Let Me Tell You a Story...

Let me tell you a story.

I was a junior Chemical Engineering student at Northwestern University, about 20 years old (a pup), and over that summer I took on a paid internship with a national consumer product manufacturer in Ohio. (It was a coveted post.)

I guess they needed top chemistry and engineering students to help mix colorful chemical formulations that cleaned kitchen floors lol.

Over the course of my summer in this Ohio riverside city, I learned several things about implicit racial bias as well as explicit sexism and racism within enterprise corporations.

The student summer interns, including several Black women and men, would meet on weekends to have snacks, joke around, compare notes and sightsee.

Near the end of our summer working for this well-known company, we opened up and talked about our weekly pay, our salaries.

It turned out that the black women, including a top MIT doctoral candidate in ChE, was being paid less than the men (including myself, a third year undergrad), and overall, all the black interns were paid less than their white counterparts for the same work.

Needless to blurt, our young lithe spirits were dampened.

Near the conclusion of our summer stay in this Midwestern city, a company-wide celebration dinner was held. All interns and corporate executive leadership were in attendance. I was fatefully seated at a table with the CEO.

I was wearing a dash of traditional African garb, including my head covering which we called fila from the Yoruba. My African consciousness phase lol! ( I'm still in it...)

During the dinner I asked the top execs about the company's investment in apartheid in South Africa. I wanted to know, if in fact they had any plans to divest from that horrendous, inhumane practice being performed on my ancestor's land. I had done my research into the ~80 countries that my benefactors did trade with at the time. I think I heard crickets at the dining table until someone interjected about the aged steak. (Oh, the audacity of a 20-year old exposed to the real deal!)

(Only much later in life have I come to realize that it is all of our ancestral lands sts, so to defile it in any way, is to defile us all, as humans of one race, on one planet...yada yada, unsustainable for us all- you're supposed to know this!)

Let's fast forward to when I resumed my 4th and final undergrad year. I received a letter a few weeks in, from this Enterprise corporation, stating that over my summer I had not performed in a way that "separated me from the herd". I'll never forget the words my "mentor" used. (I was part of a "herd", rustled together during one of our uniquely-American, generational, race-riot fueled, corporate image crises. "Let's get some women and blacks up here this summer, pronto! and take pictures!")

I'll jump back to the internship briefly- you'll want to hear this: My supervisor/mentor, assigned to me by the company, required that I submit bi-weekly reports as part of my job. These reports included rudimentary lab test results; reflective light, chemical toxicity, etc. on different chemical formulations of a cleaning product that I was creating. (I put in a lot of research, sourced some unique compounds and vetted their environmental impacts.)

Now, this man, my mentor, would take my test results and publish them as his own bi-weekly results, in his name only, and he then, basically- just threw my work into the bin. The result? I was a slacker in the eyes of and by "mister mentor's" words, to the senior leadership. (I thought you'd get a kick out of that.)

I did not become aware of his practice of suppressing my results and my performance until near the end of my summer stay. I overheard it. I was young, optimistic and naive; I couldn't imagine this breach of ethics in a professional, corporate setting.

I obviously received a harsh lesson that summer of my youth.

I was both saddened and enraged at the hubris, the arrogance, of this tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man (I ain't lyin'!) and what he must have thought of me, felt about me, to justify his actions. Blew my mind!

That was my first professional experience dealing with both hidden and outright visible racism.

This was many years ago and what disturbs me is that, to this day, in 2023 I'm hearing of and still experiencing the same stories. Implicit, institutional and explicit bias remain ubiquitous in American corporate society.

So. Why bother crafting this opinion piece at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon?

I want each of you reading this to take a quiet moment and ask yourself-

-how and where you may have participated in unfairly judging another person based on color stigma or gender bias.

Then do better.

#weareinthistogether #stepup

This letter to my LinkedIn fam is just a complete thought that formed after my morning workout today. I dictated most of it at the gym and cleaned it up at my desk.?

And I feel today that my thoughts are worthy of sharing. That's why this ish persists. We're terrified to face it, and quash it once and for all. And hold folks accountable. And I'm too far along in this life to be intimidated at "payroll-point" sts.

May this message resonate with those that feel alone, as victims of this type of abuse. Holding your tongue to protect your jobs, walking on eggshells, enduring slights and insults. Our grandparents already did that for us! js

- and may those of you, who stand by and allow this "mistreatment" (for lack of a better scatological term),

-may you be made to pause and to assess your culpability, that you may stand against this where ever you see it, going forward. Change won't happen without you. If we don't change, we're treading water in a whirlpool.

I'll leave you to it then. Sidney (Just call me Unc.)