On Monday the nation will pause to observe the annual holiday honoring the life and legacy of iconic civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet too many Millennials and members of their younger cohort, Generation Z, consider civil rights history as ancient history at the dawn of a new millennium.
However, there are profound and poignant lessons which today’s young people need to learn. The most important lesson is how to make major changes in society through the type of peaceful means championed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow civil rights leaders of the time.
Many thanks to Deborah Levine, editor of the American Diversity Report, for assisting in sharing my work with the ADR. I’ve been part of IT field for a long time and have presented on Big Data, technology in education. I have also been part of Takelessons.com in teaching SQL.
ADR Advisor Sridhar Rangaswamy
I used to teach RDBMS for new employees in 1998, then taught in Oracle University on RDBMS, SQL in 1999-2003. I have taught also PeopleSoft University on the Workflow. And have taught as a Mentor for Cyber Patriot in the year 2019 locally in Summerville, SC. Let’s take a look at how IT has evolved and what’s coming up in the future.
2020 turned into a momentous year for diversity training.The COVID-19 pandemic forced many diversity trainers, myself included, to re-invent themselves by adapting their workshops into an online format.The Memorial Day killing of George Floyd thrust anti-racism into the center of diversity training, challenging those presenters who had generally soft-pedaled the issue.President Donald Trump’s September 22 executive order, “Race and Sex Stereotyping,” caused government agencies and contractors, including some higher education institutions, to suspend or mute their diversity training.
Our Black-Jewish Dialogue for January 2021 featured presenters Mike Green and Dov Wilker. Many thanks to them and Mizpah Congregation, our co-host.
Mike Green is an award-winning journalist headquartered in Colorado. He is the Chief Economic Strategist for The National Institute for Inclusive Competitiveness (niicusa.org) and also co-founder of Common Ground Conversations on Race in America.
He is also co-founder of ScaleUp Partners LLC, a nationally networked consulting practice focused on changing the nation’s economic narrative.
Dov Wilker is the National Director for. Black-Jewish Relations for the American Jewish Committee and heads the AJC Atlanta Regional Office with the goal of enhancing the well being of the Jewish people worldwide and advancing human rights and democratic values in the United States and around the world. The office has worked with the Atlanta Black-Jewish Coalition for nearly 35 years.
Why, in many instances of social unrest, do we look the other way; that we do nothing? But before we offer some possible answers, last week’s rampage in Washington gives us some context, a starting point.
Like millions, I watched in disbelief thousands of “protesters” (or whatever you choose to call them) converge on the Capital building. The images of them scaling walls, overwhelming police and breaking windows while lawmakers cowered in hiding or were rushed out for their safety will be etched into my memory forever.
The words “diversity” and “inclusion” are big buzz words in today’s society, and they should be as they are very relevant and important in today’s times. But although these words are often thrown around, it is important for us to think critically about what they mean. And to assess their impact on business and society as a whole.
Many large companies are hiring for diversity in race and gender, amongst several other categories. But why, so often, is culture left out of the equation? Should it be? Definitely not. And here’s why.
Chatting off-topic one day with one of my favorite editors, Deborah Levine,I talkedabout feeling like an outsider at age 7 in my own family. Perhaps she had not discussed her similar feelings before because she embraced the topic and told about similar feelings in her childhood. Deborah told her mom how she believed she belonged to gypsy parents who must have left her on the doorstep.Then without surprise or forethought she asked her mom, “Would you please return me to where I really belong?” Her mom was amused by her hyperactive daughter with the quick mind and tongue.
I then shared with Deborah that I felt I’d been left behind by aliens as part of an intergalactic experiment by my far-away family. This was not as far fetched as you might think when I explain how my father was a scientist working for the government in Radiation Biology. He had security clearances, and this was to explain why he was gone a lot to places he could not speak about upon return. was often on the road to places he could not tell us about.It was also the 1950s when the red-scare atmosphere filled the very air and our television programing the paranoia of the McCarthy era.
We don’t know yet what the future will bring. We never know what the future will bring. Analysts often say it’s a mistake to predict the future by extrapolating the trends of the past. The world is too complicated a place. With the current pandemic, it’s been “up jump the Devil.” But never in our lifetimes has a Devil occupied the White House. Will we forget an important lesson we should have learned—that Evil exists, and walks among us? I’ve said for years that many people believe in good, but deny that evil exists also. Yet there can be no good without evil.
In the 1960s, sociologist Harold Garfinkel founded a new field of inquiry called ethnomethodology. As such, Garfinkel uses the term indexing to describe how we depend on whatever information and experience we have to make sense of every social context. We call this social cues. For example, when a man in the US meets a person who is wearing a dress and a pair of high heels while carrying a lady’s purse, the man instantly concludes that this is a woman and therefore will instantaneously interact with this person according to the social etiquette between a man and a woman.
Garfinkel calls such mental exercise indexing. When we are unaware of social cues because we have not had interaction with members of a particular social group, we would depend on the common information available, whether true or not. This is when stereotyping comes into play.
Music moves, heals, and inspires us.
Enjoy this beautiful New Year’s song by a wonderfully creative group of artists.
Editor’s Note:
Many thanks to the writer/producer of this song, Michael A. Levine, who also composed for: science fiction series Siren on Freeform, for George Lucas-produced Star Wars Detours animated parody, and for Jerry Bruckheimer/CBS dramas Cold Case and Close To Home for which he received 8 ASCAP awards. He scored films: Landfill Harmonic & The Makeover, and wrote the theme song for Resident Evil 7 Biohazard and closing credits song, Running, sung by Roberta Flack for the documentary feature 3100: Run and Become.
Levine produced, with Michael Wolff, the songs for the Nickelodeon TV preteen comedy series, The Naked Brothers Band. Levine also wrote “Gimme a Break”, the Kit Kat jingle, named one of the 12 greatest jingles by MSN in 2013.
Levine was also a Governor of the music branch of the Television Academy (Emmys).
Chatting off-topic one day with one of my favorite editors, Deborah Levine,
