“There’s always something more on the horizon, something more that we can work toward because this work isn’t going to get done in five or 10 years or 100 years. But every step is a little bit better.”
Steven Humerickhouse, Executive Director, The Forum on Workplace Inclusion
We all have a responsibility in co-creating inclusive work environments. It’s more than a “good idea.” Workplace inclusion is a business imperative. Organizations that prioritize inclusion (not just diversity) experience exponentially greater innovation and collaboration, which combined gives them a distinct competitive and fiscal advantage. And beyond that, more importantly, when employees feel included, they gain a genuine sense of belonging and are more likely to be positively engaged within the organization. But if leadership and its employees are not working effectively together on this, it will be hard to gain momentum and buy-in for initiatives related to inclusion and building a culture of belonging.
So what are the mindset shifts and work that must be embraced to advance workplace inclusion? Let’s talk about that.
In this episode, we’re joined by Steven Humerickhouse, Executive Director of The Forum on Workplace Inclusion, who has expanded The Forum from a one-day event into the leading international global conference for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. Tune in to hear proven perspective on what it takes to cultivate positive, inclusive work environments where everyone is all in.
Watch the interview
Or read on for the transcript
Queing (she/her/queen): Well, Hey, you all, I’m Queing and I’m so excited to be here with today’s guest. This is Steven Humerickhouse, and he is the CEO of The Forum for Workplace Inclusion, which hosts, and you can let me know if I’m off here, but I believe the largest DEI conference that there is. Am I right about that?
Steven Humerickhouse: We think so.
Queing (she/her/queen): Let’s just say that you do.
Steven Humerickhouse: Sure.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yes. Well, we’ll say one of the largest, definitely the most renowned for sure and there are also ongoing learning experiences. There’s the podcast, there are different webinars for DEI leaders and really anybody who’s passionate about advancing workplace inclusion. So, thank you so much for being here, Steven.
Steven Humerickhouse: Thank you, Queing. Happy to be here.
Queing (she/her/queen): Thank you. You know, I saw that The Forum has been around for 34 years now.
Steven Humerickhouse: Right.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: This is our 34th conference. Yeah.
Queing (she/her/queen): And when you think about the fact that for some folks, they seem to have jumped, I’m just going to say what it seems like, have jumped on the DEI bandwagon in the past couple of years and for the most part during the pandemic. But you all have been in this for 34 years, which is even the topic, and I’m curious to know what it was even being called then. But you all were really ahead of your time in putting this conversation out there. So, could you just give us a little mini-history lesson of how The Forum came to be and how you got involved? Because you’ve been involved with The Forum for about 20 years yourself.
Steven Humerickhouse: Right.
Queing (she/her/queen): So yeah. Tell us about that.
Steven Humerickhouse: Well, it was… Yeah, we’ve had multiple names.
Queing (she/her/queen): Okay.
Steven Humerickhouse: So, we’ll reference that a bit. But 20 years ago, what? 1988, I guess American Management Association, which is a big national organization, but a subset of it, the Black Managers Association decided to do a teleconference to multiple cities. I don’t even know from reading the history, what that topic was about but I’m sure it was about being a black manager in America right. So, there’s that in the business world. They did this teleconference to a bunch of cities, about 75 people here in the twin cities showed up. Twin Cities, Minneapolis- St. Paul, Minnesota, and at one of the local community colleges, I think is where they had it. That teleconference they did about four or five years may be at the most, but the first year there were 75 people. The second-year more people showed up and the folks in Minneapolis added more components. So, it was actually a keynote that year. That keynoter by the way is still a volunteer with The Forum for 34 years.
Queing (she/her/queen): Wow. Oh, that’s awesome.
Steven Humerickhouse: And every year they just kept adding more stuff. At one point the teleconference, which was the main thing, ended up just becoming a side workshop forum with a bunch of other workshops and they just kept doing this conference and it kept growing. It was all local. It was all Twin Cities presenters, twin cities sponsors, companies, volunteers, attendees, all that. It was all about kind of this Minnesota understanding of what the word diversity meant, because of course it had other things before that. Multicultural and affirmative action and all those things that are still true, but that terminology certainly has changed over the years. I suppose when they finally first put a name to that conference, but it was just a one-day conference at that time. It was called a multicultural forum. So, forum being the idea of, of course, the conversation of people talking to each other and then multicultural because that was the terminology that was used back in the late 80s.
Queing (she/her/queen): And then how did you get involved? So, you would’ve come in a decade or so after that. What attracted you to it? Were you aware of it already and kind of had your eye on what those folks are doing over there or what happened? How did you get in the mix?
Steven Humerickhouse: Not at all. I mean, it’s probably a growth experience you could call it. So, I was doing in the late nineties, early 2000s, I was doing learning development work for a global legal affiliation and was based here in Minneapolis. So, I was setting up section training for US lawyers and then planning as an event planner, all the global conferences that they had around the world and then in the US for the whole association and then 9/11 hit.
Queing (she/her/queen): Ooh.
Steven Humerickhouse: And people weren’t doing travel. So, there was…
Queing (she/her/queen): Right.
Steven Humerickhouse: There were no meetings, nothing was happening.
Queing (she/her/queen): Wow!
Steven Humerickhouse: They actually started doing the virtual stuff and so my job was eliminated, and I needed a job. Back probably in December of 2001 right so, right after 9/11. That happened, of course in September, I lost my job in November and there was this little, tiny ad in the newspaper because that’s how people found jobs back then.
Queing (she/her/queen): Isn’t that something. Oh, my goodness.
Steven Humerickhouse: For this event planner job. One day conference, three days a week part-time no benefits, no staff, no office. But I went to The Forum, which I think was the 14th forum as my final interview, and sat down with a bunch of just attendees at the conference at a table and the interviewer was coming later. I was having a conversation with these folks. She sat down and just joined in the conversation. I got the job. Okay, great. But think about it. I have been doing global work for lawyers with a pretty big budget and then I was down to my wings clipped as it were one day a week or one day a year for the conference, three days a week, no staff, no office, all those kinds of things, a third of the salary. I was hired as an event planner, not a person who knew diversity, equity, inclusion, multiculturalism fill in any of those names and I didn’t even like the job, but it was a job.
Queing (she/her/queen): And you weren’t even thinking about the greater impact at this time. This was a job.
Steven Humerickhouse: This was just, I needed a job. I got the job on the 20th of February. So, a week from Monday on the last day of my severance. Yeah, the timing was great, but it wasn’t a job I wanted, it was a job I got. I mean, look at me, I’m a white guy, right. So, I am what I am. My daughter was adopted from Honduras, so she’s a Latina. So, I had some lived experience about this diversity thing, but it wasn’t something that I myself needed to live because I was a white guy and I had all that privilege, but I saw possibilities at The Forum. There were things in my skillsets, in my past that could help this thing because these people were really passionate about what they were doing. There were lots and lots of volunteers.
Everyone was a volunteer in the program committee that they had and the presenters they had and the volunteers that staffed it. Everyone was a volunteer, and they were really passionate about this work. So, what can my experience do to help? They kept asking me just will you commit one more year? Will you commit one more year? I was like, okay, okay, okay. But what I saw was that yes, lots of expertise within the group, but it was all focused around this Minnesota experience. What would happen if we pulled people from the east coast, from the west coast, from the gulf coast, or for that matter globally in as our presenters to give us a different perspective about what this diversity thing was really all about.
Queing (she/her/queen): Right.
Steven Humerickhouse: And so, we started doing that and I think that’s the spark that I saw this opportunity to grow this thing to take the passion of the attendees and the participants each year and expand that in a more well, regional and national and presumably global space. That’s what got me going then I learned all the DEI stuff on the way, literally listening to my Procom CUNY members and reading proposals and whatever else I could get my hands on.
Queing (she/her/queen): And that’s what locked you in. Thank you so much for sharing that story and I heard you when you were saying, oh, at first, I’m thinking, okay, I’m a white man so maybe I’m not in this. There are a lot of studies that show that there are folks who don’t really believe that they are a part of the conversation or that they should not be in it. So, hearing you talk about how that began to turn for you. So, you really got locked in to see that, no, this is a collective responsibility that we all have. That’s great.
Steven Humerickhouse: It really is about… Yeah. Some of the questions you asked in preparation for this. This made me think about things that I’ve been thinking about a lot. White people don’t think they have race and are different from what. Well, for me, of course, because I’m the majority with the privilege, I have the power and so everybody else is different from me. But when I went to China a couple of years ago, I was the difference. I got some deference because I was an older man, so age has had some privileges in China, but otherwise, I didn’t speak the language. I couldn’t access the [10:25 inaudible] system. I definitely stood out in that space in Shanghai. This idea of race it’s all relative and so white people don’t think they have race and therefore they don’t see themselves in that kind of terminology and that kind of space. You Queing live it every day and my daughter is a Latina lives that every day and my grandchildren who are mixed race of black and Latin live that every day. So, we are really all in this, but the white folks don’t always know that they are and that was, I suppose, this is that growth moment earlier. That was probably the learning experience for me was that I am a part of this.
Queing (she/her/queen): And we need you. This is giving me chills because that’s what I want people to get to. It takes all of us. We can’t do it on our own. It takes everybody finding their place and rowing. I’m getting this visualization of when you think about rowing competitions and things like that. Everyone has to row in the same direction and there may be a different person who has the responsibility of saying which direction we need to row in for that particular moment, but we all have to be rowing together.
Steven Humerickhouse: Yes.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah, finding your place in each position. I went to this place called Row House once, which is like a fitness center that’s based off of the concept of rowing and I didn’t know this, but they talked about how, when there is rowing, each individual has a particular responsibility. I thought it was just people with oars all rowing the left side and the right side. They row and they row but everyone has a part to play. So, yeah, it means a lot that The Forum has these learning opportunities for folks to do. Yes, the conference is the big thing but there’s something to learn all the time. I was just on the site the other day and saw the things that are happening with the podcast and the webinars and then you have so much information that’s archived that people can go back to. So, you can find out what your next steps need to be and be inspired to help other folks where they are. So, yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: As we record this podcast, we have a webinar happening right now. So, every month on the third Thursday, typically there’s a webinar. So, exactly a podcast twice a month or more.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah. You know, let me ask you about this. So, there is some debate, even heated debate around DEI and critical race theory and things like that. There were even earlier this year, leaders of some DEI organizations. There was a big news expose on this. Leaders of certain DEI organizations were being targeted and attacked mostly online. They were being bullied, people calling them racist, and saying that the work that they were doing is divisive and that they were creating more problems. So, I’m curious to know in the work that you are doing with The Forum have you encountered any of that either directly or people just challenging what you all are doing, calling it divisive and not really seeing the value in it. And if so, how have you been able to handle that? What has your response been?
Steven Humerickhouse: You know, I’ve been lucky I mean because I am a white guy. So, I carry some privilege and people give me passes because of that. I’ve been lucky. I’ve not actually been challenged and The Forum itself hasn’t been challenged too much either. Now, in social media algorithms being what they are, particularly on Facebook, you know we place ads about the conference and other things that we’re doing, and we get push back every once in a while. People come back and say some pretty ugly things. Obviously, when they’re really ugly we hide them. Sometimes we report them. But for the most part, we just allow that debate to happen. But think about it this way, about five years ago maybe, I did a speech at the opening of the conference.
I don’t know why I was thinking about this, but I was talking about the missing voices. So, one of The Forum’s kind of attributes, I think why, by the way, I would say whether the biggest or not I’d rather be the best and if we are the biggest, maybe it’s because we’re the best and I hope that’s the case. I hope that’s true. But one of The Forum attributes is that every voice matters and so the voice that’s missing might be the key to all the things we’re talking about, who we will never know it, because that voice isn’t heard. So, we tell all of our presenters that they are facilitators of learning. They’re the expert in the front of the room. They’re not the only expert in the room and it’s true in some cases…
Queing (she/her/queen): I like that.
Steven Humerickhouse: …because other people could teach this. But the key point is that even the most novice person might have a perspective about whatever it is we’re talking about in that workshop, in that space that changes the way we think about this DEI stuff. So, that being said, I try to place myself in this divisiveness in the mode of the missing voice and trying to think about these societal issues in a different way. So, first of all, we are a workplace conference, but there is nothing in the workplace that isn’t effective by society, right. This is a continuum. These things that happen in the workplace happen in the workplace because they’re happening in society and vice versa. So, there’s an influence both ways, but this DEI stuff that has been workplace-specific for the most part has been pushed out into society particularly because of the triple pandemics of COVID and then the financial aspects of that and of course, George Floyd, which of course happened right here in Minneapolis.
So, you mentioned the people earlier in the podcast. You mentioned that people were becoming more aware of these issues, and they are and George Floyd in particular made a lot more people aware. Then trying to put myself in the shoes of people who look like me, who have been in power and control all these years, centuries and they are feeling the pressure. People are using it in a political ploy. I used to work in politics so I’m going to throw that out there, is being used as a way of garnering support for political purposes. But these people are afraid. They’re afraid of change anyway. They’re afraid of a loss of status, of position, their way of life. Think about the Confederate battle flag being brought up as a representative of a way of life, of a culture. They’re afraid of all this change because they’re finally realizing there are other people out there and people and those other people who don’t look like them are being brought to the forefront.
You and I would say, and so why not? But for them, it feels like a loss of opportunity for them. It’s a zero-sum game and if this person gets a job, then I don’t get the job. So, it’s all about fear and so we have to think about it in that way. So, in our DEI spaces, are we really hearing those voices? I don’t mean the white supremacists, the Nazis, all those kinds of people. That is a whole different thing.
Queing (she/her/queen): Right.
Steven Humerickhouse: The average person. do they really feel welcome in our DEI spaces? Are we really as inclusive as we say we are? And when I put that speech out there, I talked about it actually representing my own family because I come from a very religious Republican family. It’s my background rural and conservative. Would they actually feel comfortable in our “liberal” DEI spaces? The interesting thing was that after I put that speech out there to say, we need to figure out a way to bring in these other voices into our conversations I got a whole lot of texts back saying thank you because those voices were in the room. Not as many as me may want to be in that room, but those voices were in that room and they felt silenced until I called them out and said, they’re part of this conversation.
Queing (she/her/queen): Right.
Steven Humerickhouse: So, I think the challenge we have is how do we alleviate that fear? How do we bring those people into the conversation? So, if we’re going to have this conversation the pushback is going to be obvious because once you start talking about it in the broader concepts, in the broader spaces, more people are going to be in that conversation and some of them are going to push us and we need to be pushed. How do we bring those folks into this conversation and let them realize that people like me have race and we’re a part of this conversation too? In fact, because we have power and privilege, we can’t advance this unless we use that power and privilege to advance others and give power and privilege to others. That was a very long answer.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yes, I mean, oh my goodness, spot on and I like how you describe it as calling people in because what I’m seeing is that for a lot of folks what they’ll do, if they’re not brought into the conversation is they will retreat and you’ll begin to hear things like, well, I just don’t want to mess it up or well, I’m just not going to say anything or, hey, here’s a black woman. Here’s an Asian man. Let’s just have them do it. Thankfully we have programs like The Forum but unfortunately what ends up happening with that is you get a lot of people coming into these DEI roles and they are completely unprepared. Now it doesn’t mean that they don’t have lived experience. So, for example, if someone just chose me to be their DEI lead and most of it was because I was a black woman, I would not know where to start right at all. So, it can’t just be that performative thing either because you don’t want to mess it up. So, that’s the challenge, bring people in and say, hey, go out there, you’re probably going to make some mistakes but that’s okay. This is a learning experience for all of us. Speaking of those… Go ahead. I want things that you’ve got.
Steven Humerickhouse: That’s kind of really basic leadership, right is the vulnerability and the transparency to say one, we screwed it up. That’s the transparency part and the vulnerability, we didn’t do it right and help us do it better. So, to your point for the leadership of organizations where it might be performative. Sure. Hopefully, it’s deeper than that, but to actually be willing to admit what they did wrong, but do something…
Queing (she/her/queen): Yes.
Steven Humerickhouse: …so you could at least progress this a bit and then you learn from that mistake. But we don’t want people to make mistakes right.
Queing (she/her/queen): Sad, but true.
Steven Humerickhouse: Yeah.
Queing (she/her/queen): Even if people are holding themselves to that, you know. We were just talking about DEI professionals and their need for proper training and preparation for roles like this. So, I’m curious to know, what would you say makes a really great DEI leader and how important is it for them to have that leadership buy-in? I really want us to get at this because there may be some DEI folks watching this and sometimes, they feel really isolated, especially in this world of hybrid work right now. So, what would your council be to them and how important is it that they get the buy-in and get that organization-wide support, so they don’t feel like they just got to make change all on their own.
Steven Humerickhouse: Right. I mean, it is very true as you called it out that oftentimes… I apologize for this word sometimes, but it’s the token. So, what is it? The black woman, right…
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: …who ends up becoming diversity officer because, well, you know this space right. Okay. I have the lived experience of being a black woman, so I know what that feels like to have intersectional disadvantages perhaps, or maybe advantages coming from the strength and positives rather than the negatives. But I think you’re right that the leadership buy-in is the critical factor because otherwise, you become this performative check a box. We have a person, whatever the title might be, chief diversity officer, VP of diversity, head of whatever it might be. We’ve checked a box, we have that person, and we can tell the world we have this person, and you can put a pretty statement on the website and yay, and maybe some employee resource groups or something like that. But the key challenge is getting the actual buy-in and not just buy-in, but the lead from the leaders.
Because what you really need to be able to do with this DEI thing properly in the workplace is time and money. It’s just you put your money where your mouth is. What you think is important you devote time to. So, it’s more than just, okay, we’ve got an executive in this DEI space, but we don’t give him or her any money. We don’t give him or her any staff. We don’t give them the time of day. Maybe they come to talk to the C-suite once a year or once a quarter or whatever it might be. No, that’s [26:04 inaudible] and what they really need is the leader to actually say, this is important and by the way, you report to me. Me being the CEO, the leader of the organization. You get to speak to the board of trustees when they meet to tell them how we’re doing. I am going to lead the diversity council. I, being the CEO, leader of the organization and we’re going to do this together …
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: …and the money and the time are there. Here’s the staff you need. Here are the dollars you need, here’s the support you need, and by the way, if we appointed you because you don’t have a lot of experience, here’s the training and development you need for you and your staff to be able to actually do the work that we ask you to do. Otherwise, it is a check the box.
Queing (she/her/queen): Oh, my goodness. I’m speechless right now because it’s so wonderful to talk to someone, and I must say, who does not look like me and who does not share my same experience but gets this and is leading an organization to help other people in this area. There’s this article and I wonder if you’ve read it. It’s by Dr. Tiffany Jana. She’s one of the authors of “Subtle Acts of Exclusion” along with Dr. Michael Baran and you just hit almost every point she makes in this article that she wrote called ” How to Lose a Chief Diversity Officer in Six Months.” She goes down the list.
Steven Humerickhouse: And that’s Tiffany and Michael both right?
Queing (she/her/queen): Yes. One of them is, and you hit this, it’s under-compensate. That’s one. Deny staff and budget, poor data, bait and switch, dodge metrics. There’s another one where it says, keep them away from the CEO.
Steven Humerickhouse: Yeah.
Queing (she/her/queen): You know, all of these different things. She’s basically saying, if you follow these steps, you’ll lose your chief diversity officer in as little as six months.
Steven Humerickhouse: Oh yeah, and maybe quicker.
Queing (she/her/queen): You know.
Steven Humerickhouse: I’ve heard the stories. I have friends who have told them to me, so yes. I know Tiffany, she and Michael both have spoken on The Forum a number of times.
Queing (she/her/queen): Oh, wonderful. Okay.
Steven Humerickhouse: Yeah. So, the one I didn’t bring up was the metrics. So, it’s like what you measure gets done. So, it’s important you measure it and if you measure, you better look at what their results are and make sure that people feel comfortable telling you the truth. So, that’s another key factor and that takes time and money.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: And particularly commitment to look at their results and say, we’ve got to do something about it.
Queing (she/her/queen): Now, when you metrics that made me think about this year’s theme for The Forum “Solving for X.” Yeah. So, I hated algebra by the way. I just didn’t understand why numbers and letters were coming together like this. I thought they should stay separate. So, when you think about solving for X what was the inspiration for this theme? What is X or I guess that’s the whole question, right. That’s the whole point…
Steven Humerickhouse: That is what is X.
Queing (she/her/queen): …to solve for. Okay. Okay.
Steven Humerickhouse: I mean, think about it. I know I’ve said this to myself and to my staff and to other people before that what’s normal? Everything is constantly changing, but all of a sudden for us in March of 2020…
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: …everything changed. The Forum actually ended on the 12th of March and on the 13th of March, the governor closed on the state of Minnesota. I mean, we were that close to a pandemic shutdown. But this is true for the whole country, for the whole world. Sometime during the beginning of March, everything changed. We had a pandemic, a health pandemic, which caused a financial pandemic, and then George Floyd…
Queing (she/her/queen): Right.
Steven Humerickhouse: …which caused the racial reckoning pandemic. However, you want to refer to that. What that did was that we realized something that normal isn’t normal. Everyone talks about going back to normal or whatever the new normal is. There never was a normal, but this just kind of brought it to the forefront. In all three of those cases, we’re suddenly aware of all the inequities that always existed and were a part of our normal but now suddenly part of our earlier conversation is now right in our faces. The health disparities for people of color because they never got good healthcare in the first place or they didn’t have adequate nutrition because they didn’t have good jobs or transportation or, oh gosh, we could tell them some new things there.
But nothing was the same, nothing we now realize is going to be the same. Everything is constantly shifting. We don’t know when normal will actually be normal because we don’t even know whether it is yet. All the things that might have been coming at us were accelerated to coming at us right now instead of five or 10 years into the future. So, how do you put a stake in the ground anywhere to solve for anything if everything is constantly shifting? That ground is always going to be different and so that’s why we came up with this. Typically, in The Forum, we have a theme, we have learning pillars, things that you can kind of center around the content. It’s hard to know how to do that when you don’t know what’s coming.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: So, it’s like we should acknowledge for ourselves in The Forum theme here to see what everyone else was living with and calling it out and saying, solving for X. Okay, bring us your X. Let’s see what we can do to solve for it. That is The Forum’s key thing. It’s, co-creation, it’s collective, it’s collaborative. So, in fact, on our second day of our conference, in the general session on the second day, it’s all about solving for X. We actually have two challenges that are going out in our communications. One of them is to tell us how you have solved for your X. Give us a video of how you have solved for whatever X is for you. The other one is, tell us what your X is. Send us what you are trying to solve for. We’re going to have a panel of six intergenerational intersectional folks to try to answer them in the moment from our virtual stage. We’re going to pose them different X issues and see how those six people, I think it’s six. Five, six people, actually how they might answer that solving for X. But the theme came out of the reality of even we in The Forum with all the kind of sourcing and information we have, we don’t know how to solve X because we don’t even know about X is because it keeps moving.
Queing (she/her/queen): Right. You said a lot there but even the stuff you didn’t say was profound. At one point you, this is what you did, I’m reenacting, when you said [sigh] and I thought there’s a lot in that sigh because the work that you’re doing and the people who are working in the DEI space period, it can be heavy. There are times where, well that’s all you can say is [sigh].
Steven Humerickhouse: Yeah.
Queing (she/her/queen): So, as we begin to wrap up and again, thank you so much for being here. I’m curious to know what is the most rewarding part of your work that keeps you here even after. You’re two decades in now and I’m sure that you have a vision for the future of workplace inclusion and what keeps you going toward that?
Steven Humerickhouse: Yeah. there are days when I just don’t want to do this anymore. There are days when, when it feels like no matter what you’re doing, there’s no acknowledgment of it, what you’re doing, no one cares. It feels like everything is going backward instead of forwards and certainly, during the pandemic times, some of that was true. Actually, I’m really hopeful. I’m hoping this speaks to what I hope the future is, that we take advantage of a horrible disruption of this triple pandemic we are living through, not were living through, but still are living through.
Queing (she/her/queen): Right.
Steven Humerickhouse: Because it gives us opportunity. I actually think I’ve been more hopeful in the last two years than I was in the years before because finally people are realizing the reality of all the stuff that’s always been there and we’re calling it out. Now by calling it out does that not bring pushback. Yeah. Some of it’s really ugly too and as I said, the political manipulation is coming with that. But we’re actually starting to have some of these conversations as painful as they are critical race theory, what you can teach to your kids, whether masks are good, bad, or indifferent, vaccinations, all this stuff. But people are actually starting to have some of these conversations and recognizing, for example, the inequalities that have always been there. But suddenly now people are faced with, in such a different way than they ever have been faced with before. So, oddly enough, I’m hopeful that the pandemics are actually a hopeful sign. I know we’re going to backslide. I know that some of the stuff you go three-steps forward and two steps back but at least it’s one more step forward…
Queing (she/her/queen): Yes.
Steven Humerickhouse: …and that finally, folks, maybe who look like me will actually start to understand the reality of people who look like you, because for the first time they’ve really been confronted with it in a way that they hadn’t before. So, I think that’s probably giving me hope. There’s always something more on the horizon, something more that we can work toward because this work isn’t going to get done in five or 10 years or 100 years. Every step is a little bit better now. You read the statistics and what is it? Women will finally get paid equally in 100 years from now or something like that. That’s not good. So, it’s not this incremental, but maybe sometimes horrible things like the triple pandemics push us forward so much faster than we might have been in the incremental world that we were living before in this “normal,” whatever that normal was. So, let’s take advantage of that opportunity and not let ourselves backslide or at least not slide back as far as we might.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah. Thank you so much, Steven, for sharing that and I’m hopeful too. I am. I think about that. I know the statistic you’re talking about because there’s another one that’s in line with the amount of time that it would take for black people in America to be at the same level as white people in America and it’s something like 95 years.
Steven Humerickhouse: Right.
Queing (she/her/queen): So, I think about, okay, so I guess the grandchildren of children who are being born this year, but it still makes it worth it. It still makes it worth it. Like you said, at least it’s still another step even if in 2024 people have forgotten and I’m with you. I don’t think it’s ever going to be normal again. But even if 2024 some progress has missed like the summer slide when kids are in school.
Steven Humerickhouse: Right, exactly.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah, but we will be ahead of where we’ve been. So, thank you for this conversation.
Steven Humerickhouse: Thank you for asking me for the conversation.
Queing (she/her/queen): Yeah.
Steven Humerickhouse: It’s always a learning experience to be asked a series of questions and have to think through what your answers are. So, that self-reflection, I think is an important part of what we all should be doing, and this gave me an opportunity to do some self for me too. So, thank you for that opportunity.
