My journey started when I was given an opportunity while I was still a teenager. I can remember the recruiter mentioning that they were doing me a favor but with no degree and a new baby on the way, I was excited to take the minimum wage job.
It changed my life.
For background, you should know that my mom was a teenager when she had me. That meant I grew up cohabitating with aunts from time to time, in houses where diversity wasn’t a concept, it was a lived experience. Money was tight, and interestingly, kids in tight-money households find each other across every line the rest of the world draws. I ended up amongst the diverse communities everywhere we went, because that’s where I belonged.
At that first job, somebody else saw something in me and gave me a shot most kids in my spot never get—the chance to lead a diversity effort at the corporate scale. The focus was on generational diversity, and as a young cis white male, leading that work cracked open every other dimension of diversity for me in a way that I hadn’t experienced, up close, with real impact on the line.
As I ventured into the new frontier of generational diversity, I learned quickly that it touches every other dimension. Everyone’s an age. Building generational awareness turned into conversations with every other community in my circle. After stepping away from the generational diversity work, I had the chance to serve in other groups too — AVAS, the Association of Voices from Asia South being another with its own imprinted experiences. Once again, I found myself amongst people whose lives looked nothing like mine on the surface. But I listened, I saw them, and I learned we weren’t so different.
I had the opportunity to engage with programs like Real Talk Real Change; partner with community groups like Big Brothers Big Sisters; and to listen to a thousand stories from people who were excited to share, and all had to do was show up.
At the same time, somebody gave me another shot: the chance to learn Six Sigma and Lean techniques – operational excellence at scale. Those two tracks, the diversity work and the operational discipline, became one skill set in my hands. The discipline taught me how to make a case to leadership while the diversity work taught me whose voice to champion. Put them together and you get the way I have done every important thing in my career since: Build solutions from what the people doing the actual work tell you. That listening turned into million-dollar solutions for big companies, and into a career for me.
Years later working at Aetna, I had the chance to found a multi-generational Employee Resource Group and to continue doing the work alongside leaders across every dimension of diversity at the company. I am still doing this work today. I am proud to serve as the current Community Outreach Lead for our company’s Black Employee Resource Group, invited to support in that role, again, by people who saw something in me.
When I close my eyes, I can see their faces: the ones who helped me get started; the ones who gave me the chance to be seen; the ones who got me into continuous improvement programs; the ones who shared experiences back then and are still sharing their experiences with me, today, like on our recent trip to Tallahassee. I am grateful for every one of them.
Speaking of that trip, while on the bus I had the opportunity to make a new friend who told me something I am still processing and that will certainly shape my thinking as I go forward.
This man spent a lifetime as a public school teacher before retiring into a professor role at our local nursing school. He talked about black centers of excellence that existed before integration. When integration came, it didn’t really integrate—it absorbed educators and their techniques. One faculty member, a couple of teachers, and even a janitor would go one way, along with a handful of high-performing students from different grades while another cohort of professionals and students were selected to go another. The concentrated Black excellence got broken into pieces and dispersed into majority-dominant educational models, where they became lost features inside somebody else’s system.
The things that made for excellence got diluted and over time, the system forgot what that excellence even looked like.
Integration meant absorption.
The same weakening tactic is being used again, right now. It’s called Gerrymandering.
Concentrations of minority political power are being fragmented and spread across majority-dominant districts, where it becomes a minority feature inside somebody else’s system. The people defending the moves use phrases like “it’s race neutral” and “color wasn’t a factor,” as if those phrases prove their good intentions. They don’t. They prove the absorption tactic has become better at hiding what it is, and emphasizes the need for cultural competency more than ever before.
It is exactly why DEI programs must exist. The thing critics call DEI—recognizing, preserving, and celebrating the excellence that minority communities create—is the only thing pushing back on a system that has been quietly bleaching our vibrancy for generations. The thing the critics call neutrality is the absorption itself and it is unAmerican by its very nature.
I am a DEI hire because the poor, uneducated white kid that was given a shot 20+ years ago is no different than his minority neighbor.
The shot that started my life came from somebody who chose to see me. The next person is waiting to be seen. That is what DEI is really about, and that is what we must defend.
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Mike Sell describes himself as a father, husband, and professional problem solver who looks at ‘broken’ systems and asks who designed them this way and who for. He’s also an insightful writer and IJR member. You can check out Mike’s excellent Substack blog at this link.