This week Jean interviews Amri Johnson, CEO of Inclusion Wins, "a global cooperative of product and service providers focused on people-related solutions for organizations of all sizes." He is the author of Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable. Amri Johnson has a few provocative things to say about the current state of efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. "Contact theory basically said, when you bring people together as equals, and I'm not talking about economically, but as under the Constitution equals, and you bring them together to solve a common problem or to address a common goal, and you give them time, and so you have them connect with each other over time, and you have some sort of institutional support, prejudice gets reduced significantly.
"And that research, along with many hundreds of psychologists telling the courts that segregation harmed Black and White kids, it wasn't just about harming the Black kids. They came together around it, and that science was the other piece to go beyond the moral abhorrence of segregation, and separate but equal. "And so what we did, where we had the opportunity to actually create more contact, we didn't solidify the contact, we just kept hammering at what White people are doing wrong, kind of collectively, and I think it took us from the potential for something transformational to something that was reductionist and, you know, it was getting major blowback." He also has much to say about the importance of dialogue, acceptance of personal responsibility, and the need to get out of the victim mentality.
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Jean Latting is an organizational consultant, inclusive leadership coach, and behavioral scientist.