ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray shares part one of his interview with Andrew McCaskill, a marketing executive with a penchant for inclusion.
While diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI — has recently come under political fire in Florida and states like it, McCaskill maintains that initiatives such as equitable hiring and affirmative action can sometimes be considered a way of simply forcing people to do the right thing.
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“What we can’t deny is that diversity, inclusion and equity programming has had incredible impacts on many of the careers of tons of people for the last 30, 40 years,” McCaskill said. “We’ve had all these conversations about affirmative action. My father was a bus driver and a chemistry teacher in the Mississippi public school system before affirmative action came along, and because there were people putting systems in place at some of the largest companies in the world that said that ‘You’re not going to get these tax breaks if you’re not actually going out and hiring equitably,’ my father was recruited to go be an offshore engineer at Exxon Company USA (...) and my father was doing the exact same type of work in terms of studying chemistry on oil rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico for Exxon, and because of affirmative action, my father’s pay — his compensation, his salary — quadrupled from what he was making in the Mississippi public school system.”
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DEI in the corporate world has also led to beneficial and much-needed transparency, McCaskill said. According to him, though DEI initiatives are not perfect across the board, he compared them to the budding AI industry in advising that opponents of DEI should not move too quickly and throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to say.
“A lot of that financial inclusion and a lot of that equity work is really what has sort of paved the way, particularly in corporate spaces, for many people to have the careers that they’re having and to open the door and reach back and bring more people along the way. I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, well, you know, diversity and inclusion is going to go away in these places,’ I think we still have to fight for it. It’s not perfect, but it is a system that we still have to continuously fight for and I don’t think that just because you lose a couple of battles that you don’t go out and still keep fighting a war,” he said. “Just like times change, politics change too, and I think that we can never lose sight of the gains that we made.”
Hear the full interview in Season 4, Episode 11 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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