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Growing up in Sapulpa, Risha Grant recalls her grandmother — a woman, she said, who loved nearly everyone and was loved by nearly everyone.
But being born in 1923 in Oklahoma, her grandmother also had some very tough experiences.
“So for her, she tried to teach her kid and her grandkids how to navigate in a world that wasn’t built for them,” Grant said.
“And in doing that she made me think differently about white people. Because her experience, as you can imagine, was pretty rough. While she showed love, I learned to mistrust white folks. I learned a bias. I learned that they (white people) didn’t really care for me or like me.
“She would not have wanted for that to be something that I took away from that. But at the same time, because of her experiences, she had to make sure that I knew all of these things.
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“When I realized that I’m carrying these things around … I realized that I was hurting myself.”
Grant, a Black bisexual woman who started the first diversity consulting company in Oklahoma about 20 years ago, has a new book that will be released this week.
“Be Better Than Your BS: How radical acceptance empowers authenticity and creates a workplace culture of inclusion,” will go on sale Tuesday.
The book, she says on her website, will provide a step-by-step path that many leaders, managers and employees have used to stop judging themselves and others.
“These clients have enriched their personal and professional lives and relationships through the unmatched power of radical acceptance, which leads to authentic leadership, employee engagement, feeling safe instead of rejected, confident instead of insecure, and accepted instead of like an outsider.
“ ‘Be Better Than Your BS’ will take you from feeling disconnected from the people around you to enriched, open, and safe environments where you can be who you are without the fear of judgment.”
Grant has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review, Glamour and other publications, including the Tulsa World, where she wrote many columns.
She is founder and CEO of Risha Grant LLC, an award-winning diversity consulting and communications firm, as well as an educational and motivational speaker.
She attended Northern Oklahoma College for two years before transferring, via an athletic scholarship, to Kansas State University, where she played guard on the Wildcats’ basketball team.
She graduated in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in mass communications and is an internationally renowned diversity, inclusion and bias expert who gives 70 to 100 presentations annually.
During a wide-ranging interview last week, Grant said the book is divided into two parts: The first for employees and the second for employers.
“I wrote it so that companies can understand how to deal with all the BS that they have to deal with,” she said.
At the center of that “BS,” she said, is a term she coined “biasphere,” which she said people need to recognize.
“I believe that we can have the best policies, the best procedures in the world — in our companies — but if people keep showing up every day bringing their biases, bring their toxicity to the office, you’re going to have the same problems.
“We want everything to change in this world, right?
“We want our companies to change, we want our communities to change, we want the government to change, but the only thing we can control is ourselves.
“If we can start there and start to look at how our bias is showing in our behavior, how we’re showing that to other people, how we’re making other people feel — those are things we can control. Those are things that we can assess about ourselves.
“What happens to most of us … say a person of a different race offends you. Instead of us dealing with that one person that created the offense, we now deal with every person that looks like that person as the one who created the offense. And that sucks. That’s the part that … we’ve got to be better than our BS.”
Grant said DEI — diversity, equality and inclusion — “is being used a political pawn.”
“We’ve got to prioritize people over politics. This is about people.”
“Companies cannot stay in this mode of only hiring one type of person.
“I understand that white people who really sit down and have a conversation with me are like, ‘Hey, this sounds like it’s pushing us out. This sounds like we’re making room for other people and we’re being pushed out,’ and I understand that.
“My response to that is, ‘Can you name white people who are being pushed out?’”
“First of all, if that is happening, that’s not what this is about. That’s not what this is supposed to be about. This not about white folks gaining and losing power. This is not about Black and brown folks moving into power. This is about people. This is about making sure that all of us figure out how the hell we’re going to run this world together because nobody is going anywhere.
“This is about getting out of a scared mentality and adopting an abundance mentality … that’s there’s room for everybody.”
“It is saying, ‘We want the best person for the job but that best person could be anybody.’”
“It’s leveling the playing field. It is saying, ‘OK, we want the best person for the job,’ but that best person could be anybody, and we want to open it up to make sure that we at least have a diverse slate of candidates to choose from.”
“If at the end of that (business) interview, it turns out to be a white man, so be it. But did you talk to a diverse pool of candidates?”
“Let’s make sure we are being equitable in those decisions. And that’s all it is. It’s not to push out the white men. White men are not losing their jobs to diversity.”
“White men are going to have to be a part of this, whether they want to or not because they are running companies that need to look like the communities that they serve, and the communities that they serve don’t look the way they looked, even 20 years ago.”
“It is not — and I can’t say that enough — it is not about pushing anybody out. But the realness of it is that people have been. There have been segments that have been pushed out historically since the beginning of time.”
“People are scared; people are worried. But I think companies that are doing diversity right are figuring it out. They’re saying, ‘Hey, I want my company to look like the world that we represent because these are our customers.’ “
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