Amazon and Politics (Part 1): Inclusion and Diversity

The Race Space

Sometime around the year-one mark of my tenure at Amazon, our manager (the eponymous Libby of an earlier post) began to introduce the topic of “Inclusion and Diversity” in team meetings. After the boilerplate SSSpacer (safety tip, standard work, and success story) to begin one meeting, Libby’s lead-in to the topic went something like, “Hey, at Amazon we promote inclusion and diversity, whaddya think?” The free-form, around-the-horn, discussion elicited a few awkward, terse responses.

The following week, Libby primed the I & D discussion pump with a YouTube video of a 2014 Ted Talk by Mellody Hobson titled, Color Blind or Color Brave? Ms. Hobson, a businesswoman and spouse of film director George Lucas, tells a story about attending a 2006 editorial board luncheon in NYC with her “good friend,” then-congressman Harold Ford Jr. (D) from Tennessee. The luncheon was arranged by Ms. Hobson’s connections at “one of the most successful media companies in the world” to publicize Mr. Ford’s run to a U.S. Senate seat vacated by Bill Frist (R). When, according to Ms. Hobson, they arrived at the venue and announced they were here for the luncheon, the receptionist guided Hobson and Ford, both African American, through corridors into a dim back room and asked, “Where are your uniforms?”

Despite the unsettling, indeed (given the time, place, and event) incredulous, nature of the incident, Ms. Hobson said she was not surprised. This, she relates, because of something her “ruthlessly realistic” mother taught her years before. “I remember coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited and she asked me, ‘How did they treat you?’”

Ms. Hobson doesn’t tell us. For the next 30 minutes our team (comprising, as befits Seattle, a United-Nations-like cross-section of ethnicities, races, religions, and sexual/gender orientations) got a wake-up call about our reactionary focus on work and common human assets at the cost of I & D zeal: A speech steeped with the innuendo of wholesale, ineradicable white racism, advocating the adoption of a mindset stressing acute consciousness our differences, particularly pertaining to skin color.

Libby (White) flipped on the lights. I glanced sideways across the table, catching a sightline of team faces: military-veteran and program manager Jordan (White), eyes bulging, lips pursed and protruded in a frozen, silent whistle; compliance specialist Debbie (Black) cracking her neck sharply toward the side, pressing a finger into her ear, as if to clear her hearing; business analyst Fatma (Iranian), wearing a beige, merino hajib, furiously texting a message into her cell.  “So,” Libby asked fixing her first gaze directly on me, the oldest of the dubiously color-brave white males on the team, “Thoughts, comments, discussion?”