I'm a Sahihpe, Global Head of Corporate Engagement and President of the Goldman Sachs Foundation. I'm excited that today's episode of Undistracted

is brought to you by Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses,

which helps entrepreneurs create jobs

and economic opportunity

by providing access to education, capital and business support services.

Later in the episode you'll hear from one of our program graduates and learn more about their

business and experiences. To learn more or apply to Goldman Sachs 10,000 small

businesses, visit GS.com slash 10Ks B. And Hey y'all it's Brittany. So here's a question for you. Is it better to fix a

social problem from inside the system or to push it off from the outside.

This of course is the eternal question of social change and it's often presented

as an inquiry with a binary answer.

But y'all know we hate binaries and this ain't true. Like we live in the both and not that sad little either or. You may be surprised to learn that there's actually a great deal of scholarship that suggests that either or thinking in general is really a central element of white dominant culture.

If you study Jones and a Coon's famous work dismantling racism,

which is a text that I in part taught from

at Harvard's Institute of Politics,

you come to learn that either or thinking

is something that helps preserve the status quo

because it leaves absolutely no room for nuance.

Complex things are oversimplified. So poverty then must be a result of poor personal choices,

for example, because either you work hard and earn your keep or you're

lazy and you don't. But riddle me this, oh wise one, what social movement has ever won anything based on an either or philosophy.

For Martin Luther King Jr. and the entirety of the civil rights movement, it wasn't either

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