Lorraine Cole: Good afternoon, everyone on behalf of the Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion known as OMWI, welcome to our webinar, Beyond Words, Race, Work, and Allyship amid the George Floyd tragedy. This program is a collaboration between the OMWI directors at the eight federal financial agencies. Lora McCray, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; Claire Lam, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; Sharron Levine, Federal Housing Finance Agency; Sheila Clark, Federal Reserve Board; Monica Davy, National Credit Union Administration; Joyce Cofield, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; Pamela Gibbs, Securities and Exchange Commission; and me Lorraine Cole, US Department of the Treasury. We thank you for being among the 8,500 people joining us this afternoon. Before we begin, we have an invitation and a request for you. First, we invite you to submit questions throughout the session. Use the Q and A tab at the bottom of the screen. Be sure to indicate who your question is directed to. Later in the conversation, Monica will provide audience questions to our speakers. Of course, we won't be able to get to every question, but all questions will be compiled as a resource for other discussions. Secondly, at the end of the session, we ask that you give us your feedback. Use the survey tab at the bottom of your screen to respond to a few quick items. Now, it's my privilege to introduce our speakers. They are two of the nation's preeminent thought leaders on social change, Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Mr. Howard Ross. When Dr. Johnnetta Cole was featured on the cover of Diversity Woman magazine, the editors put one word next to her name: nonpareil. She has dedicated her career and her life to reversing systems of racial and gender inequity. Dr. Cole served as president of both historically Black institutions for women, Spelman College and Bennett College. She also was director of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. Currently, Dr. Cole is the president and chair of the National Council of Negro Women, an organization that powered African American women, their families, and communities for more than 85 years. A prolific scholar with a doctorate in anthropology, she is also the recipient of 69 honorary degrees. Dr. Cole is such an American icon that her ceremonial robe, cap, and gown that she wore as a college president is now on exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Howard Ross also appeared on a magazine cover, featured in a recent issue of Inclusion magazine. He is a lifelong social justice advocate and recognized as one of the world's seminal voices on mitigating unconscious bias. Mr. Ross is the founder of Cook Ross, the premier consulting firm that focuses on organizational culture change. He recently founded Udarta Consulting, concentrating on high impact projects that dismantle the invisible walls between people. A much sought after consultant and speaker, he has delivered programs in 47 states and over 40 countries to many of the leading corporations and organizations in the world. Mr. Ross is the author of three groundbreaking books, "Reinventing Diversity," followed by the Washington Post bestseller, "Everyday Bias," and his latest title, "Our Search For Belonging." The moderator of today's conversation is Rodney Hood, the chairman of the National Credit Union Administration. Mr. Hood holds the distinction of being the first African American appointed to lead a federal banking agency. He previously served as vice chairman of the NCUA board under the George W. Bush administration. Immediately prior to rejoining the NCUA board as chairman, Mr. Hood served as a corporate responsibility manager for JP Morgan Chase. So with that, Chairman Hood, I pass the mic to you.

1 Chairman Rodney Hood: Great, and thank you for that very kind and gracious introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to have the opportunity to moderate this important conversation between Dr. Johnnetta Cole and Mr. Howard Ross on the different perceptions of race related incidents. For me, these discussions are more than simple abstracts. They are personal to me in every way. In my banking career, I've attended conferences and professional events where I was the only man of color in the room. I've often arrived early to speak on panel discussions and other activities where I wanted to get an early start. And people were actually surprised that that young man behind the microphone was actually one of the participants and not someone who was just there foolishly playing around. I vividly remember the conversations with my father when I was young about how to engage with police when pulled over and mother routinely performing safety checks on my car before I went on weekends to ensure the signal and brake lights were all functioning properly. In 2020, I sadly find myself having similar conversations with young African American cousins and young African American men I mentor. As an African American man, I am shocked and appalled and share the heartbreak of many in the Black community. I'm all too familiar with the anger and frustration that comes with the everyday challenges and realities surrounding race. While I indeed pray for justice, healing, and peace for our nation and for the family and loved ones of George Floyd, I am also encouraging everyone to have difficult conversations and to look for ways to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within our communities. Individually and collectively, we can all make a difference. One conversation, one relationship, and one community at a time. I'd now like to begin today by getting straight to the central issue at hand. I'm now going to pose a few questions. We have been here before the protest for equal rights and civil unrest with calls for justice after senseless incidents involving Black people and police abuse of authority. But the tragic killing of George Floyd caused a major seismic shift across the nation and I dare even say the world. Could you both please tell me what's the difference this time and where are we and why are we at this particular point now? We will begin with you, Dr. Cole. Johnnetta Cole: First, I want to thank you if I may call you this, Brother chairman. You have so accurately and very movingly set the stage for this conversation. My only other introductory comment before addressing your first question is to say that while my Dr. Cole did a wonderful, I'd even say, overly generous introduction of myself and of Howard Ross. She did fail to say one thing and that is that Howard Ross and I have a very long and a very special professional and personal relationship. I remember saying the other day when we were in a conversation, if I'm in a situation where things are really, really not just tough, but threatening to my life, I want Howard Ross to be nearby. I deeply admire his, not just allyship, but his activism around the issues that the three of us including now, Dr. Cole, my Dr. Cole, the four of us, care about so deeply. So Brother Chair, you have asked, what's different about world? To respond, allow me to offer a notion, a concept. It's the idea that we as Black folk, just like other communities, we have a collective memory. We don't just live our lives remembering only what has happened to us or even what has happened to our family. We are conscious of what has happened to our people. I have the strong feeling that when a policeman's knee went into the neck of George Floyd for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, almost nine minutes, and we saw that, the people of America and the world saw that. For Black people, it had an unusual pain. Our collective memory took us back. I think first to the shackles put on our necks during that period

2 of enslavement. But come down now, even after the horrors of being owned and abused and justifying that horrific experience by defining us as inferior, come to the period of reconstruction when our necks again are now the parts of our bodies experiencing the most horrific expressions of racism. I'm speaking of lynching. And as the Equal Justice Institute so ably and wonderfully led by our brother, Bryan Stevenson, reminds us, that kind of racial terror was used against Black men, Black women, and Black children. And so when we saw that knee on the neck of George Floyd, yet we did remember, we did remember all of the recent incidents of racial violence and terror, but there was something in our collective memory that made that incident more than ever before. I can't conclude and invite my bro, as I call Howard Ross, to give his perspective without saying, with all of my concern and pain, anguish over what has happened recently, I dare, I dare to have guarded hope and optimism. Because for the first time, in my many, many years on earth, I have heard White Americans use language that is so often only spoken in marginalized communities. I have read corporate leaders, government officials, everyday citizens, saying this is enough as they actually speak of White supremacy and systemic racism. So thank you for calling us into this conversation. May we indeed go beyond the words. Chairman Rodney Hood: Thank you, Ma'am. Howard Ross: Thanks so much, sis. I appreciate the gracious introductions and your statements particularly touched my heart and I feel the same way about you. Thank you. They say the Chinese word for crisis is made of two symbols. One is danger and the other is opportunity. And there are very few times in my life that I think it's more appropriate than now to focus on that because clearly we're at a tipping point in our culture. I think that it's -- you know, I go back long ways. I mean, I went to my first civil rights meeting probably 53 or 54 years ago. And so I've been through lots of these peaks and valleys over time. And I think that there are a number of things about this situation that give us the sense of urgency and also the possibility of hope that we haven't had at other times. I think obviously we're at a sort of a perfect storm. We've had all the polarization we've had in our society, and the reemergence, and it's not like any of us who did the work didn't think that White supremacy and White supremacist organizations were not still out there. But the reemergence of them and incidents like the Charlottesville marches and things like that have, I think, woken up a lot of Americans who were numbed into believing that we were in some kind of a post racial society and that that stuff was of yesteryear. And now we know that that's not the case. We've had, of course, these last few months of dealing with COVID and being trapped inside, which builds up a particular energy. And I think for a lot of people, I know for friends of mine and folks who I've spoken to, it's also sobering to sit back and think, wow, you know, here's this threatening thing out there, what is my life really about? And what's really important? And then of course, the other aspect of that is the devastating impact that COVID has had on the Black and African American community, the First Nation and Native American communities, and the Latinx communities as well. So, not to mention, all of the hate speak that it has encouraged towards Asian Americans. We know that, for example, in New York City alone, that this year it was 23 times the number of incidents of

3 hate speak, bullying, or hate crimes against Asian people in our society. And so that's been there as well. And then there's something particular, I think about the George Floyd murder. And that is that, watching Ava DuVernay, the great filmmaker, speak about this she said, you know, she saw in all of these films when she made “Selma,” when she made “13th,” about beatings and all these incidents, but what really struck her about this one was that there we were watching, in real time, this man lose his life. And for one of the few times, we could actually see the face of the perpetrator staring right at us. And the cold disassociation in his face, almost like saying to somebody, it's almost like he could be asking somebody to get him a Coke or something on the side, while he was snuffing out the life of this person. And so I think people are stepping up in a way that I've never seen before. I mean, just one data point, the Washington Post published a study about a week and a half ago now that said that 69% of Americans now are concerned about systemic racism in the policing system in our country. And to give a sense of context, after Ferguson, that number was only 46%. So we have a 50% increase in just six years, which is astonishing from the standpoint of somebody who's a researcher and loves data. That's an astonishing number. So I do think we have a remarkable opportunity, but at the same time, we're seeing right in front of us, some of the dissonance in the way those of us who are White, and I want to be clear when I talk about groups of people I'm talking archetypally not stereotypically. I know it's not all White people or all Black people or all of any group, but it is helpful sometimes to see patterns in groups. And I think it's fair to say that most of us who are White, even who care about and are disturbed by situations like the George Floyd killing or similar things that have happened before, you know, whether it was all the way back to Rodney King, or Tamir Rice, or Breonna Taylor, or Sandra Bland, or any of these kinds of cases, is that we see them as horrific incidents that need to be dealt with. We see that something bad happened here, yet again, something bad happened here. But as you described, Mr. Chairman, in your opening remarks, African Americans have a very different experience because for African Americans, it's a lived everyday experience of the various kind of micro experiences that you were talking about, the subtle kinds of experiences, the ones that don't show up in a camera or somebody may not get killed. Maybe they just get pulled over. I had a client a number of years ago who was here in the Washington, DC area where I live, a very senior person in a major corporation, probably made a half a million dollars a year on salary, lived in one of the more expensive suburban neighborhoods, African American man. And he told me that one summer his son was home from school, from college, and in 10 weeks, his son was stopped four times coming in and out of his own neighborhood driving his father's car. Not charged with anything ever because the crime was that he was a young black man driving an expensive car in a predominantly White neighborhood. And I think that these daily experiences' grinding effect is a very different experience for African Americans than most of us can possibly experience. So when a George Floyd incident happens, while you're saying here's another, you know, one more day, for us it's like something's finally popped up and we see it. And I think it's so important for us to understand that difference. Chairman Rodney Hood: Well, thank you Mr. Ross. And I'd like to continue with another question because it follows up again around the George Florida tragedy. And that is for me, it's

4 finding an opportunity for my employees. So for the past few weeks, I have been meeting in small groups of up to 20 of my employees to give them a safe place to come and talk, to know that their chairman cares about them as people. And that I really want to create an environment where they can bring their true and authentic selves to work each and every day. And as we've done these sessions, there's been a range of emotions. People have been stunned, they've been able to express anger and outrage, sadness, and also tremendous empathy. But unlike other incidents that we've had in the past, and this is what I want to ask you all about, never before we've lost a Black life to this type of brutality have I had people calling me, friends from Japan, or people calling me from London or Australia. This has gotten the global sense of awareness unlike anything we've seen. And also, I know Mr. Ross, you mentioned we can't talk about race archetypically, but I’d love to know, if you both could perhaps talk about the main differences how the racists are reacting to this incident. Racists and cultures. I'd love to get your thoughts on those. Howard Ross: Yeah, I mean, I'll be glad to weigh in. I think first of all, just from the standpoint of how I think I and I believe Dr. Cole's approach to this is that I think we need to distinguish between racism and racists. We have a system that is built on race and for 400 years, it's been built on race and we know that we don't need to go through the whole history of America to know that this is true. But it's important for us to know that African Americans were slaves in this country for 246 years before emancipation, and then legal segregation for another 84 years after that. So we're talking about almost 350 years before we even have legal standards that treated people equally in this society. And we know that since then we haven't achieved equality. And in fact, we know that some parts of our country in schools, for example, there's as much or more segregation now as there was in the 1960s. So there's a baseline system that we all are part of and all of us are raised to be a part of that system. And I think the challenge that we've had is when we personalize this, and certainly there are some terrible people out there, you know, we could pick out David Duke or Richard Spencer or some of these, you know, really extremely hostile and hateful people. But for the most part, this lives in our daily experience, each of us being trained to play a particular role in this society that is built on those racial classifications. And so when people talk about systemic racism, it doesn't mean that they're saying that people are bad people, specific people are horrible people, but that their behavior is consistent with the system that was built on. And so getting back to people's experience of that, I think right now what's happening in the world and I do work all around the world and I have friends and colleagues who are in various different places that I’ve been getting those calls as well. It's like, what's happening to you as a country? I think people see things like the Charlottesville incident. They see this rise of White nationalism again, and they see swastikas in marches and all of these kinds of things. And there's a deep concern for people that this is more than just an incident, that this is a sign that our society, which has been such a beacon of hope for people around the world, is actually dissembling right before their eyes. And so the tragedy that we see in the George Floyd incident is magnified by those larger concerns that people have about our concerns about people who are different in our society. Chairman Rodney Hood: Great. Yes, sir. Thank you. Dr. Cole.

5 Johnnetta Cole: I would just add this. Let's imagine two individuals. One is African American. The other is White American. Each has experienced the horrific murder of George Floyd. Without oversimplifying and getting into stereotypes, I am prepared to say that many, many, many White Americans are able to see that as an abomination, as something that never should have happened in our country. But they don't attach that to a long history of abominations. The African American that I'm using in this contrast sees that George Floyd incident as one more, here we go again. It's happened over and over and over again. Those are two experiences, not because one person is good and the other is bad. Those are two experiences because of the historical and the everyday expressions of racism. And so what that means, in my view, is White folk got to do some work, some serious work, even some inner work, to move beyond a sort of one-off. You know, I feel so badly about George Floyd, but I can continue with my life. Black folk don't have the option of continuing. We live in that kind of neighborhood. Here in Florida, we have a kind of ritual that at a given point in a day, my husband finds his walking stick and off he goes to walk. There were days when he just could not walk. He didn't feel safe. It is an everyday experience. Whether it is the reliving of the recent racial terror, or it is do I have to go to work again today and put on the mask? So again, without over simplifying, basically just describing what are the day-to-day experiences of many Black and White Americans. It is so different. And yet I've got to say that I not only believe, I have evidence to show that there is something called human empathy. I don't have to have been either personally the victim of, or have in my family, the victims of the holocaust. Am I not as a human being capable of understanding what that must have been like? I am not of an indigenous group of people in this country. But if I can't remember, by calling up human empathy, what it has been like for indigenous people in America, what is wrong with me? I don't have to be a member of an LGBTQ community to be full of human empathy, to at least come close, if not fully understanding, what it means to be victimized because of the way that I think you were made. So despite these enormous differences in the way that White and Black Americans have experienced race -- we could spend a lot of time talking about whether there is such a thing -- but racism. I invite us to always at least introduce into this conversation, the power, the potential power, of exercising human understanding and human empathy. Chairman Rodney Hood: Thank you, Dr. Cole. I'm going to follow up with some of what you've mentioned, especially about the mask. One of the things I'd like to share is that many people may assume that you, Dr. Cole, and I, because of success that we've obtained, that we are immune to some of the issues that have played out with the tragedy of George Florida and when I do those talks that I'm telling you that we're doing with my employees, I let them know that yes, I'm the chairman of an agency. Yes, I get to do some wonderful things on behalf of mankind, but normally when the policeman stops, he doesn't ask me for a copy of my CV, he doesn't ask where I went to school. He just sees me and assumes that if he pulls me over, I must have done something. If he didn't see anything that day, there may be something from the past. But I will say that based on what's going on today, I believe that one of the gifts that's come out of the many conversations that we are now finally having about racism and racial injustice is that our non-Black colleagues heard the level of pain, dismay, frustration, and sadness that their Black colleagues are forced to follow up every day and compartmentalize before we all step off the elevators and go into our respective offices. Dr. Cole, can you please talk about the

6 conditioning that many African Americans must go through to show up every day and perform while carrying this heavy weight? What would be some of the tips? I know for me, it was hard but once you assumed not to be the speaker and then you have to give them your best speech ever when just moments ago, the light crew thought you were an imposter. So how do you cope? What are some of the tips that you would give? Johnnetta Cole: Brother Chair, forgive me for being the professor, but you know, recently I had to go back to the 1952 publication, "Black Skin, White Masks" by Frantz Fanon, an extraordinary intellectual and psychiatrist who talked in ways as I reread now and ways that it's so painful, what it means to be Black in a colonized or in a racist environment. The toll is severe. And there is, if I can play off of his title for that book, there is a sense in which, in order to just get through a day, not to mention to advance one's professional life, you got to put on the mask. You walk into that office, taking a deep breath saying, I can't offend these White folks. I cannot, if I'm a Black woman, do something that's going to label me as the angry Black woman. I can't speak up again if, for the third time, each time I make a point in a meeting, there is no follow-up, but every time someone White makes a point in the meeting, it's lifted up as a brilliant intervention into the discussion. When you are a part of a marginalized, of an oppressed community, you wear the mask. And, even outside of those work environments, just little things, going to the grocery store, being in the airport, I mean, I still go in grocery stores and retail stores, making sure that I am not doing anything that looks like I am going to shoplift. I shouldn't have to live my life like that. I think my bro, Howard, has heard me tell the story of being in an Atlanta airport when we used to be in airports. Do you remember when we used to be in airports? That's the thing. Howard Ross: That is one thing I don't miss. Johnnetta Cole: All right. A White woman comes up to me, greets me very warmly, and says hello. And I tried to be gracious. I didn't know -- why not? It cost me nothing. I'm doing well. How are you? She said, it's good to see you again. I said, oh, I'm sorry. I don't think we know each other. She said, but you were just with me last night. And I said, ma'am I don't think so. I wasn't in Atlanta last night. She became outraged and accused me of denying the fact that I had served her table at an exclusive club in Atlanta, Georgia that night. It doesn't matter how many honorary degrees I have. It does not matter. And so I appreciate, Brother Chair, that you spoke about providing safe space, especially in these recent days, safe space for your colleagues to be able to express their hurt, their grieving, yes, their outrage. And so when we move beyond this current period of such intense pain, the question becomes how do we continue to provide that safe space. Because as much as I pray for and hope for an end to systemic racism, it is not due to happen next week. Chairman Rodney Hood: Yes. Ma'am. I want to just point out Monica Davy, who runs our Office of Minority and Women Inclusion, she's the one who's invited me today to do these talks with our employees. And Monica said to me recently, she says, Chairman Hood, you are busy with your meetings with the Federal Reserve, with Treasury Department officials. There's no way you can keep doing these events with your schedule. And without missing a beat, I said, Monica, we’ve waited 400 years for us as a culture to have these types of conversations. What's

7 my time in 30 minute blocks if it's really going to move us forward? So that was very important. Mr. Ross, I have a question for you and this is, having so much talking about allies, what do we mean by that term? And what are some of the most important aspects of allyship? Can you give us, maybe our non-Black colleagues, advice on acknowledging this weighted advice on how to be an effective ally? Howard Ross: Sure, absolutely. As a preface to that, I’d just like to take a minute and just say that, you know, one of the most important things for us to recognize about the system that we're all a part of, is that it's not an aberration. It's not an accident that the system we're a part of was actually designed to be exactly the way it is. You know, if we go back, we know that we've learned this narrative. You know, Bryan Stevenson, who Dr. C called out a couple of minutes ago for his great work, calls it the narrative of racial difference in our society. And it's a fundamental narrative that was necessary for the institution of slavery to exist. Because it simply wouldn't have been possible for good and decent people to participate in a system where other human beings were being enslaved unless somehow we could convince them that these weren't actually human beings. And so we put a system in place that consciously devalued people based on race because that held the economic system in place. And that system then has to be secured by various structures and policies and procedures. And so over time we have discrimination in housing, we have discrimination in education, we have discrimination in healthcare, and loans are given differently, red lining, you know, all of the various structures and systems that held the system in place, which creates unearned advantages for those of us who are White and unearned disadvantages for folks of color. And of course, the irony is that those very systems create different outcomes. And so African Americans seem less educated because of that. They have less wealth because of it, et cetera, et cetera. And in the human mind that then reaffirms the narrative of racial difference. So we're in this closed system that's built to reinforce itself. And as White folks -- this is all leading up to the answers to your question -- as White folks, we play a role in that system, not necessarily by choice, but by automatic response to the ways we're taught. Now, this is why I think Ibram X Kendi's work is so important when he talks about anti- racism, because if you've got a system that's based on racism, which, you know, is really irrefutable if you look at American history, that that was part of what was built into our system, as I said before, for more than 350 years legally, which is, you know, mind you, how many generations? I mean, you know, a huge amount of almost 20 generations. Then that system is built into us. And so we grow up and just try to be good and decent people, unless we're consciously challenging that system, we're actually supporting the status quo. And the status quo is the system of systematized racism. So from my standpoint, as White allies, first of all, it's critical for us to know that allyship does not mean helping other people. It doesn't mean I'm going to help those poor people who need my help because that kind of an attitude actually maintains the same kind of power differential that's in our society already. I'm now in the parent position, you're in the child position, I'm here to help you. It's only when we really see ourselves as standing side by side with a common destiny that true allyship begins. And so when we see -- it's not hard for me. Four of my six grandchildren are mixed race. I have no problem seeing the personal impact of it in the future. And I have no problem with seeing the personal impact from the past because my family does

8 have some horrific holocaust experience. And so for me, it's pretty clear. But that's just the beginning. Now I say, okay, the three of us or anybody else are standing side by side to create the kind of society that can serve all of us now. Now, what do I need to do? Well, it starts with educating myself. It starts by understanding. You know, Albert Einstein famously once asked, what would you do if you were given one hour to fix the world? And he said, I'd spend 55 minutes learning what the problems are. And the very thing that, that Dr. C was just talking about the mask that African Americans are forced to wear on a daily basis is something that's pretty invisible to most of us who are White, unless we've had the blessing of having relationships where we can let that mask down. You know, a lot of us feel like we have to, kind of, you know, show up in a different way to be at work. You know, most of us are dressed differently from the waist up now because we want to look good on camera because it's the work environment, you know, that sort of a thing. So we all put on masks to some degree, but it's the persistence of it, the depth of it that African Americans have experienced when it's different. And I think anybody who has to be somebody other than themselves at work has had that moment where you get home at the end of the day and you plop down in the couch and it feels like, oh my God, I can finally breathe again. You know, this line, I can’t breathe, is an important line for us. It's an important choice of words for us to see, because that is the expression, not just of George Floyd, not just of Eric Garner and people like that. It's the experience that I think African Americans have almost every day when they have to wear those masks. And so learning about that and understanding that experience developing, not only developing empathy and compassion, although I would certainly agree with all of the beautiful words that Dr. C spoke, but also recognizing the true empathy and true compassion is not a noun, it's a verb. It's me in action on a daily basis. It's stepping up when you see somebody say something and somebody else say the same thing 10 minutes later and get acknowledged for it to say, wait a second, didn't Dr. Cole say that 10 minutes ago? You know, when we see something, say something. When we see somebody being mistreated, to investigate and see if there's something that we could do, even to bear witness of that so that people know that they're being held accountable for that behavior. It's looking for ways to mentor, to sponsor, to advocate for people who you know are talented and people aren't seeing, because there's an invisibility to being of color in our culture. You know, so all those things, and it's reaching out and touching people and letting them know on a very personal level that you're there to listen. I think that the most important aspect of being an ally that I can think of is listening and especially now, because there is so much pain in the African American and Black community around this issue. You know, the pain is so deep and just simply to bear witness to that pain and let people express it honestly without being judged is in and of itself a liberating activity. So those are just a few things that pop to mind. Johnnetta Cole: If I may Mr. Chairman, I was thinking about three words, each of which begins with an A: allyship, advocate, and activist. And while I think we can lift up now, each of us, the three of us, the importance of allies, there's something about advocacy that is getting one a little further on this road that I hope we're all going to be on, this long road toward racial equity and justice. But that third A, being the activist that Brother Howard was really talking about a moment ago is where I hope we can go. Now, when I use a word like activist, that will conjure

9 up for many folks, the notion that means I’ve got to be in the street, I’ve got to have a banner. But being an activist can be as simple as speaking up and speaking out. One of my she-roes, the great poet, professor, and she was a warrior, Audre Lorde, once said, your silence will not protect you. If each of us were to identify as being an ally can move to speaking up, that has a possibility, I think not only of speaking up, but literally of taking actions. If you feel you're an ally, then did you write to your school board? Did you ask your school board what is it doing in this particular period? Even though our children are being, you know, educated away from the schools, are you taking advantage of this period to do greater anti-racism education? If one is an ally, did you write to your local, your state, your federal representatives about what you think are the most sensible and important reforms for law enforcement in our country? And so moving from just saying, I am an ally, which when reduced, can become, I am with you, I feel your pain, to being an activist, which says I'm with you, what are we going to do about your pain? Chairman Rodney Hood: Dr. Cole, thank you. That is so poignant and I admire and respect how the two of you have referenced someone whose work I believed in for quite some time and that is Bryan Stevenson and the work he's done in Just Mercy. And I think what you both have articulated is how he talks about being proximate and being near and being a part and present. So you both have articulated that. Dr. Cole, you just touched a little bit on police reform and if there's anything about the George Florida incident that we're seeing now, we are now not just hearing mentioning of police reform, but there are concrete things that are being done to provide reform mechanisms. What are your thoughts on this and the timing now around police reform, what we're seeing? Both of you, we’ll get your insight but we’ll begin with Dr. Cole. Howard Ross: Sure. Of course. Johnnetta Cole: I would like to share with, I hope by now I've got 8,000 new sisters and brothers and siblings who are tuned in this. I want to share that this is a question that is so deeply personal for me because on the one hand, I'm watching from the horrific killing of George Floyd to the most recent shooting of Rayshard Brooks. But I am also the mother of four sons, one of who is a law enforcement officer. And so out of my personal experience, I do feel compelled to say that we must understand that not every policeman or policewoman is doing these horrific acts of violence. But we also have to say, and I, as the mom of this son and this son would say himself, we are caught in a system where this stuff, and Howard can talk about this far more effectively than I, where this stuff is like fed into the beings of law enforcement, folk who under stressful and non-stressful situations allow actions that no human being should commit. This is a time when, on a federal level, on state levels, in cities, we have the opportunity to make policy changes. And that's where hopefully we want to go from this very difficult period now in American life from owning systemic racism to saying, what are the policies, the new procedures, the new ways that we can institutionalize, that will do everything possible to make sure that Breonna Taylor does not lose her life because a policeman walked in under -- well, you understand where I'm going with this. Chairman Rodney Hood: Yes. Ma'am. Mr. Ross.

10 Howard Ross: Yeah. I think in order for us to understand this whole dynamic, it's so critical for us to understand that this notion of thinking about police officers who do bad things as bad apples is really missing the point. I'm not saying there aren't bad people. Like I said before, you've got extreme cases where they're bad people, but we have to understand, you know, William Faulkner famously wrote that that past is never dead. In fact, it's not even past. And I think if we look at the history of policing in our society, we can see that there's a system that was created that produces the results we're seeing, very much like I was saying earlier about systemic racism in general. The policing system in this country has always been about race. You know, after emancipation, the police served a very important role in terms of keeping freed slaves in their place. When there was a need for workers in the agriculture system in the South to replace slaves, the police force provided a way of doing that by accelerating, catching Blacks doing things, putting them in prison, and then creating things like chain gangs and the like to be rented out and sold out to farmers to replace what had been the field hands. We remember Bull Connor and his fire and his dogs and his fire hoses. And this has been throughout history. And so the relationship between African Americans and the police, the institution of policing in our society, has always been a difficult one. And, you know, I remember when Ferguson happened and, you know, there was such a difference between how, I’m talking of course about the shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson. There was a very clear break and polling in our society where White people largely agreed with Wilson and Black people largely agreed with Michael Brown. I remember saying to somebody at the time when I grew up, as I think is true for many, if not most White people, I was told if you're ever in trouble, find a police officer. Most African Americans who I knew when I grew up were told either -- either told in words or by their experience -- if you're ever in trouble, it's likely because of a police officer. And there's a very poignant and sad meme that's going around the internet right now, which I'm sort of some of the folks who were with us, have seen. It shows a 10-year-old boy, a Black 10-year-old boy playing basketball in his driveway. And he sees a police officer driving up in a car and he runs and hides behind his car. That's the experience, that's the lived experience, and it's not made up and it's not imagined. It's lived in the life of every person who knows a hundred people like George Floyd, who've had something happen to them. Like the gentleman I described earlier, who had his son, you know, stopped four times, this tension that's there. So I think we have to get away from the notion that we're here of fixing problems by training people to be better police officers, almost like we're moving deck chairs on the Titanic and look at the fundamental function that the police play in society. And that includes the armoring of police officers, that this notion of police being militarized as opposed to what most of us remember when we were younger in a White community of, you know, officer Friday who would come to our school. And I remember parents actually knowing the names of our local police officers, because they were the police officers in our community here in Washington, DC, who would come around regularly. And they were seen as helpers. And they were seen as people who you would call if something was wrong and you could trust them coming. That I know is a very different experience and that's an experience we want to get back to. And so I think it's unfortunate when people talk about things like defunding the police, that terminology brings a very different image than what most people talk about. People want to talk about is moving the police to be more of a peace force than a militarized force in our society. And that

11 doesn't mean that they don't need to protect themselves. I've worked with a lot of police officers. I have immense respect for what it takes to be a police officer and immense respect for the challenge it is to go out there every day and have to make split second decisions, decisions that people's lives could depend on. And knowing that if you make that wrong decision on an instant, that you may become the next national pariah. And so I have tremendous respect for that, but we're not going to deal with that through simple means. We have to deal with it by rebuilding that relationship, rebuilding the very structure that we see in the communities as to how that plays out. Chairman Rodney Hood: I agree. Thank you, sir. Dr. Cole. Johnnetta Cole: I'm sorry. No, I didn't. Chairman Rodney Hood: If you had anything else you wanted to say, you were nodding, I was thinking my goodness. I always want to give you a chance to have the floor. One of the things I wanted to share with you all is that we often think that these are egregious displays by law enforcement. We think that they just stop and end or begin with law enforcement. That's not the case. I'd love to maybe shift our conversation now to micro-aggressions and unconscious bias and how they play out in the general workplace. For me, it would be as a young banker finding out that all of your colleagues who are non-minority may have been invited to the boss's house to play golf or go to a barbecue when you and people of color were not at that event. So those to me are things that are micro-aggressions and unconscious bias. Could you talk a little bit about that because it doesn't just lend itself to law enforcement when you see these types of incidents? Johnnetta Cole: Now my bro is going to lead us because who else has thought about and written about and lived through what all of this means as much as Howard. So we're listening, bro. Howard Ross: Thanks. I think that one thing we have to start with the understanding that the way our human brains are designed, bias is an incredibly important function of our survival. You know, we make very quick decisions about things every single day. Some of them are lifesaving. You know, we know instantly when we look at a fire on a hot stove, that it's not a good idea to touch it because our brains have learned that it's dangerous. So we don't have to test it each time. We walk across a floor and we know that the floor will hold us because it’s held us so many times. But imagine if you had an experience where you touch that hot stove and got burned, and most people listening have probably had this experience, the next X number of times, you're at the stove, you're very tentative when you touch it because what the brain does is it says, okay, I had this experience. This new experience reminds me of that previous experience, and therefore I'm going to extrapolate from my previous experience to predict my behavior in this case, the appropriate behavior. We do the same thing with people all the time. And if you go back to what I was saying before about this notion of the narrative of racial difference. If we've been taught through media, and we can give a hundred examples of the way media has portrayed African-Americans going back to Amos 'n' Andy and everything like that, as slow, lazy, all of these kinds of things. If we've heard it through religious practices and we know that many religions, even missionaries who were seeming to do good, did good by making

12 people wrong and in some cases, even punishing, physically violating people for not giving up their own traditions to embrace a new one. We know that it's happened through our schools and education. You know, I was struck by the last week, the conversation about Tulsa -- the Tulsa massacre, which of course wasn't unique. We had Tulsa, we had Rosewood, we had Greensboro, you know, there is unending number of these times when African Americans had achieved something and then all of a sudden White folks came in to remind you that that was not your place. And really virtually, all of our institutions have constantly communicated this narrative of racial difference. And so our tendency is even when we -- you know, I like to say, when I'm working with groups, it's not like many people wake up in the morning and say, how can I suppress people of color today? You know, that's not the way it happens. I mean, yes, there are people like that and we have to take care of dealing with people like that, but it works far more like this, which is if, Mr. Chairman, you come in to do an interview with me and I'm just -- you know, I'm waiting to see if you can qualify yourself. You know, so I'm listening to every word in a much more discerning way. I don't give you the benefit of the doubt for certain things. Somebody else comes in who reminds me of myself when I was a kid, you know, when I was younger, you know, maybe he went to the same school, he had some of the same interests. He plays golf like I did. Maybe he has hair, like I used to, you know, but the point is I sort of resonate with him. And so I'm a little bit easier giving him that advantage. I'm willing to give him that stretch opportunity. I'm willing to bank on that he'll be okay. And not only that, even if he fails, nobody's going to fire me for giving somebody, you know, giving another White guy an opportunity because we don't focus on the group identity as much when it's somebody in a dominant group, whereas if you were to fail in that same job, you know, Black people fail, to a lot of people's perception. And so the way that tax that you described when you were talking about having had that experience and then having to get up in front and give a speech immediately afterwards, and I've seen that happen with colleagues before. I've seen that exact thing happen. And I felt the pain of that. And sometimes even -- you know, there was one time, I remember, a good friend and colleague of both of us and I were speaking together, she's an African American woman. And the person who introduced us went on and on and on about my qualification, because they had known me and then said, oh and he's here with her, almost like that. And I felt the life drain out of her at that moment. Now in that case, it was an opportunity for allyship when I could stand up and say, before we go on, I want to explain who this person is I'm with, whose qualifications are every bit or more impressive than mine. And so that's the kind of thing we could do about it. But when we realize this is soaked in our environment -- now, one of the things I also want to say is, you know, one of the real tragedies of what's going on in our country right now around these issues and has for a long time, is how deeply this has been embedded into our political system. So rather than saying, no matter whether you're Republican or Democrat or see yourself as a conservative or liberal, equity and equality and justice should be something that all of us as Americans want for all other Americans, but because it's been so deeply put into the political system and because our political system has been so deeply tribalized now, it means that acknowledging that systemic racism exists may make me on the outs with the people who are on my team. And so I'd really love to say to everybody here, I don't care what your politics are. I don't care whether you're Democrat or Republican or liberal or conservative. That's not what this

13 is about for me. This is now, can we create a society in which everybody has an equal shot to be successful? Everybody has an equal shot to contribute. And when we do create that, whether it's in an institution like yours, or in a school, or anywhere else, then doesn't the entire institution benefit when everybody can reach that level of performance, when everybody can reach that level of safety, and everybody can bring their best self to work, to use the language that you said, that you used earlier? Chairman Rodney Hood: Thank you. Johnnetta Cole: And I would simply add that it's not a bad idea to read some of those Howard Ross books, mainly because there's a good message there. And while Howard helps us to understand that to be human is to have biases, so anyone who tells you, look, I don't have any biases, I just don't, then you give them a certificate, because they belong to a species that the rest of us don't belong to. So what Howard has helped us to understand is that some of those biases are just, they're harmless. They're not going to do anything to hurt somebody. One of my favorite examples, here I am back in the airport again, but I’m walking through the airport, somebody is coming toward me, the individual presents as African American. I have no idea who this person is. Don't know name, occupation. I know nothing. But guess what, we do the nod. If our eyes make contact, the next thing you know, we’ve nodded. We just simply affirmed an assumption that even though we don't know each other, we have had experiences that are very similar. There's nothing wrong with that. It's got a moment of joy to it. But let's say that I am in very, very dark alley. I'm not going to explain why. I guess I was trying to take a shortcut to get somewhere. Coming toward me is a dark, thin man with a machete. Now, what do I do? I mean, my bias tells me I am in trouble. Of course, I could say, you know, I work in the area of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. So maybe I would just invite this gentleman to have a conversation about why he's walking through this alley with a machete. But my bias tells me to get out of there and I'm going to trust it. Even though it could be that that individual, even though he and his family immigrated to the United States years ago, he has decided, let's assume he's from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, somewhere on the West coast of Africa, he's brought his machete. Don't ask me how he got it through customs. Maybe he bought one here. But he's decided to clear some land on his own property and make a garden for his family. So our biases, some are harmless. Some protect us and some do unfortunate things for us. They say to us that because I'm looking at that person with dark skin, I know since I'm White, they can't be as smart as I. And we may not be conscious of that. So there we are a part of an interview panel and when all of the interviewees have come before us, it has happened again. The African American interviewee who may have qualifications not only as good as but better than the White applicants, doesn't get the job. And this is why reading these books that Howard Ross writes will not do any good unless we translate what we learn into our everyday actions. If I could do just one thing, for example, imagine from, I don't know, out of nowhere, I just got this power. I can have an effect on bringing greater diversity and inclusion into workplaces. I could only do one thing. Okay, I get two. Unconscious bias training and a refresher course before every interview of diverse candidates.

14 Howard Ross: If I could add something for a moment, you know, I think that one of the things that's really important for us to recognize is how invisible we are to ourselves around this kind of stuff. And I want to share a story about myself just as an example. I said before that I went to my first civil rights meeting 53 years ago. I think it was 53, 54 years ago. I've done this work professionally for 35 years. I've worked with literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world. I mean, we've spoken, Dr. C and I just this week have spoken to 40,000 people in things like this. I promise you there are not very many people who have worked on themselves around this issue more than I have. And I say that to preface this story. About seven, eight years ago, I was driving down from where my home is in Silver Spring, Maryland. At the time Silver Spring, Maryland was just a suburban Washington community for those who don't know. And right near my home is 16th street, which goes directly to the White House. And so I was driving down one day and I had a convertible at the time, the top was down in the convertible, it was a warm day. And in order to get down, you have to go through a part of upper Northwest, which is sometimes called Gold Coast because it's a relatively wealthy part of the city, a Whiter part of the city than most parts of the city, an extremely safe part of the city. So driving through, I stopped at a stoplight and a young African American man walks across the street in front of me with a baseball cap on backwards, loose jeans, et cetera. The best way I can say it is my hand locked the car door. Now I say it that way because the top was down into convertible. It offered me no rational safety of any kind. It was an act that was so instinctive and so automatic that as soon as I did it, I looked at my hand and said to myself, where did that come from? And he heard it. He heard the car lock and he stopped right in the middle of the street, not 10, 12 feet from my car, and turned around and put his hand on his hip and just looked at me. And I immediately felt embarrassed and ashamed an you know, I apologized to him and said something awkward but an apology. He thanked me with a particular finger of his hand and kept walking. And I sat there for long enough so the people behind me started to honk their horns. Feeling that sense of shame and guilt that swept over me and also wondering, like, whose hand just came out of my sleeve, because it was almost that experience. It was like a button had been pressed on this internal jukebox and that thought or that feeling really, of danger, in a situation where I was not, where what I did, didn't protect me at all. And I am sure that everybody who's listening to us today and who's with us today has had some experience like that with some kind of person somewhere where you had an instant reaction to somebody and afterwards it's like, why did I assume that about that person? You know, it doesn't have to have been around race. Maybe it was around something else. And so first to understand that so much of this is, like I said before, we are so much strangers to ourselves around this kind of area. And the challenge is, and I think that those of us who have done diversity work for years have to accept some of the responsibility for this dynamic, is that we've traded so much in guilt and change sometimes that we have driven people even more underground. And we can realize this happens even to good people that, you know, there could be racism without being racists in the way we think about it. That's important because that gives people the opportunity and the freedom to talk openly about this. You know, there was a time when I would have been too ashamed to share that story. Now I intentionally share it because I want people to know that we need to be able -- if we're going to move forward -- we need to be able to own when things like this happen and not necessarily feel guilt and shame about it but

15 take responsibility for it. And there's an important difference between guilt and shame and responsibility. Guilt and shame is just self-flagellation. We beat ourselves up. And inevitably, if we feel guilt and shame, we do one of two things. Either we contract and withdraw, which is why sometimes those early diversity trainings that we used to do, where we used to beat people in the head with the two by four until they saw the error of their ways and if somebody cried, it was very cathartic for everybody. But afterwards, what we saw happening was a lot of people's response is, okay, I'm never going to talk about race again, because I don't want to say something wrong that will have me feel that way again. That doesn't get us move us more to inclusion. It doesn't move us more towards belonging. That moves us more to unconsciousness. But when we can create an environment where we can say, yeah, I own this, and now I'm going to be responsible for this. So in the future, I'm going to be aware of that, consciously aware of that, when I interact with people. I'm going to be conscious when I interact with young Black man that that's in me and I need to be responsible for mitigating the impact that has. If I am interviewing somebody or evaluating somebody on the job or choosing somebody to put on an assignment or any of the hundreds of decisions that we make as leaders, I want to be aware that I have that in me so that I could be careful that it doesn't impact somebody else. Chairman Rodney Hood: Great. Mr. Ross, thank you for making this a safe space for you to share your commentary. And if it's of any interest, I often have people who lock their doors and I'm at the crosswalk in DC or New York and oftentimes dressed like that. So you were mentioning the person in a baseball cap, if it makes you feel a lot better when they see me in a tie and a suit. So it happens in all occasions. So I just wanted you to know, but at least it's taken 400 years to have this level of candor and to be able to talk about this just openly. Howard Ross: Well, you know, Mr. Chairman, I think that's so important for White folks to realize, because I think that often a walk, you know, I was telling the story the way it happened. Often we think that it is only the young Black kid who experiences this. And we don't realize that no matter how well you're dressed and no matter what you achieve, and no matter what kind of car you drive or where your home is, or what your title is, like you said, people aren't looking at your CV. You know, there's a wonderful book that was written about 30 years ago by a New York Times writer named Ellis Cose. It was called "The Rage of a Privileged Class." And what he spoke to was exactly the frustration that people like you and Dr. C experience, where you've done everything that people have said you need to do to achieve in this society. You know, here you are, you're leading an important agency for us. Dr. C has her 69 degrees and Sis, why haven't you gotten more, what's wrong with you? You know, all of these achievements that are incredibly noteworthy in the context of our society and still both of you are sitting in front of us and sharing examples of how you were diminished or minimized by people around you despite that. And I think that's so important for those of us who are White to realize that's one of the ways that White privilege plays itself out. Is through that experience of knowing that when we achieve something, we're likely to be valued for it, which is not necessarily an assumption that you can make given our experience Chairman Rodney Hood: Very well.

16 Johnnetta Cole: Excuse me, Brother Chair, but I often think of the lessons I was taught growing up and what I hope way into the future, Black, Brown, and children of other marginalized communities will never hear. I'm pretty sure, Brother Chair, you heard it. Somebody told you, because somebody told me more than once, Johnnetta, you're going to have to be twice as good to get half as far. And so the point I'm trying to make is that it doesn't just dawn on you when you are mature and perhaps have begun to accomplish things. This is what is drilled into young Black girls and boys when they are, as the old folk would say, knee-high to a duck. What does that say? What does that say about fairness? What does that say about your chance to soar to the height of your possibilities when you have to be twice as good and then only get half as far. Why? Because of the color of your skin, which represents, as Howard so wonderfully helped us to understand, is really the necessary explanation for allowing systemic racism to continue. Chairman Rodney Hood: Yes, ma'am and you mentioned twice as good to get half as far. Mr. Ross, you were about to make a comment. I'm sorry, sir. Howard Ross: I was just going to say that, I thank you, I appreciate that Chairman. And the pain in that story goes even beyond what you're saying since I know you know this, but I want to bring it up for everybody to think about, which is, imagine you're a 4-year-old child and your parents start telling you that. You know, you hear this over and over again. You're going to have to work twice as hard to be seen as half as good. That 4-year-old doesn't have the sophistication necessarily to know that what you're doing is trying to protect them from a system that's designed for them not to be very successful. They don't know that you as a mother or a father is committed to their safety and their wellbeing. And so you're trying to prepare them and the only way you know and have known for life to be successful. The way they hear that is you're not as good. They interpret that internally as you're not as good. And this is one of the real, I think, most pernicious costs of any kind of bias or bigotry of racism in this particular case, is the damage it does to the self-image of people of that group and it starts as a very young child. You know, I remember years ago, we were doing one of our unconscious bias learning labs. You know, we had people for three or four days with just some deep work. And there was a woman with us who was a sociologist, an African American woman who was a sociologist of some renown. She'd written a couple of books. She had a PhD, very successful career. And we got into this conversation and at some point, she looked at me and said, I have something to share. And she started crying and she said, I just realized something. She said, I've spent my whole life suffering from the imposter syndrome. No matter what I've accomplished, it's never been enough. And I just saw that when my mother told me that, what I heard was I'm not good enough. And no matter what I've accomplished externally in my life, it's never filled that hole because I've never dealt with that. And we did some work together in the room. And subsequently I talked to her and like a month later, she called me and said, I feel like for the first time in my life, I can appreciate what I've accomplished because I dealt with that source in me that was telling me all the time, you're not good enough, you've got to work harder, you're not good enough, you have to work hard. So for the first time in my life, I can relax and enjoy what I've accomplished.

17 Chairman Rodney Hood: Thank you for sharing that. And I was going to add about twice as good, half as far. That's part of the reason why I keep mentioning getting to these auditoriums and hotel ballrooms at the crack of dawn to rehearse and practice, it's because you have to knock it out of the ballpark every chance you are facing the public. I don't get the opportunity to get a do-over if that's the term that we want to use. So again, twice as good but half as far. And I'm going to end now with one more question, because you all there are about almost 9,000 people who probably think I've been taking all of your times. And I think they want to ask a few questions as well. But when we think about again twice as good but half as far. No more is that more pronounced when you look at the racial wealth divide. Here with us today, we have my eight regulatory agencies that I work with in tandem each and every day. You are with all of the folks who are responsible for the American economy. With that being said, I, since becoming Chairman of the National Credit Union Administration, almost in every speech, I mention that financial inclusion is the civil rights issue of my generation, of our generation. With that being said, I’ve worked in concert with a lot of the leaders from the other banking regulatory agencies on an inclusion statement that I'm going to read now: “We, the prudential and consumer financial protection regulators of the US financial system are committed to financial inclusion. Racism and discrimination must not be tolerated. Everyone deserves the opportunity to participate in our financial mainstream. We remain steadfastly dedicated to ensuring that the financial institutions, which we regulate, provide fair access and fair treatment for everyone in America.” And it’s under that statement that I'd like to ask you the final question. What are the things that the 8,000 of us who are here in front of you today can do to promote greater financial access and shared prosperity and address that racial wealth divide that has so contributed to a lot of the intractable issues facing communities of color? Johnnetta Cole: Well, I will begin by just saying something that you Brother Chair know so well and so does my brother, Howard Ross. And that is that the gap in wealth between Black and White Americans is not only substantial, it has not changed since 1968. You know, we can go online now and learn almost anything. And so I did go online because I wanted to know a little more specifically something about Black wealth and White wealth. Not only has it not changed since 1968, but listen to how huge that gap is. 2016, which is the last time the data was at least available to me, Black wealth, Black wealth: $13,024. White wealth: $149,703. And so what this says is Black wealth continues to soar -- Did I say Black? Howard Ross: Yes. Johnnetta Cole: I mean White wealth. While Black wealth is stagnant. I'm talking about wages. I'm talking about your home. I'm talking about, do you have stock? What is your family worth in financial terms? Probably, that is a wretched indictment about inequality in our country. And I can say that about African Americans. It is no less the case, and in fact worse, when we look at Indigenous people, when we look at Brown, Latinx people. And so this notion of a gap in wealth gets again connected to some of the things that the three of us were talking about. And it's that unconscious everyday bias that says, well, they're just not working hard

18 enough. Or, you know, they just don't know how to save, or you know, they just spend their money on, you know, foolish things. This is so serious, and major, and fundamental in terms of the ongoing future of our country. I had an experience recently where one of your colleagues -- I won't identify her -- but she helped me to understand how sometimes we just refuse to think. Watch my language. In racial terms, when that's exactly how we should think. Our government decides that this pandemic, the worst since 1918, requires that everyday working people have assistance from the government. And so one of the things they said was, you will get checks into your bank accounts. Huh? Did anybody stop to think about the unbanked, about the number of poor -- that's 140 million Americans -- and people of color who don't have a bank account. And so the great Horatio Alger story that says that any and every American can simply work hard, accumulate wealth, and do well has never really been true. Howard Ross: I think, you know, Mr. Chairman, you ended with a question we could easily have spent the two hours talking about in and of itself. And I want to just -- I do think that financial accomplishment in our society is both the result of, and the cause, of the continuation of this cycle. We see it being the result of in so many ways, access to jobs, you know, how many people have had jobs they were introduced to by their parents or relatives who were in a company and therefore gave people an opportunity, the kind of jobs that people have. We know, for example, that people of color are far more likely to have hourly versus salary jobs in our society, far more likely to have jobs that we considered essential during this COVID epidemic for example -- pandemic, for example. And all of that leads to results based on -- and COVID has given us a brilliant example of how this system becomes self-replicated, because we know that the percentage of African Americans, poor population who have been affected by this pandemic is out of line with the percentage of people we have in our society. In some counties, predominantly Black counties, three times the level of deaths and incident of COVID, for example, in predominantly Black counties. But think about how this plays out in very simple terms, relative to the health of people. If people have less acquired wealth, as Dr. Cole was just saying, that means that the incentive to get back out into the world, the incentive to work and do your job is greater, staying home and staying safe is not an option for you because you can't pay your family. If I've got money in the bank, I can wait a little longer for it before I'm doing that. Secondly, people with lower incomes tend to live in lower income communities, particularly, in the case of African Americans, urban communities. Those lower income urban communities have people with older cars that produce more pollution. There are more buses that produce pollution. This is where the bus and the truck depots are, again, more pollution. Therefore the air quality is worse and makes people more systemic, their bodies more susceptible to respiratory diseases and the cycle goes on and on and we can see how this plays out. If there's discrimination in the schools or I have poorer quality schools in the community that I come from. And we know the school desegregation, as we said before, school segregation -- excuse me -- is still relative to the numbers it was 1968, then how are my opportunities going to be there? If I'm in a low income family and with a single parent and I've got to help my mother or father, whoever the single parent is, by working on the weekends and working after school, I don't have the time to get extracurricular activities. So my college application doesn't look as good as the White kid out in Potomac, Maryland, who not only didn't have to work after school but the parents wouldn't allow them to because they had to build up those extracurriculars. And I could

19 go on and on and on. This is the system at play. And that's why, as I said at the beginning, it's so important that we learn about how this system plays out. And one of the things I would say to those of us who are White is, I know it's challenging because if we really understand what this system is and we really understand what white privilege is, it's sometimes hard for the ego for us to realize that maybe we were born on third base and we hit a triple. You know, maybe we got here because we got advantages that other people didn't get. And my ego does not want to believe that. My ego wants to believe it was me who accomplished what I accomplished. But we know, there's a fascinating study that was done about 10 years ago now, I think, by the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institute, which was interesting enough because these two liberal and conservative folks did the study, and found that social movement in our country is actually now no more than one half to one quintile from where we started for the average person if we’re in lower class, maybe we'll get up to lower middle class or lower middle class maybe to middle class, but the Horatio Alger story just really doesn't play out. So it's a huge impact both in what causes our financial performance and in how our financial performance then causes the system to continue itself. Chairman Rodney Hood: Thank you. Thank you both. And now I'm going to turn the floor over to Monica Davy, who's going to field questions from one of the 8,500 plus participants that we have. Good afternoon, Monica. Monica Davy: Good afternoon. Thank you so much. And this has been an incredible conversation. We have hundreds of questions. So first, I would like to let people know that yes, this session is being recorded and you will get a link for the recording. So that's a prevalent question we've seen. And secondly, I will let people know we're going to compile all these questions. The OMWI directors will get together and figure out how we can make them more useful. I'm only going to get to a few of these hundreds. So the first one is for Dr. Cole, specifically for Dr. Cole. Could you comment on the hidden bias that occurs if a person takes the approach, I don't see a person's color and how that approach perpetuates systemic racism? Johnnetta Cole: Thank you. Thank you, Sister Monica. I am going to assume that the colleague who posed the question is saying, how do you respond to someone who says they're colorblind? Is that the question? I don't see race? Monica Davy: Yes, that is the question. Johnnetta Cole: Well, I'll tell you what, I think it's about as dumb and dangerous as saying, when I come to a stoplight, I just don't see color. I don't see red. I don't see yellow. I don't see green. It's just a stoplight. There was a time and I remember it, when we thought this was an affirmation of one absence of bigotry. I am looking at Chairman Rodney Hood, but I don't see anything but a Chairman. We're not wired that way. We’re not wired that way. We do see race. We do see gender. We do see other identities that we have. It's not in seeing race, whatever that is. And as an anthropologist, I have to tell you it's a disputable concept. That's not the issue. The issue is what does that make me think? What do I unconsciously assume in seeing race? And then finally, if you say to me, you know, I really don't see you as an African American woman. I really find that insulting. You’re saying you don't see who I am. I want you to see

20 who I am, and then I want us to figure out how your biases and mine do not trigger assumptions about what we see.

Monica Davy: Okay. Thank you so much. This question is for Howard. What do you believe causes systemic racism? And can we resolve the topical problem without first resolving the root cause? Howard Ross: Well, I think I talked a little bit before about what causes systemic racism and we have to understand it. And it's hard because, you know, we live in a country in which, you know, we love our country, I certainly do, but at the same time, sometimes we have this narrative that loving our country means that we can't admit that we have flaws. And while we can love our country, and love what it stands for, and love the remarkable role that it's played in the world, we can also recognize, like everything else, its flawed. And one of the core flaws, the original sin, if you will, of this country, is that it was built on the backs of people who were enslaved and that in order to keep that structure in place and I went through that description earlier, we've had to form systems and structures and we've had to hold that in place and use policing and use discriminatory practices and all of that stuff for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so it's built on that. Now, does that mean that we can't do anything until we completely strip it down to the rafters and build it up again? No. We can on a daily basis do things that begin to unwind some of those systems. You know, we talked about reform of the policing system. We've talked about, you know, ways that, the Chairman was talking about ways that you can look at the financial system and ways to be sure that the biases that are built into our system have less impact that we can mitigate those biases. Dr. C talked about training people to be more aware of our biases so that we had a better sense of being able to control those biases. So I think we have to do everything we can at the present time to minimize the impact of that. But if we're going to make really full systemic change, we're going to have to get a much deeper understanding collectively. I'm not just talking about a few historians here and there or a few people who are interested here and there. I'm talking about a collective understanding of how our history has naturally led us to create the society that we have and to stop treating it like it's an aberrant thing, that it just somehow happened in some crazy way, because a few bad people were around that made this happen, but that's just simply not an accurate assessment of history. And that doesn't mean that White people today who are wealthy are bad. It doesn't mean that White people today who had advantages are bad. I don't think I could've started my company if my parents hadn't been willing and able to lend me $25,000 to start my company. You know, that was a stretch to them. My parents were decidedly middle class. My mom had a government job. My dad worked in a Pep Boys store, an automotive supply store. But they were able to loan me $25,000 to start my company. I was a single parent at the time. There was no way I would have been able to start the company that later gave me an entire career, had I not had that. And how many families can afford to do that? You know, not many. That's where the acquired wealth that Dr. C was talking about comes into play. You've got do both. You’ve got to think and act locally but you’ve also got to think and act globally in terms of how this plays itself out. Monica Davy: Okay. Thank you. Chairman Hood, this question is for you. Chairman Hood, I applaud you for being proactive and speaking with your staff about the current racial climate. I

21 hope other federal agencies involved in putting this program together will follow suit and do the same. What did your agency do to get these conversations started? Chairman Rodney Hood: Well, it started with my head of OMWI, which would be you, Monica Davy, coming to me saying that you wanted to do a series of talks. And I said that I want to support it. It's my life story. It's something that I have never been so vocal about talking about the issues of being stopped and things of that nature, but this was the right format. And I thought that if I did it, it would give our employees a chance to not only hear me talk about giving them moments to bring their authentic selves to work, but they could see me and my authenticity. Monica Davy: All right. Thank you, Dr. Cole, this next one is for you. There are many questions about the reference that you've made to the mask. This one, specifically asks, I have struggled as a Black woman to describe the code switching that we do to survive professionally. My question is, what should we ask of our employers and colleagues to help support us and break down these barriers to being our authentic selves. Another person asks, can you please elaborate more on what you mean by having to wear the mask? Johnnetta Cole: By having to wear the mask, I am simply referencing what I think countless Black people do in environments where most of the individuals there are not Black but are White. It's putting on a face, it's acting in a way that one assumes one is supposed to act if you want to get very far in your job. It is not being -- to use the Brother Chair's language -- it's not being your authentic self. It's being who you assume you're supposed to be in this work environment. How do we break that down? There is no magic. What there is, however, in my view, is first the importance of acknowledgement that we have an issue. We have some challenges. We have some stuff going on that is not right. James Baldwin said it in a way that nobody else has managed to say it. Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not faced. And so just acknowledging in a workplace that it is not a place that is comfortable for everyone, owning that some colleagues cannot bring their whole selves to work. That's a major step. But that acknowledgement without action in response to it will not make a difference. You know, things that we care about, you know what we do, we give attention to it. We have a plan. We evaluate the plan. We even make changes to the plan. No difference here. If we want to create a work environment where everybody can bring their whole selves to work, we need a plan. How are we going to do this? And take comfort in knowing that you're not the first organization to say that this is something you want to do and that you are now ready to make the plan and put the plan into action. Howard Ross: Monica, do you mind if I add a comment to that? Monica Davy: Sure. Howard. And I was going to ask you if you could follow up with how to remove -- how can White colleagues help Black colleagues remove the mask? Howard Ross: Sure. Thank you. I mean, you know, first of all, I think that if I'm speaking to the White folks who are on with us, you know, if any of us have had the circumstance and found yourself in a circumstance where you were the only White person in a large group of people of color or maybe one of only a couple in a large group of people of color, my guess is that people

22 may have found that to be a really positive experience or a really negative experience. But my guess would be that the universality of that experience for most of us is we've never felt more White in our life. All of a sudden we're very aware of our Whiteness and things that happen in that context begin to be framed through our Whiteness. So you're at this wedding, you're the only White person there and you notice people looking at you with a funny look. You immediately say to yourself, okay, they're looking at me like that way because I'm White. It never even occurs that it might be that crazy looking tie you’ve got on or something else, because being in that non-dominant group at that time, our group identity becomes very loud and very present. And I've had the blessing being in a number of situations in my life where I was a person like that. My wife and I have many friends who are of color. We are often among the only White people at their gatherings. I taught at Bennett College for a year as a White male professor in a school for Black female students. And when I'm in those environments, I see so much more of African American culture be present because people are comfortable, because as Dr. C said when we're in a mixed environments, it's almost always the default to turn towards the dominant group. So people will kind of tone it down a little bit. The mask comes on. So I think it first starts with personal relationships. I think it first starts with getting to know people for actually who they are with taking the time to learn about people, to establish trust. And sometimes that trust takes a while to establish. And some people don't feel safe, will never feel safe enough to take it down and it may have nothing to do with you. It may have to do with their experience of other White people. But nonetheless, we can, we can begin to do that by sharing a little bit about our life experience, by inviting people into our lives. The more we know each other for who we are the less we treat each other like what we are. And that's why we have these relationships sometimes across group, where we can tell a joke that we would never tell in front of somebody else because we know the person knows us well enough, so they'll know what our intention is and that sort of thing. I think the second thing we can do is that we can actively work to create environments around us that invite people to bring themselves and their culture in through everything from the way we act to the symbology that we have displayed around us. You know, do we have symbols around us that only represent one culture or do we invite people's African heritage, for example, or the Latinx heritage, or their expression as LGBTQ people or whatever, in the environment so the environment by itself begins to welcome people in. We can ask the question to people. There are things that I can do as a leader that can have you feel more comfortable to be yourself. So there are lots of things that we can do if we're actively anti-racist, if we're actively engaged in trying to dissemble the system that we've had for so long. There are lots of things we could do from that position. And I recommend that people go out and do some exploration. You know, it's been a time when a lot of people are turning to people like us and saying, tell us what to do and we’re certainly glad to do that. But we are also in a time where you can go online and you can learn how to build a car, a house, or an atomic bomb by yourself. So don't sit back and wait for people to tell you what to do. At the same time, go out and take this on as a way to educate yourself, learn about these things, and then find some friends who cross some of these differences to have real conversations with about this. You know, read a book together and then sit down and talk about the book together. Watch a video or one of the million TED Talks that are out there about these kinds of issues. And then sit down and say, okay, we're going to create a book club. Once a month at lunch, the six of us are going

23 to get together. We're going to read a book. We're going to watch a video. We're going to do something. And we're going to use this time to be each other's coaches, mentors, and teachers across race. What you'll find is that it not only is healing but it's fascinating. It's truly fascinating. And it's a whole other part of life that we can be enabled by and empowered by. Monica Davy: Okay, thank you, Dr. Cole, this one is for you. Can you speak to the possible significance of George Floyd calling out for his mother? Although we cannot know what his thoughts were, there is something significant about the Black woman to her community and family. I think this may have been something that called out that human empathy you mentioned. Every mother can relate to a call from their child when they are in pain. I truly believe that part of his story was a unifying, emotional pull and tug at human empathy across the races, perhaps, even for men. Johnnetta Cole: First, I want to say to whoever posed that question, thank you. Thank you for not just the question, but for a very moving statement. I too have thought about that. And you know, because George Floyd's mother had gone to glory, you know, we, Black folk have trouble talking about death. We go to glory, we transition, we go up above. Because she was not on earth, it was even more poignant that he was calling out to the soul of his mother. There is in every culture that I know of, and I can say this as an anthropologist, there is acknowledgement within that culture of what it means to be a mother. I do think it's important for all of us as we work on ourselves and try to advance our own thinking to understand it. Not every woman wants to be a mother, needs to be a mother, but that all women and all men have the ability to interact in a motherly way. I think that one of the consequences of systemic racism that we all need to lift up before we end this conversation is that so often, and this is why I'm giving you a virtual hug for raising the question. So often when we talk about systemic racism, when we talk about racial terror, our focus really is on men as if women have not endured racial terrorism from 401 years ago when 20 enslaved men and women arrived in British Virginia to this very day. And so when he said two different things, I can't breathe, and he called out for his mother. While there are specific meanings for both of those expressions, in African American culture let us acknowledge that if you got red blood running through your body, you should know what it means to say, I can't breathe. And you sure ought to know what it means to call out to your mother when you are in the greatest of danger. Monica Davy: Thank you so much for that. So this is for either panelist. Will you please shed light on the words Black Lives Matter and why anyone would counter with all lives matter? Do you believe this supports the notion of white supremacy or people are so clueless that they cannot understand why there would even be a need to say Black Lives Matter? Howard Ross: Yeah. I mean, I'll be glad to respond to it. I think first of all, we have to understand when we hear those three words, people hear them very differently. In a way, I like to say sometimes it's almost like we hear four words, but the fourth word is invisible and it's different for each group. One group hears Black Lives Matter Too, which is, I think the intention of the statement, which is to say that Black lives haven't mattered to people, so we want to remind people that Black lives also matter in addition to others. Some people hear it Only Black Lives Matter. But I think if we put it in context, you know, somebody said, sent me a thing over

24 this weekend. They sent me a note, it said, I want to wish my friends happy Father's day, but all parents matter. You know, we know that there's certain times in life when we focus on certain things. If you fall and break your right arm and go to the hospital, you don't ask that they put a cast on both arms, you put a cast on the right arm because the right arm is the one that needs support at this particular time. And you can give a hundred examples of when we do that. The fire marshal doesn't come into a block when one house is burning and spray down all the houses with water. We focus on the house that's burning. I think the purpose of the Black Lives Matter movement is to say that the very systemic issues that we've been talking about for our whole two hours together impact the African American community in a way that makes it difficult for them to survive, let alone thrive in this culture. And that needs to be addressed. We need to put special attention on that just like we put special attention on that broken arm. It doesn't mean that we don't care about our other arm. It doesn't mean that we don't want to keep that other arm healthy as well, but we need to elevate this one to that level. And that's why we put our focus in that way. So I understand what people might misunderstand it, but when we think about in rational terms, it makes perfect sense that in every aspect of our life, we will focus on the part of us that needs special attention. Johnnetta Cole: Monica, if I may. There are two very important realities about the Black Lives Matter movement. One, it was founded by Black women. Two, founded and still led by young people. And as a Black woman, I can tell you, I resonate to this. As a Black feminist, I resonate to it. One of my favorite African proverbs says, when women lead, streams run up hill. Now all of science tells us streams don't run up hill, but it's to capture the possibility that women can lead and lead differently and lead effectively. But also when I hear Black Lives Matter, I am thinking of the role that young people are playing in this movement. Young people have always been a part of movements for social change. But today when we look across our country, we ought to really feel encouraged that the very future of our nation is out there calling for positive change. Monica Davy: Thank you. Thank you so much. And again, we have so many more questions. We'll figure out a way to gather them all together and maybe use them for a conversation guide. But right now, I'm going to turn it back over to Chairman Hood to give closing remarks. Chairman Rodney Hood: Great. Thank you again, Monica. I'd especially like to thank our brilliant and talented panelists for joining us today. Dr. Cole and Mr. Ross. I'm sure there are 8,500 of us who are virtually giving you an applause right now. I'd also like to thank Monica Davy for her help in organizing today's event. In closing, ladies and gentlemen, healing begins with strengthening our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity is important, but to me, it is simply more than checking the right boxes. Inclusion requires a deep commitment to cultural change, but the change must indeed reach beyond government agencies. Private industry must also support inclusive growth. In that regard, it's been especially encouraging to see so many financial services leaders make supportive statements about diversity, equity, and inclusion. But to reiterate the title of today's discussion, it is beyond words. I encourage financial leaders to bolster those statements with a strengthened commitment to community building through financial inclusion and access and shared prosperity. This includes giving more working families access to tools that’ll help them achieve financial

25 independence, providing more young people with the educational and vocational training they need to succeed, and nurturing the material conditions that allow people to prosper, thrive, and reach their full potential. Each of these will help Americans build stronger, resilient communities and a healthier society. And finally, let's renew our commitment to having the difficult conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion needed to foster and nurture greater community understanding. These aren't at all controversial principles. They're the forces that bring us together and serve as sources of enrichment, strength, and unity. And in that, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you all for a very productive discussion. And again, thank our panelists and may you all stay safe, healthy, and well as we as a nation combat the pandemic. Thank you all very much.

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