she spoke about her book "diversity inc." at barnes & noble in new york city. [inaudible conversations] hello everyone. welcome are welcome back to barnes & noble upper west side, i'm excited you are here tonight

we have an amazing author who will be talking about her new book and i hope you're as excited as i am. for those of you who do not know her is an award-winning journalist at new york university who's written extensively about diversity in news media in the art world. she is the author of spectacle the axon machine life which when the naacp image award and the black journalist white media which won the national press word for media criticism, those books are available on the table as well. pamela's articles are published in major media including the washington post, new york times, the guardian, the nation and chronicle of higher education but let's face it she knows what she's talking among them "diversity inc." the failed promise of the billion dollar business is an expiration has turned into a profoundly misguided industry and done little to bring equality to major industries and

institutions. the book highlights the rare success stories sharing valuable lessons of how industries and if we are to deliver on equality we need to abandon ineffective costly measure and do what it takes to challenge racial attitude. if you don't take my word for it on the back of the book the award-winning author of how to be antiracist has said the far-reaching i have been waiting to read, the statement and costly consultants are not working and they explain precisely why, institutions can do better and "diversity inc." precisely how, take my word for it. tonight we have -- joining her in conversation is joan walsh the national effort corresponded for the nation as well as the cnn political contributor into

amazing intelligence fantastic woman, without further ado join me in welcoming pamela newkirk and joan walsh,. >> thank you. hello. mine is on. we are ready. hi, everybody. i am very happy to be here, i love pamela and her work and i was very attracted to the title in the idea of this book, "diversity inc." because i think we all know we are spending billions of dollars to put a band-aid on a during norma's --

his name is donald trump. but no, it is more than that. but the book is more than that, the book goes into how all kinds of institutions are dealing with this even when they are not bringing on consultants in doing these things for better and worse. let's start with the industry. how do we have an industry that is so expensive and so into factual. it is like the american way. we throw money at everything. and for some people spending a lot of money means you're doing something and in the case of diversity initiatives, the question that i started out with is why do you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. we been doing the same thing for

50 years and counting, the wheel is barely moving, the numbers are expounding and i did not realize how bald the numbers were until i started doing research for the book. i write about journalism and i knew those numbers were bad but going across field when were talking about the arts or partnerships and lawyers, black man, what percentage of black male, less than 2% or academia, i'm a tenured professor but i'm among 4% in the country and that includes black colleges and universities. so when you look at the billions of dollars that are being expended without any accountability and we have constructed this elaborate apparatus of diversity, we have

it down, we have to pass into the climate surveys and hired the consultant and we hired the diversity and a lot of this only happens after embarrassing episodes. we talk about prada and gucci and you name it, starbucks, nfl and they know who to call in. there's an industry after and are treated as one person who does this in their treated like fire extinguishers. and they had to put out a fire in their forgot about. and she got a lot of numbers in this book and i'm a complete nerd, i do not want to bore you with them but one of the numbers blooming away with the industry, it's a totally un-regulated industry and there's no standa standard, there's no this is how you get certified, but one of the things upload me away, 35%

of diversity professionals have no access to the demographic data of their companies so how do you do diversity, how do you say we want to be more diverse and we want to elevate people who are underrepresented if you don't know but you cannot see where the problem is, that indication exhibits us that maybe these companies are not as serious about diversity as a rhetoric and expenditures would suggest. >> another number google spent 114 million -- almost every year on diversity. >> you are looking at 2014 and 3% of the workforces. >> intech it's like 2%. >> they are doing well.

[laughter] >> what are they not getting, you have some success stories and we should talk about them. >> yes, we should. >> i think that is the big news in this book because a lot of times journalist, we are writers and we are good at analyzing problems but were usually not as good as finding solutions to those problems so i was happy to see that there are effective models and is institutions are really serious about this, if they want to go beyond having a symbolic diversity and to do the work, one of the companies, the major company that i looked at was coca-cola after it was sued and settled a landmark discrimination lawsuit. what they did was part of the

settlement, they established a task force and the task force oversaw every thing that it was doing around diversity and we hired someone who was serious about the job and he got into the metrics of it and examine numbers throughout the company who is being hired, what kind of jobs and how much were people making at the same length, what patterns of bias could be detected and disrupted. so they did this over five years and they dramatically change the numbers in the culture of coca-cola and i'm not suggesting it was easy. >> or perfect. but it does eliminate how one might go one way about actually transforming the workplace instead of throwing money at it.

it is interesting because it became about lawsuits obviously and a lot of pressure and is i it's an atlanta-based country. in the civil rights movement and a lot of great schools there, there should be a pipeline, highly trained african-american professional coming out of all the schools and there is never an excuse and what a lot of companies have continued to say when they are called out it's the pipeline, it's a pipeline. if that was true in the 1960s i will give you that. in 2019, that is no longer true. if you only looked at the ivy leaks which you should not, if you only looked at them you would be able to move the needle if you are serious about doing this work. one of my experiences in the

late '90s, the late '80s early '90s was i worked for a black led nonprofit in oakland. and there was an incredible pipeline of african american talent. every job had multiple people . .

they couldn't find us. it's exhausting. you don't write like it's exhausting. you write with a lot of passion and re- al-isam and optimism -- realism and optimism. hispanic the optimism you may have detect that i don't see as optimism. it can be done, that's all i mean. what i am not optimistic about his life in america's -- white america's ability to see past the fiction of african-americans

of this entr the centuries old g images of people and how that has to do with a lack of diversity in the education system, what's on museum walls, what's in our literature. we are in a toxic culture where people of color are concerned. in a lot of ways these diversity initiatives like putting lipstick on a pig. you try to address something without really addressing the cancer of the culture. as you say it's a band-aid on a gunshot wound, on a cancer that we have not even begun to really deal with. i've been on the faculty at nyu for going on 26 years.

i haven't seen curriculum changes the way that one would expect. in the 1960s, that's what all those college protests were about. the faculty of color, the lack of curriculum that addressed the history of race in the country that presented a realistic take of america so that white america could understand its complicity and the continuing inequality and continuing racial injustice and until that happens, i am optimistic that it can be done but i'm less optimistic about the will to do it. >> the other amazing part of the book that's separate from the industry is about academia,

journalism and entertainment and what came across so strongly these are the fields representing the world and i thought about the need to move meant and what we saw in the last couple of years as the men who were being accused, some of the men, a lot of the men were in journalism, political journalists telling the story of hillary clinton in 2016, charlie rose and mark lauer and -- matt lauer and mark halperin. these men are telling us our stories and the same is true and much worse for people of color because academia, journalism and entertainment has just pushed

this narrative. >> much of my work is concerned with portrayals because if you can draw a straight line from these come in to the police pulling over someone and they end up dead, you know, just innocent people. last week someone in their home. people in their home. people think of it as it's just a show, movie, book. no. it has real-life consequences for a cool race of people. all of my work somehow kind of conference the implications of media portrayals because they

have devastating consequences for people of color. >> we paid attention the last few years that we should pay more attention to how the slave trade builds major university. when you think about it, i don't mean to sound like a more naïve white person, but as i think about it, that is part of what's going on. you also have academics going back. but the people embedded in academia who are just about the peddling of white supremacy and

scholarships. >> but they will look at a book like this or scholars of color that want to look at the past and connect the dots and they're like moveon, what does that have to do with anything. are you kidding me, it has everything to do with it. when have we disrupted even the narrative, when have university presidents gone before their student faculty body and said we have been complicit for centuries the way we have told the story of america, the way we've told the story of african-americans, the way we've told the story of native americans. who's doing that? >> almost no one. >> and has to start. everyone wants a simple solution to the problem. there is no quick fix.

thethey won't drive by diversit, something really quick. i did an interview earlier today on bloomberg like five minutes and it's like quick, quick, tell us how do we do it. it's not that simple. the american experience is multilayered and complicated and people want to look at someone like me and say you made it, what's your problem. my problem is i know other people that look like they don't get the opportunity, brighter, better writers, scholars who didn't get to have the kind of opportunity that i've had. it hasn't ended. people thought we are

-close-brace like two and a half years ago, right? the times said we were post race, probably cnn, and now it's like we are not. no one is saying that anymore. but we never were. for every achievement, we want to celebrate and stick the flag in the ground and say victory. when he won the civil rights movement. it's over. we elected barack obama. it fo of. then we had the ku klux klan and the civil rights movement and reagan and all the backlash to that. we have been in these cycles forever. >> is a two steps forward and

one step back. i go back and forth. how much do you feel like electing barack obama brought us donald trump? >> i feel very strongly that we are living in the backlash to barack obama just as we did the backlash to reconstruction seeing the black governors and senators and congressmen. like people were not having that. that's where you had the epidemic of lynchings and now we are living through something similar to that again and you know, if america. >> it is america. but we keep working on it. >> the beauty of america is the ideals. our model out of many, one.

so we have that. we have the words, just like we have diversity. we have the words, but it is living up to it where we have always struggled and you know, the optimism is that people continue to struggle. even some of us who don't think that in the end we will see that kind of the quality that was articulated by people like reverend martin luther king, like will we get there as a country but i do know many of us will continue to fight because it is our right to have the quality. on a front where i should ask you, but it does feel like those in your book and also from our experience, entertainment has gotten better. as you know, i'm working on this project of 1968 and this week that perry bellefonte hosted the

tonight show and it was like this revolution and he had all this amazing black talent including diane carol who just passed away and you know, was bringing together this amazing and really subconsciously i wanted the world to see black talent. and doctor king and bobby kennedy. >> that we've been here before. >> right. so, that's always a temptation when we see progress to imagine that progress as a linear thing that is going to continue to progress. without vigilance, we will fall right back as we have done with any other stuff that we have taken. but, you know, in the 60s, you know, after president johnson commissioned the report and it spoke to whit white america's complicity in exclusion of african-americans from practically every field and then

suddenly the doors opened and you have shows like julia, diane cabell and the cosby show, you know, we had a flood of films and the doors opened and been justhenjust what, 2015, we had o years in a row where none of the acting nominees were of color. so, what i'm saying is yes, this past year one of the biggest films was black panther. you would think that would mean black films make money. well, they do, and they do in every study shows the more diverse a film cast, the more money you make us. >> more numbers. >> we are nerds, we are journalists. >> that's incredible. >> the problem is, see, this is

the problem, we still live in a rigidly segregated society, segregated. i mean i live in new york, you live in new york. i go to many journalism events, publishing events, art events. i'm the only african-american or one of few. the parties, you know, i have a lot of white friends where i am the only african-american in their universe and you know, that's fine, but what happens is the social worlds of people are replicated in the workplace. who do you hire, who do you recommend, who do your friends know, and it's the good letters, who gets the -- many of us are not in those circles, so this isn't ku klux klan overt racism that i'm writing about, no, not

at all. though that exists of course. more and more obviously. >> but that isn't what i'm writing about. i am writing about the event flow of the way we live in the society. a society. segregated churches, segregated schools, segregated social spheres and then we are supposed with segregated workplaces. in the higher up the chain you go, the more homogenous. so, you know, there are so many patterns in american life that would need to shift from diversity to truly flower. short of that, yes there are strategies that can work. i mean, if for instance in journalism where they can't seem to find any people of color even in new york city, i don't even

get it. >> another number. 21 sports writers at "the new york times," there are no black sportswriters? >> i mean -- yes, god bless them. i love bill. [laughter] you know. >> right. so, how can it be. >> i was trying to be optimist optimistic. >> let's keep trying. >> had so many social spheres have so short of that because maybe tha that will change, andm not asking anyone to be my friend. i have plenty of friends. i'm not asking -- >> she does. she has no fear. she's too busy. >> and i don't think that there's a black person saying white person, please be my friend said that maybe you will think about me when there's a job. that isn't what i'm suggesting. i'm just saying that this is the natural way that people get jobs

and we are kind of shut out of that, so short of that changing and that may never change, you can still go outside of your circle. there are professional organizations, there are all kinds of networks particularly in journalism that you should be able to tap into to find talent. absolutely. >> but somehow, we are just not able to do it. it's kind of crazy to me. >> it is crazy. >> i guess i wa what i was askig about in hollywood is dead offers no ligho-oscar snow whitd that was 2015 i think and then the boycott in 2016, do you think that that felt like the next few years quick >> i think it helped for a few years. >> no, it did. but if you look beyond the camera, that hasn't changed. so, when you look at the director's, the executives who greenlight films, the studio

heads, the producers, the writers, 7.8% of writers of the top 200 films last year were of color. 7.8%. so, that hasn't changed and that needs to change if we really want to move the needle becausee again then it's that same cycle of, you know, who are you hiring, what networks are you tapping into come int and it ist a vicious cycle. >> and is it about like pulling in talent but is entertaining talent, but not the people who write the story or greenlight the stories. that sort of that's the barrier, one of the barriers. there are quite a few. one of the revelations in giving

this book, when you look at the purportedly progressive fields, the most progressive fields, hollywood, journalism, the arts, architecture, they are the least diverse field and the most is corporate america. higher education, one of the least favors come and what we find in the field for the least favors is they don't use basic business principles. there is a lot of nepotism. there is no anti-nepotism clause is like many of them have been corporate america. they are small shops, delete and what does he lead a click in america or at least in the american imagination fax what is easily? said, there are many factors that contribute to the lack of

diversity and field but you would think would be the most diverse and they are the beast, supposedly the most progressive and like trying and bringing us ideas. and the more that that is perpetuated, the worse situation we are in. >> and i think a lot of people because they are progressive, they feel like i've got this. i care. you don't need a -- [laughter] so, we can open up questions unless you have more. >> i have many more, but -- >> we will take some audience questions. keep them brief, respectful and relevant to tonight's discussion. thank you. >> i know less about the industries that you are discussing tonight, journalism, entertainment and so on, but i

do know a lot about -- >> this is. who was the president of the new york urban league. >> but more important to the discussion. >> and she headed the minority, national minority supply council which is a 50-year-old organization to bring minorities businesses into doing business with fortune 500 companies. and i posted something on your facebook because i am so glad you are talking about it, but there is a competition that you haven't touched on tonight, and just may just designate on the corporate side, and that is diversity as you discussed it tonight is mostly you are discussing black and white which is the most emotionally fraught and most difficult. >> i'm talking about all people of color. >> in corporate america now, what has happened when you discuss diversity -- >> it is a catchall for everybody that isn't a straight

white male. >> and even that, there was one i forgot which company, i think it was apple where the diversity officer said that even a blue-eyed white man can be diverse. well, that's correct because they are trying to get economic diversity, regional diversity. so, what happens if it becomes -- >> you say let's have some metrics. they will have some numbers but they are so rushed and dispersed over a large group of people. >> and that is why i focused in this book on racial diversity because it isn't like that is mutually exclusive that we have all kinds of disabilities, we have everything that compounded by race and all of that gets eclipsed because we broaden the term to mean -- >> it is a shell game. i don't know about journalism or

entertainment, but i can tell you in corporate america it is a shell game. ed% or more of contracts that go out through corporations every year are still going to white companies, and everybody else gets a percentage that has stayed for years. >> over 15 years, case in point is that with fortune 500 ceos, the percentage of whites dropped from 85% to buy think 82-point something percent because of white women. white women, so people of color, the numbers didn't really change that much for people of color, so now you are right, and it's why i am drilling down on the racial diversity because it has been overshadowed by this overtaxed term and it's part of

the problem. thank you. >> are there any other questions? please raise your hand. >> or solutions. but answers, we take also. >> hello, peter. >> nice to see you. >> thanks for the great book by the way. >> thank you. >> one -ish uic is that diversity like some other corporate initiatives is really so i load away from the profit centers in the corporations, so if you say a law firm and all the partners are thinking about is the billing hours, not thinking about diversity as bringing in people of color it has nothing to do with me and that's just where it goes. >> it's part of the problem. it's marginalized in the corporate structure and most institutional structures and

then you have a situation where most of the diversity is our alsalso of color and often times are the diversity. >> and in the executive suite. >> and then they are marginalized, so it's not helpful. it's not helpful. >> any other questions or answers? okay. one, too. >> i am not sure my thinking here, but why would people who dictate policy change if they don't have to? and number two, power never concedes power, so -- >> okay, little malcolm. [laughter] i understand the struggle and -- >> and that may be true that it's just not going to change because who gives up power. i ask my students i say how many of you have had a privilege but you have given up just because

it is the right thing to do some say well i took my allowance one weekend i gave it to a homeless person and i said but did you give it up forever, like for a year, like what did you give up, would you really give up. so, you may be right but then that's pessimistic, too. you know, sometimes things change because they are right, that often. i am probably not all the way there yet with cane knife into his edits the arc of history that bends towards justice. i think it than thi been this at goes back. i see it as a continuum. i see where we will fight and big change, and we are giving better than many of our ancestors did and we have

children and we are going to do everything we can to make sure that they do better. we just can't stop fighting. we have to fight, and i think what happens is many people think victory. it's over. we are going to be fighting until the day we are dead and then our kids will have to continue to fight and their kids will have to continue to fight, so that isn't quite as pessimistic as like who's getting up power. the demographics of the country are upon us by 2045, people of color will be the majority. that is what this whole immigration hysteria is all about. that's what the wall and the kids in cages you know, the voter suppression. i mean, it's on. we are in that kind of struggle. it's a struggle over

demographics. so, the graphics are going to determine some of the change. not all. because you know, i am often reminded of south africa was like 90% black, 10% of the people have the power to the demographics don't necessarily determine destiny. but we are going to have to continue to fight the fight. >> keep on fighting. >> we have another question over here. >> i was wondering whether you did any research into traditionally female professions like social work and nursing. i know carla hayden is the first african-american librarian of congress. >> i look at the numbers. i do a deep dive on the three fields the ball indicated, high

here in hollywood in corporate america. i can't look at everything. people of color are acutely underrepresented in every influential field. every single one. you know, where we may be overrepresented as caretakers as, you know, in museums, security guards, so no, this is a systemic issue, it isn't relegated to one or three fields. >> i have another question over here. >> i just want to know your opinion about recently we have been seeing so much of the anti-biased training. based on a couple of them i cannot understand as an immigrant myself looking at the structure that exists in the

society and now you include everybody will be looked at that as you are biased. >> in a few hours, we are going to undo the damage that has been done for centuries about race. check the box. that is what is considered a tried biodiversity. we are just going to fix it overnight or in a few hours. i looked at many of the studies on diversity training, anti-biased training and the most comprehensive studies at the best say it makes negligible difference and a study by the professor at harvard found that it actually makes things worse particularly if you require it. it causes a lot of resentment

and the numbers of people of color usually drop after you go through that because there's soo much tension and resentment around it. so yeah, it's not -- it isn't a way to go, but that is what most companies do. that's what they are spending billionthe billions on, things e that. >> the timwe have time for one e question. talking about being hopeful in terms of the entertainment industry, do you think that tyler perry and his new enterprise, which will bring so many people of color into various aspects of movie and theater production, or part of the answer in trying to put more people out there. >> obviously, you know, people of color owning their own is

always hopeful. tyler perry, and there is a number of people, gray started by a vote oby aides that he remo there are a lot of activities around people opening their own studios, and of course that will help. does that help the systemic problem that we are talking about? probably not. but if it will help and it will import some people and then there will be training and hopefully they will be able to go into other studios. but i'm not convinced the pipeline was ever the problem anyway, so i don't think that that's going to change the systemic issues but i'm talking about. >> pamela newkirk, everyone. give it up. [applause] that was an incredible discussion and we are so lucky to have you guys here tonight. we will move on to my favorite

portion of the night, the book signing. we have a lot of copies over on the table there if you haven't picked one up, you are welcome to grab one, get a signed integer registers downstairs before you leave. we also have copies of the other books. we will have you wind up down past christian living and make a right as we rearrange the stage for the signing. thank you so much for coming tonight. [inaudible conversations] pressn

washington, d.c.. >> it's not coming back. >> are you picking up audio? okay. it's working. we will get