I'm Walking On Clouds!

The new diversity client in San Francisco calls my writing "awesome" and "perfect" while one of her diversity trainers call it "magic." I can live for a month on compliments like these! I still have 30 more articles to write for these folks, and after that I'll be creating a media kit, a blog and some other collateral materials for the company. It's going to be a fantastic relationship. It already is, but there's lots more to do in upcoming weeks and months.

My other diversity client (on the east coast) is appearing regularly on a well-known cable network reporter's blog, so we're going like gangbusters there, too. It's great to be involved in this field with two terrific diversity professionals.

Before I started working with facts and figures regarding diversity, I thought we were making great strides to have recently elected a black President and to have a black Attorney General. And we are better as individuals, in most cases, than we were.

But just because we're no longer lynching black people, running around in Ku Klux Klan capes, and mandating separate water fountains and eating counters doesn't mean that every last vestige of racism has dissolved. Blacks and Hispanics still make $200-300 less PER WEEK than white folks do on average. They still face racial discrimination and sub-par education in most cases, which is why there are so few people of color in the upper echelons of society to date. And when, during a recession, people get laid off, guess who's first to go? People of color, even when they are producing more, and have superior education, than less-qualified and less-productive whites. That stinks. And I'm white! When push comes to shove, we seem to still prefer to huddle with people who look like us...

So I'm happy to be working with folks who are working to change all that. We have to enter the 21st century and realize that, in a global environment, we all need to "get over" tribalism and ethnocentric prejudices, start working together, and find out how to understand and honor each other to a greater degree.

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I was very sad to hear about Natasha Richardson's untimely death. It's tragic that a lady so young, with a young family and a devoted family life, should be taken away so suddenly, for so surprising a reason. I pray that her husband and sons will be given solace by everyone they come into contact with, and that her lovely spirit will remind them often of her love and nearness.