WASHINGTON, D.C. — When racial justice protests swept across the country last year, hope sprang that the change pushed for on the streets might spill over into the workplace, too.

“Increasingly, the world is getting to be more diverse,” Sandra Timmons, executive director of The Steve Fund, said last year. “This is the future workforce; these are the future leaders.”

However, experts on diversity say that hasn't quite come to fruition at work.

“While we do believe that certainly there's been a lot of good that's been done on by ‘diversity first’ consultancies, that change has not been as sustainable as it should be,” said Lauren Tucker, founder of “Do What Matters,” a consulting firm that helps businesses navigate inclusion in the workplace.

A recent report on diversity in the workplace, from the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, surveyed more than 1,500 working women across the country—more than two-thirds of them were women of color.

It found that 97% of those surveyed feel their employers need to establish better ways to investigate and address discrimination at work.

Among the other findings: 57% of women of color say they hear damaging stereotypes, based on their backgrounds, while they are at work. In addition, 58% say there are no senior leaders of color in their workplace.

Tucker said that’s where so-called, “activist employees” might be able to make their mark.

“Activist employees, in particular, are those who are leaning forward articulating to management what the expectations are,” Tucker said, “and I think we need to understand that those expectations are not just about getting a paycheck.”

It’s also about creating an inclusive environment, where ideas can be freely shared by everyone. Tucker said that starts in company meetings, though, it doesn’t always happen that way as she saw for herself two weeks ago.

“I actually timed how much men talked versus women, and 90% of the talking that was done in that meeting was done by men,” she said.

So, how can all employees help to start a change? Some suggestions include sharing your workplace knowledge with informal networks at work and including a diverse array of co-workers.

As for formal networks, Tucker said employees should get involved in a company’s employee resource group that addresses inclusion. If a company doesn’t have one, she said, employees should consider starting one of their own.

“They have a choice to stay in and lean forward, and a lot of them have activated these groups on their own,” Tucker said. “I mean, it isn't necessarily the employer that's created these groups.”

It’s a focus on diversity that Tucker believes companies should expect to keep seeing.

“What we're seeing is the growth of activism period, both by employees and by consumers,” she said. “And I will say that company leaders who dismiss this activism, company leaders that do not take advantage of listening to these employees, they do so at their peril.”

It is a risk that includes paying a potentially high price to their bottom line.

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- Tracey Williams-Dillard is the granddaughter of an influential journalist who gave a voice to black communities when they weren’t being heard back in 1934.

"He was righting the wrong,” Williams-Dillard said.

Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder

is the oldest black-owned newspaper in the state of Minnesota. It was born from oppression -- lifting up voices and stories that might otherwise go unheard. But as publisher, Williams-Dillard is afraid not too much has changed in 86 years.

“You just want everybody to have equal rights. You want everybody to be okay. But it don’t end,” Williams-Dillard said. “We’re talking 1939 youth stabbed, same thing we’re talking today. Shocking video shows Minneapolis police caused man’s death.”

She’s encouraged to see people in the community protesting in the streets.

“This is a peaceful protest," Williams-Dillard said. "This is because people want to see justice. They want to see something different from what we’ve been seeing for way too long.”

It hasn’t all been peaceful. Williams-Dillard was overcome with emotion when she saw her family’s building boarded up for the first time in its history.

“When I walk up to the black press and we realize that we’re boarded up too because the violence is out of hand,” Williams-Dillard said.

They sit only a few blocks away from where George Floyd took his last breath.

“This anger, this goes back beyond Minneapolis around the nation. Some people don’t know all this history, but they feel it in their bones because their parents have lived through it,” the paper’s community editor Mel Reeves said.

Reeves is also a human rights activist and says people of color are sick of seeing their brothers and sisters killed by law enforcement time and time again.

“If you kicked me and you said ‘Oh sorry Mel,’ and then you kicked me again and you said ‘Oh sorry Mel,’ and then you kicked me again…. I’d start to think ‘maybe you’re kicking me on purpose,’" Reeves said.

Even if people aren’t inherently racist, he believes prejudice has been built into American society.

“We’re taught to be racist," Reeves said. "We’re taught to hate ourselves. White people are taught to feel superior, and black people are taught to be inferior. And we know it.”

University of Minnesota professor

Edward Goetz

studies issues of race, class and access to affordable housing.

“Systemic racism refers to racism and disparate outcomes that are built into our systems. That may have been built into our systems for reasons that have nothing to do with race, but that in fact work now to reinforce racial inequity and inequalities,” Goetz said.

For example, in the 20^th century, Goetz says there were explicit forms of racial discrimination in housing. It was illegal for some people to occupy certain types of housing and it created great wealth imbalances.

Even though those overt acts of racism may not happen now, “What that has created over time is a huge disparity in wealth because there’s been a generation or two of white people who have been able to generate a lot of wealth from their housing and have passed that wealth onto subsequent generations,” Goetz said.

Many minority groups don’t have that same privilege. Another element of systemic racism has to do with rules that are built into our systems like the way we fund our local schools – most are funded by property tax revenues and local funds.

“So you have very well-endowed schools in some neighborhoods providing tremendous opportunities and experiences for students, and you have schools in other neighborhoods that are underfunded that don’t have the most recent textbooks or facilities, and this produces disparate outcomes in education which then goes on to have impact on subsequent earnings,” Goetz said.

It’s a cycle that’s hard to break, but systemic racism goes beyond housing and school. According to Goetz, for the same crime, people of color are arrested, prosecuted and jailed more than white people.

“Systemic racism and white supremacy isn’t just a white cop with his knee on the neck of a black man. It’s the system that creates that cop, it’s the system that tolerates that cop, and it’s the system that allows officers like him to escape punishment,” Goetz said.

Acooa Ellis

has also spent time researching systemic racism. She's the Senior Vice President of Community Impact at the

Greater Twin Cities United Way

.

“There are so many people whose heart is literally to protect and serve, but too many… too many where that isn’t the case, and that behavior goes unabated, and it spreads, and it becomes part of the culture,” Ellis said.

Ellis says there are possible solutions like training officers differently, or getting them connected with the community.

“There’s something about policing a person that could live around the corner from you, or go to school with someone that you love,” Ellis said.

Ellis says she’s optimistic change is coming soon. Williams-Dillard says Minnesota Spokesman Recorder will not stop its activism until that change is made.

“My hope for going forward is that we can just be real. Let’s get real about what is happening, let’s get real about our role to be a part of the change. And let’s stop having nice conversations, and have honest ones,” Ellis said.

“We gotta keep the news out there, we gotta remind people that these are real times, and we gotta talk about it,” Williams-Dillard said.

“At some point, we gotta lay down our prejudices and our assumptions about folks, and we gotta see each other as human beings. Can’t stress that enough,” Reeves said.

“I cannot breathe. My heart is so heavy. It’s just so heavy,” Williams-Dillard said.

 

CLEVELAND — It’s not a secret, and the tech industry has a problem.

“It’s always been pretty abysmal,” said David Ferreira.

For David Ferreira, tech’s diversity issues are more than numbers. It’s his experience.

“I went off to college. I was the only Black person in my program there for four years," he said, “Being the only representation of my race.”

When he reached the professional world, things got a little better. He was no longer the only Black person he worked with. But Black people and other minorities were still wildly underrepresented.

White people represent 60% of the US population but 78% of the tech world. Minority groups in tech make up just over half (22%) of where they stand in the real world (40%).

Tech Elevator, a coding boot camp company where David is an instructor, is trying to make a dent in those numbers.

“Here at Tech Elevator, because we have that scholarship that we talked about, we can actually just make it seem that the workforce in our classroom matches what society looks like,” said Ferreira.

Tech Elevator’s Represent Tech Scholarship is available to anyone a member of an underrepresented group in the industry.

So far, it’s paid for all or almost all of 135 students’ tuition through the program. Those recipients have gone on to make a combined $337 million, according to the company.

Jasmine Brown had been looking for a change after spending seven years as a speech therapist.

“With speech pathology, there really isn’t too much to do other than being a speech therapist. It wasn’t horrible, but I didn’t feel the field, and the passion wasn’t there,” said Brown.

85% of her tuition is taken care of because of the scholarship.

“That was the only way I was going to be able to come, was with the scholarship," she said.

She loves the program but growing up, and she never saw this career as an option.

“When I was younger it was just something I didn’t really think about just probably because I didn’t see myself represented,” said Brown, “I have a lot of families that’s in education social work, things like that and so it just seemed natural to go that way,”

She didn’t have an example or role model in this world, so she never thought it was an option.

The hope is this scholarship will help build the pool of qualified coders, so diversity in tech can grow. And tech elevator isn’t the only one offering scholarships.

A quick search on bestcolleges.com shows 25 scholarships available to minorities and the same number to women.

“You have that network starting to build of candidates who are used to and willing to vouch and reach out to folks of different backgrounds,” said Ferreira.

While the pace of change is still slow, Tech Elevator hopes to make the industry look more like the world we live in.

CHICAGO — When former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin goes on trial for the killing of George Floyd, the odds may be in his favor. Following a year of intense protests, the voices calling for accountability may be getting louder but statistically, police prosecutions are rare, even in the face of potentially damning video evidence.

Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder. The charges stem from a May incident, where he was caught on camera kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

“I think anyone who watches this video and hasn't even sort of a cursory familiarity with what happened here, I think would have to conclude that this was egregious, unconscionable and unlawful misconduct,” said Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice.

In the years following the 2014 killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the calls for accountability have grown stronger. Yet, it’s extremely rare for police officers to face serious legal consequences for using excessive force or even killing civilians.

“It takes a lot of political will to bring prosecutions against members of law enforcement in the first place,” explained Schweikert. “And in general, prosecutors are very reluctant to do that.”

The Supreme Court also gives police officers a great deal of leeway in their use of force, saying that it “…must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight."

“It's one of objective reasonableness, so if their subjective belief is that there was a threat because they're afraid of Black men, that's not objectively reasonable,” said Philip Stinson, criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University.

In Kenosha, this past September, protests and riots broke out after police officer Rusten Sheskey fired seven shots into Jacob Blake’s back, paralyzing him. No charges were filed.

“Many police officers have a fear of Black men and Black boys, and that is what's driving a lot of what we see,” said Stinson.

The 2014 fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland was especially striking, says Schweikert. Rice, who was playing with a realistic-looking pellet gun, was shot dead by an officer just two seconds after he arrived on the scene.

“I think it's shocking, that case in particular, because, as I recall, there wasn't even an attempt to secure criminal charges in that case,” said Schweikert.

Even when charges are secured, officers are seldomly convicted. Juries and courts are reluctant to second guess the split-second, life-or-death decisions of police officers in potentially dangerous situations.

According to a statistical analysis by Bowling Green State University, since 2005, 138 police officers were arrested for shooting and killing someone while on duty. While 44 were convicted of a crime, most were for lesser offenses. Only seven officers were convicted of murder.

“About 1,000 times each year, an on-duty police officer shoots and kills someone,” said Stinson. “And it's actually a very rare event that an officer is charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from one of those shootings.”

It's a rare event that will soon begin inside a Minneapolis courtroom. The question will be whether the Chauvin trial results in an exception or a rule.

EL SOBRANTE, Calif. — The name of the building you work in, the bridge you cross, or the school you attend may not matter to some, but it’s important to Anaya Zenad.

“Usually the name of a school is supposed to be something nice, and it’s supposed to be something we can look up to. But we found out it's not something we can look up to,” said Zenad.

Last school year, as an eighth-grade student at Juan Crespi Middle School in northern California, Zenad led a school-wide research project on the Franciscan missionary. Every student participated.

“Juan Crespi, he’s associated with the mission system and he really didn’t care about kids because he didn’t care what the people were doing in the mission system, unless he got what we wanted, which was Christianity,” said Zenad.

Juan Crespi was a Franciscan missionary who was charged with recording the history of one of the exploration journeys north from San Diego to San Francisco in late 1769.

Those explorations also helped establish the California mission system, a series of fort-like churches up the coast of California. Many of the missions were named for Christian Saints, like San Diego, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco which would later become the names of those cities.

“Most California schools touch on the mission system in fourth grade, and the most frequent thing, if you talk to anyone who went to school in this area, they probably took a shoebox and made a replica of a California mission. And that was they learned about the missions, right? But what that does is that sanitizes that history right? Awful things happened there and that’s just truth,” said Guthrie Fleischman, the principal at the middle school Zenad attended.

In his opinion, the current curriculum washes over some of the atrocities now associated with the missions.

Research from Umass Boston shows the population of indigenous people in California around 1769 was estimated to be as high as 700,000. That number declined to about 100,000 by the 1849 California Gold Rush.

Jack D. Forbes, a Native American scholar and activist, described the missions like this: “The purposes of the missions were several, but "Indian control" can be identified as the most important initial purpose. Subsequent purposes included the assimilation of the natives into Hispanic society."

“I found out that in the mission system that you had to deny your cultural practices, you had to learn Christianity, and people got their hair cut off, they got physically and mentally abused,” said Zenad.

Zenad and her classmates learned Crespi was essential in the establishment of the California missions. The school decided it wanted to move on from the name.

“I’m a person of color and he didn’t care for people of color, so I’m going to school where maybe the teachers don’t really care for us because the school is named after somebody that doesn’t really care for us,” she said.

“We wanted there to be a local connection to the name. We wanted it to be a name for social justice. We wanted it to be a name that stood for equity and inclusion and a name that honored diverse perspectives,” said principal Fleischman.

More than 45 new names were suggested by the community, but one rose to the top of the list.

“She’s just really an amazing person and her life’s story, her commitment to equity and justice and for human rights has really been profound,” said principal Fleischman.

The school board voted to rename the school Betty Reid Soskin Middle School. She is the oldest National Park Service ranger and a long-time Bay Area resident.

“I like coming down, taking the place of someone who considers themselves revolutionary, who wasn’t,” said Soskin.

Soskin is still recovering from a stroke, but still has virtual visits at the Rosie the Riverter Memorial in Richmond, California.

Soskin has a long history of activism during the civil rights movement and beyond.

“I think that I have always been on the lookout, without realizing it, for where help was needed,” said Soskin.

Zenad has had the chance to speak with Soskin and thinks she will represent the school's community and values better than the Spanish explorer.

“Oh she’s wonderful. I love her," she said.

Lawmakers in Arkansas passed legislation to ban gender-affirming treatments for transgender youth earlier this year, becoming the first state to make such a move. Now the ACLU is fighting back.

They have filed a lawsuit against state officials representing two physicians, four trans youths and their parents. The Brandt family is among them.

“It was years of going back and forth, trying to figure out who I was," said Dylan Brandt, a 15-year-old trans youth.

Self-discovery has been a journey for Dylan but two years ago everything changed when he handed his mom a letter.

“And in the letter he signed it 'your son Dylan,'" said Joanna Brandt, Dylan's mother.

That summer was a new beginning for this transgender teen. Nearly a year later was the start of hormone therapy. Dylan and his mother Joanna say that was the answer to much of his depression and anxiety.

“Most of that went away. The anxiety about going out to places, going to see people, gone. It changed everything. I’m so much happier, I’m so much more confident," Dylan said.

“It’s all of the things that give him the space to fully encompass externally how he feels on the inside," Joanna said.

Now, nearly ten months later, all of Dylan's progress could come to a halt. Arkansas, his home state, has passed a bill that would ban health care professionals from providing transition-related care to transgender minors.

Holly Dickson, the Executive Director of ACLU Arkansas says this ban has already done damage.

“This is such a sweeping government intrusion into the private lives of these young people. They have been targeted because they are transgender young people and it takes away their parents' autonomy to work with their physicians and make the best decisions for themselves," Dickson said.

“We’ve had at least six trans youth attempt suicide just since the time they heard these bills were filed. It is absolutely horrible.”

“That gender-affirming medical care that they are trying to take away from him is that thing that has allowed him to be exactly who he knows he is, exactly who I know who he is, in a way that he wasn’t able to before and he would not be able to if this ban actually took effect," Joanna said.

Arkansas Republican Sen. Alan Clark, the sponsor of the bill, claims the bill is necessary for protection. He denied our interview request but made these comments on the Senate floor about gender-affirming treatment for youth:

“At best, experimental, and at worst, a serious threat to a child’s welfare," Clark said.

Teenagers like Dylan couldn’t disagree more.

“It’s not just something that we wake up one day and say, 'hey I want to do this. Because that seems fun.' No it’s not fun," Dylan said.

“People think that these kids come to their parents and say, 'hey, I’m transgender, I want hormones,' and we go, 'sweet,' and we go out the next day and we get them for him, without seeking out the advice and the expertise of those in the field. That’s not what happened," Joanna said.

Clark claims that children are too young to make this decision before turning 18 years old.

“But this is certainly not the answer, it is not the answer today. This does not stop anyone at 18 from doing whatever they want to do. But it does protect children from making mistakes that they will have a very difficult time coming back from.”

But Joanna says age is not a factor when it comes to knowing who you are.

“I don’t need to be 18 before I know who I am and these kids don’t either," Joanna said.

Arkansas' bill is pushing families out of the state they call home.

“At this point in my life, I have been seeing more families who are thinking about and who are leaving the state of Arkansas because of this bill and other anti-trans-legislation that was filed and passed this session," Dickson said

Former Republican state Rep. Dan Douglas has voted for some anti-trans bills in the past.

“I would have voted against this bill," Douglas said. “I don’t think the legislator and some of these very extreme bills and these very extreme votes really represent the accepting nature of the state of Arkansas.”

This, he says, is too black and white. It needs exceptions.

“Whenever legislation gets in the way of physician patient treatment and decisions, then we are interfering and we're going too far," Douglass said.

“The government doesn’t have any business getting in the middle of medical between parents, patients, and medical professionals, it’s not their lane," Joanna said.

Arkansas is the first state to make this move, but according to the ACLU, similar bills have been or are being considered in 19 other states.

"Every major medical organization in the nation opposed this law," Dickson said.

As families like Dylan’s fight against this, they remind us: this isn’t just policy, this is their lives.

“We are real people with real feelings," Dylan said.

“He is every bit the boy that any other boy I know is," Joanna said.