By Terry Allen
Big Mama never fails! Her wisdom transcends time. Lucille “Big Mama” Allen’s birth in 1906 sparked a faith driven wisdom trail within the family. She created a process of self-awareness, self-examination and spiritual alignment for all of her children.
She also once stated to me after I bought something via the mail from a magazine ad that did not look like its picture. She said quoted Maya Angelou, “Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” I learned that I had to examine the credibility of the source, the reputation of the product and the entire relevance of the offering.
Let’s examine this African proverb in terms of the new DEI movement across the country and in other global spaces and platform. The proverb says, “Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” I flip that to expand to this statement. It’s easy to talk the talk and give advice on how things should be done. But the person giving the advice does not act in a way that agrees with the advice they are giving. The proverb implies that a person should back up their talking with action. In the DEI movement sparked by the global impact to the death of George Floyd, where we are giving ourselves a self-examination of equity and belonging in our organizations. Yet here is the issue. A lot of the green lighted programs are led by individuals that do not have the appropriate competency to execute and establish a presence of equity and belonging.
In other words, the purveyors of DEI do not have any ‘skin in the game” and the DEI process is mired in House Negro and Field Negro situations. The “field vs house’ process is hard to identify, measure and diffuse. It is dipped in an ineffective process that a person of color is all that is needed to run a DEI program. As ‘Big Mama” said, the “powers that be” will place an overseer on you and reward them to keep you in your place. The iconic Dr. Claud Anderson called it meritorious manumission – a process where enslaved people of color received favor when they reported other enslaved people who they felt were a threat to the process and/or they were not aligned with their oppression.
Just recently, I gave a suggestion to a BIPOC group leader that the individual and his quote selected for distribution was problematic because the chosen author had a steep history of supremacy and Jim Crowism. Other white team members agreed and confirmed the racist nature of the selected quote. I felt good that we dodged a public incident. I suggested a quote from James Baldwin that matched the intent of the 1st quote yet the day of the event the original author and quote was in the materials. Several white colleagues called me concerned. I restated my concerns and the quote was deleted without the suggested replacement.
I thought it was done. Then all of a sudden, the group leader and an accompanying high-end colleague began a series of actions like visibly not speaking to me, blocking any post-participation reporting, no inclusion in any support events, creating new rules that were spearheaded to minimize my actions and scrutinizing my every action with a parent-like scorn. All of this undermines the DEI movement. It mirrors most DEI movements in the country. So, we now are seeing a failure of authenticity.
There are three key reasons why DEI initiatives fail: failure to explicitly connect DEI objectives to the organization’s merit system, branding and values; lack of sustainable power from C-suite leadership; and absence of a cohesive competency in the staff charged with integrating DEI into all aspects of the business. Self-hatred is real and BIPOC people are being minimized by their own due to an unchecked incompetency dipped in self-hatred. Big Mama reminded me, “when you are with a naked shirts, you have to D.U.C.K! – (Deflect Unhealed Competency Kindly)” Thanks, Big Mama!
Terry Allen is an award-winning media professional, journalist, and entrepreneur. He is also the founder of City Men Cook and 1016 Media. Reach him at terryallenpr@gmail.com His column appears in over 16 BIPOC newspapers.
