I am all about turning us and them into we. I facilitate workshops on effectively working across differences and use #GettingToWe for my social media posts. I lead a Getting to We online community of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging practitioners who have meaningful, enlightened and forward-moving conversations that establish inclusive policies and practices for building inclusive organizations, enlightened educational institutions, and peaceful communities. I am also a psychologist with decades of experience in clinical practice and whose research agenda focuses on healthy racial identity development and fostering cross-racial friendships as a pathway for lessening our ever-widening racial divide.
But you really don’t need to be a diversity professional or a practicing psychologist to understand why Black people are not eager right now to work with whites for systemic change on race relations. Over the past few months, we’ve experienced Amy Cooper, a white woman with her unleashed dog in Central Park falsely claiming a black man was “attacking and threatening her;” the murder of unarmed jogger Ahmaud Arbery by two white men; the killing by police officers of Breonna Taylor, as she slept; and the horrific 8 minutes and 46 seconds of video of Minneapolis police officer Dereck Chauvin kneeing George Floyd to death with three other officers participating and a…