Breonna Taylor gets little justice, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit spotlights racial disparities in health care, and advertising looks to utilize Black talent as much as it utilizes Black culture.
But first, here’s your fitness-inspired week, in Haiku:
Bryant Johnson, now
Ruthless, honored her life with
three perfect pushups.
She called him the most
important person in her
life: Special Forces
turned records clerk, turned
companion on the journey
to health and justice.
Hands on the cool floor
at the foot of her casket.
Three perfect pushups.
She could do twenty
at eighty years old! What will
we do, now Ruthless?
Some professional news: After getting quite a bit of feedback and doing some in-depth thinking with my edit partner, Aric Jenkins, we’ve decided to increase the frequency of raceAhead going forward, as best we can. Each dispatch might be less in-depth, but still filled with the news-you-can-use, resources, and inspiration you need to better stay on top of a rapidly changing world. We hope it’s the right thing for you; we know it’s the right thing for us.
Please keep those cards and letters coming. We can’t always respond, but they help us set our course. And stay strong, like RBG.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On point
Seeking justice for Breonna Taylor It was a painful, if not unsurprising outcome in the ongoing inquiry into the botched police action that killed medical worker Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky. last March. Earlier this week, a grand jury indicted a former Louisville police officer for wanton endangerment for his actions firing blindly into the sliding glass door and window of Taylor’s apartment. None of the other officers on the scene were charged, and no one was held responsible for her death. The decision triggered public demonstrations in Louisville and around the country; two officers were shot in a subsequent protest in the city. On another note, the local Courier Journal is an excellent resource for the inside track on the people and issues. I subscribed. A good review of the case and decision is below.
New York Times
Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit highlights racial disparities in health care
The difference in health, outcomes and longevity based on race have long been a problem in the U.S., and the coronavirus pandemic offers a unique opportunity to remedy the entire health delivery ecosystem, experts agreed at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference on Thursday. “Obviously this is systemic, so for us to say at this point in time that we’re just learning about this [disparity] would be somewhat disingenuous,” said Rhonda Mims, the regional vice president of community affairs at Centene Corporation. “We at Stanford medicine often talk about how zip codes are the greatest predictor of our long term health, more than genetic health,” said Priya Singh, chief strategy officer at Stanford Medicine.
Fortune
Can advertising move beyond its colonization of Black culture? Bennett D. Bennett, principal at content firm Aerialist and co-founder of advocacy organization 600 & Rising—and dear friend to raceAhead—has some powerful ideas on how the advertising industry could finally live up to its promise of meaningful diversity. But he starts with a powerful question. “What could advertising look like when Black talent matters as much as our lives and culture do?” In this exceptional digital package for Adweek, he points to a host of people who have been doing the work in part by investing in underrepresented talent and working around status quo thinking. Enjoy.
Adweek
If you’re looking for the future of business, look no farther than our annual Change the World list, published this week. This list—our sixth—shows a clear trend: Collaboration, even among rivals, in service of a better world. The “vaccine makers” came in at number one, a natural place to find rapid collaboration in a world besieged by pandemic. But the quest to achieve racial equity is an interesting twist in corporate mandates. Enjoy, and know hope.
Fortune
On Background
Emmett Till’s journey Georgia-based writer Alexandra Marvar digs into the noble work of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC), formed by Mississippi-based advocates in 2005 in an attempt to memorialize the events of Till’s life and lynching and add the racist violence of the Jim Crow era to the area’s historical record. People in the Delta were either horrified by Till’s brutal murder or horrified by the attention it brought to the area. “Because of racial barriers, investigators and historians wouldn’t interview key witnesses for years or even decades. Others took their accounts to the grave,” Marvar writes. “The sites in Mississippi where key events took place were forgotten, became overgrown, or were quietly but defiantly razed.” What follows is a poignant record of Till’s experience in Mississippi, as laid out by the Commission’s unique Emmett Till Memory Project mobile app. Yes, it will break your heart.
Gen
Advocating for your culture at work Jaclyn Roessel grew up on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona, and has worked from an early age to build cultural bridges between the two nations she calls home. In her work as an entrepreneur and director of public programs for an American Indian art and cultural center, she says she learned the importance of including outside voices in important conversations. She offers five tips for anyone who wants to be a better partner for inclusion at work. Number three really hit home: Sometimes your ideas are going to slow things down. “When I worked at the museum, I consistently provided feedback to other departments about their language and visual choices for ads,” she said. That sometimes necessitated different art or a new approach, a tough ask when time and resources are scarce. “But in the end, it gave us all the space to think through what we were communicating,” she says.
Jopwell
When father will never know best In a poignant essay, writer Lilian Min explores the new divide felt by so many first generation Americans. How do you manage when the person who raised you, and raised you well, offends your notions of social equity, race, gender roles, and justice? Raised in a middle class family, within an “East Asian diaspora bubble in Central New Jersey,” she feels herself growing apart from her family and wonders how to navigate the often difficult patriarchy of a family that oppresses as much as it protects.
The Establishment on Medium
Today's mood board
