The DEI Chronicles (Part 3 of 5): R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Five core commonalities of organizations truly committed to inclusion.

“There Is No Spoon”

“All I’m asking is for a little respect — just a little bit…” — Aretha Franklin, Respect

Aretha, the Queen of Soul, in her iconic rendering of Otis Redding’s Respect, utterly transformed the song from that of a plaintive plea from a man to a woman’s declaration of power. The year of her passing, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it the #1 song of all time. But it wasn’t just her arrangement. It was her interpretation of the song’s meaning. It was she who came up with the idea of spelling the word out — R-E-S-P-E-C-T — the most memorable aspect of the song.

But she wasn’t done. She added an important qualifier — “Find out what it means to me”. In it, she was redefining the terms of the relationship, saying, “Only I get to determine what feels respectful to me.” We often think we get to determine whether our actions toward others are respectful or not, but we don’t. Only they can tell us that. It was in 1967 that Martin Luther King, during his Riverside Church speech, said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

That phrase, “flinging a coin to a beggar,” has always stayed with me. There’s something about the carelessness of it, and how we can do an objectively good deed, but do it in such a way that makes a person feel more like an inconvenience than a human being. Sure, they’re a dollar richer, but we’ve robbed them of far more in self-esteem and human regard. These both fall prey to the same assumption; that we are the ones who determine if what we’re doing is kind or not, helpful or not, loving or not.

They, the people on the receiving end of our words and actions, decide that; not us. Sure, doing what we believe to be good for them might be our motivation. But the true test of whether it’s respect that we’re transmitting is not us, but them. In everything from policing to how we treat people in welfare offices, from how seniors are neglected to how the salespeople in LA’s upscale shops treated the Julia Roberts character in the film Pretty Woman, it’s not hard to determine if people feel better about themselves after an encounter with us than before it. Just look.

But personal interactions notwithstanding, it’s when it gets woven into our policies and practices — from a pharmacy’s decision to no longer accept cash at a time when so many people lack access to debit cards to laws that prevent employers from hiring undocumented immigrants to bail policies that lock people away for months before ever seeing the inside of a courtroom — that human devaluation goes airborne.

Inclusive organizations take this seriously, examining both their actions and their values for human disregard, then, doing the hard work — making changes. In DEI Chronicles #2: New Attitude, we learned about anchoring, the tendency to assign value to something, not based on objective criteria (like the actual dollar amount in an envelope), but rather, based on whether it falls short of or exceeds our expectations.

Anchoring is why, though straight-identifying Anglos still dominate representation in films and television, it sometimes feels like all the LGBTQ+ and BIPOC characters are squeezing them out. They’re actually not. These tendencies are no one’s fault. They’re the culture we’ve built. But recognizing how each of us has implicit biases baked into core concepts, including fairness is an essential precondition for making anything better.

So, how do we get past this? In The Matrix, Neo, in an encounter with a child mystic, was told, “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.” “What truth?” Neo asked. “There is no spoon,” the boy answered. “Then you’ll see that it’s not the spoon that bends; it is only yourself.” In other words, if we truly want to be places where diversity lives and inclusion thrives, we’re the ones who need to bend. Getting this right means starting with three kinds of work on ourselves:

Facing the facts — “You can’t fool all the people all the time.” Recognize that our superior position was tenuous from the start. In a diverse democracy, only a society that works for all of us will work for any of us. Going forward, if our spaces don’t become places where all are welcome, then no amount of spin will convince people otherwise, at least not for long.

Author Freada Kapor Klein, in Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay, details the real reasons so many diverse workers exit the back doors of their companies as fast as they enter the front. The primary culprit? A culture that, in vast numbers of ways, is hostile toward them.

Mending our ways — We simply can’t be part of making things better without owning how we’ve benefitted from the way things are. This was the path of every slave owner turned abolitionist. There will be costs. Farms might be lost, friends might oppose you and your way of life will almost certainly have to change. But all that pales in comparison to the gains — what it will mean for the economy and for a society where everyone can make their best contribution.

Our companies already have a reputation among diverse communities. If it’s poor, then investing in marketing and PR is a waste of money. Instead, do the work of rebuilding trust. Governor George Wallace, after years of blatant racism, put in the hard work to rebuild trust with Alabama’s minorities. As a result, three years out of office, he’d win reelection with over 90% of the African American vote. He’d go on to appoint a record number of African Americans to state positions, including two cabinet members.

Making our intentions clear — If your company values inclusion and is committed to treating people of diversity with respect, state it clearly in everything from web properties to job postings. Provide ways for customers to tell you what you’re doing wrong, and pay attention. Let job seekers know that the company is happy to provide alternative means of applying, and that, if needed, is willing to sponsor the right candidate for the job.

In the end, each of us is already far more diverse than we often admit. And that’s a good thing. Because the same differences that were counted as demerits in the old structure will be assets in the new one.

Five Core Commonalities

From congregations to police precincts, agribusiness to ecommerce, colleges to charities, entities of all kinds who have dared embark upon this work are increasingly discovering how they can become places that get inclusion right. Though it looks different in different contexts, below are five core commonalities they share:

1. They don’t enrich themselves by impoverishing others.

When I was young, my grandmother, like much of the working class, made every one of our family’s high-dollar purchases, from the refrigerator and washing machine to the family television and my first bike, all by reserving items, often at Sears, then making monthly payments until the item was paid in full. I remember overhearing a conversation between my grandmother, my grandfather, and my Aunt Naomi and Uncle Sid; all making sure they’d have the money to get my birthday gifts (a chemistry set and microscope) paid off on time.

Starting in the 80s, however, just as credit card companies were inundating neighborhoods like ours with high-interest credit cards, retailers were phasing out layaway programs, which meant that the only way customers of limited means could make big-ticket purchases was either by putting them on a credit card or by utilizing the company’s high-interest credit program. In the process, they’d shifted something that used to be a service into the revenue column. But in doing so, they also injected exploitation into their business models.

Then, there are credit reports, which came on the scene in the 90s and turned both consumer credit and mounting student loans into an instrument that does exactly what political strategist Lee Atwater said they were designed to do. He confessed how, in an era when it hurt segregationists to say “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger”, he and others came up with other ways to tilt things in their favor — tactics that hurt their victims more than they hurt them.

Credit scores penalize the very same people who have been locked into jobs that they can never live on; people who, despite working, can never afford to pay everything on time, all the time. Additionally, the information itself is submitted by for-profit companies, none of which are legally accountable for injurious, inaccurate information. Those reports are then sold by other for-profit companies who, though they call themselves “agencies”, are, in almost every case, publicly traded.

And all that’s before getting to what might be most problematic — most of what’s on credit scores isn’t actually credit. Which is also where efforts to address the instrument’s inherent problems by expanding its scope break down. Then, there are companies like Credit Karma, recently purchased by Intuit, which profits by tying poor people’s financial well-being even more closely to credit scores; all of which enmeshes people even deeper into poverty.

Across the board, instead of fixing the ways the instrument is broken, we’re going further in the other direction, productizing personal data while denying the rightful owners of that data, our customers, any control or financial benefit. Fortunately, an increasing number of companies are offering credit non-contingent products, from Empower cash advance to Dave (which describes itself as a “banking app” and seeds new accounts with $500) to Sofi Invest.

There are car dealerships that don’t require a credit check to get an auto loan, credit non-contingent credit cards, and a growing number of property owners who no longer use credit checks as an excuse to charge application fees, which severely over-penalize the poor and ethnics.

Then, there are all the ways we take advantage of the poor by de facto overcharging them. Entire sectors, from insurers to annual memberships, from cell phone services to ISPs, routinely charge those who can least afford it more for the same product, or charge them the same for an inferior product. Take retailers who provide discounts to customers who are approved for a store credit card, but charge full price to those who can’t; another penalty tied to credit scores.

Or take Amazon, which offers free shipping to people who can afford a Prime membership and charges those who can’t. Amazon could make purchasing fairer to low-income customers by tracking shipping charges that would have been waived if they were Prime members, then awarding them a membership for the remainder of the year, once what they’ve paid in shipping charges supersedes membership cost.

De facto overpricing also shows up in everything from junk fees that target the poor, to pricing plans that effectively charge the poor more, and that almost every company uses. Take MightyCause, a charitable fundraising platform that’s explicitly and truly committed to doing good.

But like most companies, MightyCause offers a price break for organizations that purchase their service for the entire year instead of just one month in advance. In reality, this means that poorer nonprofits — the ones most in need of raising funds — end up paying nearly 20% more for the same service. A program that rewards loyalty by reimbursing monthly customers after a year of patronage, not unlike those yogurt cards that give you one free after 10 purchases, is just one way this could be addressed.

Even grocers, by offering discounts on bulk purchases, but not offering a comparable loyalty rewards program, effectively charge the poor more, as do public transit systems that charge more for individual tickets than monthly passes, and that don’t award daily riders with free rides once their spend reaches the cost of a monthly pass. This is before getting to practices like police departments targeting certain communities for over-ticketing, or auto insurers who use those same issued tickets to justify charging higher rates to people who live in those communities.

Today, however, a vast and growing number of businesses are flipping the model; dismantling practices that result in the poor paying more. A growing number of farmers markets, recognizing that fresh produce is more expensive, offer two-for-one tokens for people using food stamps.

Winco Foods not only sells groceries at a discount, the chain is employee-owned. Or, take apparel maker Bambas and the Soulfull Project, a cereal maker. Both have a “one purchased, one donated” business model. Every purchase by a customer allows them to donate the same product to the poor. They’re using retail to make the world better in tangible ways.

2. They truly believe everyone matters.

Though we don’t often realize it, every policy our organizations adopt has the potential to impact real lives even when we’re not thinking about those lives. We get how “Whites Only” signs did this. But it can happen in all kinds of other, far more subtle ways.

My sister, Crystal shared with me an experience she had standing in line for a clinic that serves lower-income people. It was an unseasonably cold Northern California morning with temperatures in the 30s. She’d arrived early for her 8 AM appointment, as instructed, only to find other people, all of whom were sick, elderly or both, already waiting. She noticed the lights on in the building and workers milling about, and a security guard was sitting inside the foyer on a stool.

She knocked on the door and asked if they could unlock the door and allow people into the waiting room, given how cold it was. She was curtly informed that “security procedures” didn’t allow that. She persisted, pointing out how this policy resulted in sick people being left out in the cold. “Look at this line,” she said. “Do any of these people really look like a security threat?” They opened the doors. “Those who matter don’t mind,” the saying goes, “And those who mind don’t matter.”

There are all kinds of policies and ways of doing things that turn our organizations into places where diversity simply can’t thrive. But because they’re not explicitly about inclusion, we miss the connection. We don’t see how using a job portal that sells personal data belonging primarily to lower-income applicants erodes trust between us and diverse stakeholders, but it does. They not only mind, but they matter. The key question here is “Who suffers for our gain?” Companies who are serious about inclusion recognize this and test every policy for unintended adverse impacts.

The amount of diversity in commercials — from interracial families selling air freshener, to same-sex couples shopping for automobiles; from exercise ads featuring people of every size to sports ads that show all kinds of athletes, including those with limb differences — has radically increased since 2020. This alone sends clear signals that “all are welcome here”.

But commercials do so much more than create demand for our products. Over the years, they’ve emerged as the way we Americans signal what’s normal, unremarkable and commonplace. Each time, whether in media or in real life, we see a person doing something that challenges stereotypes we likely didn’t even know we held, it moves us a bit closer to jettisoning them.

So, every time we encounter a cookware ad with an African American male chef or when we see Paralympians endorsing sports drinks, when trans people are cast as hotel staff or baristas or when women of all sizes and complexions are featured in upscale clothing and beauty ads, we automatically update our social software.

In the end, this heightened consciousness around representation does more than make our society better; it makes our culture more inclusive. And in the diverse society we’re rapidly becoming, the more inclusive we are, the stronger we’ll be.

Likewise, in our companies. If we’re having trouble attracting diversity, if our customers aren’t our biggest fans, if our nonprofit clients don’t feel valued and respected, or if anyone doesn’t feel included and embraced, one key place to look is at our messaging, verbal and otherwise. If diverse customers aren’t even aware that we want their business, and diverse candidates aren’t aware of openings at our organizations, we’ll never even get the opportunity to speak with them, let alone recruit them or win their patronage.

But what we say is only one part of messaging. There’s also what they see. Representation is about visual inclusion; who’s present, or, just as importantly, isn’t. Who we include is another way of indicating who’s not included. The photos on our website and brochures, our packaging and advertising tell them about whether their particular kind of diversity — from ancestry and sexuality to religion and disability — is welcome in our space.

Still, none of this will matter if our messaging, whether verbal or visual, doesn’t reflect in our actions. Societies are ever-changing, interconnected ecosystems. There really is a network of inescapable mutuality. That’s why practices like segregation were always destined to fail — they split the foundation right down the middle. With each action, we’re deciding whether we’ll be a nation that robs some of us of our dignity, thereby endangering all of us or one that embraces and honors each of us, a land, as Woody Guthrie sang, made for both you and me.

3. They actively identify and neutralize FINOPs (fair-in-name-only processes).

Years ago, I was invited to lead a workshop at a conference for educators. My chosen topic? You’re not Racist, but Your HR Policies Are. I expected a turnout of between 5 and 15, so imagine my surprise when over 150 people signed up to attend. They had to move us to one of the largest rooms, and there I was, a couple minutes before starting, trying to rework my hands-on session into a presentation. Surprisingly, it went well. But what shocked me most was the freedom and authenticity with which people engaged.

Often, whenever conversations gear toward topics like racism and bigotry, things get tense and uncomfortable. But this conversation wasn’t that way. People dove in frankly and honestly with the subject matter; something I think was possible because of the framing itself — I’d divorced them, as people committed to ending racism, from systems they weren’t even aware of, but that were actually perpetuating it. And that made all the difference.

The framing itself recognized them as the allies they were, rather than painting them as enemies. And likewise, it allowed them to recognize themselves as part of the solution, rather than being branded as the problem. We could then get to the real problem — a skewed and dysfunctional system.

The challenge of most instruments that we assume to be unbiased is that they are not. Nor can they be. Because the foundation on which they were built was already uneven, and in a fundamentally unequal system, the use of any tool that was not designed to account for such inequality is inherently discriminatory.

In This Land Is Your Land, I call them FINOPs — fair-in-name-only processes, and give several examples, including firefighting requirements that are based solely on physical strength while neglecting things like knowledge of fire behavior or first aid, or the ability to work as a team; or, in sales, screening for an aggressive “go-getter” over someone adept at consultative selling; a skill that women, ethnics and LGBTQ+ people have likely already mastered. The requirements we choose go a long way toward predetermining who will get the job.

Getting this right means revising or retiring any instrument that penalizes people for reasons other than ability to do the job, or that uses socioeconomic criteria to render people ineligible; including:

A. “Get or Give” — Many nonprofits expect board members to financially support the organization or have relationships from whom they can raise funds, hence the name. However, practices like these disqualify people who lack means or connections, but who could contribute to the nonprofit’s work in invaluable ways. A better policy, as we’ll see later, under compensation practices, is for even nonprofits to pay board members.

B. Credit Scores — There are reasons why it’s increasingly illegal for companies to run a potential worker’s or board member’s credit. For one thing, it has nothing to do with whether that person will do a good job or is trustworthy. But more fundamentally, the primary reason people have low credit scores is because so many full-time jobs pay less than one can live on.

In New Phase of the Struggle, the 2024 MLK Day Open Letter on poverty I wrote, I described visiting my late sister, Josie, in Atlanta, and seeing how little food there was in the kitchen, I insisted on taking her to the grocery store. On the spot, she mentally calculated the entire bill down to the penny; tax included; determined to not spend more than $40, the limit she’d placed on herself. And this was of my money; not hers.

This extraordinary feat amazed me, but for her, this was what going to the store meant. I, on the other hand, am embarrassed to admit how carelessly I punch in my PIN code at the checkout stand with little awareness of how much I’ve actually spent. Yet, society considers people like me better money managers. The party line is that a credit score tells us something about that person’s moral fiber, whether they’re “financially responsible”. But it doesn’t. All it really tells us is whether they’re struggling.

C. Reverse Robin Hood — Car commercials, after quoting something like “Zero down and 0% APR” often include a caveat — “for very well qualified customers”. The higher one’s credit score, the more qualified they are. And since credit scores are indicators of poverty rather than negligence, we’re essentially awarding the lowest prices to the people who least need it and requiring those with the least to pay the most. Organizations can examine their policies to ensure that they’re not doing this; effectively charging the poor more so they can award discounts to the already wealthy.

D. Background checks — While the presence of content on a background check is an objective measure, the process behind the content isn’t. The amount of data revealing how our justice system is riddled with disparity is astounding. Studies show bias in everything from arrests to severity of charges filed, to convictions and sentencing, parole eligibility and whether one’s record can be sealed or expunged. There are multiple reasons for justice disparity, but almost all of it is tied to racial identity and economic status. This puts us in a tough position; one where having a record doesn’t mean we committed a crime and where not having one doesn’t mean we didn’t.

E. Work Visas — We’ve been told that the policies we’ve enacted that deprive undocumented immigrants of work opportunities are “for our own security,” but they’re not. These laws don’t lock all immigrants out of work; just working-class ones. Wealthy immigrants can rightfully work here in companies in which they’re significant investors and we make all manner of exceptions for people with knowledge or skills we deem rare and important. But just because we’re not aware of the powerful contributions each person can make doesn’t mean they’re not there.

But all this said, it’s not just about FINOPs themselves: it’s about the unconscious biases that lie beneath them, the unfair assumptions we make without even realizing that we’re making them. They’re why we think that people with high college GPAs are the smartest, people with advanced degrees are the most qualified and that graduates of elite schools are the most prepared.

None of which, in the real world, holds true. One person’s public college business degree, paired with years of work experience, not to mention what getting that degree while working full-time says about her and all that she brings to the table with respect to relating across diversity might easily make her the better candidate. Identifying and disarming both FINOPs and the biases that undergird them allows organizations to foster all kinds of relationships that make them stronger, more resilient and perpetually relevant.

4. They make themselves accountable.

Throughout the 90s, retailer Abercrombie & Fitch (A&F) built a fashion dynasty exclusively on the Euro-centric, “all-American” look. And as such, profits soared. But a decade later, in the wake of a rapidly diversifying America, combined with the company’s reputation for being hostile to that same diversity, stock prices plummeted from $84.23 to $14.64 in one year.

Then, there’s Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, who, in a 2004 National Business Post magazine interview, inferred that he’d chosen the name, in part, because it was difficult for native Asian language speakers to pronounce. “I’d been playing with Ls and I came up with Lululemon,” he said. “It’s funny to watch them [Asians] try to say it.”

Then, in 2013, in a Bloomberg interview, he stated that women with certain body shapes were unsuitable for the brand’s clothing; comments made in response to rising complaints, especially from Latinx and African American women, regarding excessive piling and other problems. Instead of adjusting Lululemon products to fit the community, he essentially implied that it’s their fault for buying athletic wear that wasn’t made for them. “It’s really about the rubbing through the thighs,” he stated. These and other comments led to a backlash from women in general that nearly killed the company.

The same thing happens in nonprofits and municipalities — from the adversarial policing that’s led to untold deaths and an erosion of trust in the communities they serve to charities that treat people uncharitably, from the Flint water crisis to federal agencies endowed with extraordinary powers and no public accountability.

This, entities that no longer serve at the pleasure of the people or that exercise power without the consent of the governed, strikes at the heart of democracy, and over time, renders the entire society unstable. The overarching issue for social entities, whether mom-and-pop or multinational, whether social, private or public sector, is the same — that of community, and whether it’s strengthened or weakened by our behavior.

Fostering a strong sense of healthy community can pay off in all manner of ways from enhancing our ability to find great candidates to engendering customer loyalty to helping us recover from a misstep. But only if people are respected, treated well, and genuinely included.

Each person who leaves your company as an employee could very well be a customer, an advocate or a partner. The same holds true for your customers, or, if you’re a nonprofit, your clients. In every case, your various stakeholders can be your biggest cheerleaders or detractors. They can post great things about you in their social media feeds or share their horror stories.

The reputation a company has is something it’s building one decision at a time, and not taking inclusion seriously, especially in a post-majority America, can be fatal. Here are five key ways organizations can build communities that make them stronger rather than weaker:

A. Jettison the corporate mandate — The belief that corporations exist to be money-making machines for the relative few who own shares is both wrongheaded and shortsighted. It’s a strategy that can’t be maintained in an ever-diversifying and increasingly interconnected world. Going forward, companies will have to learn to not just make money but create value, to not just enrich shareholders but everyone who contributes to its success, and to do more good than harm. They’ll need to replace the corporate mandate with a sustainability mindset.

B. Bring balance to power imbalances — Whether police stops or prison guards, psychiatric hospitals or senior care facilities, any situation where we have institutional authority at our backs and others lack the power to hold us accountable is one where we will almost certainly abuse it. But that’s not all. Because everything is always in flux, by abusing that power, we’re actually the catalyst for the rise of an equal and opposite reaction; one where they’ll want to do more than balance the scales, but push us off of it. It’s how people lose their jobs or go to jail.

It’s how famous coaches and religious leaders and film producers end up vilified and ostracized. And, it’s how every member of Ferguson’s City Council, the one that refused to implement the reforms required by the US Department of Justice, ended up voted out of office. We can avoid this simply by identifying where we have imbalanced power and bringing balance to it.

Body cams that we don’t deactivate do this, as does holding open hearings. Undercover patients or residents in places where we care for people behind closed doors do this. Elections where they have the power to remove us from power do this. We think that doing so will cost us, but in reality, we’re the ones who gain. Because by empowering them to hold us in check, we become the people they actually want in those positions.

C. Make community real — The communities we raise up around us might be our most powerful, yet overlooked asset. For one, they’re our canary in the coal mine, letting us know — if we let them — when we’re headed toward catastrophe. They’re our strongest recruiting resource, enabling us to solicit recommendations and nominations for everything from employment positions to board vacancies. And, they’re the people who will stick with us when we need it most.

In 1980, just when a fledgling Whole Foods was getting started, the lone Austin store was nearly destroyed by the most damaging flood to hit the area in 70 years. The store’s inventory was ruined, along with much of its equipment and they had no insurance. It was the people of Austin — everyone from customers to neighbors, staff to vendors, creditors to investors — who all pitched in to help with repairs and recovery. Remarkably, the store reopened in 28 days.

It’s up to us to foster this kind of community, to provide involvement opportunities and make it worth their while to be involved. To communicate openly and assess our social impact. To make community real.

D. Value every interpersonal exchange — We get this when it comes to “VIPs”. But that framing is faulty. Everyone we encounter is a very important person. It’s up to us to learn to see them that way. Take job applicants. Imagine what would change if, instead of seeing ourselves as having something they need, we saw them as having something we need? After all, our people are the greatest determinant of our success. So, bring this mentality to the recruiting process.

Make every candidate who responds feel valued and appreciated. Thank them for choosing to explore work with your company and seek to foster a relationship with them, even if they’re not the right fit for that particular role. They might easily be a fit for another role, or pass on your job announcement to someone who is. They might become an ardent fan of your company or a loyal customer, an investor or potential partner.

Solicit feedback on ways to make the nonprofit programs or business offerings more relevant and useful and take that feedback seriously. Make the executive team reachable. The more companies make themselves available for people to talk to them, and if they listen, the less likely they’ll talk negatively about them.

E. Share the wealth — Ensure that every worker, from lowest to highest paid, both employees and contractors, has a voice and a vote. Award shares to the communities that make a company’s business possible. Make every stakeholder a shareholder. Doing so fosters employee and customer loyalty and incentivizes people to do all they can to help the company succeed.

5. They never stop doing the work.

Insurer Lemonade, a certified B Corp, operates differently than many other companies in their sector. “We treat the premiums you pay as if it’s your money, not ours,” they say, before going on to explain, “With Lemonade, everything becomes simple and transparent.” According to them, they “take a flat fee, pay claims super-fast, and give back what’s left to causes you care about.”

Lemonade CEO Daniel Schreiber, in a 2020 Forbes article, elaborated on what he calls the “new normal” for business. “Not only can you do well by doing good,” he said, “But soon there won’t be any other way to do it.” But every company, even ones like this, has unfinished work when it comes to becoming all-inclusive. Take policies that result in the poor paying more. It’s standard practice for insurers to charge higher premiums for the same policies issued to people in lower-income neighborhoods and to people with lower credit scores. Lemonade follows this practice.

But besides the ethical problems inherent in charging the poor more, the reasoning behind the practice might be faulty. Studies suggest a higher correlation between accidents and where we work than where we live, which makes sense since that’s where our cars are most in use. Lemonade could revolutionize the market by being the first to stop using tools that further penalize the already disadvantaged.

Doing so would put them miles ahead of their competitors and signal to the soon-to-be-majority that the company is committed to serving them fairly. And that’s the thing, despite all the work companies like Lemonade are doing, there will always be more to do because society itself continues to change.

But ironically, by committing to that work for the long haul, it’s not just those we treat fairly who benefit, we do as well. Back during America’s segregation era, managers at NASA complained that colored women were constantly late getting back to work after breaks. It never occurred to them that the company itself, by having their bathrooms in other buildings, was causing the problem. Making things fairer for those women made the entire department stronger.

But truly getting this right involves jettisoning a dangerous false narrative most of us aren’t even aware we hold — the assumption that: a) there are inherent and immutable differences between segments of society, b) those differences are why some groups outperform other groups, and c) that certain tools, whether constructs like race and gender or instruments like background checks and credit scores can help us weed out the moral, hardworking and responsible from those who aren’t.

We’ve been told that whenever we encounter disparate outcomes between designated groups there’s something about those groups that’s driving that outcome. But that’s hardly ever true. Because, despite our tendency to exaggerate our differences, humans are startlingly similar.

There really is no superior stock. In almost every case, those diverging outcomes are due to externalities, some kind of inequity, whether where we’re handing out traffic tickets or where we’ve instructed people to sit. This, detoxifying our own thinking, might be the most challenging facet of never stopping doing the work. In the past, it meant non-segregated bathrooms.

Today, it means everything from wheelchair-accessible doorways to fitting rooms for diverse genders to providing spaces where Muslim workers can conduct daily prayer. And it will mean something else tomorrow. And that’s OK. That’s the work. And every step toward inclusion we take today makes us both better and stronger tomorrow. Below are four practical steps that can help us get there:

A. See what they’re seeing — Enlist people representing diversity as mystery shoppers and accessibility assessors to identify places where the company might be unintentionally getting it wrong.

B. Always be about removing obstacles — Addressing accessibility means paying attention to everything from hallways and elevators to bathroom stalls and offices. It means making our websites usable by the visually impaired and making our application process workable for people who don’t communicate well in writing.

It means redesigning workspaces to be suitable for people who are sensitive to loud noises and bright lights. And these are just the start. From how we conduct interviews to how we hold meetings if a month goes by where we’ve not uncovered some new way we can make our spaces more inclusive, then, chances are, we’re not really looking.

C. Respect their identity — Creating an atmosphere where everyone belongs starts with things we don’t do — not making presumptions about their racial identity, religion, sexuality, gender, etc. It means adopting respectful language and tone in all contexts, from correspondence with job candidates to conversing with customers.

Refrain from requiring legal names until absolutely necessary, and when it’s divulged, treat this information as absolutely confidential. It was law enforcement’s violation of transman Brandon Teena’s privacy by revealing his gender assigned at birth that unwittingly led to his murder.

D. Examine every assumption — We expect metrics like community livability and safety scores to do exactly that; let us know the likelihood we’ll run into trouble in those places. But those metrics don’t work equally well for everyone. For instance, they don’t take into account the likelihood that an African American boy wearing a hoodie will be accosted simply while walking down the street, or that a same-sex family will be welcomed and safe.

Or, consider the assumptions inherent in neighborhood watch signs that say “We Report Suspicious Persons” as opposed to “suspicious activities”. Chances are, if we commit to this course, early on, we’ll get more wrong than right. We might try things that don’t work or try solving the wrong problem before getting to the right one. And that’s all OK.

Pastor Sam Williams, the minister I worked alongside during my years as a young pastor, had a number of sayings that have always stuck with me. One of them was, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” The idea is that the worthwhile things are hard to do well at first. But if they’re really worth doing, we stick with them, like taking our falls before learning to walk, until we can do them well. That’s what organizations committed to being better do. They never stop doing the work.

Down Payment on the Future

Frederick Douglass, in his 1857 “West India Emancipation” address, describing both Wilberforce’s “magic eloquence” and revolts by the slaves themselves said, “While one showed that slavery was wrong, the other showed that it was dangerous as well as wrong.” That’s not far from where we are today. We’ve long realized that exclusion is wrong: We’re now, for the first time, recognizing how it’s also dangerous.

We will never again be the nation we were; one where African Americans are at the back of the bus and Latinx are in the fields, where gays are in the closet and Asians are doing our laundry, where men were told how to be men and women were told to stay in their place.

It will never again be OK to disparage religious minorities or refuse equal accommodation to persons with disabilities. The post-majority, globally connected society we’re becoming is one where caustic campaigns can’t win, hostile congregations can’t thrive and exploitative companies can’t sustain.

And in every way we’ve changed, we’re better for it. Because in this nation we’re becoming, we’re choosing to make a down payment on the future; to rebuild the common ground that, at the start, was our defining virtue. And that’s why doing this — rebuilding for inclusion — is so vital. At the same time, there’s no app for this, no easy fix, no one sure way to get this right. We’re in uncharted territory, going places humankind has never gone before.

Closing the gap between the society we have and the people we’re becoming will, of course, require big changes; to our processes and protocols, priorities and practices. But in many ways, that’s the low-hanging fruit. Success ultimately hinges on whether we, individually, can learn to both honor our own diversity and that of others, and, collectively, whether we can choose pathways that don’t just embrace some of us, but all of us.

Because that’s how, together, we build for ourselves a future. It’s how we spell “respect”.

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The DEI Chronicles is a five-part series about diversity, equity and inclusion, and the importance of us incorporating these virtues into every aspect of our society if we want to become a nation that can endure. ”R-E-S-P-E-C-T” is the third article in the series.

RD Moore is an artist, minister, lifelong social activist, emancipationist and founder of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Social Justice (MMI). He credits the people who crossed his path starting in his formative years in post-Civil Rights-era Birmingham for the person he’d become and for his unyielding faith in who we can be together. Known for his intimate storytelling and insightful understanding, his work continues to explore that fertile space where diversity, spirituality and humanity all intersect. His blog, Letters from a Birmingham Boy, can be found here.