I was afraid I would be fired this week or that this would be the week when I’d start to be alienated at my agency.
For years, I’ve had a not-so-secret agenda of bringing in more black, brown, and queer voices into the professional speaking industry. My agency has long been viewed as the best speakers bureau in the world. So, amplifying voices of people from diverse communities under the agency’s banner could go a long way to lift those experiences, stories, and ideas to a wider audience. But, like almost every other agency in this industry, we haven’t done such a great job at doing so and for years I felt uncomfortable with bringing it up.
A few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, David Kessler, a grief expert, was interviewed about that feeling in the air. He said about coronavirus, “This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We’re not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”
In modern history, I imagine we’ve collectively grieved, as a country, after the assassination of JFK and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., after the space shuttle Challenger explosion, on September 11th, and now with coronavirus. Five times in about 60 years. In the past two weeks, we, people of color, have collectively grieved the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the murder of Breonna Taylor, the attempted weaponization of police…
