What To Do When Your Child Mortifies You with a Racial Remark

Your 7 year old child who is white hesitates to shake someone’s hand who is African-American.   Your first grader tells another student she’s “a lesbian with her sister.”  You were there.  You weren’t there.  You are the most open, anti-racist, multicultural person you know.  Where did your child get this from? I’ve seen stories about…

Consciously building unconscious bias

I was struck by author Malcolm Gladwell’s desicription of “Rapid Cognition” in the book blink, and how he used the example of the car salesman to show how ignoring sub-conscious ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to people can negatively impact the bottom line.  (e.g. assuming someone won’t be buying  a car strictly from their appearance/first impression.)  When we (social…

Noting When and How we Reference Race, and the Assumptions behind the Absence

Hey you racist, why did you mention only Serena Williams race in last week’s post about the Mother Nature/Tampax ad? Luckily that comment didn’t come in, but as I was riding the train (or the “L” as we call it in Chicago) downtown yesterday, I realized I did mention Serena’s race, but not “Mother Nature’s”. …

What I learned from Marc Sims: Self Proclaimed “Pseudo Motivational Speaker”

   When Marc and I first met, I didn’t know what to think.  We were in the “Green Room,” aka the Counselor’s office at Robeson High School in Chicago, getting ready to visit classrooms as motivational speakers, as part of the Black Star Project.  “I tell them about careers in marketing, and to believe in…