Wishing you all a joyous Holiday Season!

“…They were stolen from their homes, locked in chains and taken across an ocean. And for more than 200 years, their blood and sweat would help to build the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known…”

Do you really want diversity that moves the dial on human understanding and your business – or is your diversity management program just window dressing for this year’s public relations effort?

If you are serious about diversity management, try the tough stuff:

1. Broaden your definition of diversity to include all types of difference: mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, ornamental, and sartorial.
2. Hire for difference, listen for difference, give opportunities to difference, and promote difference.
3. Expand your talent pool by having an office locale that’s reachable via public transportation.
4. Recognize that people are energized for work at different times and in different environments and push for work flexibility.
5. Think back to grade school and provide training on how to work through conflicts, deal with bullies, and responsibly handle anger.
6. If you deliver diversity training, make it voluntary and then have it focus on how to improve collaboration, knowledge-sharing, efficiencies.
7. Devise informal diversity training. My experience as a lone white person in an African-American literature class during grad school informed me more than any sculpted training program.
8. Create a stand-in policy until the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is passed.
9. Review your HR policies and benefits to ensure they cover and respect difference, such as dress codes that recognize, medical benefits that cover gender changes, and pay raises for women who ask.
10. Make it matter. Create accountability for statistics around hiring, engagement, development opportunities, mentoring relationships, increases, and promotions.

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Schwarz – Deutsch… Kein Widerspruch! from Kai Schmitz on Vimeo.

Trailer einer Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema Alltagsrassismen in Deutschland, die kürzlich in Frankfurt stattfand.

The Girl Effect, n. The powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society.

With special thanks to Ms Wooden Shoes for sharing her perspective!

Sinterklaas arrived in Holland this weekend to begin the celebration leading up to winter holiday known as Sinterklaasavond (Sinterklaas evening) on December 5. As always, he was accompanied by his controversial companian Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). For the next several weeks Holland will be inundated with images of Zwarte Piet: pictures in the windows of shops, large puppets hanging from the ceilings of Holland’s finest department stores, and even little children dressed in blackface.

Living in the Netherlands for over a decade has not made this spectacle any easier to witness. Before children, I could ignore it. But with this buffoonery being directed at children, I no longer have that luxury.

Read the rest of the article here!

On August 11th 2009, 7 people from the American and German African diaspora met to start an artistic project that explores what it means to be part of the African diaspora on the 20th anniversary of the wall falling.

Am 11. August 2009 trafen sich 7 Leute aus der Deutsch- und Amerikanisch-Afrikanischen Diaspora und initiierten ein künstlerisches Projekt. In diesem Projekt wird erforscht, was es bedeutet Teil der afrikanischen Diaspora zu sein mit Hinblick auf den 20. Jahrestag des Berliner Mauerfalls.

African American Civil Rights and Germany in the 20th Century

Conference at Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY)
October 01 – 03, 2009
Jointly organized by the German Historical Institute Washington DC and Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY)

Conveners: Maria Höhn (Vassar College) and Martin Klimke (GHI Washington)

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The conference brought together scholars of history, literature and cultural studies from Germany, the U.S., and Australia to explore the links between the African-American Civil Rights Movement and Germany throughout the twentieth century. The pre-conference program started on Wednesday afternoon with a screening of the film The Negro Soldier from 1944, directed by Stuart Heisler, U.S. War Department, and introduced by Mia Mask. Subsequently, Leon Bass, a World War II veteran, gave a lecture, “Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: A Black Sergeant Remembers Buchenwald.” As a nineteen-year-old, Bass served in the 183rd Engineer Combat Battalion, a segregated unit of the U.S. Army, and was among the soldiers who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Bass gave a moving recollection of his own struggles with racism in the U.S. military during his training in the South, and of putting his life on the line for a country that did not deem him “good enough.” He recounted how seeing the atrocities committed at Buchenwald led him to become an agent for social change upon his return to the U.S.

Read complete article here…