I was among the found; I took the calls. I mention this because hindsight has a way of turning everybody into the person who saw through everything at the time, and I have no interest in improving my biography that way. I was skeptical, but I was also hopeful, and neither feeling prevented me from accepting an invitation to a conversation that should perhaps have occurred years earlier. Professional opportunity is not made counterfeit merely because the person extending it has recently altered their rationale for doing so. Besides, I work in marketing, a profession built in no small part on the proposition that what people want is inseparable from when they want it.
In November 2020, while much of the country was still speaking of a racial reckoning as though the reckoning had already produced a result, I wrote in American Theatre about my own difficulty believing that the country’s newfound racial consciousness would endure. George Floyd’s murder had entered my home, my work, and my seven-year-old daughter’s understanding of what might happen to her Black father. By the end of that essay, she had decided to join me on my morning walks to make sure I was safe. I wrote then of America’s “fleeting capacity to love.” I had seen enough cycles of national horror, recognition, resolve, and amnesia to distrust the permanence of our attention. Rodney King, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and too many others had already taught the lesson. What I did not know was whether George Floyd would become another name in that sequence or the name that finally broke it. I hoped for the latter while understanding how mercurial the odds could be.
What happened next is usually discussed as a story about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and I think that understates it. DEI was merely the institutional vocabulary of the moment. The more consequential event was a temporary renegotiation of relevance. For a period of time, Black experience was not treated as a specialized form of knowledge useful primarily when the subject was Black people. It became germane to conversations about business, audiences, culture, leadership, risk, talent, and the country itself. People who had long possessed that knowledge experienced the peculiar sensation of watching its market value rise while its substance remained unchanged.