Hi everybody I'm Diane Brady. I'm here with James D. White who is the former

CEO of John Bajus co-wrote a terrific book with his daughter,

Anti-Racist Leadership, How to transform corporate culture in a race conscious world.

James, good to see you. I know that this book was written in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder we're now seeing all these interesting

moves in the political realm against being anti-racist I was curious to to know your views of this, you know, what do you make of our current environment?

Dan, thanks for having me on. We're thrilled to be able to talk about our book, anti-racist leadership.

Again, this book was, you know, catalyzed around the tragic murder of George Floyd and precipitated kind of on my part after

receiving just countless calls from board members, fellow CEOs that wanted to, you know, kind of

understand actions that they might take to make their own organizations more inclusive, more thoughtful.

So if I fast forward to where we sit today, I'm still receiving the same set of calls.

But the calls have the contacts in this divided world. How do we continue to do the work that we know is important?

We view the topic of anti-racist leadership is being even more important in this

divided world but we've got to find ways to really unite our organizations to do

the right work and you know create safe spaces for really all the

humans that work in our companies. You know one of the things that's interesting

to me is what's really changed you know we have a

recency bias where we tend to think that you know what happened in the last year or two is is new and

I'm curious in terms of your own experience let's take Target which you

mentioned in the book I don't I can't imagine that five years ago rainbow-colored

underwear would actually cause such a backlash that it would

visibly hurt sales. Do you think the conversation around race has changed that much? you know, when you look back over your career and

where we are today.

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