Civil Rights 2.0 with Tony Prophet | Equality Keynote | Salesforce

Can you tell just by looking at me? Can you tell just by looking at me? So can you tell by looking at me that I'm an Iraq war vet? Would you guess that I am a pro bodybuilder? I'm an avid college basketball fan. I love Bruce Lee films.

I am half redneck.

I used to be a chubby kid. Would you have guessed that I'm a swimmer, that I'm catholic? I did not learn how to speak English until I was in second grade.

Just by looking at me, you wouldn't.

Know that I was the first in my immediate family to graduate high school. So will you guess that I'm undocumented and then that I got a degree from haas business school? Would you assume. What many people assume is that I'm happy. But many people don't realize that I'm scared. I'm afraid of being misunderstood. We're all afraid of something. We're all insecure about something. Yeah. I wake up every day with the fear of deportation. Are just afraid of what we don't know. Don't assume. Ask what you ask what you don't know. You don't know about Islam. Ask me questions won't offend me. And if you ask me, I'm Filipino, I'm apache and comanche. I'm very much proud of my spirituality. I am a she, I am a he. I'm striped.

I'm a lesbian.

I am a husband, I am trans. I am a three time cancer survivor. I'm Mexican, Chinese. I'm gay. I am a proud muslim. I am an ally.

I am an ally. Not only am I an ally, I'm a champion.

My truth does not have to be someone else's truth, but they are still true. So we're asking you to tell us who you are. Be seen and be recognized.

Be part of a more diverse and more inclusive culture.

Help us move forward together. Because together we are salesforce.

Junto somo.

Salesforce. We are ohana. And salesforce welcomes all.

Can I hug you? And now please welcome chief equality officer salesforce Tony profit. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And salesforce truly welcomes all and I am delighted. I am thrilled to welcome you to representation matters, our very first but not last racial equality summit. So incredible. I don't know if you know in the room we've got this incredible energy. We've had more than 100,000 media views online. So there's people joining us all around the world watching this moment here. So I'm delighted and thrilled to be a part of This I want to tell you a little bit of story of background at the beginning of Representation Matters. And originally this event was going to be this Wednesday, the day after the election. And the name of it was Woke Wednesday. But somehow I loved it. Everyone loved it, right? But somehow, by fate or luck or divine intervention, it ended up being the day before the election. So here we are, this super important day in the history of our nation, the day before the election, and we're together for Representation Matters. And you've heard from some of the amazing, amazing leaders. And there's more to come. We're just getting started. Of Civil Rights 2.0. And one of the moments, one of the key highlights for me early on was deray's remarks and the importance of the stories that we tell, how important that is. And so I'd like to share with you some of the stories from Civil Rights 1.0. And these were the stories that my family told. These were the stories, particularly that my father, who's this amazing storyteller, he has hundreds of stories that he passed on to me, this oral tradition of what it was like to grow up black in the south in the 30s and in the 40s. And we had this annual pilgrimage where we'd all pile into a 1957 Buick and we would go off to Oklahoma, Mississippi. I'm sure there's nobody here. Maybe there's someone watching online. I'm sure there's no one here in the audience who's ever been to or heard of Oklahoma, Mississippi. It's a town of 3,000 folks, and it's 70% black. 70% black. Now, that is. My grandfather called him Big dad. And that's my dad's dog. Dog's name was Shep. And we'd go and we'd go and spend time with my grandfather and my grandmother. And my dad would tell stories along the way about the history of growing up. And the stories that he would tell about my grandfather were about my grandfather's fighting for his rights. And he'd tell this story where my grandfather would go to the courthouse every election day and he'd try to vote. And the folks at the courthouse would tell him his name was Matt. Matt Prophet. Said, matt, we thought you were one of the smart Negroes. Now, you know, you're not going to be able to vote around here. Now just go on home now. Just go on home. And so that was the story, year after year, of my grandfather coming back and trying to vote. We think about it. Here we are the day before the election Now I'm going to ask for a show of hands now in the audience. Who's heard of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission? Anyone heard of that? Few hands going up. Right. And these were these state convened bodies that their purpose was to perpetuate segregation, to perpetuate Jim Crow. And so in 1998, there was a landmark decision in the courts of Mississippi that unsealed the documents from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, 124,000 documents. And so my family of late has become very interested in our history and trying to understand just the genesis of what was happening at that time, the genesis of our family history and what particularly my grandfather was doing at the time. And we came across this document from July 1960. I was alive at this time and obviously won't go through all of it, but. But the essence of it was the Sovereignty Commission made these observations. They're noticing a difference in the attitude of Negroes, particularly young Negroes. They appear better informed about their rights and they believe. Matt Prophet, a painter, was probably a member of the naacp. And so this is this amazing divisive cauldron of segregation and discrimination that was happening particularly in the south, other parts of the United States, but particularly in the South. And into this vacuum, into this vacuum, a group of leaders arose. And one of the most significant leader, if not the most significant leader, was Rosa Parks. And Rosa rose up, and she didn't stand up, she sat down. She sat down in the front of that bus around 1955 and began this bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. And that literally changed everything. Now, halfway, halfway across the nation, another group of activists was standing up. This one Dolores Huerta, standing for the rights of the Latinx community here in California, of immigrants, of agricultural workers. And so you saw these two converging movements and progress was made. One important element of progress was the Voter Right Act. And that Voters Right act was signed in 1965. 1965. There you can see President Johnson, Martin Luther King, who took up the mantle of leadership of this movement, this momentous. It didn't change everything because as we know today, those obstacles are still there. They are still real. But for my family, it's part of the story. It changed a lot. So my dad, who's got these stories, another one of his story is he's fighting and serving this nation in Vietnam. And one of the big days when you're on the battlefield back in the day before technology was you'd get a letter from home. And this letter came, and the letter was from his dad, Matt, and he's Matt Also. And the letter begins, junior. Junior. Today was the happiest day of my Life. This is 1966. Today I got to vote for the very first time, the very first time in his life, he actually got to. And the story goes on, because in the 70s, Matt Sr. Became the very first black city councilman in that small little hamlet in Mississippi. And that. That is the power, the power of our votes. That's the difference from a black man told to go on home to a black man serving in the city council of that very same city, that very same city where he couldn't even vote. Now there's more work to be done, for sure. There's absolutely more work to be done. And so people around the nation are still marginalized, their rights to vote still being compromised. And it's super important because in society, there's many challenges we're facing in this society. And we still see the forces of discrimination and bias and division and hatred playing out before our eyes in this nation, across the nation, right? We saw it in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. We saw it less than two weeks ago, the Tree of Life Synagogue. And I would just encourage everyone watching online that these are our brothers, these are our sisters, these are our siblings in this fight for equality. And I would just encourage us all just take a moment, a moment of silence to remember every life, every life that has been lost or challenged or compromised or diminished by hate in this nation and around the world. Let's just take a moment of silence. Remember these all folks whose lives have been lost are compromised due to hatred. So the question here at Salesforce, and I would really propose the question that all of us should be asking ourselves in the tech industry, in all industries, what is our responsibility in the midst of this? What's our responsibility? To act? To stand up or sit down like Rosa Parks? What is our responsibility? When I hearken back to Dolores Huerta, to her words, we must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things. This is what we were put on the earth for. That's our responsibility. That is our higher calling. Now here we are effectively in the heart, the new heart of Silicon Valley, extended down the peninsula and really extends all over the world because there's technology companies active in every major country, in every major city. But here we are at the dawn of this fourth industrial revolution. We have many folks that work for tech companies, great and amazing tech companies, our colleagues and peers in this journey that are every day we sit in these offices and we are inventing and discovering and imagining the future, and all of these forces of robotics and autonomous vehicles and machine learning and gene editing, it's going to change everything. It is going to change every aspect of what it means to work. What does education mean? How do we communicate with each other? The very basic fabric of society, all of it changing before us. And the challenge in question really is, are we making a more equal world through this fourth industrial revolution, or are we making a less equal world? What sort of world are we creating for this next generation of leaders? And I love this particular photo there on the left earlier, you saw Leah McGowan Hare. That's Leah's daughter, That's Simone. And you think about the power of coming into one of these great technology companies, and you're looking at Salesforce Tower here in San Francisco from afar. You come into this space and you see your mother and you see she's beloved and admired. She's a hero at Salesforce. And then Simone seeing her mom and saying, wow, that's what leadership looks like. That's my mom. That could be me. That could be one of my classmates. That's super, super powerful. The important power of representation and seeing yourself being able to see yourself in the leadership and the folks that are driving and creating and crafting and changing the future. Let me give you another example. This little girl, some of you have seen this photo, Parker Curry, 2 years old. And here, the power of one image and looking up and being able somehow to see herself in this incredible iconic leader, our first lady, Michelle Obama. And saying, you can just imagine, you can just put yourself in her shoes. You can imagine what she's thinking. And then just last week, Halloween rolls around. Who do you think Parker Curry wanted to be for Halloween? That life, she's probably still two and a half, three years old, transformed by one image. Just seeing one person that looked like her that's on the front, on the vanguard of leading and transforming the world. Absolutely incredible. And it's these notions of why representation matters. The notion of having organizations, a society at large, the leadership of society, that you can see yourself in that one of the ways, one of the important and foundational ways that we're driving that forward here at Salesforce. And I know I'm not just speaking for Salesforce, speaking for all the companies represented in this room, right. Is through our employee resource groups. And we've got 10 incredible, amazing employee resource groups. And they've grown to the point, and they're flourishing to the point where now about 1 in 2, about 1 in 2 of the employees of Salesforce are active and engaged in these employee resource groups. And I highlight two of them in particular. That's Latinoforce and Boldforce, because they are the sponsors of this event today. And it's their brainchild that brought you all together on this first, I hope, of many racial equality summits that will happen here in San Francisco and over time around the world. And this is how we build community. This is how we build families. And you think about it in any family, just like I shared my view from my family, one of the important elements of a family is having shared memories. And one of the beautiful things that these employee resource groups do is they create shared memories. And I'll give you an example of just one, and that's the MLK march should be familiar to many folks in the room here in San Francisco. Now, in 2017, I'm speaking just for Salesforce now, at the MLK March, we had about 100 people show up. We thought it was incredible. 100 folks showed up, most of them black. And then we thought about how you build movements and the notion of intersectionality and the need for pulling in allies. And this concept of allies has been, for the last 12 to 18 months, has been core and Salesforce to how we think about taking this movement to the next stage so that everyone can see themselves, even if they're not precisely represented in the identity that's being celebrated or honored or remembered on that day. Now, one of the incredible things about being an ally and super important things about being an ally is it doesn't necessarily mean you agree when I ask you to be my ally. It doesn't mean we're going to agree on every single issue, every single lifestyle choice. It doesn't mean you're going to have to change your political affiliation or your religious beliefs. It just simply means in that moment, I am your sibling. I am your sister. I am your brother. And I'm asking you to come with me on a journey of learning and expanding your empathy and your aperture to learn more about what it means to walk in my shoes. And so we've offered that call. We offered that call around MLK. And so in 2018, from Salesforce, 1100 people showed up, but not just Salesforce, because we had a convening at the Giant Stadium before and we had 2,500 folks there from many, many companies that are represented in the room. I just want to thank and congratulate. And it's just the beginning. And we hope to have, you know, a greater outpouring of support and allyship this year. So I just want to thank and congratulate and show my appreciation and applaud all of you for showing up, showing up as allies. For us, it was 1100 people, most of them not black. And so that notion of building a broader circle, of inviting in your allies, is an important next step on this journey into Civil Rights 2.0. And so I'd like to close just by sharing with you a brief family video from some of the recent events we've had here at Salesforce from some of the voices of Civil Rights 2.0. So I close with this.

This is a seminal Civil Rights 2.0 what are you doing every single day? Moment. This is.

There is a lot of responsibility with that word activism. Whether you have a voice or not, either you talk about it or you.

Be about it and you do about it.

I don't care how you fight, fight until your voice is heard. You have a voice. If you did not have a voice, you wouldn't be here.

When we see something that is not right, not fair, not just, we have a moral obligation to speak up and speak out and do something about it.

We stand against the hatred. We stand against the violence. Even in the darkest hour, we saw the healing power of love to light a path forward to an age of equality.

We made a decision to march in an orderly fashion from Selma to Montgomery. But last year, I had the honor to go back to Selma, and it was my honor to introduce President Barack Obama. So when people tell me nothing has changed, I feel like saying, come and walk in my shoes and I will show you change.