TAKE BACK YOUR POWER! A Conversation with Shereen Daniels, Author of The Anti-Racist Organization

In this episode, Donzel welcomes best-selling author Shereen Daniels to the show to discuss her new book, The Anti-Racist Organization, and to share her story of courageously standing up, speaking out, and taking action to challenge many companies’ disingenuous commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. She also discusses her efforts to influence the spread of anti-racism throughout the UK and, ultimately, around the world.

Now, let’s get started with our show.

Donzel: I’m Donzel Leggett, host of The ARCC of Change podcast and founder of the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, or ARCC.

Our vision at ARCC is to build a racism-free world, and our mission is to provide inspiration, education, and support for you to transform, practice, and spread anti-racism.

This begins with our three-step process of personally transforming to anti-racism. The first step is erasing your ignorance about racism and hate. The second step is educating yourself about anti-racism. And the third step is building the character and confidence to stand up, speak out, and take action to spread anti-racism and anti-hate and make positive change happen.

This process is designed so that any one person can make a difference by committing to anti-racism and anti-hate and then influencing others to do the same. Every single person, no matter who you are or where you sit in society, can make a difference. It’s about exercising your agency to act.

None of us is insignificant. Any single one of us can drive positive change.

But I know that sometimes it’s easy to feel powerless. That’s when you have to remember that we’re only powerless when we give away our power and hold ourselves back because we don’t think we’re worthy.

We can all be powerful when we exercise our power by believing we’re worthy and standing up, speaking out, and taking action for who we are and what we believe in.

Today’s guest is a perfect example of someone who, at one time, felt powerless. But one day, she decided to exercise her power and her agency. Now, Shereen Daniels is a powerful voice who inspires and touches hundreds of thousands of people through her written words as a best-selling author, her spoken voice as a world-renowned speaker, and her powerful lessons as a paradigm-changing educator.

Shereen Daniels is next, and she will tell you her story of transformation and how she unleashed her power and agency to drive positive change.

Visit us at joinarcc.org. Follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

Donzel: All right, welcome back to The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett. It is my absolute pleasure and privilege to have on our show today the incomparable Shereen Daniels.

I met Shereen virtually earlier this year, but recently had the opportunity to meet her in person in the UK with my good friend and ARCC board member, Tommy Fung. Both Tommy and I can attest to the fact that Shereen is an incredible force of nature who is changing the global landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion work and unabashedly challenging organizations around the world to focus on anti-racism.

Let me tell you a little bit about Shereen. She is a best-selling author of The Anti-Racist Organization: Dismantling Systemic Racism in the Workforce, which I’ve read, and it’s fantastic.

She’s also the founder and managing director of HR Rewired, an anti-racism advisory firm that champions racial equity in the workplace. She is also the founder and chair of the African Diaspora Economic Inclusion Foundation, which contributes to reducing the economic inequalities impacting the UK’s African diaspora community, with a specific focus on Black female entrepreneurs.

Shereen was recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice in 2020 and was the winner of the HR Most Influential Thinker award in 2021. And if that’s not enough, she holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Business with Psychology and a Master of Science in International Human Resources.

All of that is impressive, but I can tell you that it is nowhere near as impressive as meeting her in person and hearing from her firsthand, which we’ll do right now.

Shereen, my good friend, welcome to The ARCC of Change. How are you doing?

Shereen: Oh, listen, after that introduction, I know people can't see me, but just imagine I'm showing all of my teeth, including my front teeth, front and center. I'm easily complimented! So, no, it's amazing to be here. Thank you.

Donzel: That's awesome. I got to meet you, and we've certainly been talking for at least the last six months. I've also had the opportunity to read your book, so I know a lot about you. But the audience doesn't. Maybe let's start by having you tell us a little bit about yourself, and then we'll get into your story.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, above and beyond what you've already shared.

Shereen: Even part of me was thinking, "Oh, look, that is me. Those are my little accolades!"

I'm a mother of two. I have two daughters, ages 14 and four, and I live just outside of London in Kent.

I'm trying to think what else I can tell you without getting into the tea. So I think I'll stop there, and then you can ask me whatever you want.

Donzel: All right. Your story has been profiled in Forbes, and you have 80,000 followers on LinkedIn alone. I can attest to seeing some of the most powerful messages and lessons that you post daily. But I know it all started with your story.

Why don't you tell us about it?

Shereen: I think, like a lot of people, I was deeply affected by a combination of events. We had Breonna Taylor, we had George Floyd, and the straw that broke the camel's back, if you like, was when I saw the video of Amy Cooper in Central Park back in 2020.

I remember sitting in my living room here in Kent, the Garden of England, as it's known, and thinking about all the different versions of Amy Coopers I had worked with, been friends with, and even had relationships with. I'm talking about individuals who somehow felt that their skin color afforded them the right to be treated in a completely different way from everybody else.

At the time, here in the UK, we were kind of sipping our tea, if you like, and saying, "Oh, this racism thing is so terrible. What happened to George Floyd? And isn't it a relief that we don't have issues with racism over here?"

And I was like, "Listen, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what we're going to do."

So I ended up recording a completely unplanned, 20-minute video just speaking about how I felt about the subject matter. What does it really feel like to be a Black woman in the world of work, particularly here in the UK?

I posted the video on YouTube, but I guess the start of my journey wasn't so much the recording of the video as it was sharing it publicly.

At the time, I had around 3,000 LinkedIn followers, and I'm probably being very generous there. I didn't have a massive profile. I was a quintessential nobody. I wasn't working for a brand. I'd left the corporate world behind, had just finished maternity leave, and had decided I was going to start my own consultancy. I was just out here in these streets, doing my very best to be the quintessential, well-behaved, inoffensive HR person who just happened to be Black. Do you know what I mean?

Donzel: Yes, I know what you mean.

Shereen: I really struggled that night with the idea of publicly sharing the video. I remember talking to my partner. Well, I wasn't talking; he was talking to me. I was saying, "Oh, I don't think I can post this."

I didn't sleep, and I had a little bit of a breakdown. He said, "Well, if you're so bothered about this, don't post it. I'm seeing the state that you're in. It's not worth it, so don't post it."

And I said, "No, I've got to."

When I took the time to unravel why I was getting myself into such a state, I realized, Donzel, that I'd spent most of my professional career—at that point, around 17 or 18 years—trying to make sure I showed up in a way that was deemed acceptable to white people.

My background is in HR and business, and I realized I'd spent all that time trying not to be the Black person who always makes everything about race. I hadn't realized that was a driving fear, if you like, and that it had shaped how I behaved in the workplace and how I lived.

I'd dealt with overt and covert instances of racism, whether directed at me, my colleagues, my direct reports, or my peers. I also always had this internal dialogue with myself that said, whenever there was an issue or I felt like speaking out, "Shereen, don't do it, because you're going to be labeled the troublemaker. It's going to be you who's got to leave the job, because it's always you. It's always us."

Donzel: Yes.

Shereen: And if I'm being really honest, Donzel, people see what I post now and how I show up, and they're like, "Oh my goodness, you're so brave. You're so courageous."

But what they didn't realize is that, at that time, looking in the mirror and recognizing how I had internalized racism, I felt nothing but embarrassment and shame.

I wasn't sitting there thinking, "Oh my goodness, I'm going to go and change the world." I was literally thinking, "How?"

I'm an extroverted introvert. I've got all of these degrees and all of this corporate experience. I'm not a pushover. I'm assertive. I'm all of these things, and yet I still navigated this world being very conscious of feeling like a second-class citizen and always having to show deference.

So it was a very personal journey that I decided to embark on.

When I shared that first video—and I think they're all on YouTube, so if people are bored, they can go and have a look—it's the first one I call my "Day One" video. By the time I did the first one, I thought, "Well, I might as well carry on talking."

When you watch the videos from Day Two and Day Three, you can physically see it in my countenance and body language. I look wrecked.

Then you slowly saw me learning and unlearning. You saw me share my views of the world and my perspectives, but you also saw me marry those perspectives with my experience working with executive teams, leading my own teams, and working in a variety of different industries.

I brought all of that together and basically said that the way we've been treating this, the way we talk about it, and the way we sometimes act—even for those who do take action—is not enough.

We've been so scared to name racism. But what we've never understood is that this is how it keeps ticking over. It feeds off our apathy. It feeds off our discomfort. It feeds off obedience and conditioning.

That's how I got started: by simply recording videos. I've made hundreds of videos, done live shows, and all sorts of things. But I thought to myself, if I'm going to do this, let me do it my way.

And that's what you've seen play out over the last couple of years.

Donzel: Wow. That's very powerful.

There are some commonalities in our stories. I talk about how ARCC really started as a reaction to George Floyd's murder. He was murdered 30 minutes from my house.

I'm a board chair for an organization that supports people like George Floyd who have gone through troubles in their lives and are trying to turn their lives around. In fact, George had come into one of the nonprofits I'm on the board of before. A lot of our staff knew who he was and knew him personally.

So that one hit me very, very hard.

I had a lot of the same feelings you described because I was crafting my career to move into the upper levels of corporate America. That meant, yes, I'm assertive, like you talked about. Yes, I'm confident. I know what I can do, and I speak out. But there were certain things I didn't speak out about.

One of them was race. I called out issues when I saw them, but I didn't talk a lot about race or politics.

I felt like I had to do something at that point. Similarly to you, I made a video and sent it out on social media. I'd never done anything like that before. I'm not a social media presence, and I really hadn't been.

But I felt like I had to do something because I had that same feeling of shame you described. I wondered, "Am I part of the problem? Have I played these roles to get where I want to be in corporate America without speaking out enough?"

Yes, I'd done some things. I'd defended people. I'd helped get people of color into jobs. I did all of that. But could I have done more?

I felt that if George Floyd could be murdered like that, I had to take a risk. I had to step up and say something.

So there are a lot of parallels there, and that's what led me to start ARCC.

Obviously, you started HR Rewired. Was starting HR Rewired an outcome of this experience, or was it already a platform you had established? Maybe you could tell us a little bit about HR Rewired.

Shereen: I had already started the company in October 2019, when I was actually having executive coaching.

I remember my coach basically saying, "Listen, you need to be the captain of your own ship," so to speak.

But part of the very honest conversation we had was that I was just tired of going through the same things over and over again in different organizations. I'd jumped through all these hoops, and I was more than overqualified for the level of position I had. I was always hitting that ceiling, that brick wall, and never breaking through to where I perceived I should be.

I just said, "I don't know if I've got the energy to keep doing this."

At the time, HR Rewired was really about helping teams collaborate and perform better and understanding individual drivers.

As you mentioned, I'm a psychology major, and that's been a theme throughout my career. I'm always fascinated by our behavioral drivers, the way we do what we do, why we do what we do, and how that can be harnessed for better team performance.

That was always my interest.

But then George Floyd happened, and we had all the protests. I paused all of my activity to focus on making videos, talking, being interviewed, and appearing on the radio.

What started to happen was that CEOs and founders of very large, prominent companies began reaching out to me on LinkedIn. They would basically say, "Listen, can you come in and help? Because what you're talking about is not what we're talking about. We've been doing diversity and inclusion for the last 5, 10, or 15 years, thinking that was solving this problem. We're listening to you and our Black colleagues, and we're realizing that we don't have a clue."

When one request became five and then became ten, I thought, "Well, I'm just going to make HR Rewired do that."

If we want to have collegiate workforces that perform well, but where people also feel like they can do their best work, we have to reengineer the way we approach HR. Hence, HR Rewired.

What better way to further what I believe in, what is important to me, and what I feel the world of work needs than to make HR Rewired about anti-racism and racial equity?

I'm happy with that niche. I was very clear that that's what I wanted us to do, even when everybody else wanted me to go off and do other things or address other issues. I said, "No, this is what I want to do."

It focuses on how systemic racism impacts those who are most affected. For me, that's Black people and people of African heritage.

Donzel: And you wrote this wonderful book, The Anti-Racist Organization: Dismantling Systemic Racism in the Workforce.

Again, I thought you were extremely clear in the book explaining what you just said: DEI work is not enough.

Here in the United States, we have something called allyship. I don't know whether allyship has also taken off in the UK.

I've been one of the most outspoken people against allyship because, to me, it's a soft way to allow white executives, who are in the majority, to feel like they're doing something good by simply saying, "Hey, if you're empathetic toward minorities, if you pat them on the back, if you let them cry on your shoulder, and all these things, put a badge on that says, 'I'm an ally.' You're doing great. You're doing a great job."

To me, it's an easy way out of doing the real work.

The real work is understanding that racism exists. It exists in our society. It's built in. And those who suffer the most from racism, especially systemic racism around the world, are those who have suffered from colonialism, starting with Africans, but also including people who are brown, for the most part, based on where colonialism and imperialism have taken place.

I thought you did a great job in the book of really talking about what the bottom line is.

So, when these CEOs call you in, and now that you've written the book—I don't know how many of them have read it—but as you're talking to prospective clients and breaking it down for them, what is their reaction?

They might say, "We've been doing DEI for ten years. We have courageous conversations, we have allies, and we've done all these things."

When you explain what really needs to happen, how people in their workforce need to feel, and how the culture needs to change, how do those conversations go? Are some people receptive? Are there some who actually listen and do something differently?

Shereen: I think I used to say it was a third, a third, and a third, which is kind of typical of any change or transformation program, isn't it?

A third are on the bus, a third are a bit on the fence, and a third are actively sabotaging or quietly sabotaging, even through doing nothing.

I would pretty much say that, out of all the CEOs I've spoken to and worked with, you're probably looking at about 10% who are committed and capable of making what I would call the tough decisions.

I'm putting "tough" in quotation marks because it's a tough decision when you're a leader who belongs to the majority group. In the context of racism, that often means white-majority leadership teams. Your peers are white, your network is white, and the majority of senior leaders—or anybody with a management title, role, or responsibility—are white.

You also know that society is optimized for whiteness.

You're living and working in parts of the world, and I think here about the US, for example, where becoming anti-racist is very politicized. People don't like the idea of focusing on race and racism because they think that, in itself, is an example of racism.

So you have all of these different challenges around what it means to lean into this and actively become an anti-racist leader or an anti-racist organization. Those challenges are shaped by the day-to-day world you inhabit, as well as the values and belief systems you have about how you've thought about racism.

People say things like, "I'm not a bad person. I don't hire bad people. I have nice people. My friends aren't racist. I'm certainly not racist."

You get into all of that.

So you really have to be patient. I always say, "Be patiently impatient."

I'm often looking for CEOs who, to your point, recognize the systemic elements of racism. In the nicest way possible, they don't waste my time trying to convince me that they don't have an issue with racism within their business.

Instead, they say, "I've accepted it. I want to get on and do the work. How do we do it?"

That's a very, very different approach.

There aren't that many individuals who take that approach, if I'm honest, because everybody else is almost looking for an excuse not to do the work.

That's why they hide behind the fact that they've committed to diversity and inclusion, as you said. They rattle off all the different things they've done.

But I know, and you know, that those efforts aren't even touching the sides in terms of making a difference.

Donzel: There was a study that backs up exactly what you said.

One year after George Floyd's murder, major corporations here in the US were asked whether their leaders and employees were committed to helping their companies fight racism and injustice within their organizations.

Ninety-five percent of corporate executives said yes, while 75% of non-managers—the employees at the lowest levels of the corporation—said yes.

But when asked whether they felt the focus and attention that diversity, equity, and inclusion were receiving in their corporations were blown out of proportion, almost 80% of executives said yes.

Now, these are the same executives who said, 95% of the time, that they were committed. They're also the people driving these initiatives. Yet 80% of them said they felt the focus was blown out of proportion.

By comparison, only 30% of non-managers said the same.

Clearly, there's a dichotomy here and an inverse proportionality between the commitment being voiced and the genuine commitment being demonstrated.

That backs up 100% what you're saying.

I did want to ask you what drove you to write the book. I thought it was very well done and very clear. I think it lays out really well what we're trying to talk about here at ARCC, too.

What drove you to write the book, and what do you want the key message to be?

Shereen: What drove me to write the book was the culmination of literally thousands upon thousands of conversations.

Those conversations happened one-to-one, through facilitating listening forums, participating in webinars, delivering keynotes, attending meetings, and being invited into all these spaces as the "expert," in quotation marks. People wanted my views on anything connected to racism.

In particular, I was quite frustrated and disappointed with some of the organizations I'd spoken to that then decided they weren't ready to become anti-racist. They wanted to start a bit more from the beginning. Those are their words, not mine.

They would say things like, "Oh, we want to start with unconscious bias training," or, "We want to put our managers through an inclusion program," or, as you mentioned earlier, "We want to do some more work on having courageous conversations and challenging conversations."

Basically, they were just twirling around, to borrow a phrase from my Real Housewives of Atlanta friends, in a way that allowed them to avoid tackling racism.

When you mentioned earlier that you have a real bee in your bonnet, as we say in the UK, about allyship and how it's used, that was exactly it.

I was hearing all of these people's sob stories. For a long time, Donzel, I was a vessel for white guilt because I made myself super available. I'm not anymore, but I used to be.

People would say, "Oh, can I talk to you?" And they literally just wanted to offload how they felt and how they hadn't realized certain things.

Then I'd say, "Okay, cool. This is what you can do."

But they weren't interested in the action. They just wanted to go through the process of relieving some of that guilt.

They would always say, "Oh, I feel so much better after talking to you." Then they'd go off and carry on doing what they'd always done.

Meanwhile, colleagues from those same businesses would continue sending me direct messages saying, "Listen, I don't understand why they're not doing anything."

Well, I did understand why they weren't doing anything. They could no longer use the phrase, "I don't know what to do, and I'm scared of saying or doing the wrong thing."

That became the epitome of 2021: everyone saying, "I'm not really sure what to do," despite the fact that there were books like mine and plenty of other information available over the previous two years. I'm not the only person who has written about this.

It was the same thing over and over again. They were excuses.

At the same time, I was thinking about the conversations I had with CEOs and executives who did want to do something. They committed resources and budgets, and they didn't try to guide me into watering down the message.

I have examples of businesses that basically said:

"Yes, we would love to bring you in, but do you have white people on your team? We feel like the business would respond better to white people talking about racism than to a Black woman."

"Can you not mention George Floyd because we have a rule that we don't talk about politics in the workplace?"

"Can you make sure that when you talk about this, you really think about your body language and tone of voice? We don't want to upset our white colleagues because it's really important that we get them on board."

You basically had all of this DEI effort focused on easing white discomfort, cajoling people, or trying to influence white-majority management teams and colleagues to care about this.

I kept hearing this over and over again.

What I kept saying to people was that the actions they put in place to make white people feel comfortable were never going to make everybody truly comfortable with this subject matter. It's really a fallacy.

Everything they were doing was very different from the actions they needed to put in place to address systemic racism.

That was one issue.

The other major red flag was organizations that literally thought I could help them recruit more Black people.

By that time, I had quite a large following on social media. My community, as I refer to it, includes people who engage with me on social media from all walks of life and all ethnicities. But I also have a very strong following of Black people all over the world.

Organizations wanted to tap into that community because they thought that having more Black people meant they didn't have an issue with racism.

It was this idea that more representation meant they weren't racist. The more Black people they could show on their website, in their marketing materials, in their advertisements, and in their brand campaigns, the more they could demonstrate that they weren't racist.

Their attitude was, "If you can't help me get more Black people, Shereen, then you can't really help us at all."

Donzel: Wow.

Shereen: Do you know what I mean?

All of that is part of why the book took the form it did. You'll see this in the book: it could have been three times the size. It could have been three times longer.

But what I did was take real quotes from real individuals. I didn't over-index on the quotes. I simply showed them because I wanted to hold up a mirror.

I wanted even individuals who believe they're allies to see how systemic racism continues to do its best work through what feel like really innocuous statements.

Things like, "The board will never sign this off if it's only for Black people," or, "You can't do right for doing wrong," or, "I've reached out to Black people, and they've not really been receptive of my help."

They're approaching this almost like a charity donation.

I wanted to hold up a mirror without over-indexing on those statements and let people either recognize themselves in them or draw their own opinions from what they were seeing.

These are very real conversations, and that's probably partly why the book has landed so well. It's not abstract. There's nothing loose and airy-fairy, as we say in the UK, about it.

This is the reality, presented in short sentences without the trauma porn. It's not pages and pages of traumatic stories about racism. It's context. It's about embedding the issue within business and thinking about it as a strategic imperative.

But it also highlights the idea of choice, not force. I'm not going to force anybody to care, and I'm not going to force anybody to do something.

But if you want to, stick with me, and we'll go very far.

Donzel: For those who haven't read the book, I will tell you that the way Shereen wrote it makes it feel almost like when Tommy and I had dinner with her in the UK and she was just talking. We were having a conversation.

It reads like that. It's not a heavy book where you have to motivate yourself to read it. It's not like that. It's a book that's really common-sense, but conversational. She writes as if she's talking, as if you're having a conversation.

I would strongly recommend the book.

As Shereen said, there are a lot of books out there on this topic. What differentiates this one, to me, is its conversational nature. But it's also the fact that anyone who's worked in any organization will see themselves in this book.

There are things that have been said to you or ways you've felt perceived that will certainly be in this book, whether you're a person of color or a white person who maybe didn't realize the impact of your behaviors and comments.

I just think it's a fantastic book, Shereen.

Before we wrap up, I did want to ask you a little bit about the other organization you started, which is very impressive to me as well: the African Diaspora Economic Inclusion Foundation.

Could you tell us a little bit about why you started this organization and why it's so important for all of us to understand the importance of focusing on Black female entrepreneurship?

Shereen: I could give you what I would call a really PR-type statement and say, "Oh, yes, it's really important."

But, in all honesty, Donzel, I said to myself that if I'm going to do this work and make a living from it, I have to find a way to give back.

I didn't want to be one of those individuals who waits until they run a multibillion-dollar organization and then starts a foundation. I thought, "Look, I have to build this and bring people with me as I go."

Anyone who works with me knows that's kind of my mantra. This isn't just about ShereenDaniels.com. It's about all of us. My job is to bring as many people with me as I can.

Setting up the foundation, ADEF for short, was an extension of that.

The economic empowerment piece is crucial from a global perspective. It's crucial from a UK perspective and a US perspective.

What we're talking about here is fundamentally recognizing that we don't have access to generational wealth for lots of different reasons and in lots of different contexts.

If we want to stop going through the same cycle, for want of a better word, of something traumatic happening to a Black person and then having to go door-knocking for allyship, we need to change things. Allyship has its role, but it can also be very disempowering.

I know this as somebody who runs her own company. There's no venture capital funding and no debt financing. I bootstrapped everything and did it all myself.

I was a business of one for a very long time. I know the ins and outs. I know what it's like to work around the clock. I know what it's like to feel exposed, and I know how you have to manage risk in a very different way.

I also saw what happened after the global protests of 2020. Everyone was talking about venture capital funding and how 0.2% went to Black people, with even less going to women.

Donzel: Wow.

Shereen: And then, if you fast-forward two years, Donzel, the numbers haven't changed.

Donzel: Jeez.

Shereen: What happened was that a lot of the programs and initiatives being run were so worried about focusing specifically on Black founders that they started saying they wanted to support "underrepresented founders" or whatever terminology they were using.

But when you do that, just like with DEI, the people who are most impacted keep getting left out.

So I thought, well, if that's what the other big institutional funders want to do, and that's their decision because they feel uncomfortable or don't want to lean into the Black community, then I'm going to be specific.

I know there are people and institutions that do focus on the Black community, and I want to give them a big tick for that. But I wanted to recognize the nuance of what it's like to be a Black woman running a business.

We're impacted by systemic racism, but we're also impacted by patriarchy. Society is optimized for men.

I wanted to focus on that and think about the opportunities that could be unlocked.

I think I saw a study in the US showing that Black female entrepreneurs are one of the largest rising entrepreneurial groups.

Part of that growth comes from people's experiences in the world of work, like mine. I didn't start out wanting to be an entrepreneur. I was fleeing the corporate world.

But now that I'm here, I'm loving it, and I would never go back.

There are ways we can support people and make things easier. I would just like to know that I can help somebody who looks like me.

Donzel: Wow. Wonderful, wonderful, Shereen. Thank you so much.

You know, our vision here at ARCC is to build a racism-free world. It's not just about us as individuals. It's about everyone in the world.

We feel we can make the world better if we eliminate racism. Our mission is to do that by providing inspiration, education, and support to everyone so they can transform themselves to practice and spread anti-racism.

I see so many parallels in the work you're doing. I am so inspired by you, and I'm so happy and, again, pleased and privileged that you joined us today.

I'd like to offer you a chance to provide any final words you'd like to leave our audience with.

Shereen: Oh, goodness me. I would just say that we're not powerless.

Maybe somebody will look me up, because I'm very Googleable, and think, "Oh my goodness, she's doing all of these things. She's got her book. She's got a conference in 2023 that's going to be amazing. There's some stuff she wants to do with TV."

But just remember that I started as a mom who recorded a video in her bedroom, basically saying, "Enough is enough."

For 17 years in the corporate world, I felt powerless, and I needed to take that power back.

Everything I've done since has been a version of me taking it back.

I would want somebody to look at me and think, "What's my version of taking back my power? How much more of a difference could I make in my sphere of influence or in some of the things I really care about?"

Then understand the compound-interest impact of having people like you, Donzel, and Tommy, whom I've met, along with all the other people who care about working, living, and playing within a socially just society.

Imagine how much we can accomplish together.

But we have to take back our power as the first step.

That's what I'd like to leave you with.

Donzel: That is so awesome, and it's directly aligned with the message we try to espouse at ARCC: Every single person can make a difference.

None of us is powerless as long as we take accountability and use our power.

You may not be someone who wants to put out a video like Shereen did or like I did, but that doesn't mean you can't influence your parents, your siblings, your friends, or your coworkers.

If you, as one person, can influence five people, that's six people now. And if they can influence five more, and ten more, and twenty more, the next thing you know, you've gone from being one person to having 80,000 followers on LinkedIn, like Shereen.

Thank you so much, Shereen. What an awesome interview. And please tell me you'll come back again sometime.

Shereen: I will always come back. Just keep the tea warm, and I'll be there.

Donzel: All right. I look forward to either seeing you here in the US or being back in the UK at some point.

Thanks again. You are wonderful. Keep doing what you're doing and inspiring us all.

Shereen: Thank you.

To find The ARCC of Change podcast with Donzel Leggett and learn more about the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition, or ARCC, please visit joinarcc.org. You can also subscribe to The ARCC of Change with Donzel Leggett on your favorite podcast hosting sites.

Donzel: I greatly look forward to our next episode and another opportunity to inspire you to become part of the movement that will change the world by eradicating racism once and for all.

Until next time, stay safe and continue to ask yourself: Am I doing enough?

And remember that none of us are doing enough as long as racism and hate still exist.

Thanks for listening, and goodbye.

The ARCC of Change podcast with Donzel Leggett is brought to you by the Anti-Racism Commitment Coalition. To learn more about ARCC, donate to our cause, and join the coalition, visit joinarcc.org.

Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode, and share this podcast to help spread our mission to change the world by ending racism once and for all.

Thanks for listening. Until next time, stay safe and be inspired.