Zach and Mary-Frances Winters, the founder and CEO of The Winters Group, Inc., sit back down together to have another conversation, this time themed around the concept of Black fragility. Mary-Frances talks a bit about her upcoming book, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit, and summarizes what we're going through right now from her perspective as a Black woman and leader in the workplace equity space. She also shares how she processes folks saying that they "didn't know" that racism is still a systemic issue in American society.

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Learn more about The Winters Group on their website.

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TRANSCRIPT

Zach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and you know what we're doing, right? I mean, you should know, but every listener is a first time listener, so for those who don't know, Living Corporate is a platform that centers and amplifies Black and brown voices at work. And I say the word platform and not a podcast because if you go to our website, living-corporate.com or livingcorporate.co or livingcorporate.us or .tv or .org or .net... anyway, if you go to our website, what you'll see is a whole grid of podcast interviews that have been categorized by industry and theme, and then you'll also see a lot of blogs, right, you'll also see webinars. And so it's all searchable 'cause it's all been transcribed, so we really consider ourselves more, like, a database of thought leadership for diversity, equity and inclusion, and what makes us unique even beyond that is that we center black and brown people, not only in our topics but in our dialogue, the people we speak to, right? So we've been blessed to have incredible guests, and today is no different. We have the great Mary-Frances Winters. Now, this is not the first time that you've heard Mary-Frances. If you haven't heard her before on Living Corporate you need to get familiar, okay? So we're gonna have all of her links and stuff in the show notes, but Mary-Frances, welcome back to the show.




Mary-Frances: Thank you so much. Appreciate being here, and I appreciate everything that you're doing. Your platform is absolutely amazing. When I walk in the morning, I listen to Living Corporate. So y'all need to be listening, 'cause you do have some incredible, amazing guests.




Zach: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You are leading the vanguard in the vanguard, so I appreciate you. So let's get started, right? So first off I want to just give you some space to talk about--give me a summary of this moment, right? Let's start at George Floyd's murder, Breonna Taylor's murder, Tony McDade's murder, up to now, and when I say now we're recording this in July. So kind of talk to me about how you would summarize what we're going through right now, of course not just as a Black woman, which you are, but also as a leader in this workplace equity space?




Mary-Frances: Yeah, thank you for that space. And so it is July, and it is July 18th, and I just want to recognize that we lost a giant yesterday, John Lewis--actually two giants, C.T. Vivian, both really vanguards in the Civil Rights movement, and so when I think about them and I think about now, I think about the struggle, you know, in the '60s and the '70s, and you know John Lewis was jailed, you know, 40 times and hit in the head, bashed in the head, all of the things that he went through, but still, you know, he rose, and his voice was so loud. So I juxtapose that to, you know, what's going on now, and I say, "Wow," you know, "Then is now." And he was 23 years old, right? So we see the young activists out there right now who are saying, you know, "Enough is enough," and I think the confluence of, you know, the coronavirus and people dying of that and people, you know, dying in the streets of all sorts of other things, you know, dying at the hands of police, right? You know, but it's just a time when I think it was a confluence of these events that said "Enough is enough, and we're not gonna have it anymore." And what really was surprising to me--I've been doing this work for 36 years now, so I'm getting up there myself, but one of the things that was so really surprising to me was that white folks were saying, "We didn't know. We didn't know that racism still existed in America. We didn't know it was that bad." And so, you know, clients are coming out the woodwork. We had to do anti-racism training. We had to do it yesterday. We got to do it right now. And I know some of your other guests have been saying that too, and I guess maybe I'm naive that I'm like, "Y'all, we've been telling you this, at least I've been telling you this, for 36 years, and we've been talking about this for over 400 years, and you didn't know?" I had corporate CEOs--I've been doing town halls where they have 15,000 people in the virtual town hall, and the CEO of a major corporation will say, you know, "I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't know," and that's just blowing my mind, that people are saying they didn't know.




Zach: So let me ask you--let's pause there, because I have more questions about this moment, but when you hear folks say that they didn't know, like, how do you digest that?




Mary-Frances: Well, I digest that is that you didn't want to know, that you didn't care to know, but you really did know. You just blocked it. You just--it wasn't important to you, you know? So even when we--let's go back to the 2016 election and wondering, "How did that happen? How did we get Trump?" And, you know, it's obvious that he's, you know, a racist, a sexist, a homophobe. All of those things, right? He just says it. But then when you have to think about it it's like, "That's better than the chance of having anybody," you know, "another black person, another woman," and so you just see it. You just see that the racism is just so deep, and I think that, you know, those white people who are advocating for diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, you know, those are all--you know, those are all soft code words, right, for "We just really want the status quo," but I don't believe--I know that people knew it. We do trainings and they say--I give some statistics, right, and I'll say, you know, "1954, Brown vs the Board of Education made segregated schools illegal. 2019 headline - schools are just as segregated, just as unequal," you know, public schools, and I say, "What statistics surprised you?" "Well, the one about the schools surprised me." Come on, now. That's in the news all the time, right? So you just tune it out. It's not--so, you know, white supremacy, you don't have to know about it, you don't have to care about it, it doesn't have to be a part of what you think about until folks start burning stuff down, and now all of a sudden people are saying, "How do I be an ally? How do I come forward?" And so I make sense of all of that, and you asked me how, and I just say, "Shame on you." You know, "Shame on you." But when you look throughout history, that's the only way we get people's attention. Violence is the only way to get people's attention. Rebellion is the only way to get people's attention.




Zach: And I think it's just so intellectually dishonest that we don't have those conversations. I remember back in, like, 2016, I was having a conversation with some colleagues at work, one of whom happens to be a really good friend of mine now, like, we're very close, but I was the only Black man at the table, only Black person at the table, and we were talking about protests because there were some protests happening in Baltimore at the time due to the murder of Freddie Gray, right? So we were talking about this and I just said--as you know, this has become, like, an established line of argumentation around protests and the history of protests in this country, but I just, like, was very plainly like, "Look, like, if you look at America and, like, the formation of America and, like, really sort of all the policies that we have, they all come from violence," and they were like, "Well, not really," and I was like, "No, it's true." I said, "Beyond just the Boston Tea Party, like, if you go back and you look, there was a lot. There were a lot of labor riots and protests that sparked a lot of the labor laws that we have and the civil rights laws. You think about Pride. Pride was started through protests, through protests started by a Black trans woman, but my point is, like, I just don't think that we're being honest when we say that peace is the answer, quote-unquote, when that just isn't--for good or for bad, that just is not the language that we--that is not the means by which we affect change in America, and it's not the means by which America helps affect change around the world for good or bad, so I don't understand where that--beyond y'all just... and when I say y'all I mean, like, the powers that be, beyond those who are in charge just simply trying to manufacture or maintain control, that's just not honest, you know what I mean? Like, that's just not true.




Mary-Frances: No, it's not honest. It's not, and yes. We do a little history thing now that we're doing, and part of our sessions that we do--'cause folks just claim they don't know American history period, right? And Black history is obviously a part of American history, but they don't know it, or they, you know, suppress it, or it's okay. You know, it's okay for white folks to ask for justice or to demand justice through violence, it's just not okay for Black people to do so. Tha