Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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forward slash Colette and becoming a monthly patron. By becoming a monthly

patron you'll also receive our weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Colette podcast. I'm Jonathan a staff attorney

attorney with the Colette Podcast I'm Jonathan Kaye and today my guest is Nicole Levitt a staff

attorney with the Legal Office of Women Against Abuse Philadelphia's leading domestic violence advocate and service provider,

and among the largest domestic violence agencies in the United States.

As you can imagine, women against abuse is a fairly liberal, progressive, and feminist place.

But these days you can never be progressive enough, and Nicole is going to share her story of how the arrival of a diversity consultant following the George Floyd

protests in 2020 created a climate of fear in which employees were separated into race-segregated

affinity groups and friends and colleagues were encouraged to denounce

one another for being inadequately anti-racist.

All of this was troubling to Nicole, but what disturbed her the most was the hostile response when she and others tried to push

back even slightly at ideas that seemed inspired by Black Lives Matter, or BLM, a decentralized movement that, while being widely praised for putting the issue of

racial justice on America's agenda, has also been linked to scattered episodes and pronouncements

that some believe are anti-Semitic.

In my interview with Nicole, she talks about how hard it was to navigate these complex issues

in an environment in which everyone, including the diversity consultants, seemed focused on skin color as the be-all and end-all of privilege and victimhood, even though life is a lot more complicated than that.

Hi, Nicole, welcome to the Coelard podcast. Before we started taping, you told me you were in a white affinity group.

What's it like to be in an affinity group? Is it fun? Like I mean

...