When I grew up, I was always fascinated by other people, people who did not necessarily look like my middle-class Jewish family or me. From an early age, I rode my bike all over my small upstate NY town, to what was then known as the wrong side of town, across the railroad tracks to where many black people lived. I was fascinated by the different ways folks lived. Early on, I experienced white privilege and was conscious of it, but it had no name or context for it. I mostly noticed we lived in different worlds and it intrigued me. I went to an integrated grade school, and, as one is apt to say, one of my best friends was black. In junior high school, we grew apart, but it was also the 60s, and dating black young men was cool. Again, I was conscious this was one-sided (black girls were not dating white boys) but didn't question this apparent dichotomy.

Things got more complex as I got older. Created to deal with the challenging times of the sixties, my NJ state university was attended by a mix of hippies, intellectuals, politicos, and working-class kids. There were dormitories of primarily black and Latino students who didn't mix a lot with my mostly white dorm but was right next door. We ate in the same cafeterias and took classes together. We marched against the war, all colors and shapes but did not always socialize together.

Fast forward to my adult life in San Francisco, where I worked for twenty years at the City's Department on the Status of Women. We did a tremendous about of work on gender diversity. Creating diverse boards, entities, taskforces, and working groups were always an aforethought, never an afterthought. Our workforce consisted of Latina, Asian, White, and Black women. I did the trainings, wrote articles on diversity, created the Gender Equity Principals Initiative, and took the Harvard Implicit Bias Test.
 
Given my background, one would think I would have understood the mass movement that has erupted since the killing of George Floyd. But as I watched the scenes of marches and protests play out on television, online, and outside my door in Portland (a historically white town),  I realized that throughout my life despite being in mixed-race environments and working on diversity issues, I've never felt the depth of 400 years of oppression and violence. I could not feel the fear of what it meant to drive a car as a black or brown person. Or to live as a person of color in a world where the default assumptions were all white.

So like a lot of folks, I've been doing some soul searching. I've gingerly reached out to my black friends and colleagues. Being older and at-risk of COVID, I have not participated directly in the marching, but in this so unhopeful period, I'm hopeful that change is coming. I'm happy to have young people take the lead and encouraged for the future. I've participated in my community's discussions and help decorate our community vitrine with posters (see above). In this stressful and politically divisive time, I'm encouraged that change, real change, maybe in the air.

I've gone back to reread several articles I previously wrote to diversifying nonprofit boards of directors and making the business case for an integrated workforce. I share below perhaps the most useful one I wrote, a practical checklist of 12 questions we can ask ourselves at this time. And here's a link to a piece of a more personal nature, asking difficult questions, Anne Wallestad's post, "A Moment to Change," on BoardSource. As she puts it: "Have I done my own personal work to understand history and my own biases so that I can proactively work to be anti-racist in the way that I interact with others and lead? If not, what will be my first step?"  See also White Fragility by Robin DeAngelo for more on this subject.