Podcast appearances and mentions of pamela newkirk

This special episode features a spirited conversation between award-winning journalist and biographer Pamela Newkirk and BIO's 2023 Plutarch Award-winner Jennifer Homans. The Plutarch Award recognizes the best biography of the […]

In Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business Pamela Newkirk exposes the decades-old practices and attitudes that have made diversity a lucrative business […]

Pamela Newkirk is an author, journalist, and professor, and C Street Board of Advisors member. You'll hear Pamela explain why the billions of dollars being spent on diversity have resulted in so little progress; her belief that when you have a diversity problem, you have a leadership problem; and the importance of empowering people to bring their full selves to work. 

 “As long as “diversity” and “representation” is on the website, we are safe.” These terms that hold immense impact, nowadays have almost become exploited as a marketable proof that an institution is “politically correct”. From casting a BIPOC actor to a stereotypical role to building diversity initiatives that are for the benefit of the institutions, we seek to examine the issue of a lack of authentic and genuine change and inclusion in the film industry. Discussions around “representation” on screen is essential. However, at the root, are the decision makers in the room and those behind the scenes. From a series of interviews of emerging and established female filmmakers of colour artists, interludes of immersive experiences and educational interpretations from professor, journalist and activist, Pamela Newkirk, we hear first hand from those who are struggling to navigate the film industry and learn from the implications of it - what do we need to do moving forward? The central question we're tackling is this: does the increasing presence of diverse faces on our screen correlate with the faces that are present behind the camera? We want to explore how the representation of female directors of colour behind the scenes impacts films and their stories. Additionally, has the industry changed significantly or have things mostly stayed the same? We are bringing together female directors of colour from all stages of their careers to explore these questions and to lend their perspective to this multi-layered and complex question. 

How can we make diversity more than just a buzzword? Pamela Newkirk, award-winning author of 'Diversity, Inc.' and time-honored journalist with The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times shines a bright light on the diversity industry, asking the tough questions about what has been effective–and why progress has been so slow. Along with moderator Charles Trevail, host of the 'Outside In' podcast, Pamela discusses the vast gap between the rhetoric of inclusivity and real achievements, opportunities to deliver on the promise of true equality, and how we can all contribute to combatting enduring racial attitudes.

Dec. 30 edition. The killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought issues of racial justice to the front of public debate. There was a response in government, business and corporate boardrooms. Pamela Newkirk, a New York University professor and author of "Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business," joins host Marc Stewart to discuss racial justice in 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Midday, we begin with a look at new revelations that the founder and namesake of Johns Hopkins University, long described as a passionate abolitionist, was in fact a slave-owner.   Then, we consider the question: Is America finally having a reckoning about race? Since the nationwide protests against inequity and police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd, racial justice issues have been front and center in the United States.  We look back at an explosive year in American civil rights. Guests Dr. Robbie Shilliam, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Terry Anne Scott is an associate professor of History and the Director of African American Studies at Hood College. She is the author of Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City. Dr. Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University. Her latest book is called Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Industry. Dr. Rashawn Ray is a Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park. His latest book is How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work.   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on “Gathering Ground,” Mary is offering listeners an inside look into Morten Group, LLC's READI Symposium — that's racial equity, access, diversity, and inclusion — which was held virtually on November 10. Following morning sessions on READI action planning, Mary welcomed a cross-sector slate of panelists to discuss the importance of READI efforts at participants' organizations, foundations, and companies. Hear from past “Gathering Ground” guests Sean Thomas-Breitfeld and Pamela Newkirk, who are later joined by Michelle Morales, Rahnee Patrick, and Audra Wilson for a conversation you won't want to miss!

Pamela Newkirk (@ptnewkirk) chats with Ink Slingers via Skype about her books, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2015) and Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business (2019). Books by Pamela Newkirk: Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media (2000) A Love No Less: Two Centuries of African American Love Letters (2003) Letters from Black America (2009) Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2015) Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business (2019) Want to connect with Ink Slingers? Tweet us @inkslingers2 or catch us on Instagram @inkslingerspodcast. Music: Dub Feral by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3683-dub-feral License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Zach has the pleasure of sitting down with Mandy Price, co-founder and CEO of Kanarys, to have a conversation centered around the concepts of dissidence and technology. They take a deep dive into both, spotlighting what has changed in part due to recent tragic events, and Mandy talks a bit about the genesis of Kanarys and what initially got her into this line of work.Connect with Mandy on LinkedIn!Check out Kanarys.com.Connect with Kanarys on LinkedIn, Twitter, IG and Facebook.Donate to the Justice for Breonna Taylor GoFundMe by clicking here.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Check out our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and we're here again. It is a Tuesday. That's why you're listening to my voice and why you're gonna be listening to a very dope conversation that we have with our guest today. As you know, Living Corporate--or maybe you don't know because, you know, maybe this is your first time listening, but for those who are first-time listeners, Living Corporate is a platform that centers and amplifies marginalized voices at work. We do this by having real talk in a corporate world by having conversations with black and brown thought leaders, movers and shakers, executives, influencers, whoever, taking fairly evergreen topics, but centering them around marginalized perspectives and experiences. And so with that being said, we have a really special guest, very excited to have her on the platform, Mandy Price. Mandy Price is the CEO and co-founder of the Dallas-based Kanarys Inc., a web platform that incorporates data and AI to foster diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. Mandy, welcome to the show. How are you doing? How are you feeling?Mandy: I'm doing great. How are you, Zach? It's so good to be here with you today.Zach: It's a pleasure to be with you as well. You know what? I'm doing well, because, you know, like we talked about very briefly off mic, you know, my daughter is beautiful. She's getting bigger and bigger every day. My wife is strong and in good spirits, and I'm doing okay. I'm thankful for the immediate things around me and the fact that there's peace in my immediate vicinity. At the same time I'm tired, right? I'm exhausted, and I look at the news and I look at, you know, the continued brutalization of people that look like us, and that's tiring, you know?Mandy: It's extremely tiring. It's traumatic. It's draining. You know, sometimes I struggle with the words to express my emotions because they're so full, and it's very, very difficult, but the one thing that is encouraging to me and my team and I'm sure to you and many others that have fought for marginalized voices to be heard more is that the discussions are starting to change. No longer are we kind of just looking at the systems. People are starting to talk about the disease. "How do we rid out the disease?" And we know that the issues that we see in corporate America and really the systemic inequities that we see throughout our society, because it's not just in corporate America, we see it in education, we see it in healthcare, obviously the criminal justice system. It's pervasive throughout our country, and we know that these kinds of surface level policies, be it in corporate America or any other setting, aren't gonna work, that we have to do the hard work, that we have to look at these issues from a systemic basis, and so as I hear people talking about institutional racism, systemic inequities, I'm encouraged, more encouraged than I've been in a long time, because often when we're in D&I circles I felt that we were speaking two different languages, you know? I've long felt that diversity and inclusion was about justice and fairness, that that's what people wanted, they wanted to work in a work environment that they knew was fair and that they would actually have a chance to succeed in that work environment and there weren't these barriers where they're not gonna get the same type of job assignments, their pay wasn't gonna be fair, they weren't gonna have the same promotion opportunities, and I think people are starting to think about D&I through that lens, which we have long advocated, as opposed to thinking of it from a programmatic sense, which is what we see so much in corporate D&I, which is "We're going to create environments--" Which are important, I don't want to take away fom that, but so much of the work was "We're going to celebrate Black History Month or Pride Month or these different kind of celebrations," and not to me really looking and doing the really, really hard work of "Are our systems, our policies, our procedures perpetuating these inequities that exist within our workplace?"Zach: I agree with you, and I think to your point--and I've talked about this a little bit, like, over the past couple of weeks, but the idea that a lot of this corporate D&I stuff, it's talking--1: it puts the effort and blame back on marginalized voices for being marginalized, so it's up to you to adjust your behavior to better assimilate with the white majority so that you're not so marginalized all the time and maybe people forget about the color of your skin because, you know, unconscious bias and then intersectionality, right? Like, it doesn't really--it doesn't come together for anything, and then also the idea of having a bunch of training and activities that don't really tie back into the systems within the organizations themselves. So when folks are saying words like systemic but then not offering systemic solutions, it brings me pause if they actually understand the language that they're using, you know what I mean? Mandy: Absolutely, and like I said, that's why I'm so encouraged by it, right? I think that's what everyone is seeing. We'll see. We are encouraged by the amount of companies [?], more encouraged by the companies that couple those statements with action, you know? There are many organizations that acknowledge that they have work to do [?] [and not?] only were they going to make donations or contributions to groups that are fighting racial inequities externally outside of their organizations, but many organizations have actually acknowledged that they have work to do internally and that they can't just put out this statement, and I think it's up to us to hold them to that, and it's going to help the organizations that are really worried about doing the right thing and the ones that, you know, similar to what we were talking about, the celebrations of Black History Month. "Okay, [?] D&I. We're done." The organizations that simply said, "Okay, it's Blackout Tuesday. We're gonna make our logo black and that's it. We did what we needed to do." People will know the organizations that are serious and are wanting to put in the work.Zach: That's right, and to that point I really want for folks to hear a little bit about the history of Kanarys, 'cause, you know, you've been featured on Crunchbase and Business Insider and Forbes and Afrotech just to name a few, so it's not like you're a stranger out here, but I'd like to hear more about, like, the history of Kanarys and also really the story about your funding, right? Because the amount of funding that you've been able to acquire has been pretty incredible. And so we've been having conversations in the VC space about there continuing to be a more critical lens being put on how little VCs engage black founders and entrepreneurs, and here you are just gathering quite a bit, so I'd love to give you some space for that.Mandy: Yeah. So let me start with the kind of what was the impetus for Kanarys, how did I get into this work. My background is I'm a lawyer by training. I practiced law for 12 years, but during the course of that time, like many black professionals, at first I was volun-told that I was gonna be on the diversity committee, but I had a passion for the work, and as I started to delve further and further in I started to volunteer more, but I think a lot of us, kind of going back to the conversation you had earlier where people of color were the only people of color or African-Americans within that space, it's "Mandy, don't you want to be on the diversity committee?" "Well, I never told you that, but sure." And so that's kind of how the work begun, was, you know, initially doing work on our firm's diversity committee as well as being a part of the ERG for black attorneys and, subsequently later as I moved firms, I also was on my firm's women's task force. And so my background as far as interest in diversity and inclusion goes back to really undergrad, where I did these issues, and the same thing when I was in law school. I worked at the Harvard Civil Rights Project, did a lot of work as well with the Law Review there, the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review on issues, and so those issues were expansive, and then when I came into the corporate world I really got to see first-hand for myself the pervasive issues that exist within corporate America. And I felt like I was prepared for it. My parents, I think all of us kind of received this kind of training as far as what we need to do, survival skills really as far as to succeed in corporate America, so I was well-equipped, but over time I felt that it was very clear to me that the approaches that we were taking to diversity and inclusion were not going to solve anything on a systemic basis. It was very much, "Well, let me treat you," like you were saying, how to assimilate, how to kind of navigate the firm in a way that it's currently the process is and political structures work," and none of our D&I was really looking at things from an introspective basis. It was all based off of these kind of programs, you know, ERG celebrations and things of that nature, and so we know that we had 50% of women or we knew that our entry-level classes, as far as African-Americans and other people of color, were more diverse [?] people kind of ascended the ranks, but there was never discussion of "Well, why is that? Why is it that the number of black partners is so low?" I remember when I was working at a firm there was a 10-year span before there was a black partner [?], and so that kind of deep critical analysis of "Is there something within our policies that we need to change, that we need to look at as to why we're seeing these discrepancies?" I remember being on a hiring committee where there were discussions of "Well, how do we increase the diversity?" Not, again, looking at "Well, why do we keep losing people?" And I remember broaching the subject of, "Well, why don't we look at HBCUs?" And the immediate response was, "Well, we can't lower our standards." And so it was really clear to me when I looked at the kind of talent that all of the people of color, came from Harvard or Yale or Columbia, that there was these discrepancies even in the way talent was recruited, right, and when you would look at the backgrounds. And so I just started to really think about things on a more structural basis, and I wanted to create a platform where people could talk about these issues in a safe space, because I know conversations that I had in our ERG group were very different than the conversations that were had when leadership was involved, or even to be frank some of the chief diversity officers and things like that. People just felt that if HR or certain kind of leadership in the firm or the organization or the company were involved, then they weren't as free to have these conversations, and so how can we create a safe space where people can talk about these issues in a way where that we could learn from each other but then also really equip the organizations with information that they needed to really understand the structural issues and the everyday lived experiences that their employees were facing. So that's kind of how Kanarys evolved and how we grew the company. When you go to the platform, individuals are able to look at every organization from a D&I lens. Every company has a company profile page. We have around 600 companies that we're tracking data on right now, but we add to that every single month. You can go in and request that your company is one of the ones that we track. And so we look at it from a data and analytics perspective. We know that that is the language of companies, right? If someone kind of goes in and tells their own experience it's obviously real, but a lot of times those individuals are met with defensiveness, resistance, you know, all kinds of "Well, did that really happen?" And so you're going in there trying to prove that your lived experiences are actually something that others are facing within the organization. So it's extremely frustrating, right? You're already dealing with all kinds of microaggressions, and for many people overt racism, right? You know, there's covert and overt, and then to go in and actually try to address it only to be met with more resistance from HR or other leadership within your firm, we know that it's very, very daunting for individuals, so I know that what I had kind of started to do was I wouldn't talk about it with anyone. I just figured that this was the normal course [of how] people of color, especially African-Americans, were treated in the workplace, and I kind of just started to normalize everything, and I think as you look at the current events and the amount of people sharing their stories and--you know, none of the stories seem new to me, you know? It's like--you know, I read stories and I'm like, "Yep, that happened to me. That happened to me too." We just kind of become numb and think, "This is just what it's like," and we normalize it, and I think now we're starting to see people say, "This shouldn't be normal, and we have to speak up and talk about it," because although we, Zach, know as people of color, as African-Americans, our everyday lived experiences, we have to make sure that we amplify those voices and let everyone know that this is how we have to deal in corporate America every single day. And so I think it's more important now than ever, while people are actually looking at this from a systemic and institutional lens, that they know how pervasive this is within their organizations, and that's what we encourage people to do on Kanarys. You know, our platform was created to amplify and share these stories, these voices, so not only can you go to Kanarys and see company D&I policies, we track all things, like I said, from a very detailed data and analytics perspective, so you can see their demographics, how they change, you can see their D&I policies, but you can see stories and look at reviews from other people of color, other marginalized voices that have worked in those work environments, you know? When I was moving from one firm to the next, you know, I looked at all kinds of different platforms that show you culture and reviews and things like that from workplaces, but what stuck out to me was--I was like, "That's great. I'm glad to have happy hours, but what is it gonna be like for ME to work there," right? I knew my experiences were gonna be different, and so the things that I was looking for in an employer were very specific, and so that's why we created the platform, because we know that if you are a person of color, if you're LGBT, if you're disabled, there's certain marginalized voices that have different things that they're gonna want to look at for an employer, and so we provide them with that information and that data so they can really assess, "Is this place going to be open to me? Am I going to have the same opportunities? Am I gonna be able to feel included?" And that's the information we provide on Kanarys.Zach: So one, that's incredible, and I do think that--I've had conversations with folks in the past when it comes to how real change happens within these organizations, and I've had conversations with folks who say, you know, "Do you really think that corporate diversity and inclusion can really drive change, or do you think it's more external?" And I was like, "The reality is I believe that these organizations need external pressures coordinated with some folks internally who have the moral courage to do the right thing." And so I'm curious, as we talk about, like, this new season or this moment--I don't want to say it's a season, but it's certainly a moment because we're about a few weeks in--of folks, like, centering and talking about black experiences and really having to call out racism, and some of them even being bold enough, and right enough, to say "police brutality," do you anticipate an uptick, or have you already seen one, in activity on Kanarys as it pertains to folks sharing their stories and talking about these things?Mandy: So we have started to see an uptick. I think people are realizing that we have to speak up and speak out. Like I said, I think so far, for so long, we have normalized [it], we have just become so accustomed to the way things operated and the ability to see kind of widespread change, which is definitely desired, but it was "How is that gonna happen," right? And I think people realize now the importance of sharing their stories and ensuring that people really do know the day-to-day lived experiences. So we've definitely seen an uptick, but our platform was created for us to share our voices without this kind of muting that we see, especially, you know, on some of the traditional platforms. A lot of times black voices have been censored when they've talked about racism, when they've called out racist behavior, and we wanted to create something that never would mute those voices but would amplify that, because it's so important that we really do show the pervasive nature of the way that racism operates within our society. I think for some people, especially people who aren't black or who have not been marginalized, the way they view racism is very, very different. Racism is seen within this prism of malice or ill will or, you know, very concrete things. "I called someone the N word." That's racist, right? Those discrete actions, but understanding how racism actually presents itself in our society, and I think that we're seeing that--and we've known for a long time--there's been a disconnect, but I think the more we share these stories, it helps bring that enlightment to "Wow, I did not realize that someone's everyday experiences really have racism manifested [?] in every aspect of your life," and so I think we're seeing the importance of that, even though it's our normal, everyday life and we're like, "Well, of course. This has been like this for centuries," that's coming and taking on more of an importance, and one of the things that we do on the platform, because we know leaders talk through measurements and data, is we aggregate all of the responses, and we show them where there's statistical anomalies so that people can see the trends and the evidence where we're like, "Well, you know, this is just not statistically possible if there's not racism present," right? That's kind of what happens on the back end later once organizations go really, really far and maybe they're presented with some kind of class action litigation or things of that sort. People actually start doing the work, budget analysis, and looking at it, but that's what we do, we work with the companies on the data and say, you know, "What we're seeing in trends is there's some systemic issues within your organization, and so let's start proactively working on that now." So we're, like I said, very encouraged by what we're seeing, but I do think it's gonna take this push-pull, this not only working on things internally but all of us have to externally push organizations as well to know that this is important, that we're not gonna accept "check the box" or just the kind of marketing materials that we see sometimes, you know? "This is our D&I report." No, we're gonna say "These are our real experiences." It might not be all polished, but it's important that people know what it's really like and which organizations are taking it seriously to really create those atmospheres of true inclusion, equity and fairness.Zach: And so, you know, what I'm really curious about right now is as you're having these conversations, and even historically before this moment, have you noticed a certain level of fragility when you actually bring these stories and experiences and things back to the organizations and say, "Hey, look, this is what people are saying about you"? Are they fairly receptive? I would anticipate that there's a certain level of defensiveness, but I'm curious as to what your experience has been.Mandy: Traditionally there has been defensiveness, you know? There are companies that are more open than others, but overwhelmingly what we have seen is the desire to kind of hide anything that could be perceived as negative, and I think what companies are realizing is that people know things aren't perfect because they live 'em, you know? They live the experiences, so they know that there are issues, so they're not wanting, you know, this kind of sanitized view of what it's like to work there. They want to know that you have a commitment to do the hard work and to make the changes, and so that's what we've been, you know, like I said, talking about, just like you've been talking about the systemic nature of these issues for a long time, we've been talking about it for a long time and getting folks to realize that D&I is not marketing. It is not painting this pretty picture.Zach: It's not, right?Mandy: [laughs] It's not marketing, right, and so I think that there are organizations willing to do the hard work, but we've had many conversations that when we say, "This is what people are saying about your work environment. This is how your employees feel," and their response is, "How can we tie this with a bow and try to make it look pretty for people?" And so I think that's what organizations are beginning to see, is we don't want the pretty bows, we want the commitment, and we want the uncomfortable conversations, and we want people to lean into this work and say, "We're willing to look and really look at the disease and not the symptoms that we've all seen for years and years and years." We all know that the representation of blacks and other underrepresented groups is abysmal in corporate America. We know that talent does not reside in one demographic. So we've been seeing the symptoms for a long time. Anyone should have been able to look and say, and organizations right now should be able to look in there, into their workforce, and say "Wow, it's kind of amazing that all of our senior and mid-level management is of one demographic." That is a warning sign that there is something amiss within your organization. And for some reason I think it is, like, the prevalance of white supremacy, just like we said earlier, the way that people view racism is from a kind of altered lens. When we talk in those terms not everyone is envisioning the same thing. I think the same thing when we talk about white supremacy. I think some people envision the KKK, you know? So there's different kind of how we talk [?] on different levels of the D&I journey. There's definitely different levels that people are on as far as their consciousness of how these terms, what these meanings, how they permeate themselves in our society. So we know white supremacy isn't simply, you know, "I'm a member of the KKK," or that kind of white supremacy that I think sometimes people think when they hear that word. White supremacy is if you look at your organization structure and all of your leadership is white and you think that is normal in a society that's as diverse as ours, that's a red flag that there's a problem, because talent is evident everywhere. And so those are the kind of things that we're really hoping will lean into and be willing to have that uncomfortable conversation and do the hard work of saying, "There's something amiss here. If we live in a country as diverse as ours," especially in some of the environments where these companies are headquartered, they are incredibly diverse areas that don't match at all the demographics of what their workforce are.Zach: And here's the thing, right? So when you talk about leadership and leadership representation, it's a common thing, it's a commonly known thing that black and brown folks typically top out around that manager, senior manager level and that that, like, next tier of leadership--which is that, like, senior leader to junior VP level or whatever you want to call that, it thins out dramatically, and what I just described is a common thing across certainly most service industries in terms of, like, consulting and different types of client service professions, but that's a common thing, and, like, it's been common, and I'm really eager and just very curious to see how real this moment is and, like, is this just, like, a flash in the pan reaction thing or are we actually getting ready to have, like, some collective call to consciousness? That's what I'm most curious about, that part, and to your point around white supremacy and how folks typically will characterize white supremacy being, like, the KKK, and it's scary, because there are folks out there who sit in, like, very senior diversity, equity and inclusion positions who are just now coming into the reality of what white supremacy really is, what systemic racism is, you know? Are just now reading books from, like, Robin DiAngelo and Pamela Newkirk or, you know, like, studying black civil rights. You know, it's a telling time, and I said this before, it's really, like, a watershed moment for corporate D&I practices, you know what I mean?Mandy: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, I think we are hoping it's the latter of what you said, that it's a watershed moment and the kind of normal corporate D&I practice as usual is going to be turned on its head for the first time--well, I don't want to say first time because there's a lot of organizations that have been doing the hard work. I think, as I talk to many D&I professionals, they've advocated for these things. The problem is that they didn't have the support from their leadership. So when we talk about the watershe dmoment, It hink it's hopefully, you know, going forward D&I practitioners, the people that have been leaning into this work and advocating for this work, will get the support and the resources that they need from management, because that has been a lot of the disconnect. We know even right before kind of what we've seen with, you know, the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that have brought about is organizations were talking about cutting D&I. That was the first thing on the chopping block. You know, "We had the pandemic. Our business is losing--"Zach: That's the first thing to go every time.Mandy: Right, and so hopefully now organizations are beginning to see how critical these issues are. D&I shouldn't be first on the chopping block, and they need to provide the support and the resources to their D&I practitioners that they need to really do the work.Zach: Amen, amen. Now, Mandy, we've talked about Kanarys, you've talked about the functionality of the platform, but I haven't really given you space to, like, plug Kanarys, and so--you know, this is not an ad, but you're here, so you might as well just go ahead and, like, let us know exactly where we can find you and all that information there.Mandy: Yeah, sure. So you can go to www.kanarys.com, K-A-N-A-R-Y-S dot com, to look for--like I said, we have information on company profiles from a very deep D&I lens so people can go in and see not only things like the demographics or their very in-depth policies, non-discrimination policies. We do include that, but things like "Do they recruit HBCUs?" Very detailed information about kind of the structure of the company's D&I policies and efforts, as well as looking at the lived experiences of other marginalized, underrepresented voices within that workforce. We allow you to filter down by all kinds of D&I topics, so you can say "I want to look at things that definitely directly relate to child care issues or things related to the disabled community." It's all, again, from a D&I lens, so you're able to really filter down and see information at a very detailed level. We also include all kinds of resources to help you advocate for things within your workplace. So we do webinars that are more geared towards chief diversity officers, but we also have a resources page that includes things like materials if you're an ally, right, and trying to learn more about this. You know that there's been an extreme kind of reach out that we've never seen before for people saying, "What are the materials I can read? What are things I can learn more about?" We have those materials on our page, so feel free to share those with others if you are getting the same kind of outreach that we've seen so many other black Americans experiencing during this time, but we also have resources for ERG groups. So if you are in an organization where you're still trying to get your leadership to release a statement, you're still trying to get your leadership to think about "We can't just release a statement. We need to take some actions. We need to look internally and externally and think about ways we can really promote racial justice in this country." We have a couple templates, letters, that you can kind of format, reformat, to send to your leadership. So again, we're all about "How can we work together, use our collective voices, to really approach these issues from a systemic basis?"Zach: I love it, I love it. Y'all, this has been Living Corporate. Thank you so much for listening. You know we do this every single week three times a week minimum, right? So we got the Tuesday episodes, we've got Tristan's Tips on Thursdays, and then we have either The Link Up with Latesha or See It to Be It with Amy C. Waninger, and that doesn't even count, you know, some extra loosies we might drop in there depending on what the time or occasion may call for. You can check us out all over Beyonce's internet, right? You can just type in Living Corporate. We're gonna pop up, okay? But if you want to make sure you connect with us on Instagram, it's @LivingCorporate. If you want to check us out on Twitter, it's @LivingCorp_Pod. And again, just type in Living Corporate for the website, but if you want the domains, living-corporate.com, livingcorporate.co, livingcorporate.tv, livingcorporate.us, livingcorporate.net--we got all the livingcorporates, Mandy, all of 'em except for livingcorporate.com. We don't have livingcorporate.com because Australia has that one, so don't type that in and get mad at me, because I'm telling you right now [that] it's living-corporate--please say the dash--dot com, or livingcorporate dot whatever else, okay? Until next time, y'all, this has been Zach, and you've been listening to Mandy Price, CEO and founder of Kanarys. Peace.

America was founded on principles of justice and equality. Yet, it has never lived up to these ideals in regards to how citizens of color are treated. The same can be said for many U.S. businesses, which, despite investing billions in ‘diversity and inclusion’ training programs, have also failed to truly diversify their workforces and leadership teams. Pamela Newkirk is an award-winning journalist, an NYU professor of journalism, and author of the critically-acclaimed book Diversity, Inc., which examines the efforts over the last 50 years to diversify the American workforce. She joins the podcast to talk about corporate America’s diversity problem, and why she believes we’re living in a “moment of reckoning” where we might be finally ready to confront the reality of racism and start fostering genuinely diverse workplaces. Listen to this podcast to learn: • A brief history of systemic racism in America, and why the nation is becoming “post-White,” which makes race more of an issue than ever • Why the everyday decisions made in our racially homogeneous worlds perpetuate the system of racism and injustice and denies opportunity to non-white people • Reasons why the most progressive industries like entertainment, academia, and fashion are the least diverse • How, after a 2000 landmark class-action discrimination lawsuit against Coca Cola, the company embarked on one of the most successful diversity transformations ever seen in corporate America • The delusion of the colorblind or post-race mindset that many progressives fell into after the election of Barack Obama • The reasons why diversity programs and mandatory anti-bias training in companies often do more harm than good • Why progress comes not from having more strategies for change, but rather the will to change

The following episode was recorded February 2020.In an era when companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity and inclusion programs, the proportion of African Americans in tech, media, and business leadership roles is stagnating. In her new book, Diversity, Inc. The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, award-winning journalist and New York University professor Pamela Newkirk describes the gap between the rhetoric and the reality where racial equity and inclusion are concerned. She calls us to go beyond lip service and radically reevaluate how we make organizations more diverse.  “Self-Love” by Joe Armon-Jones Featuring Obongjayar from his album, A Turn to Clear View, courtesy of Brownswood. Guest:  Pamela Newkirk, Professor of journalism at New York University and author of Diversity, Inc.To watch this episode and find more information, goto: https://Patreon.com/theLFShow and please support!

(This program was originally broadcast live on December 10, 2019) The business of diversity is booming. Corporations and cultural institutions spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on diversity training, yet despite the ubiquity and expense of these efforts, overall racial, gender and ethnic diversity remains an aspiration rather than a reality. Today on Midday: what's been tried, what has succeeded and what's flopped in efforts to achieve more inclusion in American life. Dr. Pamela Newkirk is a professor of journalism at New York University and author of "Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business." Dr. Newkirk joins Tom on the line from Argot Studios in New York City. (This program was previously recorded, so we can't take your comments or questions.)

From granting Juneteenth as a paid holiday to marketing campaigns designed to align their businesses with protesters, companies are suddenly falling over themselves to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Are these claims credible, or are they simply part of a nimble marketing strategy aimed at exploiting a unique moment? Tom’s guests are Dr. Pamela Newkirk, professor of journalism at New York University, and author of Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Industry; and Dr. Andre Perry, a Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and author of Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities.

Zach has the honor of sitting down to chat with award-winning journalist and author Pamela Newkirk to discuss the historical failure of diversity and inclusion. They talk a bit about her 2019 work "Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business," and Pamela explains how and why transparent metrics across the board are the first step to actively addressing any diversity problem. She also implores institutions that truly want to embrace diversity to just stop doing what they've been doing and lean into the successful models that can be readily replicated that already exist out there. Check the links in the show notes to find out more about Pamela's work!Connect with Pamela on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.Interested in Pamela's books? Click here to read more about them on Amazon.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here or below.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Check out our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and it's a Tuesday. You know, it's interesting--as a sidenote, y'all, you know, we pride ourselves in recording content in bulk, and, you know, we had a lot of different, interesting content that we were gonna share, but because of just where we are, we had to really shift some things. So thank you in advance for the folks being gracious with us, 'cause I know we'll--you know, a little bit behind the scenes. You know, we'll tell folks when we post and things of that nature, and we've had to change a lot of different things just because of where we are as a nation. And, you know, with that being said, y'all should know, if you don't know maybe you're a first-time listener. We actually are a platform that exists to center and amplify marginalized voices at work, and of course, again, considering where we are today, this work is all the more important, and we're really blessed and excited for the guest that we have today, Ms. Pamela Newkirk. Pamela Newkirk is an award-winning journalist whose articles have been published in the New York Newsday, the New York Times, and other publications. She's written a book called Spectacle, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and The Root. It won an NAACP Image Award. She's the editor of Letters From Black America and A Love No Less:" More Than Two Centuries of African-American Love Letters and is the author of Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media, which won the National Press Book Club award for media criticism. In addition to this, and what we're really excited to talk to her about today, she is the author of the 2019 incredible seller Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. Ms. Newkirk, how are you?Pamela: I'm fine considering all that's going on in the world. Zach: I hear you. I'm exhausted, frustrated, anxious. I'm still somehow hopeful though.Pamela: Yeah, you know, I think that's kind of where I'm coming out on this. I have seen more progress over the past few days than I have in the 20 years that I've been writing about diversity and race and inclusion. Like, suddenly it seems to be breaking through, and I think there is no longer a place to hide and to pretend you're innocent or ignorant about what African-Americans are living through day-by-day. You know, as if the George Floyd travesty, tragedy, was not enough, we're still seeing constantly these videotaped images of police officers, you know, brutalizing peaceful protestors. So it's like suddenly it's all out in the open, and while those of us who have been living this for our entire lives, none of this is new to us. We've been saying it. We've been documenting it. But for some reason, the constellation of incidents, you know, from Amy Cooper to Ahmaud Arbery to then the most shocking, horrifying video of George Floyd being murdered on camera, this, you know, continuing saga of the African-American experience, to finally break through to the mainstream of white America. Zach: You know, it's interesting that you go there, 'cause I was curious, you know, in your book, Diversity Inc., you talk about the adverse impacts of unconscious bias training and how it's been proven to be ineffective, and yet that still seems to be, like, the mainstay or, like, for some organizations, like, their crown jewel. Like, they build everything around unconscious bias, the concept of unconscious bias, training around unconscious bias, you know, language that really focuses on bias only being unconscious.Pamela: Right. It's like drive-through diversity. You know, drive-by diversity. That's what the civil rights lawyer Cyrus Merry calls it. Companies are willing to spend billions of dollars every year on all of these, you know, the apparatus of diversity, but they're not willing to devote their money to interventions to actually doing diversity, actually hiring a diverse workforce. It's not that complicated, it's not rocket science, and yet, you know, we live in a world where you can go on Google and find out almost anything, and yet even in major cities companies pretend that they cannot find, you know, diverse candidates. It's really absurd, and I think, you know, that the level of frustration and the number of people out on the streets is now really shining a bright light on injustice writ large. It's not only the injustice of police brutality. Racial injustice has just been normalized, you know? Whether it's African-Americans dying of COVID at, you know, 4x the rate of whites, whether it's the radical underrepresentation of African-Americans in practically every professional field. You know, the health disparities. You go down the line, and we have, for centuries, normalized this as if it's, like, determined by God that we should have, you know, these kinds of disparities when it really is a function of policies and practices that are human-made, right?Zach: Right, right. No, I agree with you. You know, I want to ask you a question about the book title before we get to the next question. It's Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. Can we talk about what promise corporate D&I has failed to deliver on?Pamela: Oh, God. You name it. I mean... so, you know, in doing the book, I wanted to interrogate the tension between the rhetoric of diversity, the apparatus of diversity, you know, the diversity czars and the diversity studies and the diversity reports and the diversity organizations and all of this--you know, this huge apparatus. You know, the climate surveys, the training. I wanted to look at--you know, we're devoting so much time to that, and why we consistently fail to achieve diversity. Like, what's going on? Why are we spending billions of dollars on something that has been shown year after year to fail? Like, it just... it seems ludicrous, but yet, you know, you have a company like Google that will spend more than 100 million dollars a year on diversity initiatives and year-after-year end up with a workforce in which African-Americans are, like, 2% of the employees in tech. Like, how do you spend that much money and fail so spectacularly year after year, and could that money instead be used to actually hire... [laughs] Silly me! Like, do you really need to train 30 and 40 and 50-year-olds to think differently about people of color who are just, like, totally missing in those spaces? How about bringing some of those people in those spaces? And guess what, they're gonna have to learn how to deal with them. They would be their colleagues. Like, I don't need to be trained on how to deal with diverse populations, but I do need a job, and if I am in a workplace that has people from different walks of life and different races and different, you know, whatever, I mean, I will learn how to deal with that. I don't need to be trained.Zach: And, you know, it's interesting, because to your point, we talk about this training. It doesn't go anywhere, and frankly I'm frustrated by the space. And so as I continue to look at it I see certain patterns, and it seems almost like diversity and inclusion is a space where--I'm gonna paint with broad brushes here, but you know what? It's my podcast and I can do that. So it seems as if diversity and inclusion as an industry is, like, a space where white women can go to, like, help them with their careers or to help give them certain levels of access or profile. So I've explicitly seen white women, like, talk about diversity and inclusion at, like, these big platforms, like, at Davos, right? And they'll stand up there and they'll say something fairly pedestrian if not outright obvious, but they're applauded for it, and it's like they're applauded by other white people. So it's almost like a community within itself, right? Like, they use a lot of language that we really don't understand.Pamela: Right, and worse than that. I'm gonna go further on your podcast. [both laugh] Diversity has come to mean everything and nothing. What is diversity? Most institutions don't even agree on what diversity is. Diversity could be more women, more white women, diversity could be more LGBTQ, and they can be white. Diversity could be people with mental or physical, you know, issues, and they can be white. So diversity can totally eclipse racial diversity and still, to many institutions, qualify as diversity. You know, the diversity czar at Apple went so far as to say 12 blonde blue-eyed white men could illustrate diversity because of their different backgrounds. So this diversity has--which is why, in my book, I focus on racial diversity, because I think race has sort of been set aside, you know? Because supposedly after the election of Barack Obama we were suddenly a post-race nation. You know, people are not saying that anymore. No, not today, but they were saying that, you know, for 8 years, and here we are, you know, with the same issues and with the needle barely moving for decades in most influential fields, whether we're talking about journalism or academia or museums or the law firms. Like, look around, and while all of these institutions will wave the diversity flag, very few of them are diverse.Zach: Right, especially when you start looking higher and higher, right? So when you start looking at spaces for the folks who actually make decisions and really are responsible--like, who own a P&L, like, that's where you start just seeing--I mean, you may at best see a sprinkling of non-white people, and that's not even to say black people. You might only see a sprinkle of just non-white people. And so I'm curious, when we talk about this space, and you kind of alluded to it when I asked you about how you're feeling and talked about hope, but I want to talk about the fact that we had Howard Bryant, ESPN senior contributor, NPR contributor, on the podcast on Saturday, and I shared that I think right now is a watershed moment essentially exposing how by and large inept diversity and inclusion is at really engaging black and brown employees explicitly. And I'm curious, do you think that we're in such a moment?Pamela: You know, I'm hopeful. Of course, you know, the proof is gonna be in the pudding, you know, whether we actually see change, but I do--you know, I'm heartened by seeing so many white people even out on the streets, you know, protesting. You know, that's not something that we've seen. You know, Black Lives Matter has really been limited to black and brown people who have been out there on the frontlines of that battle, and it's almost as if white people have, like, cast themselves as sort of innocent bystanders in this whole racial conversation. Like, they have, like, really nothing to do with it when they have everything to do with it, and so it's really encouraging to me to at least see whites engaging in a way that I have not seen in my lifetime.Zach: It's incredible that you say that. I was speaking to my father this morning, and he said, "Son, I'm 55 years old, and I've never seen this in my life." It's incredible. So here's what's scary, police been beating us, you know, since antebellum, but to see white folks out there getting beat down alongside us...Pamela: Yeah, but we have to remember that white abolitionists were treated [just?] as badly, you know? During slavery, white abolitionists were killed, you know, just as readily as black people were. So it's really not that unusual. What's unusual is that they're out there, you know? They're out there holding signs saying "Black Lives Matter." I mean, that, I do think it's a watershed moment just for that. I think there are people who are being really cynical about the level of activism we're seeing, saying they're performing, you know, racial politics or whatever. All I know is that they hadn't done that in all of the days of my life, and so the fact that many are now openly expressing their horror in a way that they should have all along--I mean, no doubt, but the fact that they're doing it now, I welcome it, because, like, hello, welcome to, you know, your humanity, you know? We're all implicated in this, and black people should never have been the only ones to single out police brutality, racial inequality, the radical underrepresentation in all of these workplaces. That, you know, injustice affects all of us. And, I mean, I do understand that white people have benefitted from inequality, but they're also paying the price of inequality as well. I mean, you know, no justice no peace. There won't be peace in the land as long as you have a system that's so blatantly unjust. Zach: And so, you know, you talked about white folks coming out and supporting and having Black Lives Matter. I'ma tell you, Ms. Newkirk, when I knew it was a thing was when this Amish came out there. [both laugh] I said, "How did y'all even get the word?"Pamela: I guess what got me was the thousands of people in Berlin, you know? And in Paris and in London. You know? Australia. I mean, around the world, you know, the whole world is watching.Zach: And so, you know, we've talked a little bit about what we think this is. There are plenty of organizations, right, that are--and I say this as someone who, because of my network, I'm able to see... like, I know the diversity and inclusion consulting spaces and stuff out there, right? And I'm seeing there's a sharp uptick in demand for [?]. Pamela: Oh, my God. My phone is ringing off the hook and I don't do diversity training, and I tell them I don't do diversity training. "If you've read my book, you'd know how I felt about it." But I know a lot of people who do it and, you know, you're welcome to, like, speak to them. I'm all in for a candid conversation about what you can do differently to change the game, but I don't think it's something that you need someone in week after week--I mean, if that's gonna help you get to a place where you actually, you know, create opportunity for non-white people, if that's what it's gonna take, fine, but all of the studies have pretty much conclusively shown that training doesn't work. The numbers they report year after year show that training doesn't work too because most Fortune 500 companies have been doing this training for years and the numbers don't budge. And yeah, there's that Harvard study by Frank Dobbin that shows that these studies, especially when it's mandatory training, it triggers a backlash among white men who, instead of supporting diversity, it makes them even more resentful of it. And even worse, the study showed that 5 years after this training, the percentage of black women and Asian men and women actually decreased, their numbers in management. So why are companies doing the same things and expecting different results?Zach: And it's interesting because they're coming in and they're doing that, right? Like, the same training. I agree that ultimately--the whole idea of "We need to come and have a dialogue" is frustrating, because I feel like we've dialoguing--I'm 30, and I feel like we've been dialoguing for a long time.Pamela: Oh, my God. I've been in journalism and higher ed for more than 30 years, longer than you've been alive, and it's the same conversation. It's the same conversation from, you know, the 1960s, you know? And I guess the optimistic way of looking at it is--and, you know, after the uprising in the 1960s when the doors finally opened to people of color in fields that had historically excluded them, we did see, you know, the numbers jump up, you know, considerably. We saw more African-Americans, Latinos and others going to colleges, you know, entering fields that they had been excluded from, but as that progress became to metastastize, then we came into the '80s and we had this backlash against diversity, you know, under Reagan, and we had this, you know, systemic dismantling of every policy, every practice.Zach: All those social programs got gutted, yeah.Pamela: Yes, everything got gutted, and then the backlash--we're still living in that backlash to the progress that had been made. So, you know, the interesting thing is that all of these institutions can turn on a dime when they're ready, when they want to. Like, we're seeing companies now suddenly devote millions of dollars. I just heard Bain is gonna, you know, donate 100 million to, you know, black causes, and all of these things are suddenly happening, so it's so easy for them to turn it around, to open that spigot, but what has been lacking is the leadership, the will, and the intention.Zach: Yeah, yeah. And to your point, right, we've seen this organizations--a lot of these organizations, these big ones, like, they solve big problems. They solve really big problems. But the frustrating thing for me I think is that we treat racism as an abstract, right? So we'll say things like, "Well, we just need to open our hearts and minds." It's like, "We don't really actually need to open our hearts and minds. We just need to tie these things back into tangible outcomes." You know, create and add new policies that hold and drive accountability, increase transparency, and make certain demands and expectations, right? Like I said, I'm alluding back to the Saturday episode, but it's just fresh in my mind, because I think about the fact that Howard Bryant, he said, you know, "The reason you come in [and] you don't sexually harass somebody isn't--you know, it may be because you're a decent person." [both laugh] Pamela: It may be, and it may be because you'll get fired.Zach: You know that there's gonna be consequences and repercussions if you come in here acting stupid, harassing women or harassing anybody, saying something inappropriate. You know that.Pamela: Exactly. And do you need a training program to tell you that?Zach: I genuinely don't, and I loathe every single one of them. But you're right.Pamela: Yeah, and the thing is it's not even that I'm just so against the idea of training--even though I kind of am, but if there was anything, any proof, that they actually helped realize diversity, I'd be all about it, you know? There are measures that we know work, and I just don't understand why we keep doing something that has not borne fruit and we ignore the things that do, and that leads me to believe that there's not an honest intention to actually realize diversity.Zach: I agree. So some of it to me is, like, when you talk about, like, programming for diversity, equity and inclusion, you know, it's typically some type of instructor-led training, but a lot of studies continue to show that being able to have authentic conversations and build stories, again, tying and really having the critical conversations to tie goals and values to policy, is really what drives results, but we're just still not there yet. I'm curious, again, there are plenty of organizations who are just now trying to build, like, some type of office, right? Some type of council or department or whatever you want to call it. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes folks--and when I say folks I mean organizations--commit when they try to launch initiatives or departments or groups like this?Pamela: Yeah, I think the biggest mistake is that the leadership sort of farms out this diversity issue to the most marginalized person in the organization, which is usually the diversity czar, whatever they call the diversity professional in that organization. Usually that person is the most marginalized executive of the team. It's usually a person of color or a woman, and they usually don't have much power, and so don't do that, and if you're going to do that, if you're gonna go that route, then you have to empower that person to actually get results. One thing that we've seen from studies, there was a study done a year ago, a survey of Fortune 500 D&I professionals, and I think it was somewhere around 65% did not even have access to the metrics, the diversity metrics, in the organization they work for. So how could they hope to fix a problem that they can't even see, right? So they're shooting in the dark. We know the most effective way to tackle a diversity problem is first to have transparent metrics across job categories, across, you know, bonus systems, any kind of award systems. Who's getting, who's not? Right? You know, you have to look under the hood and see what's actually happening in these companies, because we know with unconscious bias you can keep blaming everything on unconscious bias, but whether it's conscious or unconscious, let's see how it's working in your organization. Only then can you hope to even have an intervention, you know? Whether it's in your promotion system, it's your hiring system, it's looking at, you know, who's even being interviewed for positions, you know? What kind of outreach are you doing? So you have to have transparent metrics across the board. It is the first step, and once you do that then you can hope to have the kind of interventions that will allow you to actively address the problem. It's what--I do a chapter on what happened at Coca-Cola after they were sued for racial discrimination, and part of the settlement was having this task force that oversaw what they were doing to correct the problem, and over 5 years they were able to make substantial improvements through a system of transparent metrics and accountability.Zach: And, you know, it's interesting because I think when we talk about metrics--and it goes back just to, like, the lack of inclusion in this work, but when you talk about metrics it presumes that the people who are measuring understand what they're measuring for, right? But if you have a group--and there's plenty of articles, you know, op-eds, analysis, reports, all kinds of things about just how behind the majority population on matters of race, so then why would that same population then be responsible for measuring the nuances of race and diversity? [both laugh]Pamela: Are you saying the fox is guarding the chicken coop? Is that what you're saying? [laughs]Zach: Absolutely. Absolutely it is.Pamela: Well, yeah. So if you're not allowing the person charged with increasing diversity, if you're not giving them access to those numbers, you know, you're hiding something for one thing, right? And you're handcuffing them. There's no way that they can hope to correct those issues without having that kind of information. I mean, that's just basic to their job, but yet you talk to most D&I people and they don't have access to that.Zach: And what's also interesting about that is that--I don't know, there's different levels, right? Because the other piece, you talked about power, and I've been--Living Corporate has been a bit more intentional in calling out, like, the ethics of power and how all of these things work, right? Because you just rarely ever see the person who's really driving diversity, equity and inclusion be somebody that really has authority, and they're not respected in the space because typically their role is something internal. You know, they're not necessarily driving any type of revenue, so they're not gonna really be heard. And on top of that sometimes compounded is the complexity that you have organizations that will get somebody who is black or brown, but again make them junior, so not only do they not have the formal hierarchal power, they don't even have the social capital that comes with being white to really navigate and do their jobs well because they're, you know, often times tokenized.Pamela: Right. It really comes down to leadership, because in any organization people know what matters and what doesn't matter, right? You know if a person really has power or if they just have a title. Like, it's not hard to figure out, you know, who you have to respect and who you can ignore and, you know, what they stand for, so it really does come down to leadership and if leaders are gonna continue to farm this issue out to marginalized people, be they consultants or, you know, a diversity person who really has no power, you know? We're not gonna see any progress in that space. And, I mean, looking at all of these fields that have not changed in all of this time, that has to be willful, and so it's gonna take will to change that, and I hope that we're living in a time now where people realize that, you know, this is not a sustainable situation.Zach: It's not, and that actually leads me to my next question. I want to quote an excerpt from your book. "The quest for racial diversity has long been an uphill crusade, but now it's waged in a far more polarized climate in which many whites now claim they are being disenfranchised as others are afforded undue advantage. An NPR poll conducted in 2017 found that 55% of white Americans believe that they are discriminated against while, tellingly, a lower percentage said that they actually have experienced discrimination. A Reuters survey in 2017 found that 39% of whites polled agreed with the statement that quote, "White people are currently under attack in this country," end quote." So I'm quoting this because the reality of this, I believe, is still showing up in 2020 in that a significant percentage of white D&I experts, quote-unquote, they have the opinion that white folks, particularly white men, need to be included, because if you don't include them, then you're essentially violating your own principles by excluding them. [both laugh] And so I'm curious, like, especially as we see an uptick in focus on black lives and really working--you know, there's a lot of folks downloading and buying books on anti-racism and, like, you know, there's really a push for that right now. Do you see this trend increasing?Pamela: Oh, definitely, but we're just weeks into it. [laughs] So I can't tell you where it's headed, you know? But I see that as a good thing, you know, because for years, for decades, you know, African-Americans and other scholars of color and journalists have been doing this work, and often times we're preaching to the choir, you know? And now to see so many whites leaning in to this scholarship and to the idea of anti-racism, not only, you know, relating to members of, you know, skinheads or the Ku Klux Klan, but could implicate the average white person, you know? Reading Robin DiAngelo's work, White Fragility, she talks about the ways in which whites perpetuate white supremacy, but they do it in a way that they feel they're just neutral in it. They don't see how they are helping by either their silence or by just holding these deeply embedded ideas about race and merit and who actually deserves the kind of privilege that many whites enjoy. Like, are they African-Americans? Maybe there are a few who they see as deserving the kind of privilege that they enjoy, but that's the exception, not the rule. So these ideas are so deeply embedded in the white American psyche that it will take, you know, some time to kind of dismantle an idealogy that has been rooted in the history of this country, right, from the very beginning, and these ideas did not bubble up from the ground up. They were taught in places like Harvard and Princeton and Yale and Columbia University, you know? So this whole idea of science, you know, was rooted in this notion of African inferiority and European superiority.Zach: Yeah, measuring skull size and all that kind of stuff.Pamela: Yeah, so we're not that far removed from that. That idealogy is still very much a part of the American ethos, and until that is exposed and examined by the people who hold those ideas, we're gonna continue to see it play out in so many ways.Zach: And to your point, when we talk about racism--there are folks who I have, colleagues, associates, whatever, right, and we'll talk about racism, and a lot of times we'll talk about it, like, in forms--like, "It's out there." Like, it's "out there." Like, that's why George Floyd--because of systemic racism, that's why George Floyd was murdered in the street on camera with no accountability until we had riots, but the challenge and I think the next step as we look at this work, to your point around, like, really addressing and interrogating it, is analyzing what the same systems that allow those types of things to happen, the Amy Coopers of the world, those systems persist here too in work. Pamela: Exactly, and it's being able to kind of position yourself within the space. Like, where are you? Like, how do you benefit from this system, and what do you do with your privilege? And it's not enough just not to be actively racist. Like, in what ways are you anti-racist? In what ways are you working to dismantle injustice? And that's the next step for the so-called decent whites who I don't think are, you know, actively racist, but they're complicit in a racially injustice system through their silence, through their inaction. They work in these spaces, and they're not using their forums and their positions to tackle something that is so persistent and perverse.Zach: You know, I just started really thinking about, again, like, connecting historical racist idealogies and beliefs in America and then, like, how they show up at work. And so, like, an example that I think about, and I'm not a researcher and, like, I've talked to some friends and, like, I really want to put some research together on this, but, like, when you think about the history of black women and how they've been treated in this country and how essentially--there's been all kinds of writing on how there was a belief that essentially black women--black people across the board, but black women specifically--they don't feel pain in the same waysa that white women do, right?Pamela: Ugh, right. The black superwoman, yeah.Zach: Right? So in fact a lot of the understandings that we have about the female anatomy comes from the abuse of black female slaves. But this idea that, you know, black women are just tougher and, like, stronger inherently or biologically, you know? And we see that in sports, right? Like, Serena Williams is, like, a classic example of that and also why she wasn't heard and she almost died when she had her child, but I think that mentality and that attitude, it persists in the workplace as well, and it shows up in the workplace by way of black women being overworked and underappreciated.Pamela: Right. Well, you know, it's what history has demanded of us, right? We had to be stronger. Like, what was the alternative to that? Being beaten more? Being raped more? So paradoxically it's partly true that that's why we're still here.Zach: Right, by means of survival.Pamela: Right, but, you know, we haven't been given the opportunity to show weakness and to cry when things happen, things go wrong, you know? That fragility that may be afforded a white woman doesn't work for us.Zach: And I think we could find, like, similar... I guess my point is, like, that the meta-narrative doesn't stop, and so when you talk about systemic racism--so I'm the son of an English teacher, so, like, I'm very sensitive about words, right? So if you're gonna use a word like "systemic," then be comfortable with interrogating the concept that whatever you're talking about reaches as far as you can see and beyond that. And so, you know, when we talk about, like, we just talked about science and a lot of the racist concepts in considering that black folks were inherently inferior.Pamela: Right. And, I mean, those ideas are still debated, you know, just--like it was, like, 10 years ago, maybe it was a little more than that, when Newsweek and Time had, like, this big debate going about, you know, the bell curve.Zach: People still talk about the bell curve.Pamela: People still do, and, I mean, it's still with us, even if it's not as polite today to [?], it's still very much with us. Even if people don't say it, that idealogy persists.Zach: Exactly, and so it's like, "Okay, not only was this--" Like, at one point in time this was rigorous, firmly accepted, widely, globally accepted academic truth, and now it's waned into being impolite conversation...Pamela: Precisely, but still true. [laughs]Zach: Right, but still believed to be true.Pamela: But it's PC to now say it.Zach: Right, so it's not unreasonable then to believe that majority counterparts presume or have some conscious or unconscious beliefs that black people are inferior, and that comes up in language like, "They're not as strategic," or "They don't think as critically," or whatever, but it's subtle, and [?]--Pamela: Or that they're natural athletes or natural artists. Like, nothing comes out of a thinking place. [laughs]Zach: Right. "They're creative, but they're not strategic," right? And it shows up in a lot of genteel language, but you talked about Robin DiAngelo and you talked about white fragility. You know, we had her on the podcast a little while ago, and--you shared it actually on Twitter. Thank you for that.Pamela: I did, because I think it's so timely.Zach: It is. And when we talk about white fragility--and for the sake of just kind of level-setting, right, it's essentially the low fluency and resilience white folks have with regards to engaging matters of race, especially discussing where they may be the perpetrators of conscious or unconscious racist behaviors.Pamela: But then think about it. There are no penalties for them not knowing so much about the history of race in this country, you know? I've written about this. You could do a doctorate, a post-doc, and never have to meaningfully confront the history of race in this country, you know? You don't have to know about what happened to the Irish and what happened to, you know, Italians and Greek people at the turn of the century and how, you know, they were demeaned. You don't have to know how race operates and how it is just, like, so deeply embedded in the whole system of this country, and so because you may know who some of the major contributors to American history were who happen to be African-American, they never have to know. They don't have to know who Fredrick Douglass is, Booker T. Washington. Like, all of the people who I grew up just knowing because my parents taught me, I would never be penalized on an SAT for not knowing that. So they've been able to skate through life without understanding why it is that we have this kind of systemic imbalance around race, and they think it's because of merit. They think it's because they worked harder. They think, "Well, slavery was abolished in the 1860s, so what's the problem? You've had all this time." They don't look at the ways in which that system is still very much actively working against any kind of racial equality, you know, racial justice. And so when you're, like, just ignorant and not penalized for that ignorance, like, it's not totally the fault--you know, I have white students who sometimes are in tears in my class. I teach a class that examines the history of racial portrayals of marginalized groups, and they say "How is it that I'm in college and I never learned any of this history?" Like, it's not their fault, you know? Because only those who choose to elect--and these are electives that they would take to learn about this--like, it's not required. These courses are so marginalized, and they're so important for white people to have a sense of all of the ways in which they have been privileged throughout history without knowing that they're twicely just ignorant. Zach: And to your point though, right, you have this group who--so, like, let's talk about the workplace. So you have this group that has never had to really critically engage around race, never had to engage around how their own behaviors have been harmful to folks who don't look like them. Now all of a sudden, no matter [?]--like you said, this just really got started, right? We're just a couple weeks in, but let's say this goes on for two years, whatever, you know, suddenly there's going to be--you go from, like, not moving at all to almost running at a rabbit's pace, and I'm curious about with the current client focusing on black people, black experiences and really continuing to unpack that, how would you advise, like, a majority-white leadership space mitigate burn-out? Because they just don't have--again, we talk about white fragility, they don't have the bandwidth and they don't have the cardiovascular, right, to keep up.Pamela: Well, you know, I think they do, you know? I think these institutions have been so afraid to engage these matters and now they're seeing the consequences of kind of their hands-off policy, you know? We've made the progress we have made due to uprisings in the 1960s, because all of that scholarship was out there then, but no one listened until buildings started building and, you know, people started feeling kind of unsafe, and then suddenly everyone leaned in [?], and I think we're in that same kind of space right now where I think people are honestly leaning in--I mean, I've gotten notes over the past week from colleagues who, you know, kind of didn't really--I guess they saw me as kind of a radical, and now all of a sudden they're seeing my ideas as mainstream. So they're writing me like, "Wow, you know, you were prescient." It's like, "No, I wasn't. You just weren't paying attention." Everything that we're seeing has been happening all along. Nothing is new. The only thing that has changed is that white people are suddenly acknowledging the truth that has been with us all of this time. So now that they are, I do believe that we can begin to--first of all, there's so much out there. There's so many scholars of color and professionals of color and people who are ready to, like, get in there, right, and contribute to all of these institutions that have ignored them, devalued them, you know? Not hired them. You know, these institutions are about to be enriched, you know, if they truly embrace the diversity that is available, you know? Well-trained, well-educated, just ready, ready to jump in and help these organizations become more just places, and I do believe that if they continue to lean in in the ways they have over the past few weeks, I think a lot of good can come from this moment.Zach: And do you think--let me ask this then. So do you think that will offset the amount of folks who are uncomfortable and end up, you know, going elsewhere or--Pamela: What do you mean?Zach: Yeah, so what I mean is, like, do you think the amount of folks that come in and they deliver learning and folks grow, and they increase black and brown engagement through hiring and of course, like, retaining the talent that they have, do you think that will offset the amount of white folks who just find all of this offensive and disengage?Pamela: You mean like the 57 police officers in Buffalo that resigned because two of their colleagues were suspended for, like, critically injuring an elderly white man? You know, I don't think that's gonna happen, you know? Because first of all people need employment, and yeah, you know, I think that you're always gonna have that percentage of, you know, just straight up white supremacists who are not going to be in spaces where there are people of color, and, you know, good riddance, but I don't think that's gonna be the biggest roadblock to having diverse environments, because I don't think they're gonna give up all of these fields, you know? I don't think they're just gonna suddenly say, "Oh, here. Take my privileged position at this law firm or in this company," you know? But I think people can learn to work together. In fact, I think that is the best way to condition people to deal with different kinds of people is just to put them in the same space where they see that, "Oh, this person is not, like, a Martian. This person actually has kind of similar values," and then they begin to see that there was nothing that frightening to begin with. But I think when you continue--you know, we live in a rigidly segregated society, and most white people don't have to be in spaces where there are people of color, and particularly people of color who are peers, you know? They may be in the mail room or, you know, delivering their food, but to have people of color who are your peers, many white people don't have that experience, and they certainly don't have that experience of having people of color who are neighbors, who go to the same church, who go to the same--we live in such segregated worlds, and that kind of segregation becomes a self-replicating situation in the workplace, right, because people hire who they know, they hire who their friends recommend, they hire from this very closed off world, and until you can break that up, you know, and have a far more diverse workplace, you're gonna continue to have that kind of self-replication.Zach: Ms. Newkirk, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Before we let you go, any parting words or shout-outs?Pamela: Well, you know, I guess the thing that I'm most hopeful about is that there are successful models that can be readily replicated, and if institutions truly want to embrace diversity they need to just stop doing what they've been doing and lean into models that have proven to be successful.Zach: Well, there you have it, y'all. This has been Living Corporate. Like, we do this every single week. We're having real talk in a corporate world, and we center and we amplify marginalized voices at work by having black and brown thought leaders of all types of varieties on the platform. You make sure you check us out. Just Google Living Corporate. I ain't about to shout out all the places we on 'cause we all over Barack Obama's internet, so just type in Living Corporate and you'll catch us. 'Til next time, this has been Zach Nunn, and you've been listening to Pamela Newkirk, award-winning journalist, educator, speaker and author. Peace, y'all.

“Diversity”—in particular, the lack of it—has become a buzzword in the past two decades, especially within the realms of education, entertainment, and corporate America. Companies and institutions alike are spending millions of dollars on programs to make their ranks more inclusive and reflective of ever-shifting demographics. Yet, as journalist and professor Pamela Newkirk (@ptnewkirk) argues, diversity remains “conspicuously lacking” in these contexts, both despite of and, in some ways, because of the efforts to confront it. On this episode, we speak with Professor Newkirk about her new book “Diversity, Inc: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business,” and the paradoxes, pitfalls and potential of business-driven approaches to rectifying social inequality. Check out Pamela Newkirk's book here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/pamela-newkirk/diversity-inc/9781568588230/ Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @ptnewkirk

It’s an election year, and whether people want to admit it or not, race is at the center of every issue -- healthcare, jobs, climate change, the media, and more. Join host Rebecca Carroll for 15 essential conversations about race in a pivotal moment for America. She talks to great thinkers, writers, and artists about faith, representation, white fragility, and how it’s all playing out in 2020. The first two episodes drop Tuesday, April 7. Subscribe now.  Guests featured in this trailer include Dr. Camara Jones, Walter Mosley, Pamela Newkirk, Kay Oyegun, Bassey Ikpi, Robin DiAngelo, and Bishop T.D. Jakes. 

Zach chats with Brittany J. Harris, the Vice President of Learning & Innovation at The Winters Group, and they take a deep dive into the concept of decolonization. In her role, Brittany is responsible for curating and facilitating learning experiences that shift perspectives, change hearts, and empower action in service of equity, justice, and inclusion. She talks about the role that power plays in how it impacts black and brown people being afraid to speak up for themselves, shares with us what it looks like to pursue justice in a capitalistic context, and discusses some of the challenges she's faced throughout her career journey in the diversity and inclusion space.Connect with Brittany on LinkedIn and Twitter, and find out more about her by clicking here.Check out TWG's website and connect with them on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.Read the piece by Dafina-Lazarus Stewart mentioned in the show by clicking here.Interested in Pamela Newkirk's books? Click here to check out her Amazon page!Visit our website.EXCERPTBrittany: A lot of times we're developing experiences and modules that focus on the cultural self, right? Understanding identity, understanding dominant and subordinate group memberships, and so getting into conversations around power and privilege, which is something that corporate environments have strayed away from, right? And so, like, the silent P in D&I work has been, you know, power and privilege, and we've had clients who have pretty much said, 'No, we don't want to bring that up." I don't think you can have conversations about calling out the fact that a power dynamic is at play. We can talk about cultural competence and implicit bias all day, but if we're not adding an overlay of, you know, some biases are more harmful than others and some biases have more harmful implications than others, then the work is for naught, right?

In an era when companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on diversity and inclusion programs, the proportion of African Americans in tech, media, and business leadership roles is stagnating. In her new book, Diversity, Inc. The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business, award-winning journalist and New York University professor Pamela Newkirk describes the gap between the rhetoric and the reality where racial equity and inclusion are concerned. She calls us to go beyond lip service and radically reevaluate how we make organizations more diverse. Music in the Middle of the podcast: “Self-Love” by Joe Armon-Jones Featuring Obongjayar from his album, A Turn to Clear View, courtesy of Brownswood.Become a member and unlock audio extras.  The latest, Laura in conversation with Eve Ensler about her new book "The Apology".  And Staceyann Chin's performs poetry from her first anthology.

On this special episode of Gathering Ground, listen in on our first live-recorded episode: a conversation with Diversity, Inc. author Pamela Newkirk at Women and Children First Bookstore. Pamela and Mary discuss Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business and the need to explore nuance and data in the conversation of how we have and can continue to move forward in diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).Diversity, Inc. addresses the progress of DEI in academia, corporate America, and Hollywood and puts the three worlds up against each other to examine how they all contribute to issues of systemic racism in the United States. Check out this special episode of “Gathering Ground” to hear Mary and Pamela's conversation about drilling down on the numbers and why doing this work is vital to our forward movement.Following their chat, Pamela and Mary answer questions from their live audience . Don't miss this great interview!Read the full Episode 10 Transcript

The business of diversity is booming. Corporations and cultural institutions spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year on diversity training, yet despite the ubiquity and expense of these efforts, overall racial, gender and ethnic diversity remains an aspiration rather than a reality. Today on Midday: what's been tried, what has succeeded and what's flopped in efforts to achieve more inclusion in American life. Dr. Pamela Newkirk is an award-winning journalist, professor of Journalism at NYU and author of the book "Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business."

The author of "Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business" joined Jonathan for a live conversation at Politics & Prose about why diversity programs fail, the success stories, and what we can all do better.

In this week’s episode, we interview Pamela Newkirk, award-winning author of Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (2015). Her latest book, published this year, is Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. This […]

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism at New York University, discusses her book Diversity Inc, on why companies spend so much on diversity initiatives and yet have so little to show for it.  Hosts Carol Massar and Jason Kelly. Producer: Paul Brennan.

Pamela Newkirk, Professor of Journalism at New York University, discusses her book Diversity Inc, on why companies spend so much on diversity initiatives and yet have so little to show for it.  Hosts Carol Massar and Jason Kelly. Producer: Paul Brennan. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Are we still struggling with diversity today? Author & Journalist, Pamela Newkirk joins us to discuss her latest book, "Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business" & tackles this issue in corporate America, academia and Hollywood

What does it mean to be media-savvy? What is the truth in a post-factual era -- and who defines it? How can we achieve basic media literacy in an age when telling lies has become a method to undermine our faith in facts? What constitutes productive criticism and healthy skepticism of the press and what is an unfounded attack? I spoke with Pamela Newkirk about ways of maintaining the right kind of skepticism toward the media in an age when the independent press is under constant attack. Pamela Newkirk is a widely published journalist and scholar who holds an appointment as Professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University. Most recently her award-winning book Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga examines how pernicious racial attitudes contributed to the 1906 exhibition of a young Congolese man in the Bronx Zoo monkey house.Her articles on media, race and African American art and culture have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation and Artnews.

With claims of "fake news" and media bias coming from the White House on a regular basis, good solid journalism is as important now as it has ever been. Bob Herbert reviews the press with veteran reporter and NYU journalism professor Pamela Newkirk.

The Bronx Zoo unveiled a controversial exhibit in 1906 -- a Congolese man in a cage in the primate house. The display attracted jeering crowds to the park, but for the man himself it was only the latest in a string of indignities. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the sad tale of Ota Benga and his life in early 20th-century America. We'll also delve into fugue states and puzzle over a second interstate speeder. Intro: Finnegans Wake contains nine thunderclaps of precisely the same length. In 1928 a British steamer seemed to receive an SOS from a perfectly sound ship. Sources for our feature on Ota Benga: Pamela Newkirk, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, 2015. Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo, 1992. Pascal Blanchard, et al., eds., Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires, 2008. Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, eds., Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage, 2011. Rikke Andreassen, Human Exhibitions, 2016. Karen Sotiropoulos, "'Town of God': Ota Benga, the Batetela Boys, and the Promise of Black America," Journal of World History 26:1 (March 2015), 41-76. Sarah Zielinski, "The Tragic Tale of the Pygmy in the Zoo," Smithsonian, Dec. 2, 2008. Pamela Newkirk, "Bigotry on Display," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 26, 2015. Geoffrey C. Ward, "The Man in the Zoo," American Heritage 43:6 (October 1992), 12. Paul Raffaele, "The Pygmies' Plight," Smithsonian 39:9 (December 2008), 70-77. Pamela Newkirk, "The Man Who Was Caged in a Zoo," Guardian, June 3, 2015. "A Fresh Lens on the Notorious Episode of Ota Benga," New York Times, May 29, 2015. Pamela Newkirk, "When the Bronx Zoo Exhibited a Man in an Iron Cage," CNN, June 3, 2015. Michael Coard, "Ota Benga, an African, Caged in a U.S. Zoo," Philadelphia Tribune, March 19, 2016. Mitch Keller, "The Scandal at the Zoo," New York Times, Aug. 6, 2006. "Looking Back at the Strange Case of Ota Benga," News & Notes, National Public Radio, Oct. 9, 2006. Ann Hornaday, "A Critical Connection to the Curious Case of Ota Benga," Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2009. Eileen Reynolds, "Ota Benga, Captive: The Man the Bronx Zoo Kept in a Cage," NYU, Aug. 7, 2015. Samuel P. Verner, "The Story of Ota Benga, the Pygmy," Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society 19:4 (July 1916), 1377-1379. "The True Story of Ota Benga," Scrap Book 3:1 (March 1907), 61. "Pygmy Ota and His Pet Chimpanzee," McCook [Neb.] Tribune, Oct. 5, 1906, 8. "A Northern Outrage," Lafayette [La.] Advertiser, Oct. 10, 1906, 2. Harper Barnes, "The Pygmies in the Park," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 4, 1992, 1C. Listener mail: Wikipedia, "Fugue State" (accessed Jan. 25, 2018). "Dissociative Amnesia," Merck Manual (accessed Jan. 25, 2018). Steve Bressert, "Dissociative Fugue Symptoms," PsychCentral (accessed Jan. 25, 2018). Steve Bressert, "Dissociative Amnesia Symptoms," PsychCentral (accessed Jan. 25, 2018). Bill Donahue, "Fixing Diane's Brain," Runner's World 56:2 (February 2011), 56. Neel Burton, "Dissociative Fugue: The Mystery of Agatha Christie," Psychology Today, March 17, 2012. Stefania de Vito and Sergio Della Sala, "Was Agatha Christie's Mysterious Amnesia Real or Revenge on Her Cheating Spouse?", Scientific American, Aug. 2, 2017. Vanessa Thorpe, "Christie's Most Famous Mystery Solved at Last," Guardian, Oct. 14, 2006. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Martin Bentley. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!

We sit down with Dr. Pamela Newkirk, Director of the Undergraduate Journalism Studies Program at NYU and author of 'Beyond the Veil' and 'Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga'.

On this week’s Past Present podcast, Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, and Neil Young discuss Playboy magazine’s decision to stop publishing nude photos, the strength and stability of the nation’s political parties, and the whitening of American cities.  Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Many commentators attributed Playboy’s decision to stop publishing nude photos as the inevitable result for a print magazine caught in a culture awash in Internet pornography. Neil pointed out that in addition to its famous centerfolds, the magazine has a long history of publishing serious articles, including interviews with leading cultural and political figures like, Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jimmy Carter.There’s been lots of talk about the brokenness of the Republican Party, but others are beginning to suggest the Democrats aren’t in great shape either. Niki contended that political polarization and party hostility have contributed to the instability of the parties.The Washington Post recently reported that the white population is growing in 45 of the nation’s 50 biggest cities. Neil argued it wasn’t right to see this development as the “reversal of white flight.” (For an excellent history of “white flight,” see Kevin Kruse’s 2005 study of Atlanta.) Natalia suggested that Thomas Frank’s book, The Conquest of Cool, provided a useful way to think about why cities have become so attractive to white professionals again. In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History: Natalia discussed the New York Times article, “The Lonely Death of George Bell.” Natalia contrasted the detached manner with which readers have seemed to respond to this story of an old man’s isolated death as compared to the outrage Americans felt about reports in 1964 that Kitty Genovese had been stabbed to death over several hours while her neighbors did nothing. (See the New York Times’ original article about Genovese’s murder here.)Neil commented on the controversy regarding Mark Juergensmeyer’s decision to boycott a conference at Brigham Young University in protest of the school’s policy of expelling LDS students who lose their Mormon faith or convert to another religion. Juergensmeyer had been alerted to this policy by the student group Free BYU which is pressuring the university to reverse its policy.Niki recommended Pamela Newkirk’s book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, which tells the story of the Congolese man put on display in a monkey cage at the New York Zoological Gardens in 1906. 

On today’s show, award-winning journalist Pamela Newkirk talks about her new book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga (Amistad/HarperCollins, June 2015). Ota Benga was a young man from the Congo, kidnapped and put on display at the St. Louis World’s Fair and the Bronx Zoo at the dawn of the 20th century. Newkirk explores…

Pamela Newkirk joins Bob Herbert's Op-Ed.TV to discuss her new book "Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga," which tells the true story of a young man from the Congo who was captured and placed on display at The Bronx Zoo in the early 20th century.

The business model of journalism is collapsing. Tens of thousands of journalists have lost their jobs, newspapers are folding, and major dailies are in bankruptcy. Sources blame the rise of the internet and the economic recession. But some argue the industry's crisis was accelerated by a decades-old trend – corporate ownership and the rise of the media conglomerate. On this edition, we hear a discussion about government subsidies and new funding models to save the Fourth Estate. Featuring: Robert McChesney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign communications professor and co-author of “The Death and Life of American Journalism”; John Nichols, Washington Correspondent, The Nation Magazine; Laura Flanders,  GRIT TV Host;  David Carr, The New York Times Columnist; Pamela Newkirk, NYU Journalism professor. The post Making Contact – April 2, 2010 appeared first on KPFA.