( ENSPIRE Culture & Business ) Judge Jackson Nominated and Confirmed To This Lifetime Appointment Is Just The Beginning
ENSPIRE Contributor: Darralynn Hutson
The expected landmark confirmation of Judge Jackson celebrates years of campaigning being done for and by Black women and the fight for racial equity in the nation’s highest court.
In 2018, Cultural Architect Dr. Kerry Mitchell Brown, for her Fortune 500 companies as clients, created a Racial Equity Sustainability mantra “Don’t overestimate your ability to change others and don’t underestimate your ability to change.”
“It is the chemistry, the glue, and fabric that holds an organization together,” says Dr. Kerry Mitchell Brown. “The good, the bad, and the ugly of how things get done and how people treat and interact with each other inside the company.” Gaining specialized expertise after doing racial organizational development work for over 20 years, her firm KMB leaped into action after the civil unrest of George Floyd and Breona Taylor’s death; she set out to help ensure that corporate organizations created sustainable strategies around combating racism inequality, long-term.
Judge Jackson being nominated and confirmed to this lifetime appointment is just the beginning of how organizations can sustain their support. “Black women have faced — and continue to face — these dual walls at the intersections of race and gender and the related disparities around all aspects of life – opportunity, income, healthcare, education, housing, etc. Yet we continue to move ahead with clarity, conviction, and commitment to the ushering in of a better future. Ketanji Brown Jackson’s historical nomination as the first Black woman Supreme Court justice nomination is inspiring as it signals that we are on the cusp of moving closer to justice,” says Dr. Mitchel Brown. “Yet while we share our pride at this moment, the confirmation hearings were hard to watch. The public dehumanization and harassment on display have become normalized. Everything but the actual requirements to reach this pinnacle of American law; credentials, qualifications, legal acumen; were interrogated. We’ve been glued to our televisions, sitting in solidarity, taking it, being stoic because we know and feel the unspoken nature of what is playing out. The reality is that Black women can’t push back in the way that others can and have.”
How do organizations, individuals, and taxpayers of this nation support black women and racial equality sustainably, not as a running TikTok trend? It requires a strategy implemented with integrity and intent. Dr. Kerry Mitchell Brown believes that every brand that supports this nomination should have such a plan in place.
The cumulative impact of state-sanctioned brutality, attack on female rights, and a legacy of second-class status amidst the backdrop of a never-ending global health pandemic pushed women especially into the streets to demand to be seen. For more reasons than one; women continue to fight for a living wage and struggle daily for dignity, respect, and oftentimes basic human rights. At the forefront of these movements have been Black women.
Dr. Kerry Mitchell Brown offers these 3 Tips on How Organizations can Sustain their support for Racial Equality past Judge Jackson’s nomination.
Tips
1. Partner with a Professional
Oftentimes, organizations will appoint people from within their organization; someone who is passionate with good intentions and ideas but who are not professionals in this racial equality space. Partnering with a racial equity firm or professional requires both intention and attention.
2. Racial Equality Should Inform Everything That Your Company Does
Whatever the organization or the organization’s leader believes to be the most important thing of focus; racial equality should be just as important. If making money is the company’s top priority, then racial equity needs to be right up there with making money. It should not be secondary to the rest of the work, it should BE the work, centering on the experiences of the people that are always the most impacted and we know that black and brown people are the ones that are the most impacted.
3. Disrupt the Process of Belittling and Demanding Black Women
You cannot be a bystander, you cannot standby and watch someone cause harm to a Black woman. What we witnessed during the confirmation of Judge Jackson was hard to watch, the dismantling and disrespect of a Black woman at her highest career point before the world to see. When I say “disrupt,” what I mean in practice is disrupting the belittling and the picking apart of black women. Because this happens in the workplace of all sectors of industry for Black women, the behavior has to be disrupted by white women, by white men, and those in leadership positions who normalize it.
Original Article by Darralynn Hutson
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