Shari Dunn: Uncovering Bias and Redefining Competency at Work

I want companies ultimately to see DEI as a strategic imperative for growth. This is not about, and it has never been about, giving unqualified people access to employment. It's about, to me, how a company can win the future. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's conversation is with Sherry Dunn. Sherry has a very accomplished and eclectic background. She is an accomplished journalist. She's a former attorney. She's a news anchor, CEO, and university professor. She was even connected with, worked with Oprah for a while for crying out loud.

And she recently came up with a book called Qualified, How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work. And so this conversation, I think, is needed. And we need to have it more often and we need to have it out loud because it doesn't feel like we're making any progress these days. It actually feels like we're going back quite a bit, especially when it comes to DEI. So if you're triggered by the whole DEI thing, you can stop listening now and go fuck yourself. But this is where the unhidden biases that a lot of us don't even know that we have exist. And that's what this conversation is about. We talked about what is competency checking and why is it adversely affecting African-Americans in the workforce.

Also talked about shadow pipelines and how hiring and the biases around that and what to do about it. And she's just got some really interesting perspectives on, again, it's probably going to trigger some people, but like accessing whiteness, which is interesting that she said that really got me thinking that we never really thought about being white or black back in the day. You know, in America and the history of it, you know, as Protestants and Jews and Italians, but it was never white. That was just a more relatively recent thing, which is really interesting to peel back the layers on this as we did in this conversation. So we talked about that. We talked about what to do about it. We talked about some techniques and some things that we can bring into the workforce to help address this.

And also, she thinks imposter syndrome is actually bullshit, which I thought was really, really interesting. And she's got a great take on that, too. So finally, really trying to see DEI. I think a lot of people see it as a favor, right? It's like, oh, yeah, we got to do this because, you know, it's important to give underprivileged people the access and the opportunities. But that's not really what it is. It needs to be seen as a strategic imperative to the business to be successful. And it's not about giving people who are underqualified opportunities. It's actually the reverse, quite frankly. People of color over, you know, large portion, they actually are more qualified in a lot of ways, but they have to jump through so many hoops to get there and be questioned at every turn.

We've got to figure out a way to turn that around. So this is a deep conversation, but I think it's really important to listen to. I hope you enjoy it. And I hope you pull something out of this that can help you make a difference and something out there that we can help move in in the right direction. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it up. Sherry Dunn, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast. How are you today? Great. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on board. I think this is going to be an important conversation to have, especially right now in lieu of all the fun stuff that's happening out there in the world right now. And for those of you listening, we are going to be talking about, mainly focusing on Sherry's book, let's see, Qualified, How Competency Checking and Race Collide with Work or at Work.

And we're going to dig into DEI and all the challenges that are happening right now. But before we get to that, Sherry, I always like to ask origin stories here. So outside of LinkedIn, you got a real interesting LinkedIn background with some very diverse experiences. But even before that, talk to us about where Sherry's coming from. So, you know, when you're a kid, your parents, your mom, whoever, like where'd you grow up? How'd you get the bug to do what you're doing right now? And what made you you? And then we'll dive into the rest of it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So like my Batman origin story. Yeah. That's I can. Well, I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I'm from the industrial Midwest. And that's where I was born and raised.

And my family's from. My mother's family and my father's family were basically refugees from the American South. You know, their families left the South during the second migration, not the first great migration in the 30s, but the second in the late 40s, early 50s, where a lot of African-Americans, you know, basically fled the South going north. And so all of my family that I've ever been related to, the majority, lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I grew up in a small, immediate family. It was just my sister and I and my parents and always dogs, always grew up with dogs. But I had a large extended family. My mother came from a family of 13 and all but I think two lived in Milwaukee. And then my grandfather's brothers, all but two, I think, lived in Milwaukee.

So I have first, second, third, fourth cousins, probably fifth cousins at this point, who the line of cousin is like blurred. It's just cousin. So I have a lot of a lot of relatives. I'm from the industrial Midwest. And, you know, this very working class. It's a community of black folks I think people either ignore or don't think exist. I always tell people there's something between the Cosby show and good times. It's called working class black people. And, you know, we grew up in a neighborhood, in a house. People went to work every day, you know, but they were working class people. They worked in, my father worked at a, he did steel construction, like worked at a plant that moved and developed steel.

And my mother was a nurse's assistant first and then she worked in admissions for Milwaukee County. So county jobs, you know, labor jobs, and that was all the people in our neighborhood. And, yeah, that story somehow gets lost in talking about working class people. But, yeah, and so that had a lot to do with, I think, informing who I am because, you know, I am a blue collar working class union person. That is, was my family. That is who I am. But I did go to law school and, you know, I went to college. I went to law school. So there's this other. Why law school, by the way? Yeah, I went to Marquette Undergrads. I got to include Marquette first. And then I went to Northwestern Law School in Chicago, which is now called Northwestern Pritzker School.

Well, after my classmate, J.B. Pritzker, who's the governor of Illinois, who donated a lot of money. And so now the school is partly named after J.B., which is hilarious. But why choose law? What was the driver for you for law? Yeah. You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to do a lot of things. And I've actually done, I think, all of those careers at this point. Law, well, actually, my mother used to like to tell the story. My parents are both deceased. But my mother, when I was younger, I was part of something called Law Explorers. It was like Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts for careers. And we went to a courthouse and met a judge and learned about law. And I was like, I'm going to be a lawyer because I couldn't even like say it properly.

And I did. I became a lawyer. And I did practice divorce and custody for victims of domestic violence. That was very important to me. I worked in legal services. I did that for several years. And then I worked on the national level for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, which is like the Bar Association for Legal Services Attorneys and Public Defenders. So we did training and we did advocacy and we worked around on the legal service side, federal funding for legal service, which is funded by something called the LSC Corporation. It's a quasi-governmental agency. So anyway, we did all that work. And that was in D.C. And then I ran a foundation for four years that funded the legal service system.

And that was in New York. And that was done. That foundation was a sub foundation of a foundation called the Atlantic Philanthropies. And why that's interesting is Atlantic Philanthropies was funded by a family called this Sweeney's or Feeney's. I always get their last name wrong. But they were the owners of the duty-free shops. And when they sold the duty-free shops, they had all this money. And they were actually the original originators in some sense of the giving pledge. And they believed in spend-down philanthropy, meaning you don't keep a corpus and keep trying to spend it down in your lifetime. And they did. And so the gentleman, he died a couple years ago and his wife had died. And yeah, he spun all of that wealth down.

So they actually really did the giving pledge. But anyway, so our foundation was a five-year term because that's the way they did things with the spend-down. So I did that in New York. And then I lived in New York during 9-11, which I try to help explain this, but I had always also wanted to be a journalist. So that was the second career I always wanted to do. So after 9-11, maybe two years after that, I was like, well, you could get evaporated at work. I probably should see what else I can do. And I started freelancing. And when I was practicing law, I actually had worked in a television station on the weekends just to learn the ropes. But anyway, so I started freelancing, moved to LA, did some freelance work, and then got hired in Texas in a town called Tyler, which is in East Texas.

If you know anything about True Detective, it's like the first season is kind of Tyler and the surrounding area to Louisiana area. But I became a news anchor. I was an anchor there in Tyler for, I think, four years. And then I moved back home to Milwaukee, where I was the morning and then the 9 p.m. anchor for about four years. So I spent almost a decade in television news. Can I ask a quick question about news? This is actually just more my curiosity about news anchors. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB Sales membership. It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are Filling the Funnel and Driving a Close that cover all aspects of the sales process.

It also includes monthly workshops that will be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like ChatGPT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process. Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to JBarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code PODCAST at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. It seems like news is so depressing. Just in general, right? Like every time I've actually, one of my New Year's resolutions was to stop watching the news. Is it? Like, cause, and I always want, like the CNNs and those types of things, like I, like they talk about this stuff all the time, which is horrible things.

They see it like literally daily. And for my psyche, it would, I don't think I'd be able to handle it. Well, you know. Is it that or is it, do you have to have a certain personality to be able to handle that type of onslaught of negativity or is it balanced with some positivity that is, that gets you through? Well, I think it's like anything. I mean, like when I practice law, I did divorce and custody for victims of domestic violence. Some of those clients got killed, some, some were murdered, like this real business. And so you, you know, you develop a capacity for the work, I guess, like anybody else, like doctors, like anything you see, you kind of develop a capacity. For me, the hard part of television was it did change.

You know, television and journalism in general used to be a lot of beat work where you work to beat and you really learned a lot. Like people would learn local government or they would learn state government or they would learn environmental. They, you know, it used to be really different, but after the first economic downturn was like 2003 or something, I don't know, whatever that was, things really changed in news and news became more generalist with people who did not have a good depth of knowledge. And so for me, the issue was, I thought I was getting stupider doing news. I wasn't so much depressed as I was getting dumber every day. It was like, it was like, you know, it was like, you, you don't, you stop writing like a human, which is crazy that I wrote a book because when you write a new script, you write it for speaking.

So when you spend years writing like that, you actually forget how to write real words in a real way. So that, that was weird. And then, um, it definitely became murder, murder, fire, fire, murder, murder, fire, but it wasn't so much that the, it was depressing. It was just stupid. Like it was stupid and, and you couldn't, and there isn't, especially in local news, there isn't even in national news, but there's less of this in local news, the desire to get deep. You know, most news stories are 30 seconds. A minute 30 is long. Two minutes is like super long for local news. I mean, so, you know, I just was like, I, if I don't leave, I'm gonna not remember anything I know. So anyway, let me ask what, how'd you get connected with Oprah?

Oh, how'd I get, and that's such a crazy story. So the Oprah story and the, who wants to be a millionaire, those are the stories everybody wants to know about. So the Oprah story was, I lived in New York, like I said, and this was pre-internet dating. And this woman had an dating cafe where you go to this coffee house and you open a book and you read, can you imagine that? No pictures about people. And then she would make the call and you meet at the coffee house. And so the, it just so happened that the Oprah show was interested in showcasing a lot of dating things. And so she called me and asked me if I would come and do a date that would be filmed for the Oprah show. And I was like, sure, you know?

And so I did that. And then later that evening, the Oprah show called and they were like, Hey, we want to change the segment. We want you to be like the avatar and try a bunch of different dating things for us. And so it really was like, I couldn't have knocked on the door for it to happen. Like it was just random, it's a random New York story, which is truly only in New York. And so they flew me to Chicago. They had me try different dating services. I was on the show with Oprah and Gail. I mean, I was a guest to the Oprah show, like half an hour, the half, half of the segment was me. That's bananas. So it was bananas, but it's not something that you could, um, you could script. Yeah. And then the who wants to be a millionaire was another New York story.

I was like, Oh, people. And I had wanted to leave New York and I wanted to get into news at that time, which ended up being like going to a casino, but that's a separate story. But I was like, Oh, I'd like to get some money to do this. So I used to be really good at trivia when I could remember things. And so I went and did the test. They had like this little test. It was simple. It wasn't like jeopardy. That's like a college exam. And the young lady who was interviewing me did not like me and was not nice to me. And, uh, when I got home, the woman who was interviewing sitting next to her called me and she was like, yeah, I don't think that was so great. You know, would you like to be on the show this week?

I was like, what the? So again, another, only in New York story. And I, I, I won a lot of money. I did not win a million dollars, but I did. Very well. I still that my favorite is the, of all time is the, the ultimate winner guy who like knew all the questions and he used his one lifeline at the end to call his dad and just tell his dad that he was about to win a million dollars. That would have been, well, I tell you the one question I crashed out on, I actually knew the answer to, but I got so excited by how much I had won. I got distracted and then they were like, what would your answer have been? And I was like, Oklahoma. And they were like, that was the answer. And I was like, fuck. Oh shit.

And so on the way home on the, on the, on the subway, I was like, Oklahoma. And I still don't even like to hear the word Oklahoma. So it's related to musical, musical. It's funny. Cause every, you know, you know, the people watching the show, oh my God, it's so easy. It's just, it's like, once you get into that scenario and you're in front of the lights and the pressure and all that other stuff, like you act different, right? Well, once they say you've won, you know, $150,000, you're not like, oh, I'm going to risk it for 250. You know, that's a significant amount of money, you know? And so I'm listed as one of the, the top earners in the summer. That's awesome. So there you go. Well, congrats on those.

So I got a strange origin story. Yeah. You got, you got a lot of different turns and hooks on that, but I think it, it, it sounds like it positioned you well to write this book. Um, qualified how competency checking and race collide at work. Um, I don't even know how to start this conversation, quite frankly, with where we are right now. Um, you know, I did a, probably about five or six years ago, I did a, a webinar with a couple of women called, we need to talk. And it was about the bro culture and sales, something had triggered and just, you know, set me off. And, you know, it was sad was I reached back out to those where I've been stayed connected with them. Um, and, uh, and I said to him, Hey, you know, out of curiosity, should we do this again?

Like, you know, should we do this? Like, Hey, we still need to talk. And my, my question was, is, and this was actually about two years ago. So it's gotten actually worse since then. But my question was like, have we made any improvements at all? Like, have, have we progressed in any way? And she goes, John, no. She's like, well, some people have. Some people have now have, uh, uh, uh, the, the filter is off because they feel empowered to say whatever the hell they want to say. So people like me, quite frankly, um, but she's like, for me, she's like, it's gotten worse. We've gotten things taken away from us. We've, we've reverted back. And that was just for women. Forget about women of color, you know, DEI or anything like that.

And all that started to shit the fan, you know, shit the bed literally, at least in the tech industry about two years ago when, in 2023, when, when everything, you know, that's what bothers me about the time. We were talking about this beforehand and what bothers me about the tech industry is there's a lot of talk about DEI and all this other stuff. And they put their, they changed their logo for the month for, you know, LGBT and all these different things. But really when it comes down to it, it's the first thing that goes. And so I guess I want to, here's a way to start. Where, from your perspective, were we moving up as far as progress was concerned? And A, are we still, I think I know the answer to this, unfortunately.

But, and where do you think the, the, the tipping point was to, to start moving in the wrong direction? Cause I, cause I, I feel like there was a point where we were absolutely moving in the right direction. We were, you know, laws and all these different things were being put in place and, and not just for charity, sir, like for real purposes. So could you help me understand where, where you saw it kind of on the increase, but it, and is it on the decrease now? Yeah. I mean, there's so much to unpack there. First of all, one of the things I would say to people is no one fights this hard against something that isn't working. So remember that. So the amount of effort and attention people have paid to undermine DEI efforts gives you some sense that something was working, right?

Cause if it's not working, if it's not having any impact, what do you care? You don't pay it any attention, but something was triggering about the advancements that were happening. But two things can be true. One is that things could, things were moving in a good direction, but they also weren't moving fast enough. Right? So you have two complaints about the recent period of attempts to diversify the workplace. One, it's going too far. It's going too fast. Two, it didn't go fast enough. It didn't go far enough. It didn't really do anything. Right? So that's bananas, right? But both things can be true, that it changed how we thought about, discussed the work, but it also didn't dig deep enough because the idea that a recent modality, which diversity, equity, inclusion are just words.

Diversity exists. Inclusion is something and equity is a part of our constitution. I think like, this is crazy. Like those are words, but it's no different than affirmative action. It's no different than the Freedmen's Bureau after formerly enslaved people were really raised from bondage. Like none of this is different, but the pushback against each one is very similar. And so there's something going on about concerns around advancement that are real. But on the other hand, diversity, equity, inclusion was not going to be able to change 400 years of systemic equity problems within, let's say, the last four years. Like that was an unrealistic burden to start. So that's one thing. So on the one hand, yes, change was happening.

On the other hand, was it happening deep enough, fast enough? No. But it was clearly happening too much for those who oppose it because they have spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours degrading and undermining the work. So there's that. The other thing about, I can get advancement that we as humans get a little confused on is progress is not linear. You know, there's a concept called spiral dynamics, which some people may be familiar with. And in spiral dynamics, there's this base level that humans are, and we advance up as we're on our way. And at each jump forward, let's say there's two jumps forward, there's a half a jump back, or there's a full jump back. And then there's a pop forward, and then there's a pull forward back.

So under the concept of spiral dynamics, one could say, okay, we had a pull forward, and now this is the pull back. And then, you know, the goal is there'll be a spring two leaps forward eventually again. Like, there isn't a straight line because we as a country have advanced and pulled back, advanced and pulled back many, many times, right? So we free enslaved people. We have reconstruction. And then we had Jim Crow, which is a pullback, right? So this is something that we do. And so I really want people to contextualize, which is why you have to be ever vigilant, which is why people cannot assume rights, like we've seen with the right of choice. We can't assume rights are permanent because they're not.

And I think part of the problem is people have an expectation of permanency, and they put too much pressure on what was a small modality, DEI, to fix hundreds of years of systemic problems. Like, that's bananas. Yeah, and this is, I mean, we can get into some of that systemic stuff. And, you know, I think as it relates to hiring and everything else, which you highlight in this book, but it's, it, it, it's hard to, I mean, for me, it's hard to look at this and go, Jesus, like, what can be, what can really be done? You know, at the end of the, because of how systemic it is, because of, you know, whether you believe in like the Illuminati scenarios and whatever, but there is just so many things that are entwined in this that, you know, and we'll get to some suggestions that you have of what like an individual can do here, right?

But what is, let's start with just the title of the book here. Help you understand what competency checking is, because this was super interesting as I, as I kind of scanned through your book and pulled out some of the highlights here. And I see it, but I, but it, but it was something that I didn't see until I was, I was shown. And I think that's the problem is like, you know, I have, you know, the, the, obviously my lens, right. As a white male here in America, this world was made from, this country was made for me. I'm six foot white dude, you know, middle class. Well, it was made for you if you were white Protestant male. Are you Protestant? No, I'm, well, I'm, I'm spiritual these days. I grew up Catholic.

I ain't Catholic anymore. Just because I, I always want people to contextualize that because it really was created for a narrow band of people. And then it kind of starts expanding out. Does that make sense? So anyway. Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, and I do believe that like almost every group has been marginalized in some way in, in some portion. Like I'm, I, my, my background's Irish, right? Like the Irish were ostracized, the Italians were, they had their own separate set of town that, you know, the Asian. So I understand that, but it just seems like that, that people of color specifically, it's, it's so deep rooted and, and, you know, the redrawing of lines and districts and making so that like the voting and all that other stuff, it's, it's a very targeted thing.

Whereas all these other groups seem to have their day, you know what I mean? Like they had their moment where that sucked for you for a solid 10, 20, 30, even 50 years, but it's not 400. It's not, you know, so systemic that it, that it almost seems unbearable. Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is whiteness, right? So the, the, the, what I call the offer and acceptance of whiteness, right? People were offered entry into whiteness, which, which took something away. It took away. Wait, what do you mean? So tell me that again. So what do you mean by offering whiteness? Offered whiteness. So Italians and Irish people were not originally white, right? In the United States, they were not, especially Italians, especially Southern Italians.

They were not white. They were seen as some kind of ethnics, but whiteness was really the purview of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. That's who really was white. And then you have all these subcategories. And as things change and, and to a large extent, that offer and acceptance of being really included in whiteness in whiteness starts to happen at different times for different groups, you know, in the forties. And actually it really completes itself for many, ironically, during the civil rights struggles. So when you look at housing patterns, housing discrimination for Italian Americans and Irish folks still existed, whether on the books or not, up until anti-housing discrimination. So you get these ethnic enclaves.

Like I tell people, little Italy's were not, they're not just tourist places. They were ghettos. You know, they were, they were the places people could live because they couldn't live other places. And as, uh, at the end of World War II is one time where that starts to expand. But even then you get these suburbs that are primarily Italian or primarily Irish. They still keep that ethnic. It's not until the sixties when anti-discrimination laws and housing really bust open housing that you see these areas push out and you see this, this full participation in whiteness from ethnic whites. Right. So I would say white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you know, for most of us history, didn't consider other ethnics on their level at all.

Um, and they certainly didn't consider them part of them, but, um, after or during slavery, um, white Anglo-Saxons start to offer whiteness to other ethnicities to help them. Keep control of enslaved people. So whiteness is something that other people got entry to, but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, that's their birthright, I guess, the way they have seen it, but other ethnics got entry to it. And that entry took a long time. Um, and it took letting go of, separating from, and degrading that ethnic identity, right? So there was a lot lost in that transition. You hear people say, well, I'm just white. Well, nobody's just white. Like, first of all, white and black are made up, right? Hopefully people know that.

They're not real terms. They don't go back to antiquity. Although somebody told me it says so in the Bible. It does not say so in the Bible. The King James translation puts a racial lens on something that is not correct. Um, but in any event, um, these are things created around the world, but in the United States, white and black are created for a power dynamic and to justify enslavement, right? So I always tell people, if you went back to 1640 in the United States and you said, we're all the white people, people would look at you like, what? Because they did not call themselves that. They called themselves Protestants, Englishmen, Catholics, Virginians, blacksmith, you know, people identified by ethnicity, job, and religion.

And it's only, um, after Bacon's rebellion, which is a little history lesson that in the United States, we really start identifying this idea of white and black and it starts to be something we call ourselves. So anyway, that's, that's, that's why. But I do, I do want to circle back to something, which is, um, diversity, equity, inclusion in the workplace is something international companies have always done and continue to do, which is if you are going to expand your markets into diverse countries and diverse areas, guess what you have to do? You have to diversify your workforce. So it reflects the people there. You have to be inclusive about their holidays, their cultural traditions, and you'd have to be equitable figuring out what that pay scale is between you in the States and your companies on the ground.

Now people say, well, Nike or somebody else plays, you know, children to do these things. But yes, that's true. But overall companies, when they move into a international posture are doing the EI all the time. And so what I would love for businesses is to shift their understanding of DEI. We have a diverse workforce in the States. We have a diverse consumer base that's getting more diverse every day. So what it means to operate in this space means understanding that, right? So, but historically, understanding the history of your, your point, why is it so different for black people in particular? And then other people of color, obviously black people could not get access to whiteness the way other ethnic cities could, right?

So the Irish, definitely no Irish, you know, derogatory things. But once that change happened, it happened. Black folks were never going to get access to that, right? And as a result, it starts a whole different road that gets us to today. Does that make sense? Is that too much of a, like, I also taught as an adjunct at a university. So if I get to professorial. No, I love it. I'm getting educated here. This is actually, I love this. If I get to professorial. The access to whiteness, that's a, that's, I've never really thought about that before, but that is a hundred percent true. And again, to your point, it didn't happen overnight, you know, it just, it evolved that way. But it's interesting to, to, to kind of wrap your head around the fact that it's not black and white.

You know what I mean? Like it's, or, or like, when did we start identifying as white versus. That's right. Right. Those type of things. Well, you know, the interesting part about that is, uh, black people and new Irish immigrants, we're talking on plantation. So indentured servants had good relationships, um, intermarried, not a story unknown. Um, Italian Americans, when they lived in the South, good relationships, intermarried as those groups sought access to whiteness, they became some of the staunchest defenders of race and racism because they wanted their place, you know? So they, there were, there were, that's what I'm saying. We, we don't know our hit the ebb and flow of our history. So we don't know about the pull, the push, the pushback, the go forward.

And this is just another one of those moments. Yeah. So as it gets to organizations and trying to address this, you know, I think there's, and I, you know, I give the tech industry shit, but yeah, I don't think it's ill intended. You know, I, I, I think there is for the most part, positive intentions to try to do something about this. But I think the issue that we talked about is it's almost never a strategic initiative. It's always a, Oh, because we should, we, we kind of have to do this, right? Like, like everybody else is doing it. So, so let's talk about this, this, this hiring and, and especially help define for me what competency checking is. And then I want to get into some of these hidden barriers, shadow pipeline and all this other stuff, but let's start with what is competency checking and why is it an issue?

So competency checking is something I identified through my own career in life. Things happen to me. And as a consultant working over the last five years with different organizations, individuals that I saw something was happening. And I was like, it, it, it has a name and I'm sure what is the name of this? And what I came up with was competency checking. And what that means is that black people in particular, though it does happen to other people of color and women are frequently forced to prove their knowledge, skill, and right to be in present in, in certain spaces more than others, specifically more than white folks, but, but more than almost all others. And so their knowledge and skill is always in question and everybody feels empowered to check, verify, affirm how deep the knowledge goes.

Is it rote memorization? Well, you know, how did you get that? How do you know that? Do you really know that? You know, this, this idea of checking because the fundamental assumption is that blackness itself is unqualified. That black people are not, uh, intellectually intelligent, intellectually capable, and therefore you have to hold them to higher standards. You have to check them more. And this shows up in hiring, in the initial hiring, it shows up in employment and it shows up in advancement. And one of the things I tried to do in the book was really put some data behind this, not just like it's feelings. And the data is, shows that it, what it shows is that black people frequently have more education and more experience for jobs that white people have equal comparable jobs, have less education and less experience.

Black people have to have more experience, more education for certain jobs. They have to perform at a higher level consistently to keep their job. They have to meet higher standards to get promoted in their jobs. So the problem is people are assuming black people are unqualified and consequently they are, they feel empowered. They, they can check their competency at all levels of their, their journey through work based on a false assumption about intellectual ability and competence, which is historical, which stays with us today. Right. So competency checking shows up in, you know, initial work, even name bias is part of competency checking. You know, when someone sees a name that seems like it could be African-American, they assume the person is not intelligent and therefore they won't hire them because they don't feel they're confident, right?

That's checking their competency based on their name. Um, I have some, uh, research in the book from, I think, Korn Ferry, where they talk about black PNL leaders, uh, who are equally and superior in skill, not getting promotions, not getting through, getting the hardest work, hardest assignments, assignments for failure. So the assumption is that diversity, equity, inclusion is about unqualified people getting jobs. When in fact, diversity, equity, inclusion is about removing blockages that are preventing qualified people from getting jobs. That is actually what is going on. But if you believe that diversity, equity, inclusion is you, you know, you're a large grass giving poor wretched, unsmart people opportunities because they're so not right.

Then yeah, I guess that sounds like a terrible thing and it's weird, but that's not what I'm not what it is. You know, I tell people the pipeline, isn't broken. The pipeline, um, is blocked and it's blocked by a series of competency checks that put your in product that one or two people, when there's hundreds lined up, slamming up against these barriers, trying to get through. Well, I think even from the applicant pool standpoint, right? I think, you know, you see so many companies, well, we just, we didn't get any candidates. You know what I mean? We didn't get any black candidates. We didn't get any women candidates, especially in sales. Right. It's like, well, where'd you look, you know, did you just do a, did you just do a posting on LinkedIn or get referrals?

And which is another thing that you bring up here, which is, you know, shadow pipeline or hidden barriers. Right. Referral-based hiring, you know, that is essentially a race-based hiring, uh, platform and referral-based hiring, uh, benefits white people. It's, I think the number is somewhere around 80 to 90%, like a very significant, uh, benefit. It all, it almost is a closed system. And we know some things about referral-based hiring. Referral-based hiring makes up 30% to 40% of all hiring. And it is a less formal way in, which, which means that people aren't looking as hard at your qualifications. You already have kind of, uh, support, um, it's not just family and friends. It could be anybody referral-based hiring.

So it is a, a closed, almost exclusively white favoring hiring system, but, and it does not benefit, uh, black people the same. In fact, when black people who work at a company refer people, their referrals don't go, uh, anywhere. They don't go through as fast. They don't, so, so it's not like, oh, black people can just start referring people or white people can just start referring black people. It doesn't work like that because of assumptions about competency, white people refer people. And because that is a more relaxed system, that system is accounting for 30 to 40% of hires. It's the best way in black people come in the more formal front door where they have to meet again, much higher standards.

It's much more rigorous. It's, oh, I don't know, you know, you know, so it's, it's a, so yeah. So if, if you have a hidden system that is bringing in 30 to 40% of hires that black people really don't have access to, and then you have a more formal front-facing system, sure. You don't, you don't have a lot of people in your pipeline because you're blocking them from getting it. So how do you address that? Because I mean, human nature, right? I think we all want to, not all of us, but I think there is an inherent, like people, oh, you look like me. You know what I mean? So it's, it's more comfortable, right? When somebody, anything different feels awkward, right? Whether it's a look, you know, or environment or whatever it is.

So again, going back to like, I don't think it's maybe, you know, overtly being done in a malicious way in some cases, how do you unplug somebody from the matrix, if you will, to realize that like every time they do make that referral that they think is a really good thing because they're helping their friend out, they're helping their company out, that it's actually doing a disservice to the organization in a lot of ways because it's, it's limiting the diversity. So is there a way to wake people up to that hidden, those hidden barriers, those things that, you know, cause everybody's got an excuse, right? But the data's there. Yeah. But some people, but people don't change their mind based on data.

Yeah. I mean, you have to do a combination of data and storytelling. And then you also have to say it's not appropriate and, you know, it may require a legal challenge. I mean, here's the thing. If we're going to be suing about DEI, then perhaps we should sue about referral-based hiring. I mean, if we're going to say that somehow one Black person in a building disadvantages white people, does 40% of hires who are primarily white who come through referral-based hiring, does that disadvantage anyone? You know, so it may require lawsuits. You know, it is, it's like legacy admissions, right? You know, you have legacy admissions that come through the back door in university. And I've known some legacy admissions.

I've known some. Some are bright, some are not. I've known some, right? And so here's the thing. If you're going to say that the 10 Black people in Harvard's law school out of the hundreds are disadvantaging people, then what about the several hundred who come in every year through legacy, right? So that is the question that companies have to answer. And people have to just realistically face the facts, you know? So it's a combination. And what I would suggest is I would like to see companies bring that number down. I would like to see them bring that number down. I do acknowledge that. The referral-based number? Yeah, right. I acknowledge that humans do, you know, whatever. But can we get it down to 15%, you know, or 10%?

And because it isn't a system that works that well for out-group people. It doesn't work that well for women, though it can work better for white women than it does Black folks or other people of color. It doesn't work well for other people of color. It doesn't work well. It works well for a very narrow group of people. And so it's disingenuous to say, wherever can I find people, when you clearly have a system set up that doesn't, you know, doesn't do that. So to acknowledge the fact that referral-based hiring is going to happen, I mean, I would like to see it not happen. But knowing that it would happen, I would say, can companies, they have the data. They need to bring that number down, you know, as low as they can get it.

And then open up their front door broader as to who they're bringing in. And then they would find a whole universe of people they could potentially hire. One of the things that I'm encouraged with, that I see at the, you know, in the tech industry specifically is that they're starting to loosen up finally on, like, the college degree scenario, right? Where it's like, you know, before you had to be at Stanford, you had to be at all these smart schools, and you had to have a degree to even get an invitation. And now they're realizing, okay, like, there's plenty of smart people out there, and they don't necessarily all have degrees. So that's the one of those kind of positive trends I see. One of the negative trends I see, though, is the application of AI into the process.

Have you started to kind of pick on or look at any data on the implicit bias that AI has on interview screening and resume screening and job application writing and those type of things, or do you think that's actually going to help? No, I mean, I don't think AI is going to help. I think AI is us, right? It's the craziest thing. People talk about AI like it birthed itself. AI is us. We are it. And so our biases, our understandings are in it. And, you know, there have been people in the industry who are trying to highlight that out and they kind of get drummed out of the industry and people don't listen. And it ends up that AI is even more of an enforcer of biases and barriers, right? And so that makes it very complicated to rely on AI.

You know, me personally, I have conflicting feelings about AI. You know, I use ChatGPT just like everybody else for different things, but I don't rely on it because, first of all, it's a hallucinator. It makes up stuff. I mean, I've never seen anything like it. I mean, it makes up things. It's wild. I mean, you know, there's these, I've tried it and it makes up, it'll make up court cases. It'll make up citations. It's bananas. And this is not what I heard. This is what I've seen, you know? So you really, you know, relying on something that is hallucinatory and potentially bias is bananas. But that's what people are doing. And I think it really requires us to interrogate our instruments in the same way we interrogate our work.

But AI can only do what we do. It can only know what we know, you know? And what we know is we make differences based on people's last names or their names. And if AI has that in its memory, it's going to kick out ethnic names also, right? So there you go. You know, and AI also can't account for nuance. The thing about hiring, and I have this chapter in the book called The Myth of Qualifications, and I call it that because it is a myth. There's never been a time in American history where your only requirement was to be the smartest, da, da, da. That's not true. Like, most of how people got hired was family, money, access. Some people had good education or good grades. Some people didn't. It's not, you know, education, grades, et cetera, is not the final indicator of somebody's experience to excel and succeed.

And that's across the board. And so if those opportunities aren't there, you're missing all kinds of intelligence. But the other thing you mentioned, which is actually a bias toward certain universities in tech, one of the things I talk about in the book is that there are other schools, like in Texas, I think it was the University of Houston, I can't remember the school off the top of my head that was turning out tech graduates who are Black and primarily Hispanic, Latinx, and just, but they weren't getting those jobs. So it wasn't even like you had to find people who didn't have the education. They had education, but the university wasn't the right university, right? So there is a lot of shell game going on here about who's available to hire, you know, based on certain biases, a prestige bias is the one I was looking for, is a problem, right?

And, you know, Harvard versus University of Houston, oh, I can only hire the only the people who come out of Harvard. Well, that's prestige bias. And again, it sets up a scenario where you're going to get just a very specific set of people. Yeah, you'll get a profile, you'll get a very specific one. All right, a couple more questions here. You mentioned in the book, Black women specifically are the canaries in the workplace coal mine. Yeah. And what, so what lessons can organizations, so first of all, explain that. And second of all, what can we learn about that so that, so that we can address it? So help me understand what the canary in the coal mine concept is here. Yeah, so Black women are very interested in leadership.

They're, they're very much about obtaining education, trying to advance in their careers. And yet they are being met with an overwhelming resistance in the workplace, like an overwhelming resistance. And it's nonprofits, it's for profits, it's the arts, it doesn't matter where it is. And what they are running up against is an indicator that the system, the workplace system for Black people in general, and I would argue other people of color, is not well. There's something in there killing the canaries, right? Because Black women are being shed out of corporate spaces at a high, at an alarming rate, at an alarming rate. One, because they themselves cannot withstand the constant onslaught of issues such as tone policing, harassing how they speak, what do they do?

You know, the consistent competency checking. Do you know what you're talking about? Do you know what you're doing? Undermining, like it's just killing them. And then, and then in addition to them leaving themselves, they're being shed out of positions. And so that, that seemed anecdotal and talking to people, but then employment data backed that up, that Black women lost employment at a, at the highest rate. And I think it was 2023. So what Black women are showing is there is a problem. So here you have people who have the education, because I thought we needed the education. And then you have people who have the skill. I thought we needed the skill. And then you have, and they still cannot make it through and they still cannot maintain their positions.

So that's houses the, the, the depth of resistance that is going on and that there is something alarming happening that is potentially endangering, uh, not just them, but Black and other people of color's ability to make a living, right? This is, this is a real problem, you know? And everybody can't be an entrepreneur. As I talk about in the book, people say, oh, just start your own business. Well, that's easy, easier said than done, right? Number one, everybody doesn't want to do that. Number two, you can't trade from an Island. Like you have to have trade partners. Even if you have your own business. I mean, think about Walmart saying they're going to retreat from diversity suppliers. It's very hard for diverse suppliers to get into supply systems.

So if, if I have my own business, who, who am I trading with? Right? So that is the, why I call Black women, the canaries in the workplace, Coleman, because their numbers, their data, their experience is a leading indicator of what's, we're going to see as a lagging problem for other people of color in the workplace. So let's talk about some tactical stuff we can do, right? Like this feels like boiling the ocean here, but what are some organizations to, to maybe highlight the old implicit biases that they have that they didn't know they had, or, you know, those, those blockages, like you say, what are some tactical things that people like listening to this right now could either do themselves as individuals or go back to their organization and try to change a little?

Well, okay. Well, before I answer that specifically, I do have to talk about my favorite topic, which is a change that people can make. And that is imposter syndrome. Okay. We can stop talking about imposter syndrome as a real thing and we can deconstruct the ways in which workplaces are making many people uncomfortable and, and engage in more collective action to help each other in the workplace. So just a quick thing, imposter syndrome, everybody feels insecure. I get that. Everybody feels uncertain. That's a feeling humans have. Imposter syndrome is a problem. It's been weaponized, particularly against women where, and I would say, especially white women, where they feel that they are at fault for their own insecurity, when really it's a response to being in environments that aren't designed for you.

And if we shift our thinking, that means we can engage in more collective action to change the places where we work. Right. And that means we can work together to be like, Hey, you know, I'm feeling bad about being a mother at work is not something we should be doing. And our workplace is 50% women. Hmm. Maybe we should work together to address that. Right. So part of it is moving from individual to collective. So that, that's one thing. And removing that barrier that is imposter syndrome could help us do that. The other thing is, oh, go ahead. Sorry. Do you mind if I ask on that point? Because, because I was always, because, you know, I feel imposter syndrome. Everybody, everybody feels imposter syndrome.

One of the things that helped me deal with it, and this is from my perspective, right? From the white male standpoint is that the woman who I was talking about actually on the podcast, she's like, well, one of the reasons is imposter syndrome is because it's actually in a lot of ways a good thing because it means you're growing and you've never really been at this level before. So inherently when you get to the next level, you've never been there before. So you feel like an imposter, but then after you get there and you kind of figure it out, you don't feel like an imposter anymore. That's my perspective, my lens. Right. I know. How is imposter syndrome different for a black woman, a white woman?

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So when you talk to most black women in honesty about imposter syndrome, they roll their eyes because black women do not generally feel like imposters. They feel like I come to work and I'm harassed and people want me to be an imposter and I'm not an imposter. And this puts them at odds with white women who frequently feel like they are an imposter. So they feel either challenged by black women who don't feel that way. Why are you so confident? I mean, it ends up being a whole situation. And so most black women do not like or validate the idea of imposter syndrome. Again, I really need to separate that from insecurity. We all feel insecure. You might come into a new job and feel insecure.

That is separate. And the problem with imposter syndrome, which I talk about in the book, is the research is terrible that created this idea. It was a small study, a small group of, I think, 47, I don't know, a small group of women, primarily white upper middle class women. And the study was done in the 70s, mid 70s to late 70s. These women were the first white women in professional spaces, right? In the time the study happened, white women finally got the ability to have, well, women in general, but to have their own bank account. The study never identifies the insecurity. They call it a phony syndrome in the study. The study does not talk about the times in which they lived, patriarchy, or the impact of being the vanguard in the workplace.

That was what was making the women feel uncomfortable and making them feel like imposter. How can you not feel like an imposter if you go to a place where nobody looks like you, nobody is like you, and nobody speaks like you? I mean, so that is my problem. And what my issue with imposter syndrome, if we've conflated it with normal human insecurity into a syndrome that is an individual failing. And that means that if you think you have an individual problem, when really you have a systemic problem, you are going to be less inclined to do systemic solutions to your problems. So that means that white women are going to be less inclined to see the system as a problem and more their personal failing, right?

And so that is, that's, you know, I call it like a Scooby-Doo character that you got to unmask and the villain is not, it's not who you think it is, right? So I'm never saying that people don't feel uncomfortable, feel uncertain in workplaces, but I'm saying imposter syndrome is not a real thing. And it's actually masking the impact of patriarchy, white supremacy, and being in workplaces that are uncomfortable. And that, of course, you are going to walk into a boardroom where everybody's a white man and you're the only white woman, you're not an imposter, you're, you're a rational human being. Who wouldn't walk into that space and feel uncomfortable? That is rational. The solution for that is to change the space so that the solution is not to change you.

The solution is to change the space. And see, we are, we diverge there a lot. I think white women and black women particularly, we diverge at that point. We are more interested in how do you change the space and less about, look, oh, I'm, I need to fix myself, you know? And I tell the story in the book because it's just so shocking. I had this woman who wanted me to do a talk on imposter syndrome and I told her my thoughts about it. And she was so shocked and she says, oh, I had somebody tell me that everybody has imposter syndrome and anybody who says they don't is a liar or a narcissist. And I was like, oh man, this is, this too much. We've, we've gone too far, you know, because if you don't admit to this syndrome, then you are a narcissist or a liar.

Well, you can see how that could put black women in a really tough spot because most black women do not feel that. They feel competent to be in spaces, but they recognize that there are limitations in those spaces that need to be addressed. Does that make sense? Oh, it makes total sense. No, it makes total sense. And I think that, well, I think everybody also needs, like these days it's frustrating. Everybody wants to label something as something, right? When it's really just like, go back, like you said, like, let's, let's peel back the layers here. All that is, is this. We just got a name for it now and it's sexy and people say it without thinking about what it means. And they made too broad, too broad of a brush, you know?

But looking at the original data, you actually see what was missed and it's kind of cringy that it became this thing we all think we have, which I never thought I had. But anytime I said that, the faces were like, and I'm like, I just, you know, so that's the problem. So that's one thing we can do is shift to collective action and think about collectively what are the issues that we can impact together? The other thing I talk about is companies auditing thing, auditing their results, you know, really looking at, to your point, where are you hiring from? What percentage of your hires are referrals? What are the resumes, time, application you accept for some people and others? One thing I also ask companies to do is who do you give the benefit of the doubt to and who do you not, so, you know, who are you saying, well, they don't have this, but I'm going to promote them, but they have all this, but I'm not going to promote them.

Like, what, you know, what's that about? And we can, we can look at that through data and we can evaluate that. And if you don't have the internal capacity, you can do that externally, right? When it comes to, you know, reviews, you know, I'm not a big fan of 360s. I'm not a fan of some of the review processes that we have in place. We can do more in-time, real reviews with people where we go through their actual work product, right? And we want to move a bit away from, I feel, I don't, I don't think with people, right? Because we know that's where bias comes in more. So we really want to try to limit those, those areas. I want companies ultimately to see DEI and diversity or inclusion or whatever you want to say about it as a strategic imperative for growth.

That is number one. I think if companies understand that this is about a strategic imperative, it's about the difference between being Blockbuster or Netflix, that this is what this is about. This is not about, and it has never been about giving unqualified people access to employment. That is, that's a red herring, a straw man, whatever you want to call it. It's never been about that. And so if companies can shift to weave this in systemically to their work, it's about, to me, how a company can win the future, right? Because you're, every company has a right to understand and support a workforce that works well together. And a workforce that is a diverse workforce around language and gender and differences isn't going to work well together if they don't have the tools to work well together.

So that's, that's your job as a business, bringing in tools, helping people understand each other. What does it mean to communicate across difference? You know, people, I've consulted a lot of businesses, some fortune 100s, and people often say, oh, I don't have time for this and that. But you have time to waste time. You waste a lot of time on confusion. You waste a lot of time on misunderstanding. So I think you have time to talk a bit about communicating across difference. I really encourage, you know, a lot of people spend a lot of money on, is a blue communicator, a Myers-Briggs, a Myers-Briggs, a this or that. I'm not a fan of any of that. First of all, most of it is junk science. Sorry, people.

It is. But there are real differences we need to understand how to communicate across. And those are gender and race and, and sexual orientation and language. And if we understood that better, we would be much farther along in our abilities to work together. The other thing I think we have to really contextualize is the modern American workforce that is as diverse as it is. And by diversity, I mean age. We have one of the most age-diverse workforces ever right now, gender class. We have one of the most class-diverse workforces. Work used to be segregated by class well until the 80s, to be honest. I mean, the 70s, but well until the 80s. So this is actually new still. We're like 40-some, maybe 39 years into this.

What does it mean to have a really robustly diverse workforce? And we've never dug down into that. You know, all of our management, all of our training, all of it still presupposes a homogeneous, very specific-looking workforce. We really, and so DEI really came to say, hey, let's look at the workforce today and let's figure out how we do that better and how we, you know, create and bring more diversity. And then the final thing I think for companies is, and there is a lot of data on this, we are missing out on the growth of markets in this country, right? So we think about the growth of markets in other countries. But the racism has diverted, according to a study, over $16 trillion from Black American wealth.

And that wealth could be going into the economy. So it's actually costing all of us in all these ways that we haven't. I often tell people how many businesses or industries could still exist if we hadn't, we didn't suppress so much wealth in the United States. It takes a lot of work to suppress wealth accumulation, which is done, right? So what if we unleashed that, right? And saw it as a net positive. You know, how many people say, oh, these people are taking my jobs. Well, maybe your job isn't good. What if one of those people was an entrepreneur and you got a better job, right? So this is the things that we have to think about. And I think there are very concrete steps that companies can take, individuals can take to collectively move forward.

I talk about how women, in particular white women, are the vanguard in HR, right? They make up, really, the majority of HR because it's ghettoized. It's ghettoized for women in corporate spaces, HR. But that's, they're the inside man. You know, if they had a better sense of systemic issues, they could work more proactively and collectively to help, it's not just about helping women or helping people of color, but ultimately I believe these things help everybody. You know, I really do. I think a more diverse and open workforce helps everybody. I think of how many white men, you know, in the 50s and 60s weren't straight males and had to pretend at work, didn't drink, have to drink at work. Maybe they wanted to be home with their kids and their families.

Oh, that's terrible. Opening all of this up has actually helped all of us. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, and we can get into that, but the data on it is, is under that. Like, that's why it's so frustrating because the data is there, right? The data of diverse organizations perform better. They have higher job satisfaction. They have higher customer satisfaction. They have higher, but it's just like, you know, it's like these days facts don't matter, right? Well, and you're fighting an onslaught of a well-funded counter narrative. I mean, there are people, I mean, the Claremont Institute in California is a juggernaut of disinformation around anything related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and they spend a lot of money and they have a lot of resources to undermine that message.

Yeah. It's the same. My wife's an environmental scientist and it's the same thing on that. I mean, not, not the same, but the similar. No, they spend a lot of money to tell people the opposite. Oh, it's fine. Yeah. Like Exxon has their nice cute little, like, oh, we do some green stuff while they get $93 billion of profit a quarter and just keep pumping oil into the oceans and stuff. So it's like, okay, great. Right. And pretending like this stuff isn't actually happening when we can all look outside and say, oh, these storms are getting worse, you know, like, I don't care if it's humans or not, it's, it's happening. So. Well, and that's one reason why in the book I did take the first two and a half, two and a half, three chapters to explain the rationale because people have heard a totally different rationale and they don't know, they don't know why.

Well, even as simple as it's not simple, but what you had said about like the affirmative action component of this, which is the feeling that we're giving people who are less qualified an opportunity over a white person that isn't, you know, that is more qualified. That's not the case. And I, but I think that's the prevailing that that's what most people think when it comes to affirmative action. It's like, oh, we're, we're giving these poor, you know, people who aren't. It really is qualified. And, you know, we got to give them a chance here because the law is telling us to, it's like, no, no, no, you're actually, it's, it's a perception thing, not a reality thing. Like they're more qualified.

And what happened, what, what was happening and what is still happening is that black people are not specifically getting an equal chance of employment. And, you know, I tell that story in the book about my mom having her application crumbled up in the garbage and thrown in the garbage right in front of her. I mean, that was the situation pre-affirmative action. So clearly it didn't have anything to do with qualifications. It's just, I don't want to hire you. Right. So I, we, we assume things have changed in a way they have not, uh, at a level they have not. And so I talk about it as anti-rejection medication, right? And like, if you get a transplant and you stop taking your anti-rejection medication, that's not going to end well for you.

And so the EEOC and affirmative action are anti-rejection medications that are designed to make sure that there is an opportunity. Right. But the other thing I do have to say is white people and other people of color have a right to be bad at their jobs, just like everybody else. Like white people are, I know some white people who are terrible at their jobs. And I've never heard anybody say, oh, we can't hire any more white people. But I have heard people say, oh, we hired one black person. I mean, it's ridiculous. Like that takes away humanity, right? So they could be bad at their job. They could be good at their job. But they have a right to have the opportunity just like everybody else. And the assumption is they do and they don't.

Because again, we know it starts with your name for entry-level jobs. We can see it happening even with education and qualification. So we know there's a problem, right? So pretending there's not a problem and then saying everybody's equal. You know, I tell the story in a book about my uncle and World War II. The GI Bill is the clearest example of what happens when you try to be race blind, right? You know, it, well, so the GI Bill was a race neutral bill. It was really great because it made no difference for black or any other veteran. So that is a colorblind legislation, right? But what happened when that colorblind legislation hit a race-based system was that almost no black black GIs received the GI housing loan.

The number of black GIs who received the GI housing loan out of 2 million was something in the hundreds, maybe 1,000. It's a very small number. And the reason was because the implementation of the, more black GIs got the education benefit, but not a lot. And they couldn't use it, so they would go to cause, but they couldn't get the job. But the housing one is a particular example. So they would try to get a loan. The bank wouldn't loan it. The FHA, the Fair Housing Administration, wouldn't secure or give them security for their loan in areas they wanted to buy housing. Housing discrimination meant they couldn't buy in the suburbs. They couldn't use the loan, really. And so it was colorblind.

It was colorblind legislation. But when it hit a system that was not colorblind, that was race-based, it inured to the benefit of white people. So millions of black veterans were systematically blocked out of effectively using the VA housing loans after World War II. And people say, well, that's local fault. Believe me, the NAACP, the Urban League, they complained to the federal government. There was a lot of advocacy done, and they still didn't get that money. And that sets in motion the economic inequality. The wealth gap. Right? That is why. So you have huge suburbs built all throughout the United States. Those are all white. Not because black people didn't want to move. They wanted that.

And those suburbs appreciate in value. And you have the biggest expansion of wealth in American history after World War II that black people are excluded from because a colorblind policy didn't take into account race-based reality. So, you know, if we are saying we're going to go back to a colorblind system that doesn't take into account race-based reality, it's not going to end well for black and other people of color because it hasn't ended well. Right? So they weren't asking for anything special. It's just the system wasn't designed for them to access it. Does that make sense? That totally makes sense. Yeah. I think, I mean, we should have this conversation for hours just so that more people won't hear it.

And I could have it because there's just so many layers to this. And before we let you go, though, how was your name supposed to be spelled? How did your mom want your name to be spelled? Because this is crazy that just for context for people listening, like, your mom wanted you to be spelled a certain way. And literally the nurse was like, no, no, no, that's not the way it's spelled and threw it and changed it. So what was your name supposed to be? Like, how was it supposed to be spelled? I use that as an early kind of trying to explain competency checking, right? Like how people feel empowered to tell black people they don't know what they're talking about. They don't know what they're doing.

So I was born a long time ago when nurses filled out birth certificates. And my mother wanted it to be spelled S-H-A-R-I, which is a long story because my grandmother, my father's mother, wanted me to be named Harriet. And she was on the way to her hospital. And my mother's like, no way, this child's going to be named Harriet. And sorry, Harriet, it's no offense, but my mother did not like that. She really did like it. And so she was up against it. And so she remembered Sherry Lewis, who's a puppeteer, who had a puppet called Lamb Chop. So you're old enough to remember Lamb Chop. I remember Lamb Chop, yeah. So Sherry Lewis spelled her name with an A. So my mother said she wanted to spell S-H-A-R-I.

And the nurse said, that's not how it's spelled. It's spelled S-H-E-R-I. And my mother's like, no, you know, she went. So anyway, find out years later, I got my birth certificate. It had S-H-E-R-I on it. And I actually had to go to court to legally change my name to put the A in my name, which is ridiculous. But yeah, so it's Sherry with an A. Awesome. Well, Sherry with an A. I'm glad you had it changed. Where can people find out more? Again, the book for people listening is Qualified, How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work. So where can people find out more about you, about the book, learn more about this to try to make a difference here? Yeah, yeah. Everything you can find on the, T-H-E, Sherry, S-H-A-R-I, D-U-N-N.com.

So the Sherry Dunn.com. You can find out everything. You can find out how to purchase the book, more about the book, more about me, more about pretty much everything. So we'll just send you to the Sherry Dunn.com. Love it. Awesome, Sherry. Well, thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation. Like I said, I think it needs to be had more often. It needs to be had out loud. And hopefully somebody out there listening is going to take an extra step here to move in the right direction as opposed to reverting back to, unfortunately, where it feels like we're going these days. But I think we can, there's hope, right? There's hope. We can always bounce forward. We can always bounce forward.

And I think we need to. So thank you again for all the work that you do and for having this conversation. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And for everybody else listening, I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. And like I say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, make somebody smile today and you know you had a good day. And the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I'll see you on the other side. Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. With your support and our incredible guests, we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now.

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