Dear Frank DeFord, meet your new friend, Pro Football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor, accused of raping a 16-year-old girl.  Perhaps he knows your other friend Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, accused of sexually assaulting a 20 year-old girl, who you defended as just “boys being boys” in your editorial on NPR last week.
Okay, in [...]

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So from this ad am I to understand that if I chew Trident Wite I’m 35% more likely to get out of a speeding ticket?
Is that only true for beautiful white women?  What if I’m a black man?
Actually, according to KJ Novak in his article “Disparity and Racial Profiling in Traffic Enforcement,”    “Minorities are significantly [...]

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I need to go take a shower.
I just caught myself talking to my husband’s kindly Indian colleague over the phone like he was an idiot, plus I read this article by Tim Wise “Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black,” and realized I am guilty. (This is a must read!)
One, because looking at actual numbers [...]

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My colleague was conducting a training during a “train the trainer” session this week on Intent and Impact, the idea being that in communications, sometimes our Intent does not equal the Impact we intended.  For example:
 “That sweater you’re wearing is really interesting” (intended as compliment).  Unexpected impact:  “You hate it don’t you?” (Spontaneous reaction:  heard [...]

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My 8 year old son made his own dinner the other night.  We were at the grocery store, he saw a bagged frozen entree of sauteed shrimp, pasta and vegetables, asked if we could buy it, went home, read the directions and cooked it all by himself.
Yes, I stayed nearby to make sure he didn’t [...]

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Dillon’s pick this week is the ad above for “Confederate Family Insurance.
It was so offensive, that we realized it couldn’t possibly be true.  Indeed, it is from Spike Lee’s faux documentary “Confederate States of America,” that looks at the US as thought the South had won the Civil War.
It’s extreme representations, however, provide perfect fodder for [...]

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Have you ever been in a position at work where you are working your tail off and all you hear is criticism from those around you?  As explained by a sympathetic friend to me once, “it’s like the idea of a moving target.  If everyone else is sitting around doing nothing, you running by gives [...]

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Hey you racist, why did you mention only Serena Williams race in last week’s post about the Mother Nature/Tampax ad?
Luckily that comment didn’t come in, but as I was riding the train (or the “L” as we call it in Chicago) downtown yesterday, I realized I did mention Serena’s race, but not “Mother Nature’s”.  Why?
As [...]

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 When Marc and I first met, I didn’t know what to think.  We were in the “Green Room,” aka the Counselor’s office at Robeson High School in Chicago, getting ready to visit classrooms as motivational speakers, as part of the Black Star Project.
 “I tell them about careers in marketing, and to believe in themselves and [...]

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 Here are two resources that go well beyond the two-dimensional, US construct of diversity:  Global Voices–which “aggregates, curates, and amplifies the global conversation online,” and the book “A Stranger Among Us:  Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection,” edited by Stacy Bierlein (the book I picked up at a recent event at ThinkArt Salon, an [...]

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