Hello and Ramadan Mubarak, everyone.
Ramadan ends this Thursday with Eid al-Fitr, the festive celebration marking the end of the month-long period of prayer and fasting for Muslims.
One can find nearly everything to know about Eid on Google, thanks in part to the efforts of the search giant’s ERG, which played an outsized role in making sure that a search for Ramadan information—timing, celebration ideas, recipes—would populate something other than anti-Muslim sentiment on the site. That was not always the case. “If you look at Ramadan searches from 2016, the page was very stale, but also full of the bigotry that was being perpetuated in the media,” Alaa Aissi, the global co-lead for Google’s Muslims@ ERG, told raceAhead last month. After internal collaboration informed by Muslim employees, the site better reflects the needs and lived experiences of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims.
It feels like an inclusion success story.
I’m regularly uncovering successes like these in my reporting, specifically instances where companies tap ERGs to not only accommodate employees but improve products, services, and the stakeholder experience.
Last month, I caught up with Jada McFadden, a people experience manager who oversees the strategy for SAP’s employee network groups (ENGs). Her primary concern is creating psychological safety, which she aims to do through regular check-ins with ENG leads, who speak candidly about the employee experience. “I want them to provide real feedback,” she says. “I want them to see me as a real resource.”
She cites, by way of example, one Muslim employee who suggested that the company provide training resources so all staffers know how to support Muslim employees during Ramadan. “It was asking us to further the message of empathy and understanding for employees during Ramadan,” says McFadden. “And she helped us write a ‘how to be an ally’ guidebook for SAP employees.”
That guidebook highlights the unique challenges of working through Ramadan—fasting, scheduling, exhaustion, and finding a place to pray, among them—and lit the way for further changes across the company.
“The initiative started in our Montreal office to create dedicated prayer rooms and foot-washing stations,” she says, with their New York and Philadelphia offices following suit. SAP will provide similar accommodations at its global Sapphire customer conferences, which anyone of any faith can use. It’s a public-facing change that sends a broader message about how the company has learned to listen, she says. “That change to our large events comes from direct feedback from our interfaith group, [to be used by] anyone who may be practicing their faith and who just needs the time.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ruth Umoh.
On Point
Oklahoma officials under investigation after appalling leaked audio
The audio is from a county commissioners meeting last month and was captured by a reporter for the McCurtain Gazette-News. The individuals, including a county sheriff, were caught lamenting that lynching Black people is no longer an option. “I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got,” said McCurtain County District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings (R). It gets worse; the FBI is investigating.
Heartland Signal
Where is our safe, convenient, affordable birth control?
U.S. health insurers are supposed to cover birth control. Yet, many don’t, stifling the innovation necessary to create a robust marketplace of options, finds Fortune's Maria Aspan in a must-read investigation. She writes that the squeeze out of small pharma players, coupled with 45% of all pregnancies being unplanned, contribute to a horrific U.S. maternal mortality rate that disproportionately hurts Black women.
Fortune
Scholastic asks children’s book author to cut racism from novel
As you can imagine, it just wouldn’t be the same story. Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s 2022 children's book, Love in the Library, is set in a World War II incarceration camp for Japanese Americans and inspired by her grandparent's own unlikely love story. Scholastic, the revered children’s book publisher, offered to license the tale, but only if the author removed the historical context, including the word “racist” from her author’s note. "[W]hen you omit the word racism from a story about the mass incarceration of a single group of people based on their race, there's no compromise to be had,” Tokuda-Hall said.
NPR
Beef has a serious problem
Last week, I covered the extraordinary new Netflix series starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong. This week, Beef actor David Choe is under fire after a 2014 clip from his podcast circulated about his self-proclaimed “rapey behavior” and an elaborate story in which he describes raping a massage therapist. He disavowed the tale at the time as a made-up “story simply for shock value.” Last week, he moved to have tweets that referenced the old clips removed, and fans are now asking his costars to address the controversy. Chicago Tribune TV and film critic Nina Metz says entertainment media cannot stay silent about powerful men's problematic behavior. “Our silence is deafening.”
Chicago Tribune
On Background
Yusef Salaam was just 15 years old when he and four other Black and Latino teens were wrongfully convicted of a brutal rape in New York City’s Central Park. It was 1989. Donald Trump, at the time just a loud-mouthed real estate personality, called for their execution with full-page ads in four New York newspapers, including the New York Times. The Central Park Five, as they were known, were exonerated in 2002 after a Manhattan judge vacated their conviction in light of DNA evidence linking the crime to another individual.
Now Salaam is a first-time candidate for the City Council in Harlem, seeking to leverage a platform largely made possible by the outsized attention Trump forced on his case. “We were almost untouchables,” he recently told the New York Times. Salaam, whose family had escaped the Jim Crow South and who had studied in elite high schools before his arrest, noted the irony of Trump’s recent indictment. “I do not resort to hatred, bias or racism—as you once did,” he wrote in a message to the former president. “I am putting my faith in the judicial system to seek out the truth.”
New York Times
Parting Words
“I always used to say I’m not going to knock on closed doors—I’m going to make my own door. When I come here, I’m walking through my own doors. I built my own door. I built it.”
—Director Ava DuVernay, talking about her production company, Array, which produced the Netflix miniseries When They See Us, about the Central Park Five case.
