For more than 15 years, my local Publix has felt like home. Ms. Susanne has watched my daughter grow from a baby into a teenager, and they even share a birthday. Then one morning, a manager decided I might be someone to watch out for, over gift cards I had already paid for. Here's what that moment reveals about how one leader's bias can put a brand's southern hospitality at risk, and what companies can do about it.

When I told Emory's psychology department I wanted to study how children develop racial identities, I was told, "That is not something we do in THIS department." Years later, the Black professor who helped me feel I belonged there is missing from the department's public In Memoriam page. This is my tribute to Dr. Eugene Emory, the mentor who believed me, and a question for academia: what does an h-index fail to count?

If you need something shorter for a preview card or social snippet:

Dr. Eugene Emory helped me feel I belonged at Emory. Since his death, he has gone largely unrecognized by his department. This is my tribute, and a question for academia about whose impact it chooses to see.

I never had the chance to meet Kaleena, but I knew her spirit long before her funeral, through the sister she raised, the sister who raised her, and the life she lived out loud. From the beauty she taught her sisters to see in their own dark skin, to the interview she walked into and declared she'd already won, Kaleena fought bias everywhere she found it. She was only 43 when colon cancer took her, a full two years before medical guidelines even said to screen her. This is her story, and the three lessons she left behind...

"We laugh to stop from crying." My grandmother said it long before I became a social psychologist, but the idea has shaped how I think about one of the hardest topics I study: bias. Years ago, I took that question out of the lab and into a comedy theater, testing whether laughter could do more than entertain an audience, whether it could actually shift what they believed about race. The results surprised even me. Here's what I found, and the four rules that determine whether humor heals or harms.

While political headlines tout record jobs, Black men are absorbing some of the deepest employment losses in the country. Here's the data leaders need to see, and the real cost of looking away.

Blog Excerpt

Women are passed over for leadership roles not because they lack competence, but because the system was never designed to see their competence clearly. That is a governance failure, and it has a measurable cost.

Out of 112 kids' profile icons on Netflix, exactly one is a Black boy, and his story is entertainment, not science or leadership. That's not an accident. It's a design choice, and design choices like this one are countable, correctable, and cost your organization more than it realizes.

DEI work isn't a box you check once and walk away from. The program didn't just shift unconscious biases. It gave people a place to connect, to be heard, and to act. When that infrastructure was removed, the culture didn't just stall. It eroded.