelia Boynton Robinson – by Terry Howard

Some people are just made to cause, as the late Congressman John Lewis called it, “good trouble.” They’re contrarian by nature. It’s in their DNA. It ignites their fury. It explains their courage to put life and limb at risk for what they believe in.

Which brings us to African American History Month 2024 and to “Mrs. Good Trouble” herself, the late civil rights pioneer Amelia Boynton Robinson, inarguably the matriarch of the voting rights movement. Now if you subscribe to that familiar saying, “behind every great man is a woman,” then I’ll say, “behind every great movement is a woman.” Many of them in fact.

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Authors I-Q, Politics, Race & Ethnicity

Civil Rights: A Most Righteous Hangover – by Ashok Panikkar

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How Outrageous Successes of the Civil Rights Movement Weakened Minorities
and Destroyed Liberal Society  

The Nineteen Sixties promised a new chapter in US history, with the election of a young charismatic President, John F. Kennedy. However, the perfect storm of the Vietnam War, multiple assassinations (JFK, RFK, MLK, MX), the Cuban missile crisis, and continued segregation in the South, turned it into an extremely turbulent decade. Taken together, the failures of the Reconstruction (1865–77), Brown v Board of Education (1954), and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, shattered America’s self-image as “The City Upon A Hill”, destroyed faith in the political system, and forced the nation to question its foundational assumptions.  

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Neuro-diversity, Trends 2024: Divisive World

Embracing Unique Thinking Styles – by Lee Webster

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Navigating Machines and Race: Shaping Cognitive Diversity and Innovation

cognitive diversityWe are at the threshold of a new era where diversity, equity, and inclusion will leap beyond biology into an interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics.  We are at a stage where robots mimic human motions, AI voices converse and learn, and technology pushes the boundaries of our understanding.  We are witnessing the breakthroughs of innovation advances: quantum computing redefines reality, genetic engineering rewrites the code of life, and self-driving cars reimagine mobility.  But it is the cognitive diversity introduced by AI and robotics that truly compels us to redefine our concept of “different.”  

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Advisors, Authors A-H, Authors I-Q, Race & Ethnicity

Jewish Allies in African-American History – by Terry Howard

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Dr. Martin L. King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer are some of the many leaders who paved the way through the rocky history of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. But the movement would not have succeeded without the contributions of people from all races, among them philanthropist Julius P. Rosenwald, whose name is associated with hundreds of schools for Black students throughout the south.

But first, we should remember the many largely unreported Black/Jewish American partnerships in that history. Case in point is the relationship between Dr. King and close friend and advisor Stanley Levinson, a Jewish American.

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Academic Articles, Advisors, Authors A-H, Religious Diversity

DEI, Religion, and Hate Crimes – by Deborah Ashton, Ph.D.

Introduction

Deborah Levine requested that I join her group on Black and Jewish Dialogue in 2021. Given today’s atmosphere, dialogue is crucial. Levine is the editor-in-chief of the American Diversity Report (ADR). She is a Holocaust documentarian (Courter, 2023; Levine, Untold Stories of a World War II Liberator, 2023), whom I am sure when she launched ADR never anticipated that diversity and DEI would be equated with anti-Semitism. Yet the cry has been aimed at academia and business (Cohen, 2023; Notheis, 2024) I am baffled by the cry to silence and dismantle DEI. 

Through my DEI journey and practice since 1991 in corporate America, DEI has been inclusive and provides respect and dignity to all across religion, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, physical and mental ability, and other demographics. I will provide some examples later in the article.

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Authors A-H, Race & Ethnicity

Honoring MLK Words of Wisdom – by David Grinberg

10 Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.
that Resonate Today

America again pauses to honor the monumental life and legacy of civil rights icon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK). The annual MLK Day national holiday is an opportune time to ponder some of Dr. King’s timeless words of wisdom and their immense influence on the nation more than half a century later.

Like other giants of American history, MLK showed that great leadership begets great communication (among many other things). His powerful message about the critical importance of racial justice, equal opportunity and economic empowerment  connected with diverse demographics of every race, gender, age, color and creed across the country.

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