2020 was a tough year. Halfway through it we were knee-deep in the COVID pandemic and then George Floyd was murdered. As a half-homebound, half-emerging America started wrestling with the images of police brutality out loud, corporate spaces became full of well-intentioned listening and calls to learn. At the time, I was working as an L&D program manager for a telecommunications company. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion wave came our way and several initiatives of guest speakers, awkward and emotional conference calls (we were still remote), and quickly deployed learning modules were here. As I had well-intentioned connections with my white work family and some brave leaders, I kept thinking "we can do more." Terms like intersectionality, microaggression, and CRT were new and hard to parse for them and while Black people like me having frank conversations about race was helpful it felt overwhelming.
I knew it was overwhelming. They told me so.
Those terms weren't new to me. Part of the package of being Black, working in corporate, and having a bit of schooling is knowing what the language of oppression was. (Also shout out to AFA3101 Theory and Dynamics of Racism and Oppression in my FSU undergrad days). I could see these new learnings wash over my peers and the fear set in. The fear manifested in furtive nodding and tight smiles and silence. And it hit me: this has the danger to scare people out of change. My designer senses didn't see behavior modification but overwhelm breaking any hope of learning retention. It was all foreign to most of them: what scaffolding? Not to say the actual modules were ill-formed. The strategy was actually thoughtful. However after drinking from the DEI firehose, these people need to talk it out. Ask questions that were too awkward for the virtual led course. Make mistakes with new terms and not be judged. Take it home and make sense with the people they loved.
As an avid media consumer working for a media company, I found the answer right in front of me. For more than a decade, I took full advantage of the free cable TV and Internet benefits at work. That means from broadcast channels to premium channels to every random digital TV app, I could access it free of charge. So could my peers (network permitting). If we could watch some of these shows together and discuss them in psychologically safe ways we could get somewhere. We could use them as debriefs and practical applications for the DEI learning coming at us from the company and really focus on inclusive behaviors.
I went back to a couple of my friends from varying backgrounds at work and some of the same white people that talked bravely with me. Those conversations led me to form The A/V Club. Nine of us met for half an hour on bonus time to discuss curated programming that helped us get through some DEI issues. If your day job got in the way, no problem. Come back when you can. I kept the commitment to two hours of programming per month. One 30 minute conversation per month. This was off the books: I told my leaders what we were doing but it wasn't tied to an official program.
What did we watch? I started with America to Me. The Starz docuseries covered a suburban Chicago school that had a BLM rally after the murder of Philando Castile (predating George Floyd). I picked this one because the time with the teachers and administrators connected with me as an L&D professional. That with the intersection of race was powerful. It also reminded me of my days in a suburban magnet school in Southwest Florida:
We watched the first six episodes over three months. I started to realize that at that pace we would never get to some really tough series and movies. I purposefully didn't start with programs like 13th or the Kalief Browder Story because I remember the overwhelm. Let's ease into things we could relate directly to. The two questions I asked in each session were "how does this viewing change me?" and "how does this viewing inform my work?" What good would all this viewing do if it were far afield from our work in L&D?
I decided to lean into keeping it light with a favorite HBO series by comic Wyatt Cenac. His part-sketch, part-docuseries Problem Areas devoted an entire season to policing. Again before George Floyd...the problem isn't new. If we started this new corporate DEI wave with police brutality, let's talk about it, I figured:
We were into 2021 now and I could tell even our conversations were still weighty. Calendars were filling up so extra TV was tough, much more an optional meeting with me. I tried to lighten the mood with another HBO series - its first live-action family series: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Set in Botswana I purposefully pivoted to an international perspective. The selected episodes also were the first intended to bring in racial intersectionality: the main characters interaction with Asians in Botswana.
After the departure to Africa, we came back to the first show from the app side of TV: Amend on Netflix. Will Smith produced a docuseries about the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and its broad legal and societal implications. A great way to get into Black History Month:
My vision was to make this group democratic, reflexive, and repeatable. Since we were still off books, I saw us organically growing, making A/V Clubs in other teams at the company. So I welcomed great suggestions like the one for a viewing party. People were really struggling to make time to meet or watch, so could we do it together? A virtual viewing party after 5pm would work. We started with ABC's Soul of A Nation, another docuseries:
I took a look back at the shows and realized I had completely centered this diversity exploration on race. If this was really inclusive, it was time to expand to other dimensions to diversity. HBO to the rescue with a light reality series about roving drag queens. We watched We're Here, not just because the intersection between race and sexuality showed up but because it fiercely confronted both. These three performers left the major stages in metropolises they had become accustomed to and charged into rural and suburban America (with all that implies):
A new inclusive term people were navigating was BIPOC. It's harder to describe why the Black and indigenous experience in the US fits together in a short paragraph. Thankfully, the new show Rutherford Falls on Peacock debuted during this experiment and brought some humorous expression to tough topics:
The next dimension of diversity I wanted to crack was ability. How we approach the disabled among us also has deep roots and has to be part of any DEI conversation. It's also one that personally I struggled to be eloquent in without talking points. So when a member of the Club suggested Special on Netflix, I was glad to jump in:
As my time at the company drew to a close, I wanted to bring in some of my favorites. There are millions of hours of great programming out there that take people out of the familiar. I used the last selection to celebrate one of my favorite artists (one whose music helped me learn Spanish) and another passion - soap operas. Our final show was Celia (originally on Telemundo in the US, now on Peacock):
(Non-Spanish speaking readers, activate the CC in the video, then use the settings to activate the auto-translate.)
In my last posts to the A/V Club I have a ton of extra-credit viewing to recommend. One that was near and dear to me was Small Axe: a movie anthology on Amazon Prime Video detailing the experience of West Indians in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. Watching these with my father, who lived in England before he met my mother in the US, and discussing it with my British older sister was a joy. It brought understanding to stories I heard repeatedly and varied from how I grew up here:
Now as an instructional design manager in a completely different industry, I ask myself regularly, "do I put together another A/V Club? How does it live on?" I'm proud to be connected to projects at the new company that are targeted to keep and promote diverse talent and foster inclusive environments. Yet we could all use a space to talk the hard topics out. (Even if we don't have free cable around here.)
As a designer, there are two things I would do differently. I had great conversations with DEI learning team members but I didn't get a chance to prove this enough over time to build a case to make it official learning. Everything, including the hours I watched and rewatched shows, was volunteer time. How powerful would it be if we could have called it designated personal development? It's not something that you can require out of every worker, so the organic model is more practical. But keeping time sacred is a known requirement. The other is reinforcement. I did start to ask for volunteers to write notes from our discussions and facilitated some lengthy debriefs. Yet they weren't convertible. Could anyone go back and read them? Would they care to? Where was the shared confirmation experience? We admittedly didn't take many risks together: picking friends means you're really polite to each other. A new iteration would push confirmation such as journaling or video responses to keep the learning going.
To my A/V Club members, thank you for learning and taking risks with me. I hope you're keeping the journey going. If you weren't part of our circle, I highly encourage you to watch these shows and ask the central questions of yourselves. Have the tough conversations. Our struggles as a society aren't going away and each of us have to lean into the uncomfortable and learn together to save lives.
In the meantime, like the old Jamaican broadcasters would say in evening, I wish you pleasant viewing.
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