America is faced with the reality that has never faced before for hundreds of years, the Caucasian population has been in the majority and things are changing more rapidly than expected.

Companies are recognizing the need for diversity, inclusion and equity.

Our nation elected its first non-white president and female, multiracial vice president.

What's happening in our country?

What's all the buzz about diversity, equity and inclusion?

Hi, I'm Pastor Phillip Davis, the host of courageous conversations.

Joining me today on our show is Darrell Lyons.

She's an author, transformational storyteller, journalist and actor and an activist.

She's the creator of the podcast Demystifying Diversity.

Make sure you stay with us.

We'll be right back.

Well, welcome back, we're so excited to have this wonderful conversation that is so important to help us understand context.

We have an amazing guest with us today.

Darrell.

Welcome to courageous conversations and thank you for taking the time out of your busy, busy schedule to be with us.

And so we are grateful that you would come and have this conversation with us.

Well, thank you so much for having me, Pastor Phil.

It's really an honor to get to be with you today, so thank you.

Yeah, I've had a chance first off to hear about your TED talk that you just recently did up here.

It's still stacks, I heard was amazing, so I rushed to reach out to see if I can connect with you because as you may have heard in the intro, there's so much going on with diversity and inclusion and equity, and it's kind of been thrust to the forefront, I would say.

Right?

And so I know that you have a background in this and you know, this is an area of expertise for you.

But talk a little bit about about Dara.

Please tell us who you are and and how you've arrived at the place that you're at.

Yeah, thank you so much for that question.

So I think I was born for this and I mean that, quite literally.

So my dad is black, my mom is white and I'm biracial, and I've always been very proud to know the full spectrum of my background and my experience.

And I think that for me, why I got into work in the space of diversity, equity and inclusion was, first of all, my own personal experiences and realizing that not everyone who shares my same racial and ethnic identities was given the space to embrace that.

And so I became personally passionate about these issues as pertains to race right and my own limited experience.

And then after I began doing this work, I became a journalist and I got really, really passionate about looking at how oppression impacts members of all different communities, especially, you know, people who have been marginalized and oppressed.

And I began to see the overlap of these layers of oppression and the ways in which various people have been unsafe and being themselves for hundreds and hundreds of years, and how this country was really founded on stolen land and stolen labor.

And so it became more of a more of a mission.

I want to say, like a vocation and an avocation for me.

And so I have made a career and a lifelong pursuit out of this work because I see it, I see it as essential to the good of humanity.

And so, yeah, I could talk for an hour just on this one.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, when I was starting and thinking about the intro, you know, I was going to say from the beginning of the American experiment that the Caucasian population has been the majority, and I had to change that kind of on the fly because that's not the case, right?

This land belongs to indigenous people and they came over as the minority, but ultimately through genocide and many other acts of violence, this land was stolen, right?

And how do you, in the space of diversity and equity, help Europeans understand that long history of violence that allowed them to arise to a place of power and essentially dominance in the world and specifically here in the United States?

Yeah, right.

So I think one of the misconceptions in the conversation is that it is history, right?

I think that sometimes people, myself included, can get stuck in these very linear understandings of the progression of time and the progression of history.

And so it can seem like, oh yeah, this was this shameful thing that happened in the past, and it's no longer an issue.

And you know, and that's actually not the narrative.

I mean, the reality is, is that indigenous people are still being subjugated in a lot of instances.

A lot of the things that are cited as like America's innovations are actually not the great Iroquois law of Peace is actually was co-opted and stolen and misappropriated to form the Declaration of Independence in the U.S. Constitution, right?

And so I think once people start to be aware that it's not as if we can point to a moment in time when everything went from being oppressive to not being oppressive.

It's really an ongoing process.

And I think once people start to realize that it's less about sort of sweeping something under the rug that happened five hundred years ago and looking, Ooh, how is that still happening and how can we really be agents of change?

Sure.

And you know, you think about the analogy to use the African-American experience that the average wealth of an African-American family, right, is one tenth of that of a white family.

And that happened intentionally as it relates to the Federal Housing Administration and, you know, loans that were given to white families to be able to build out suburbia and purchase homes and to pass down that generational wealth.

And so often when folks see the condition of African-Americans, they think, Oh, well, they're just.

You know, not smart, and they don't have capacity to to earn and they're not wise with their money, they like, you know, malt liquor and marijuana.

Right.

And this this this propaganda gets promoted.

And then you come to a place where we are seeing one another, not through the lens of humanity, right?

But we're seeing one another through the messages that we've heard over the years.

How do you help people, companies, corporations to be able to look at people through the eyes of humanity and love and acceptance?

Yeah, that's such.

So I think it's twofold.

One is sort of like the pragmatic, practical kind of analytical side of it, and the other is the human, the emotional evocation.

And I think because I'm blessed to be the host and the co-creator of the Demystifying Diversity podcast, a lot of the work that I do is bringing stories to the forefront because people can connect on the level of story, right?

They hear the experience of someone who might not look like anyone that they've been exposed to in their life.

Or, you know, it might make a whole biases against Ryan.

And so hearing those stories and really relating on that human level, I think, is what changes hearts and minds.

I mean, you're a pastor, right?

And so, you know, like Jesus taught in stories, right?

Nobody remembers the exact year B.S.

that something happened, but people remember the story of the woman at the well or, you know, those kinds of things or that that has impact.

So I would say the story level is where I tend to want to intercede the most, but in a pragmatic way.

A lot of times when I go into corporations or a lot of times and I'm talking to people who maybe are more analytical, I explain racism.

I explain oppression as almost like thinking about amortization of interest, right?

So like if you think about someone who puts a thousand dollars in the bank, you know, I don't know if that was 10 years ago.

The interest is going to accumulate and accumulate and accumulate over time.

Right.

And versus someone who puts $1000 in the bank yesterday.

And I think when we look at racism and sort of compare, well, OK, how are these various populations doing relative to one another?

If we can understand that that it is not enough to look at what's happening now, we have to look at the impacts of these things accumulated over time, whether they be financial, lack of financial literacy and lack of the ability to build generational wealth, whether it be generational trauma, which has an impact, you know, so just really kind of getting to people on both levels.

I want to say like the mental and the emotional is where I have found it's possible to make a difference.

Yeah, I found that in having these discussions many times when statistics are communicated for those that are analytical because they have to break through kind of the homeostasis of this is just the way it is.

We're going to keep it normal.

But when you begin to present facts, it's like, wow.

Twenty four trillion dollars is you know what the number is that the free labor that was given to, you know, America on the backs of slaves, right?

And you begin to think about the impact of the production of cotton, that cotton was the number one exporter commodity in the world, right?

Providing eighty five percent of the cotton came from America.

And you begin to think about the wealth that America has accumulated.

And then when people begin to look at it from that perspective, maybe they can get a deeper understanding and then understand that it's very systemic too.

Right.

So it's been interwoven into the fabric of our nation now.

You know, I had a guest on earlier that was talking about the one drop rule.

So when you identify, do you identify as a black woman?

Do you identify as a white woman?

Do you identify as a multiracial woman?

What does that look like for you and how do you kind of communicate that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll answer that question.

One quick point that I wanted to make based on what you just said possible, and I was like, Oh, wait, you know, I think it is.

I think sometimes people see my work.

As for those people over there, right?

And I'm thinking specifically here now about white people who could be allies in the race conversation.

And when you start to when I start to talk to people who might think about, Oh, this isn't really for me or it's not really my issue, I really look at the costs of unchecked white supremacy to white people like the opioid crisis in America can be directly traced back to white supremacy.

The inordinately high rates of suicide among white youth can be traced back to white privilege, unchecked gun violence.

And so I really believe that for the good of all humanity, every single person should be invested.

Now, in terms of the question that you asked me about my own racial identity, I have always identified as biracial, I'm half black and half white and in fact, that was the topic of my recent TED talk because I think that the one drop rule, while while it remains true to many people's experience and while the race, the roots of that can be traced back to to slavery and then specifically segregation and the effort to really subjugate all people of color.

Yeah, my experience has been that of being enriched by my black and white heritage and culture, and I think that many people who have had that experience have been told that it's not OK for them to claim that as their often legitimate experience.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's interesting because the demographics of America is changing.

So you know that for two weeks of our show, this is what we're talking about, right?

Diversity, equity, inclusion, the changing demographics of America and what it's going to look like 10 years from now.

And how do we as a people, what I said before was embraced one another, not not based on what our skin looks like, right?

But being able to see one another through the eyes of love, compassion, acceptance and humanity.

I think that's so, so important.

And you have written a book, right?

And I think you have a copy of it.

It's called Demystifying Diversity, which is a huge topic.

And so I had a chance to download.

I read some of the book last night, which was amazing, and thank you for for your work there.

One one story that stuck out to me.

It was early on in the book you were placed in a room, I think, with a number of people from mixed race identity and they went around the room and they had everyone, I guess, explain, you know, who are, you know, who are you and everyone identified as black except for you?

Can you talk a little bit about that and how at that young age you were able to really embrace the duality of your identity?

Yeah.

Well, so I I think I wanted to use it a little bit back before that moment because I didn't have good modeling and a whole lot of love and receptivity and black and white role models in my life.

I don't because kids kids are taught to regurgitate what what they're told and what they see and what's around them, right?

And so I learned at a very young age that who I was was something to be proud of and to embrace.

And so I grew up listening to, you know, a diverse set of music and eating a wide range of different cuisines and spending time with black and white relatives and friends.

And so.

So all of that kind of culminated in this moment where I was sitting in this multiracial group and we kids had been taken off to one side and all of us had both black and white parents and facilitator pulled us and said, You know what?

Race are you?

And every other child answered black.

And when it got to be me, I said, Well, I'm half black and half white on biracial.

And she said, Well, you have a really what are you?

And.

Yeah, yeah.

And she was like, No, no, but which one?

And I was like, I don't.

I'm not one.

I'm two things at the same time, I'm the same person.

Like, what are you not understanding about this?

And she just said, Well, that's not how society is going to see you.

And even at that young age, I knew that the problem wasn't me.

It was with society.

And I was like, I didn't want to change who I am to fit some broken mold in this broken society.

I would rather set out to change society to accept people of all identities than I think I was.

Maybe, I don't know, seven, eight years old at that time, and I have never wavered from from that.

But I was also and this is a privilege that I hold.

I was raised in an environment where it was OK for me to have a truth that went against the grain, you know, and and I was embraced and loved in my authentic self.

And not everybody gets that.

Yes, that's pretty powerful.

So you must have had a very strong upbringing.

I was reading the dedication and you dedicated the book to your mom, right?

And and kind of what inspired and motivated that?

And how did that upbringing kind of set the framework of how you view yourself and view others?

Yeah, so I was my mom was a single mom until I was 11, and I'm thirty eight years old now.

And so in 1983, it was not as widely accepted and embraced to be a single parent.

And I think there was a lot of potentially could have been a lot of backlash for her, especially because I'm biracial and, you know, and she was like, this white woman raising this biracial kid and and I think that she just always had an attitude of, I'm going to be who I am and I'm going to do what I want to do.

And I'm like, and I'm going to lead with love and let everyone else think what they want to think and do what they want to do.

And also, because I was raised, I was raised around a lot of adults as a child.

And so I was very I was raised to be very precocious and an independent thinker and to like and to have opinions.

And it has served me well in some situations and not serve me well and being entirely honest.

But but yeah, I mean, I think I just had a very strong core in that.

And at the same time, my white mother knew that she was not equipped in the areas that she wasn't equipped.

I mean, you can see my care is not was not something that she knew how to deal with.

You know, my like the concept of lotion with, you know, like white dolls and stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

My mom realized very early on it is important for my daughter to have a multitude of different influences.

And so I had a lot of black and interracial and mixed race friends and and and surrogate family members that were a part of my life since the very beginning.

Read a lot of books with characters who look like me.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I mean, I think I really credit my mom for being a trailblazer in a lot of ways and also honoring my identity, even though in some ways she recognized that she couldn't relate to it.

But she could love me enough to want me to be me.

Wow, that's very powerful.

I mean, I can imagine that that journey for you and reading the book, the experiences and the interactions that you had with people of both races right again tried to put you into a specific box, categorize you, classify you.

And I think people are comfortable when they're able to classify people.

But you seem to be a bit of an enigma.

You wouldn't get into the box and you wouldn't you wouldn't fit in to that kind of preconceived idea of who you were as a person.

Now you're a journalist.

You've written twenty two books, right?

And the one that jumped out to me and we'll get back to demystifying diversity was I mixed that.

I say that correctly.

Yes.

Yeah.

Can you can you talk a little bit about that?

Was that a children's book?

And you wrote it under under a pseudonym?

Yeah, right?

Yes, I did.

So because I'd written and published so extensively.

My literary agent at the time said, you know, like, maybe you should write kids' books under a different name just to keep the brand separate.

And so I did.

In the name that I chose to write under was the name Maggie Williams, which has spiritual significance because my favorite, my two favorite deceased people in the world are my aunt Maggie, who passed of cancer at the age of 29, and my grandfather, who was like a surrogate father figure to me and I took the names from them.

Yeah, the book was it was an exploration of what it is to be biracial and to be proud of that and to be embracing of that and and to love that.

And so I wrote the book and it was really for me.

It was really uplifting because I found that not a lot of people were talking about, you know, we're talking about sort of what it felt like to be othered or what it felt like to be, you know, excluded.

And that is such a value that those stories need to be told.

And at the same time, I think affirming examples are also important so that people can realize that there is another way.

And it's funny because when you were talking about how I never really fit in, that's my experience.

And at the same time, my experience was of always being included, even though I never really fit in.

So I always, you know, I had many of the people in my life who were black were like, Oh, well, like, you're with us, you know, people who are white or like, Oh, well, you're with us, and I'm like, Yeah, I'm I'm everywhere.

You know, I've been able to be a bridge in some ways for groups of people who wouldn't normally get together.

But because of who I am and the identities that I hold and because I was beloved by many people, I ended up creating a space where people could come together, and that can be a lot of pressure.

But it was also.

A great joy to be throughout my life.

Yeah, and you've you've had the opportunity to, from a diversity perspective, to address a number of issues from LGBTQ to people with disabilities.

How does that play into the overall conversation?

Because sometimes it's so monolithic.

It's like, OK, black and white, and this is a diversity issue.

But there are so many other realities as it relates to diversity and acceptance of the other, if you will, those that are different from us, right?

Yeah.

And I was very clear when I set out to do this work, especially with the Demystifying Diversity podcast that I wanted to do because there's great work out there.

So I'm not knocking anyone's work.

There's wonderful work out there, but that's very topic specific.

And what I wanted to do was I wanted to create something that was a microcosm of the macrocosm.

So I wanted work about diversity to be in and of itself diverse.

And so we were very thoughtful in the curation of different topics and different episodes and representing different people because partially because I think it's important for people to get windows into the experiences of others, but also partially because I think that the more we start digging into these different topics, the more apparent it becomes that these systems of oppression are interwoven.

And it's not just like I'm not interested in playing a game of whack a mole when it comes to die, right?

Like, just sort of like knocking down one issue at a time I'm interested in.

Like if you think about a table, right, like cutting some a couple of the legs out of the table.

So the whole structure comes down and we can begin to build something better and newer.

And so I think having these conversations that are in and of themselves inclusive and incorporating of diversity, really, when I say diversity, I mean, beyond the black white conversation, I mean the topic that you were just putting out there, plus body diversity plus religious diversity plus immigration, like just so many different things.

I think that the more that people can realize that, the easier it is to locate themselves in the narrative, to become invested, to know someone who is impacted in a way that feels like it's not OK for them.

Like this show came about in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder.

Right.

And I think part of that happened because people started to wake up.

And the more that these various stories are brought to the forefront, the more it's like, Oh my God, you know, people can't stay asleep anymore.

And I think I think the more binary and the more polarized these conversations, the easier it is to resist.

But the more that people start to really realize how deep the roots of oppression go, the more invested they are in doing something about it.

And I'll just say we did an episode on LGBTQ identity and experience, and we sort of provided a general sprinkling of issues.

And I can't even tell you, you know, people called in and wrote in about that particular podcast episode and said things like, You know, even though I am a binary gender right like male or female, I learned so much about the way that gender is constructed, and I saw the ways that I'm being oppressed or the ways that I'm I'm feeding into this.

And I think when people start to see how they are impacted and start to see how those that they love are impacted, they become way more invested in going the distance.

These issues?

Yeah, I think a lot of times we don't understand the cost, right and whether it is emotional, you know, psychological.

And then, of course, the loss of life for those who feel a marginalized and oppressed specifically in the LBGT LGBTQ community, right where there is a higher level of oppression, many at times and even the suicide rates are higher, suicide rates are rising in the African-American community.

We did a show not that long ago talking about those, and a lot of it is coming from oppression, right?

And then the cost to economics.

How much has it cost America for not giving mortgages to African-Americans, right?

For the years of redlining and oppression, where you know, this could have been in a building our economy by providing loans to people from oppressed communities?

So the cost, I think we haven't really fully counted up and really given voice to what it has cost us as a country.

You know, we're coming to a close.

I really want you to just talk a little bit.

If you could hold your book up again, I want you to.

I want you to just talk a little bit and share a little bit about what folks are going to get when they read demystifying diversity.

Yeah, absolutely.

So the title is demystifying diversity, embracing our shared humanity.

And I would say that the subtitle really says so much because this book is an invitation to to get human right and to and to begin to embrace the inner emotionality that we all share.

I mean, we humans have the same spectrum of emotions, whatever their experiences.

And I think that if people will read this book, if they'll listen to the Demystifying Diversity podcast, they'll learn how to be a better human.

I know doing this work has made me a better, more empathetic, more loving person, and that has spilled over into every area of my life.

Personally, professionally, it has enriched my relationships with others.

It's enriched my relationship with myself, you know, and that's like self-care, right?

Suffers when we don't embrace our own humanity and care of others, suffers when we don't embrace the humanity in others.

So I really see this as almost like a spiritual experience to be able to do my work because it teaches me about the interconnectedness of humanity.

And I care.

I care deeply about about other people, and I care deeply about myself in the process.

So I would say that it gives people a taste of that.

And and there's also a workbook that they can buy if they want to do some exercises and have a little more practical application to go along with the wonderful.

That's amazing.

You know, it reminds me, as I heard you talking of a simple passage in scripture where Jesus is teaching and they ask them, What's the greatest of all the commands, right?

And he's like, It's real simple.

Love the Lord, your god.

Love your neighbor as you love yourself, right?

There's this trinity of love that really embraces humanity and embraces a higher power.

And if we could get to that plane right, it doesn't matter the color of someone's skin or their ethnic origin or what we call race the constructive race.

We would see them as human beings.

And I believe that that makes for a a more accepting world, right in a world filled with love and compassion.

You're doing great and phenomenal work.

Just really excited about that.

And folks are going to be able to see the information on how to get in touch with you.

Thank you so much, Daryl, for taking the time to be with us on courageous conversations.

Thank you again for having me and thank you for having the courage to do this work.

I think it's wonderful that people are getting an expanded consciousness and yeah, I'm just happy to be a small part of it.

Thanks again.

Thank you so much.

And on behalf of everyone here at PBS thirty nine, I'd like to thank you for joining us on courageous conversations.

Keep being courageous and we'll see you next week.