E49: Counter Play Post Claudine Gay, What Black Women Must Do Next!

You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound. And when I fall, you tied a rope to me. You're blessing me every day. I was down with an illusion, like a sparrow with broken wings. But now I shine with your reflection on me.

Hi everyone, welcome to Inclusion Unscripted. And this is the re-recording of our earlier podcast, um, the Counterplay Post-Dr. Claudine Gay: What Black Women Must Do Next. So welcome to Inclusion Unscripted. My name is Margaret Spence. I am the founder of the Inclusion Learning Lab. And the Employee to CEO Project. And for many of you who follow me on a regular basis, you know that I have been offline for, uh, about 4 or 5 months now, and I wanted to sort of explain that to everyone, why I was offline and why you weren't seeing me online. Um, I had a very nasty fall in July. Um, I fell at home I was coming out of the shower and the floor was wet and blah blah blah, and I went down a pretty bad fall. I ended up having a concussion. I had all kinds of symptoms from that concussion for many weeks, and that went on for months and months. And then I had some injury to my face and jaw and all that jazz, so I wasn't able to do the podcast recording as I had been able to do it. But in between all of that, I got married, and I got married in September and so on. So first off, I want to say Happy New Year to everyone. Thank you for joining Inclusion Unscripted. I wish all of you an amazing 2024 and beyond, and I want you to, to accept all the blessings that comes with the new year as we think through this new year. So as I said, I'm re-recording this because we had some snafu with the mic earlier, and I want to talk about what has been going on with Dr. Gay and what Black women must do next. So that's the basis for this conversation, and again, as I said, we had some snafu earlier, and so I'm doing this over.

So here we go.

First off, I decided to do this show today because I want to address everything that's going on with Dr. Claudine Gay, everything that happened at Harvard. I don't want to go into the nitty-gritty of the stuff. I want to talk high level, and I want to talk about DEI and I want to talk about what we do next, and I want to talk about where we go from here. Those are the key parts of this process. That's it right there.

Okay, so here's the deal.

I want to set the record straight first because I went on to a bunch of the podcasts on Apple Podcasts, and I saw these right-wing men, these right-wing white men talking about Dr. Gay as if she was subhuman, right? As if she didn't exist, as if she was not a woman that had earned her right to stand in the room and earned her right to be in the position. So today we're going to tackle what Black women must do next and what we as people of color must do next. What should we do next? Where do we go from here? So first off, I want to set the record straight. First, the first thing that I want to do is set the record straight.

Dr. Claudine Gay—

and I'm gonna give her her crown, her flowers, and all of it—

Dr. Claudine Gay was absolutely qualified to be the president of Harvard University.

Stick a pin in that. She did not plagiarize within her dissertation.

There were errors in her dissertation, there were quotations issue— issues in her dissertation, but she had defended that dissertation years ago.

She didn't defend that dissertation a week ago. The citation processes have changed, they've been adjusted, they move back and forth.

But her dissertation had been reviewed, countless reviews, before it was accepted. So when we sit here and say she plagiarized and so she's not eligible and she's not this, the institution that gave her the degree was Harvard. The institution that gave her her education and training was Harvard. The institution that she gave her career and has given her career to is Harvard. So I'm not going to allow white men who are on an agenda to dismantle DEI to try to use Dr.

Gay's credentials as something other than what it is. Her credentials are her credentials, period. So let's take that off the table.

But here's what I am angry about, because I come to this angry, but I'm not going to be angry on this today.

I'm gonna be clear and specific and targeted and say what needs to be said. And because I'm re-recording this, I'm going to be condensed and say it just the way I needed to say it immediately.

Here's the deal: the playbook that is being run on Dr. Gay is a playbook that started in slavery that white men have been running on Black people forever. See, the way that white men became the powerhouses that they were while they had us picking their corn— their corn and their—

and their— and their cotton—

is because they got to say that we were subhuman and we weren't good enough. We were subhuman. We weren't good enough. We weren't at the top of the game. We were at the bottom of the game. And because we're at the bottom of the game, you get to say that we're not good enough. So that playbook of this Black woman not being good enough or not being worthy or not being eligible for the role that she's in is a playbook that has been used since slavery to justify the treatment or mistreatment of Black people. So let's get that part out of the way. The playbook that Christopher Rufo and his buddies are using is a playbook that they invented in the '50s to maintain inequity, that they have dusted off because we were marching in the street during COVID and after George Floyd, and they think that we have come out of our place and they need to figure out how to put us back into our place. Right?

They need to put us back in our place. That's the playbook that they're using against us right now.

That is the playbook they are using, a playbook that is tested and tried and dusted off and clear. The challenge is we don't have a counterplay for them. We are still behind the 8-ball, the same 8-ball that they used to enslave us for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

When you understand counterplay, you understand that we are not playing checkers, we are playing chess.

That the playbook that they're using is a checkers playbook. If I move this, they'll do that. If I do this, they'll do that. But they also have a deeply ingrained chess move in what they're doing. And that chess move is simply this: annihilate Black people, remove them from their existence, and remove any vehicle that can help them be more empowered than they are right now. In the '50s and the '40s and the '30s and the '20s, what they did was they burned our cities down. They burned down our cities so that we could not progress. They burned down our institutions so we couldn't progress. They burned down our ability to build viable, enriched societies for ourselves so that we would always be dependent on the white man for a handout, and he would get to decide how he handed it to us. So We use the couch of antisemitism to really do what you want to do, which is to annihilate Black progress. That is what you are doing, annihilating Black progress. That was the whole goal of Chris Rufo and his friends. See, Mr. Investor Person, who had the nerve to say she was a diversity hire and and she wasn't qualified, right? You did that because you don't think we are qualified, and you think the original playbook, the original playbook that you use, which says Black people haven't earned the right to even breathe the air that they're breathing, is the one that you need to pull out and use again. But we need a counterplay So here's the thing, here's what I know, and here's what I want us to clearly understand.

I want us to clearly understand this, and I'm going to say it as many times as I need to so that you all hear me.

We as Black women have no allies that are not Black. We as Black men don't have any allies that aren't Black, because here's what I know Here's what I know: the second it gets uncomfortable for them, they will back out and leave us standing there by ourselves. They will hang us out to dry. Their silence will contribute to us being annihilated by the playbook that has been—

that is being used against us.

That's what I know. That is a fact. So we as Black people need to stop thinking that we have these allies out there who are first going to save us and second going to have our back and third going to be there, to be there for us. We don't have that. And Claudine Gay and what has happened to her has taught us one thing: we do not have allies who have our back. There is no white person coming to save us. There is no white woman coming to save us. There is no white man coming to save us. We as Black people have to save ourselves because they have no intention of saving us. They intend to take back what they think we have gotten.

Out of the system that they created.

Because here's it— our foreparents told us one thing: go get educated, get educated, get an education, learn, get degrees. And so Black women knew the assignment, and we went out and we got college educated and we got degrees, and we wanted to climb the ladder, and we went into organizations and we asked for more responsibility, and we climbed the ladder And now they're looking around and saying, wait a second, first off, Black women have an economic power. Black women are saving the democracy. Black women are moving into education ranks, and we don't think they should be there because if we give one of them an opportunity, it might give the rest of them the idea that they can do this too. So if we do that, we are now setting ourselves up to have more Black women running college campuses in our Ivy League towers that are reserved for Black—

for white men.

That is the message that comes out of Claudine Gay. The message is Black women, stay in your damn corner. Don't come out of the box we gave you. We gave you that fucking box. Stay in there. That's what has come out of this. That's what Chris Rufo and his friends are saying. And then they're saying DEI— diversity, equity, and inclusion programs— is what gave you the opportunity to be in these positions. And so if DEI gave you the opportunity to be in these positions, we must also, while we annihilate you, we must and the vehicle that has allowed you to ascend to the positions that you are ascending to. Because at the end of the day, we don't want to see your black face in our white spaces, and we will use white women to make sure that you stay in the box that we've put you in. That part That part. They're saying what they're going to do out loud. They're no longer hiding behind the sheets. They're saying it out loud. They're no longer hiding behind the KKK. They're saying it out loud. They're saying it in a modern 2024, 2023 world. But here's what I know. We are smarter than them. We are smarter than them. We are smarter than them. If we figure out one thing, they are not our allies. They are not our friends. They are not. They are our acquaintances and associates in this playbook.

In this playbook, there are 5 types of people, and I'm gonna go through it again because I keep saying it over and over and people don't keep hearing me say it.

There are people who want to detract and annihilate the progress that is being made towards equity and equality and inclusion. There are people who are actively working every day to maintain the status quo. There are people who are sitting in the middle saying, let me see how this shit plays out. I don't want to be a part of it. If those Black people get a job, they're probably going to take my job. So I don't really want to do anything about it.

I'm going to be sitting in the middle. And if you persuade me, I may join this group. And then you have people who show up as true believers who say they believe in DEI.

They talk a good talk. They could give you the bullshit story. They could tell you all the ways they want DEI to work. They could tell you all of that, right? But at the end of the day, if you ask them to make a decision that's going to impact them, they say effing no, and they go back to maintaining the status quo. And then we have the people who show up as partners for us, who show up and say, I'm a partner, I'm the one that's here for you, I'm here for you. I'm a part of this, and they show up saying that, but in reality, the reality is they do not want us in their space either. So they will partner to a point. They'll set up the DEI program in the organization, they'll set up the ERG, they'll set up all the things, they'll give it funding. They'll show up for meetings, they'll raise the flag, they'll be all happy and rah-rah. But oh, wait a minute, a Black woman wants to be in the C-suite? Hell no, I don't want that woman in the, in the C-suite. I'ma do everything I can while I'm in the room pretending to be a partner. While I'm in the room pretending to be a partner, I will do everything in my power to annihilate that woman behind the scenes. So that I can sow doubt about her competency so she doesn't end up in this room that I want for myself. That's who we're dealing with. Those 5 people. Those are the 5 people that we think are our allies and our friends. There is no DEI program in any organization that is effectively producing what it's supposed to produce And I don't care if you are the DEI leader. There is no DEI program in this country that is producing what it's supposed to produce because at the end of the day, it is not creating equity. It is not creating equality. It is creating belonging. It is creating inclusion. It is creating hiring opportunities, but it is not putting Black people at the equity table. What it is doing is giving us the false perception that we belong and giving us this false perception that we are included, and it's giving us the false perception that if we're hired, we will have opportunity. That is what DEI is doing. So by golly, I wrote an article that is the obituary to DEI. Let's kill the damn thing. Kill the freaking thing and ask for equity and equality. Here's how equity looks: all the Black people are hired in hourly employee places. Why do you think Claudine Gay had to go? Because she's now the highest earning person at Harvard, probably.

So how dare her ask and get that kind of equity money on the cap table that they don't want us on.

See, white people are okay with us being the hourly employee. They are perfectly fine with us being the hourly employee.

Where shit gets to hit the fan is when we want to be the equity employee, and that's where DEI does not make a difference.

Because the people who are on the equity cap table in the organization are not the people of color.

They are still white men.

So we can do the DEI subversion at the lower levels. We can create those ERG programs. We can build all those things at the lower level because it keeps the masses happy and it keeps you from becoming insurrectionists. It keeps you coming back because we've thrown a bone at you, and in throwing a bone at you, you will be fat and happy. And so we show back up for the bone. But what they taught us with Claudine Gay is if you try to go after the equity, we're going to put you back in your place.

And her place is being a professor. That's her place. Her place is not being the representative of Harvard University. Her place is not going into the white rooms with the white men as the CEO, as the head of Harvard University, where all these secret deals get made and we don't want a Black woman in that room. She was out of place in their eyes the second that she was selected for this job, and they were going to find a way to get rid of her. The, the challenge is they couldn't figure out how to do it, but they found a way because of an incident that she has no control over. What control do you have about students who want to protest except kicking them out?

That's it. No one gives up their free speech rights because you entered a college campus. That's the part that we're forgetting. Nobody gives up their right to speak because you're on a college campus. But the dismantling of college education is a, is a total goal. If we dismantle college education, then we dismantle the upward mobility of Black women. That is what they're trying to do. That is the goal of Christopher Rufo. If we dismantle the Fearless Fund, the fund for women that's going to fund Black women business, then there's no Black women business that could ultimately become a business that employs more Black women. See, there's a science to this playbook. This playbook occurred in Tulsa, it occurred in Rosewood, Florida, it occurred in all these places. It occurred in the systematic putting highways through Black communities. I went to Charleston last year to speak at a conference. I'll never go back to Charleston, South Carolina. I will never go back there. First off, it's hollow ground. It reeks. The energy of our ancestors are walking around in that city. If you're an energetic person, you feel them walking around in that city. I had this white woman say to me as I was walking around in the streets of Charleston, are you lost? You look like you're lost. I'm not damn lost. My ancestors made this ground that you are lost on. So this playbook that they are using, that they pulled out on Claudine Gay, is the same playbook that they used on us always. Here is the box, don't climb out of it. But here's the shit. And this is something that we don't think about. If America stopped being a super racist country, we would be the best country in the planet. The energy and time that it takes to be a racist who goes after a Black woman who has earned her crown— the time you did that, you could have solved some damn world problems. You could have done a lot of things with that time. But we are the target, Black women. We are the ones you want to annihilate, Black women, because if you annihilate Black woman, you annihilate the Black family.

But here's what I want you all to understand, because the core playbook is what do we do next.

The core playbook of what we do next is simply this: we do not become so loyal that we forget that we do not have allies. We have to speak with our experience. A lot of you are in departments where you are the sole brain trust of those departments. You—

if you walked out the door with your brain knowledge, that department would probably end for months.

But, and they treat you like shit in those departments. You ask for a promotion, they take a shit on you. You ask to move up, they take another shit on you. But we keep going back to have these white people taking a shit on us. Here's what we do next: we stop allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of by this system. If you are applying for jobs and they're not giving it to you, put your resume together and try to get out of there. What we do next is we do something simple. We say, we will not allow ourselves to be treated badly. We will not allow the system to annihilate us. We will not allow it. We will gather around ourselves and recognize that we are playing a long game of chess. And what we are doing right now to solidify ourselves as Black women, as we anchor Claudine Gay in our memory of what they've done to us— we have to anchor her in our memory of what they—

what they've done to us.

As we anchor that in our memory, we remember one simple thing. What they did to her, they will do to us. We will not and no longer be loyal to these organizations who don't want us in their midst. If you don't want me in the C-suite, I'm not going to be in your hourly pool. And we need to dismantle all of what we think we have gotten from these organizations. We need to go where where people value us, where they want us there, where they're moving us up the ladder. We need to not sit in positions where we are being taken advantage of. The best thing that Claudine Gay did was resign. Give them their damn presidency. Shove it up your ass where the sun don't shine. Give it to them. Give them their presidency because they don't think you deserved it. Give it to them. Let them put who they want in there because we cannot continue to fight all the time. If we are fighting like this all the time, nothing is coming into our hands. We are just fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting. And if we are fighting all the time, then we are stressing ourselves out. For what reason? To help these white companies that don't want us in their midst make more money off of our sweat and labor and then treat us bad? And you go home to your family and you're so stressed out that you can't do anything? No, that is not what we are doing. That is what we are not going to do. We are going to leave them with these baskets that they want to weave. We are not going to get in this fight with them. What we are going to do is an economic fight against this. Everybody that wants to treat us like crap, who want to, um, pull out their playbook on us, we pull an economic playbook out on them. The Black pocketbook will not open for these white companies that don't want Black people in leadership, who don't want DEI, who don't want to promote, who don't want all of that. We will stop spending our money with them. We will stop. We will have to take an economic action against these people. It is not enough for us to protest in the street. We need a counterplay. Our counterplay is economic. Our counterplay is boycott. Let me explain something. Apartheid didn't end because we protested in the street. Apartheid ended because we put pressure, economic pressure, on South Africa, and they had to buckle under the economic pressure that was put on them. If you want to take away our rights in 2024, then we are going to put the economic pressure on you so that you recognize that as people of color, we have a voice. We have earned the right because we built the shit that you are standing on. Your ancestors didn't build anything. Your ancestors had a gun at our head and we built it for you. That is what happened. That is how this worked. But we as people of color, we as Black women, cannot keep fighting every day in unhappy work situations with organizations that don't give a shit about us. Because when we fight like that, we end up with high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer, heart attacks. We die early because we are worn out fighting for the mere existence of standing in their shitty rooms that they don't want us in anyway. I am tired of not having allies who have our back. I am tired of that. I am tired of white women's tears. I am tired of y'all crying. I can tell you, recently I saw this— Black woman builds it, white woman comes along and starts in the background making sure that, that, that Black woman loses that position because she wants it. But that's fine, because guess what? Give it to you. Go take it. Do whatever you want with it, right? But we're not gonna fight for this anymore. We're not. What we are going to do is do an economic impact. An economic impact. And in that economic impact, we say pretty clearly You don't want us here, okay, but I'm not gonna sit here every day and help you build your millions when you want to make sure that I remain an hourly employee, that I don't get equity in this organization.

I'm gonna make sure that I get what I need to get out of here, and I'm gonna leave because I have no loyalty to you, because the loyalty is a two-way street.

If I'm loyal to you and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do and I'm trained and I'm producing and I'm— I'm—

you're telling me that I'm great, but you will not give me another role so that I make more money. See, this triangulation and playbook that is being used against us is economic, it's emotional, and then it is psychological.

It's a triangulated playbook that is being used against us to make sure that we stay in the box. So what do we do? Where do we go from here? The question I asked— I was on LinkedIn and I asked Denise Conway, what do we do next? And what we do next is an economic counterplay, an economic counterplay. Who are the companies that we need to stop spending our money with because they don't want to have inclusion? Who are the companies that we need to stop supporting because they don't want the equity table to be shifted? Who are the companies that are stopping progress? Who are the individuals that are stopping progress? And when we see the progress stopping, we figure out how to take legal action against these people.

No right that we have today was earned without us going to court and fighting for it.

So if you want us to go through the court system, not depending on the Supreme Court, but taking civil action against you for discrimination, for terminating us, for all of those things. If you want that war, we can have that war. We can have that war. Because if you feel emboldened to use the playbook that Chris Russo is putting out, and you feel emboldened to use that playbook, then we are emboldened to use a legal playbook against you. That's really it. Because see, America only understands two things: finances and legal. That's it. Money and law. That is it. Money and lawsuits. That's what we understand. So I want to sort of set, reset the record straight. Dr.

Gay deserves her crown and and her flowers for putting up with the bullshit for the last couple weeks. And I hope and pray for her mental well-being because what they put her through was untenable for a woman.

But I've watched this before. I've seen it. We've all seen it. We've all seen it play out and we let it play out And then when it's done playing out, we go on and we say, okay, that happened, it's okay, and we forget and we keep moving on. But we cannot forget. We cannot forget what they've done to Claudine Gay. We cannot forget what they've done to that sister. We need to constantly be reminded of the counterplay that we have to have against the people who felt that they did this and they are now running a victory lap. We need a counterplay against them.

The counterplay is economic. The counterplay is not protest. The counterplay is economic.

Economic justice is what it's going to take to shift these men, these white men who think that they are more entitled to positions than we are, because this is not going to end. And here's a message to white women that I want to give, a message to white women.

Here is the message to white women: they will come for a Black woman, but you are who they're really coming after.

They want you pregnant, at home, in the kitchen, taking care of your husband. That is the rule. They want to go back to that handmaid—

Hansel and Gretel tale.

They want to go back to that. They want to go back there, and they want to drag it there. And so they use these playbooks because just as they don't want Black women in the executive level, they don't want white women there either.

And we saw that with how they are treating the the MIT president and the president in Pennsylvania.

We're, we're seeing it, we're seeing it. See, they don't want women, period, in any of these roles. They don't want women, but they are going to target Black women because they feel if they set us straight, we won't try to do this again.

There won't be another Black woman who tries to become the leader of an Ivy League college in the United States. And so in that sense, they won, because there won't be another board that will put a Black woman to lead an Ivy League college in the United States after what they did to Claudine Gay.

So in essence, they won that battle because the message they wanted to send to all the boards and all the executives at all these college campuses: don't put another Black woman at the top. That's the message they wanted to send. That is the message.

Don't you dare ever put another Black woman at the head of our institution of learning that we think belongs to us. As white men. And if you dare put even a white woman there, we will come for her too. I.e., the MIT president.

Think about this. The Columbia University president, she didn't show up for that hearing.

She said she was busy, and she was the smartest one in that room.

Nobody looking at her. They had a lot of stuff going on, anti-Semitic, on their campus, but nobody's looking at her because she didn't fall into the playbook.

We as Black women need to not fall into these playbooks where we feel we have to do something because they asked us to do it, where we feel we have to go along because that's what they require.

We have to stop going along because of what they require. Even in your corporate role, they are setting you up for failure right now, today. They are setting you up to fail. They looked at what happened at Claudine Gay. They looked at it and they said, you know what, there's a blank white woman here who has gotten out of her little britches in her little square place.

And we're going to teach her a lesson.

See how they did her?

Let's start making sure that people think she's incompetent.

Let's start making sure that we plant self-doubt about her abilities. Let's make sure that we start moving the needle.

Let's make sure that we go out of our way to make sure that the rest of everybody else knows that she hasn't earned the right to be in that role. Let's make sure that we play the playbook, the Claudine Gay playbook, on her too, because ultimately we want her ass out of here. We're gonna work on making sure that she leaves.

So what do you do as a Black woman when you're in that?

Recognize you don't have any allies. Decide how much you want to fight versus not fighting. Decide when enough is enough and counterplay, push back.

Don't docilely say, I can't say anything. If their ass are coming for you anyway, their ass are coming for you anyway, right? So we can't sit there and say, oh my God, I'm afraid. No, you cannot be afraid.

You need to say, what is my plan? What's my counterplay? What is my counterplay today? I need a counterplay. And in that vein of a counterplay, I don't want to put myself through the psychological trauma of this. I'm gonna look around and see if I can find another place to go before they fire me.

And if they fire you, regroup.

Regroup is probably the best thing that they've ever done for you. Because the stress of being in that environment where white people don't want you is worse than having some massive disease, because that environment will push any disease onto you. We need a counterplay. We cannot lay down and let these human beings think that they can run the book from 1619 on us in 2024. In 2023, they ran it. We can't allow them to run it into 2024. You see, the 1619 book of annihilating Black people can't be dusted off and updated for 2024. We must have a counterplay, a clear strategy that is driven by economics. And here's the last thing I want to say to you: if you're in a department and you are the brain trust of that department, you are the one that's producing in that department, and they are shitting on you, put your resume together and find a place to go and let them figure it out on their own. Don't sit there and say, this is a loyal company, I've been here for years and I don't think I can leave. Leave.

Let them figure it out. We are no longer going to be the loyal doormat on the back of white—

of Black excellence when white people are coming for us. Every which way. Black women must have a different counterplay. Our counterplay is economic. Don't get so caught up in the organization that you forget that you do not have an ally there. You don't have a friend, you don't have an ally. No one there cares about you. If you drop dead tomorrow morning, they will have a white person in your seat. And they will not even say your name. A few will show up at your funeral to say, hey, Margaret was great, but the majority will not. So remember that counterplay is the answer. We as Black people need to speak an economic message. We need to go back and look at our playbooks that got us to here.

Because we didn't do an effective job of telling the next generation what had to be done to allow us to get here. See, abortion would never have been overturned if we had explained to women what had to happen in order for us to get the right to have an abortion.

See, voting rights wouldn't have been an issue if If we had explained clearly from the time a child spit into this earth why voting rights was essential and how many Black people died to give you the right to vote, and everyone would be voting not because it's a political thing, we would be voting in our self-interest. We would be holding our politicians that we vote for to be accountable for our communities, not when they want our vote.

Right, so we need to create the counterplay. What did we do to get the rights we have today? We marched, but we sued, and we did economic boycotts. What did we do to end apartheid in South Africa? We did economic boycotts. What did we do to earn the voting rights? We sat down and did economic boycotts. What are we going to do right now to stop the men, the white men who want to roll us back to, to 1619?

We're going to deal with them from an economic standpoint.

This is an economic fight. It's not a personal fight. It's not a position fight. It's not a DEI fight. What is happening to us is an economic fight. If I allow you to get more than we think you're entitled to, you're going to be better than we want you to be. This is an economic fight. This is not about DEI. DEI is the engine to the economic fight. DEI is the engine to the economic fight. The economic fight is what they're fighting because DEI says you must create an environment where everything is equal and equitable and people can advance. That creates the economic engine. So if we stop DEI, we stop the economic engine of progress for people of color and women. See, so we need to get it through our heads what we're really fighting. We're not fighting for DEI. Kill DEI. I just wrote an article, The Obituary to DEI. Kill it. Let it go. DEI is an economic engine that empowers Black and brown people to be better off than they were the day before. And if you can stop the economic engine and you can stop the education engine and you can stop the movement engine, then you get to keep us in the position that you want us in, which is poor and impoverished. If you sue the Fearless Fund and stop Black women from getting funding to start businesses, you get to do an economic hit job on us. You see, the fight, the Claudine Gay fight, is an economic fight It is not about DEI. Do not get us caught up in these fucking acronyms. The acronyms is not what we're fighting. What we are fighting for is the economic engine to allow the next generation of Black people to be better off than the current generation of Black people. We are fighting an economic fight against white men who want to maintain their the status quo. This is an economic fight. It's not about fucking DEI. It's about the economic engine that creates sustainability for people of color. So let's get it straight. That's what we're fighting. We are not fighting to maintain a program and a set of programs who aren't currently serving us in any way, shape, or form. That is what we're fighting. We are not fighting for DEI. We are fighting for economic sustainability as a person of color so that my grandson can have a better economic future than I do. That is what we're fighting for. Don't get caught up and twisted in DEI. DEI is the economic engine that is being fought against. Because if I give you a C-suite position, you're now at the equity table, and I don't want anybody at the equity table that isn't a white man.

Because here's the thing, white women, they don't want you at that equity table either.

That's the fight we're in.

We're in an economic fight. So thank you for listening to me about Claudine Gay, and the counterplay is economics. The counterplay for what they did to her is all about economics, and if we forget that, we continue to lose. Thank you for joining us. I'll be back next week. With another Inclusion Unscripted. And you can visit our website at inclusionlearninglab.com and join our community. Um, we have a community access for $98 to just join the community and get the support you need as a DEI and HR leader. Join the community, and I will be back at 2 o'clock on Friday, um, next week. To talk again about where we go from here. Thank you for joining me on Inclusion Unscripted. Take care everyone, have a wonderful weekend.

You're like a circle that floats around me, keeping me safe and sound, and when I fall you tied a rope to me. You're blessing me every day, I was down with an illusion like a sparrow with broken wings, but now I shine with your reflection on me.

Take care, everyone.