EPOP Board Appointment

I am proud to announce that effective July 1, 2019, I will be a member of the board of directors of the Portland Business Alliance's Emerging Professionals of Portland! EPOP offers programming focused on helping emerging professionals obtain personal and professional development opportunities, network and connect with organizations and peers across the city of Portland, and promoting the civic engagement of professionals in our community.

I am super stoked for this opportunity and I am very looking forward to diving in head first!

Someone said to me when I was in my 1st year of HR that I was "going to be trouble" in response to my wondering why we weren't trying to hire anything other than White cis men. The "someone" in question was the White cis female head of HR at the tech startup I was working for.

The head of HR let it be known that she openly viewed me as troublesome because I wanted to address hiring biases and inequity. And she said this to me with a smug smile and disdain in her voice for me even thinking I had the right to question things.

Funny thing is she was right about me.

I am "trouble".

I'm the kind of "trouble" that makes White people with power who like to let me know they "don't see color", "have a Black friend" and "saw The Green Book this past weekend" deal with who they are and what they think.

So here I am five years into my career and I am still, and will always be, "trouble". And the real trouble is not me but anyone with power and privilege who would view me as trouble because I want to make companies better and legitimately equitable and inclusive places to work.

FYI: that tech company went under. And their head of HR doesn't even work in HR anymore.

So I am proudly always going to "be trouble" because one thing I know from experience is that trouble can prompt change.

It's often intriguing to me that in my personal and professional lives I have talked about and shared information like this and graphics like this way more than I feel I should have to. The normalization and casual integration of racism, White supremacy, and White privilege affect me personally as a person of color but also professionally as an HR professional who works very hard to make sure hiring practices, management practices, and work cultures are devoid of this pyramid and its building blocks. You cannot imagine how many interactions with directors and hiring managers are rife with indifference and minimization or how integrated veiled racism is in the work culture and fabric of higher ed. It's daunting...but I've never been one to lay down. I'll keep sharing this info and educating and checking people and their supremacy personally and professionally because without challenge there is no change.

I spent this past Saturday morning representing Reed College at BEAM’s 6th Annual Black Student Success Summit at Portland State University. Equity, equality, inclusion, community, and opportunity don’t take weekends off and neither do I.