Don’t Blame the Fish – Racism and Growth

The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

Calm and rational conversations about racism, and its impact ethically and economically, are hard to come by. I learned a lot from Dora Anim, COO of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, who moved to Ohio from Ghana and France and brings an important voice to the conversation.

2:07 – on Dora’s early journey “I went to college at 16 years old... excited to come to the USA, wanted to learn English… Master’s Degree at 22... my entire life I had to do that… build credibility.”

7:55 – “Groundwater is a theory around the idea that if you’re walking around the lake on a beautiful day and you see a dead fish, you’ll think ‘probably something wrong with the fish’… if you see ten or a hundred dead fish you start to wonder if something is wrong with the water… and if you see 1000’s of dead fish… maybe you have a groundwater issue… it’s an analogy we use… fish solution vs. system solution.”

10:00 – “we started to create a shared language… groundwater, fish, or lake”

11:16 – “if you’re not addressing the system… you’ll keep having the same outcomes. So I like to think about organizational culture and mindset as maybe the lake or groundwater.”

14:48 – “make sure this story of prosperity is true for everyone, that ties to my TED Talk ‘Modern Day Tale of Two Cities’, that we are a city of the best, and the worst. We have the most generous individuals, we’re Top 10 in the country in philanthropy… world-renowned restaurants, etc.…. but a huge portion of our population has the worst outcomes… poverty, health outcomes, etc.”

17:26 – “that’s where the race piece comes in… our community would have an almost $10B GDP greater than what it is now, if we closed the racial gap…. We need to stand for something… not because it’s the right thing to do, certainly it is, but also because it’s an economic, moral imperative.”

20:22 – in our polarized and charged atmosphere, how do you stay calm and productive? “It requires the recognition you need to have different mindsets… because the heart and the emotion of this is so intense.”

23:34 – about a podcast series “Seeing White” on the Racial Equity Institute website, an African American asks a White American “how attached are you to the idea of being white?” – I recommend listening to this episode: https://play.prx.org/e?uf=http:%2F%2Ffeeds.sceneonradio.org%2FSceneOnRadio&ge=fdaf9bf62365a0bd348eef8ca7cda5a9. The other podcast I recommend listening to is titled “Crazy we built a nation”: https://play.prx.org/e?uf=http:%2F%2Ffeeds.sceneonradio.org%2FSceneOnRadio&ge=120fbbba48d9f7b58964af5b7bdd9c5f