ep 102. Tony Tidbit & Friends - Why There's Still a Glass Ceiling?

A Black Executive Perspective.

Look, man, they didn't get a chance to play chess. They had to play checkered. Let's talk about it, t openly and honestly. There was a lot of smart kids there. Black Executive Perspective now, my story's not unique. There's thousands of professionals of color who have experiences like mine. A Black Executive Perspective whether you're aware of it or not, it's a topic that is often avoided.

We'll discuss race and how it plays a factor and how we didn't even talk about this topic because we were afraid. A Black Executive Perspective welcome to a Black Executive Perspective podcast, a safe space where we discuss all matters related to race, especially race in corporate America. I'm your host and your guide.

Tony Tidbit and I've had extraordinary journey on this thing we call Life.

I'm an advertising media executive. I'm an army veteran. I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a friend, and I'm a black man. And a black man for over 30 years who was so silent when it came to talking about race at work. Well, today that is over. I'm here to use my voice and platform to create a lasting change through storytelling.

From the beginning of time,

we were always afraid to talk about race.

Our fear, my fear of not having open and honest conversations hasn't brought people together. It's only widening the gap between the races. Will that change today? Because we're going to have these type of conversations. More importantly, we're going to have conversations that make people feel uncomfortable. But we're going to have a goal to help educate.

We're going to have a goal to help everyone learn,

help everyone be able to hear different perspectives. And we're looking to inspire everyone to finally come together as one race, the human race. Today you're going to hear a little of my story and what inspired me to do something, as I said before, I was so uncomfortable to do, and more importantly, why you should listen to this podcast.

Moving forward. However, this is not going to be Tony Tidbit doing this all alone.

I have some remarkable guess who's going to help us navigate these choppy waters.

In each episode, we will be sitting down with these compelling storytellers to hear their unique experiences, their challenges, and their triumphs on their pathway to success. These are not average folks. These are people who are experts in a lot of different subject matter we're going to discuss here, from dei to allyship, assimilation, authenticity, colorism, the whole nine yards.

However, today, this episode is a little bit about me and my encounters with race as a young kid in Detroit, Michigan, and how it affected me not just at that time, but also through my personal career. You're also going to meet somebody that I am very close to. I am blessed that she's sitting here to my right, a lady that I met three and a half years ago.

Three years ago. And how did I meet her? Conversation on race. And this lady, I have learned so much from her. I am just excited that she's here because she brings so much energy. She brings a passion. She brings a love to people. And she's going to bring all those things here to help us be able to help you reach the goals that we're looking to do here.

So without further ado, I want everyone to meet the legendary Les Fry. Thank you. Oh, goodness. That's such an illustrious introduction. But I do want to speak to the fact that how we met each other, we were doing such good work and we continue to do such good work in the workplace.

You obviously saw something me and I saw something you. For us to partner together, to do these conversations in our workplace, that has been transformative. I mean, people's lives have been changed. People have found out things in this very safe, space, inclusive environment that we've created to talk about race within the workplace and race in general around the world, within our own communities, within America.

When you asked me to do this podcast, there was no hesitation. There was no hesitation. And this was based on the fact that I've seen success in the conversations that we've had previously at the workplace. We will go into a little bit about that, what it has done, how inclusive the environment has been and the success of those conversations that we've had in the workplace.

And basically kind of bring some of that here too for our audience, so that they know that this is going on, maybe to create that own environment correct within their own workplace. But you asked me to give a little bit of background about my. Health. So I am right now 61 years old.

I'm somebody who was born in the 60s. Had you not said nothing? Yeah. Thought nothing. Okay. Because

you should be proud of it. You look awesome. Thank you. I appreciate you so much. I want to bring that into context here, because that perspective is important here. But I'm someone who was raised in the 60s but also lives with a modern day mindset. And I say this because I consider myself someone who is a huge geek.

And being a geek is timeless. Basically, I am a working actor here in New York City. I am the content creator and executive producer of Native Brown Media and Cliff Dye Productions. And I consider myself to be a BIPOC individual. And let me explain

chose that moniker for myself just recently, just recently, based on some things that I learned. And I've decided to embrace that about myself, embrace everything about myself. So real quick, just so we make sure our audience understands what BIPOC mean, because you know this I didn't even know what it meant two weeks ago.

So can you tell us what is BIPOC? It's an acronym. Okay. And it means black indigenous people of color. Got you. So just to give a little context about that, we as black people here in America, or people who have identified or have been labeled as African American here in the United States, we were given that label.

We weren't able to choose that. You mean the label of being black, but the label of being black? Because of how we look, how we phenotypically look, we've been labeled as black. And if you think about that color black, you're not black. And I'm definitely not that color. Right.

So we've been labeled this historically. And what I do know is that black people here, even if you have an African origin, if you came here during the transatlantic slave trade, or if you just came here as family coming here to live, the American dream because there were plenty of us that did.

Or if you were indigenous to America and you appeared to be black, you had dark skin, you had dark skin. So we are of a mixed race, but we are not able to claim that about ourselves. All the different parts all the different parts of ourselves. Now, it does not in any way negate my European heritage, because I'm very proud of that as well.

But how you see me as being black and possibly being mixed with something else as indigenous, I'm claiming that as a person of color, and this is what it means. So a lot of us here in America ourselves to be black, indigenous people of color, because we are people of color.

Not necessarily black, but people of color with a huge, more richer heritage of mixture of family that are indigenous, European and such. And we'll get into that a little bit later into our conversations. Absolutely. I consider myself to be BIPOC and why I decided to take on that name about myself and identify her as myself in such a late age.

And the results of that as well, some of the things that have happened to me when I say that, but that is a little bit about myself. And when we go further into these conversations, I will kind of share a little bit more. But thank you so much for having me as a host.

I think we're going to do good work. No, no. You already started us off. Right. And this is one of the reasons that you should tune into a Black Executive Perspective podcast. Just as Les was giving her background, and she just talked about things that the majority of people don't know.

Right. And it's no different than somebody being Irish and Catholic, having some Spanish background that makes you up in your totality of who you are. So this podcast is really for you. Right. And it's very important that you understand what we're going to put together here and more importantly, why it's going to be beneficial for you to be able to come and watch on a weekly basis.

Right. First is first, one of the things that we want to break a stronghold is that most people feel uncomfortable talking about race. If you think about it, it boggles the mind. Right. Les just talked a little bit about being labeled certain things in the whole nine yards since we've been in this country, we have never really the majority of us never really have honest and open conversations about race.

So we're going to do that here to make people to be more comfortable to talk about the topic. We talk about everything. We talk about everything else, but when it comes to this, we avoid it. Right. So we're asking you to come with an open mind and be willing to listen and learn from a Black Executive Perspective podcast.

Right. All the things about race. The other thing is that a lot of my white brothers and sisters and that's people we know and people that we don't know, they have real questions. There's stuff that they want to know about, about people of color, their background should I call you this?

Are you that? But they're afraid to ask those questions because they going to be judged as a racist. Right. Not here. You will have that ability to ask stuff that you think about. Out that you want to know. Because if you think about it, if you're able to do that, what does that do?

It educates you and it brings us all closer together. Right? Les, I agree with you totally. I think one of the best things about this podcast is that we are going to discuss our real, authentic experiences in a very candid way. We're not going to shy away from some of the things that have been triumphant for us, hurtful for us, our perspectives on things, our misconceptions of things.

So this is part of what this podcast is about. We want to get our audience members engaged in these experiences because I'm quite sure some people out there have had these same experiences that we've had and haven't been able to talk about them. There's no question. And when we talked about this is going to be through storytelling.

We're going to tell our stories, our guests are going to tell their stories. They're going to get vulnerable here. They're going to open up. We're going to open up. Because at the end of the day, we're all human and we can't learn from one another unless we share what those vulnerabilities are.

Because believe it or not, the stuff that we go through, you go through. And a lot of times we think, oh, it just must be me, right, or I'm the only one going through this. Right? And at the end of the day, it's not. So being able to tell those stories that we went through is going to really be something that you're going to want to listen to because I'm pretty sure it's going to be very relatable.

Right. And we're going to have guests on here that might not necessarily agree with our own beliefs. Correct. So we're going to stand our grounds. But basically what we're here to do is to educate one another. The whole essence of what we are is educating each other. So even though we may stand our ground, we're also wise enough to realize that there are some things that we do not know that's correct.

And maybe our guests don't know either. So we're going to have this conversation in this space so that we can come to a meeting of minds, basically. We also know that by having these conversations, it will help us to successfully navigate the world as a

thing or the other reason why you want to watch a Black executive perspective is exactly piggybacking off what Les talked about. By coming here and learning different perspectives, it's going to make you have a deeper, more understanding of the people around,

going to you don't have to listen to politicians or somebody else try to tell you about a certain group. Right. You're going to now because at work, even though we work with one another, even though we work with people from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, it's all surface. We chat, we talk about a little bitty thing.

Hey, how was the weather? How's your family? Blah, blah, blah. But then when work is over, the majority of us go. Our own neighborhoods. So there's no real deep connection. Okay? So by attending and listening and watching a black executive's perspective, you'll be able to get that deep connection which will help break down stereotypes and misnomers.

That's right. We won't keep it 100 no cap, because I'm telling you no. I think there's this misconception about being somebody of color in an executive position that we don't identify with our blackness or our experience. But we're definitely going to show you all our authentic self here. Exactly.

And now listen, I know it's labeled. The title is A Black Executive Perspective podcast. But this is not just for people of color. This is for everyone, right? So we're going to talk and we're going to dive in to all backgrounds. We're going to talk about what black people or people of color go through.

But then we're also going to discuss from our white brothers and sisters, their perspectives, what is important to them, how to be an ally, how to understand more of the people that you work with on a daily basis or your neighbors, what their perspective is. But more importantly, people of color need to understand your perspective too.

Because at the end of the day, we're one sided, right? We're one sided. In other words, this is what I believe or this is what I think. And then this person over here, this is what I believe and this is why I think. And until we sit down and look each other in the eye and have that perspective and listen, more importantly, listen to the other person's perspective, we're not going to move forward.

So we can sit here on a Black Executive's Perspective podcast and talk about black people all day long and talk about things that we deal with, blah, blah, blah. But if white people are not open to listening and we don't also share their perspective, we're still going to be siloed.

So here, this podcast is for everyone. That's right. And we're not just going to specifically talk about workplace issues. We're going to talk about the history behind what shapes the opinions and mindsets of our culture today. Correct. So we will definitely talk about workplace navigation and things like that.

But we also want you to be able to navigate your space, your community, your world by talking about our experiences and the history behind why people believe a certain way. Why people treat us a certain way. Exactly. Because now we're facing a community. We're facing a world right now where they're taking that out of high schools and classes.

The truth about who are our contributions of people of color to this world, our contributions as people of color to America. So we're going to have these conversations. This is a place of education and knowledge, no question. And when you talk about education, Les, we're also and you're 100% right, we're going to talk about some corporate stuff and a lot of stuff is Going To Be Outside.

However, by watching a black executive perspective podcast, you're going to be able to learn people of color how to navigate corporate. America, right? How to be able to be your authentic self and still be ambitious and still be able to get to where you want to go. We've had those experiences.

We're going to have people on here that has those. This is when we talk education, we're talking education from all different facets, right? And if you are a leader, be it a person of color or a person that is not of color, we're going to help you be able to navigate your workforce, to be able to speak to the people of color within your management realm, and how you can approach them through a cultural knowledge and understanding of who they are and their mindset.

So this is a place where you're going to be able to have those conversations like, what should I tell my employee who is coming from an underserved community that is now finding themselves in a position of leadership and how they should react within this community? A majority corporate America, which is of course a white corporate America, how they are now going to transform but still keep their authentic self as a leader within this community.

No question. No question. And look, at the end of the day, our country is growing and yes, it is becoming more diverse. I know some people don't want that. They are afraid of that, right? But at the end of the day, in another 20 years, the majority of people will be people of color.

So it's important that we all finally sit down and discuss and learn from one another so we can have a better perspective and really understand where each person is coming from, their culture, their background, their fears, their strengths, the whole nine yards. And not let politicians dictate that to us, because their goal is to divide and conquer at a black executive perspective.

Our goal is to bring people together. Okay? So hopefully we've discussed a lot of things, litany of things, I would say why we feel that this should be a podcast, that you should come on a weekly basis and be able to come and be able to get fed and be able to provide something that's going to provide value to you in your career, in your family, in your daily walk on this planet.

And like I said, our goal is to create one race, the human race. Now, that kind of dovetails in terms of what I want to ask the legendary Les Fry here, and we call this turning point. I would love to hear from you. What was the turning point in your life?

A woman who grew up in St. Louis in the 60s. When did you find out or what happened to you that you knew that that race was going to be a factor in your life?

And then, more importantly, how did it make you feel? And then what did you do moving forward to deal with that? awakeness awareness, I should say. Wow, that's such a deep conversation to have, because I have to tell you that it just wasn't one moment. It were several moments, but I can tell you about my first moment.

And my first moment was that my family, we were a very close knit, the family, and during holidays, we would all gather together and go into St. Louis. I grew up I was born in a small town. It's a river city. It's called Alton, Illinois. My mother moved us to St.

Louis when I was about seven years old, but our family still got together, and we went on picnics and stuff together for holidays. So for Memorial Day or 4 July, we were all together, and we had, I would say, a regular, traditional thing where we went to Forest Park, which is in St.

Louis every year for maybe 4 July, and you were allowed to grill, and everybody came there. We were all gathered together, right. My mother we didn't have very much money, but my mother always made sure that my sister and I were just adorable in how we were presented. We had the same kind of clothes on and everything like that.

And so while we were in Forest Park, and I would say this was probably maybe late 60s, early 70s, we were in Forest Park. We found two little white girls that were playing. Everybody was close to each other. It was not like a designated space for specific people that were out there hanging out.

And we started playing with these two little white girls. We started playing and talking to them and everything befriending them. And at some point, the mother of these two little white girls saw that we were playing with her daughters, and she came over and grabbed her daughters and slapped my sister and said, get away from her, you little N word.

Now, we didn't realize at that time, my sister and I didn't realize what was really going on here. So real quick, how old were you and your sister? So I think we were about maybe six, seven, eight years old about that time. Got you. We were little kids, right?

If you look at the circumstance here, neither those little children, the little white girls, nor did we see color here. Didn't see color at all. We didn't see color. It was with some other kids, right. We just came over there and started playing with them, and it caused such a ruckus because the lady ended up leaving, that our whole family was looking for this lady now.

So you guys went back to your parents and told them. I went back to my mother and told her that this lady slapped my sister. At that moment, I don't think that we really knew what that was, because we were so protected by our family and we didn't identify what we didn't know what that was even at that age, even it had to happen several times before I started realizing that there was an issue with color.

And I will talk about some of those incidents in our Future podcasts. But that was the first incident that I remember here. Am now remembering at 61, I'm remembering that particular incident,

that moment. So, like you said, you still remember it when it happened. Obviously, it was a shock, right. You didn't think of color at that time frame. It was just we just kids. We want to play. Exactly. And that was the first turning point that you still remember. However, you said there were multiple, right?

And give me another one and tell me a little bit. Did you carry it? Did it make you think differently? Did it make you act differently? Give us a little bit, and I'm going to fast forward now to grade school. Okay. One of the things that my mother did and I kind of recall asking my mother why she did this, because St.

Louis was not racially integrated at the segregated. It was very segregated. But my mother chose to move us from our small community, our sheltered community, and move us to St. Louis. And the places that she moved us to, which was called North County at the time, the schools were not integrated.

Matter of fact, the schools that we went to, there might have been maybe, like, three black kids at the whole entire school. So my second incident that I recall was I might have been in probably about the third grade. I was going to a predominantly white school, and I had a teacher that did not like me, and I didn't understand that she was racist.

I did not know that because I wasn't taught that in my house. My mother always told us we could be whatever we wanted to be, do whatever we wanted to do. Little did I know that my mother had kind of forged the way and for us to be protected in the sense that we know, experiencing those kind of things.

And the incident I recall and I remember the teacher's name, and you know who she's probably not living anymore. Her name was Mrs. Romaine. I'll never forget this. We were doing an art project, and we had to use a potato. I don't know why we were using potato, but we had to use a potato, and we all had to bring a potato to school.

And when everybody got doled out their little potato to start the art project, I didn't have a potato. I took the potato, but it was mine. And one of the other little girls was a white girl did not have her potato. So she didn't bring a potato in. You brought one in.

I brought a potato in, but that's not what my teacher told everybody. She told me, and let me just preface this by saying that whenever I got up on the board to do anything or whatever, she would shame me. So oh, my gosh, it was so awful. I'm even to this day, a little stigmatized by that a little bit, trying to shame you.

Like, give me an example. I'm not stigmatized, but I have some issues of residual issues as a result of that math was not always my best subject. It's not that I'm in capable of doing math or anything but kids some things, they just excel and other things right? We are strengths and weakness.

This, but when it came to me doing math, she would just say, like, horrible things like, you're stupid, or, you don't know that. Why aren't you studying this? She would not do that to the other children in the class at all. But when I got up there to do my math, it was extra pressure upon me to succeed, and it was very nasty.

But I didn't see it as this way. I just saw her as being a very mean teacher. You're right. I didn't see her as being a racist because I didn't identify with identify. So going back to the potato incident, she basically said, you didn't bring a potato. And I said, but I did.

And she said, no, you didn't, because you don't have potatoes in your house. You don't have money to have potatoes. She said that? Oh, yeah, you don't have money to have potatoes in your house. And finally, let me tell you what my saving grace was. The little girl who did not bring a potato said, no, that is her potato.

I didn't bring a potato. I forgot it. And then what did she say? She basically just kind of said, all right, well, I'll give you a potato because she had extra potatoes. Kidding me. Yeah, but I'm telling you, I didn't recognize that until I got older. Then I start realizing that this was a racial incident here.

What possessed this woman to hate me so much? For no reason. For no reason. For no reason. And you were how old were you? Ten. I must have been in the third grade at that time. Yeah, about an eater or something like that. But my point, I guess what I'm flabbergasted about at this time is that one.

I still remember that. I remember the teacher, I remember the incident. I remember everything that happened in that class. It stuck with me. And even though I don't carry it into who I was, and like I said, there are other incidences, not until I got older did it become a lot more profound in me.

And then I started taking action as an older adult saying, okay, I'm going to have to stop this, or I'm going to have to use my rights to do this. But those moments of

racist intent stay with us, and that's the important thing to remember here. And I don't know if it's intended. I don't know if it shapes who we are today, and I don't know if it shapes the mindset. My mindset has definitely changed about that. I could have taken that moment as a child and said, all white people are bad.

But I didn't because my family wouldn't allow me to do to do that. Later, I found out why, and it's because we are of mixed race in our family. But that was never the issue there my mother's. Her important thing to us was, how are you going to navigate this world knowing that someone's going to see you differently because you're a black child.

And she did a great job in doing that, god rest her soul. She did a great job in helping us navigate that. Because I don't think I would be in the position that I'm in today or have been able to succeed in life that. The way that I have.

But Missouri was just like a hot pot of racism at that time. And it's getting better. It's becoming a little bit more diverse. But I have so many incidences that occurred to me. Yeah. The reason I wanted to share this with our audience today, we have and I think a lot of people of color have what we call turning points.

Right. I think all in general, I think all human beings have some type of turning point. If they were poor or whatever, something, right? But when it came to race, the majority of us woke up one day, and all of a sudden we had an incident happen, and it let us know that what we thought or how innocent we thought everything was, or how we were a part of the community.

We were just like everybody else. That moment changed us. What was yours? It's interesting. I'll tell you. Mine was similar growing up in Detroit, Michigan, but also that turning point, and you talked a little bit about it. That turning point, I never forgot it. I did suppress it, and I'll get into that.

But that turning point is the main inspiration that made me do what we're doing today. Right. And so sometimes a negative, not sometimes, a lot of times a negative can turn into a positive. Right. But growing up in Detroit, even though at that time, I'm talking in the 70s, detroit was the fifth 6th largest city in the United States.

It was 1.61.7 million people that lived in Detroit. And then, obviously, a lot of times, people think that, oh, the south, segregation and Jim Crow and stuff like that. At the end of the day, Troy was segregated, too. All right, let's hear the commonality here. Midwest. Yeah, Midwest. The whole nine yards.

Right. However, my mother, who is from New York, she grew up in Long Island, and she moved to Detroit when my grandmother passed away when she was 13, and she went to live with her aunt in Detroit, Michigan. My mother, because she grew up in New York, she had a different perspective.

She had a broader perspective, I should say. Right. And obviously, she had her things that she went through. And as all parents do, you want to make things a lot better for your kids, right? So we never

think it's. One time, my mother was having some economic challenges. It was a little later, but for the most part, we lived in an integrated side of Detroit, right? So my neighborhood, there were black, white kids, Jewish kids. We were all playing together. Right. I mean, it's different today because kids don't go outside.

They don't play outside, right. In my neighborhood, you would have 30, 40, 50 kids on a Sunday running up and down the street, riding their bikes. Their parents will sit on. On the front porch in the whole nine yards, right? So my turning point happened when I was ten, my brother was nine, I'm the oldest, and my mother sent us to McDonald's to pick up some food.

And we were walking me and my brother went to and this is not we did it before. And we were walking to McDonald's and we got the food and we're walking back, and then these white kids were riding their bike and they rode past us and they knocked the bags out of our hand, knocked our food on the ground, and then we heard them say, we got those in words, right?

And when they said it, I didn't even know what they were talking about. So my brother was crying, so we went home. It was just a couple of blocks from her house. So we went home and we told my mother what happened. And she sat us down, and at first, to be honest, I was like, It was an accident, okay?

I just thought it was an accident. And then my mother said, no, it wasn't an accident. We didn't know what the N word meant, okay? So then that's when she sat down and talked to us about race, and she told us that some people would not they wouldn't accept us just because of how we looked, right?

And then she talked about the police and she talked my mother I wouldn't say she was militant, but she wanted her kids to know what time it was. This is ten years old. I'm ten, my brother's nine, my sister is eight, and my other sister is five. And she sat us all down and she had this conversation, and then here's the kicker.

She said, however, you can be whatever you want to be, and do not use race as an excuse on why you can't get ahead. So she was telling us the horrors, okay? She was telling us all the things, but she said, Regardless of that, you still can be successful, and more importantly, don't never use race as an excuse.

So I took that literally when I opened up in this podcast, and I said, I've been in corporate America for almost 35 years, and I never talked about race. I was silent on it. A lot of that was because of what my mother said to me, and it was in the back of my head, right?

he advertising industry since: 1998

e been a vice president since: 2009

So the higher I went up. The less people of color I saw right now. Did I have a lot of people that were white that helped me out? Absolutely. There's a ton of people who saw stuff in me that I didn't see in myself. Right. But there is something to seeing people that look like you.

to how we met. So in March of: 2020

And I'm talking the thick of it in New York City. I started March 9. Our office was in Rockefeller Center. I started that Monday, and then that Wednesday we went to work, and they said, Take your stuff. And then we worked from home for a couple of years. Okay?

And so I didn't know anybody. I didn't know you. Why? Because I didn't meet anybody in the office. I didn't meet nobody. Everything was virtual. I had to build out a sales team. I had to do all these things. I had to do it virtually. Even somebody on my team.

I interviewed her. She quit her job. She was supposed to start. She didn't start to April 6, but she started virtually and almost didn't start, because they wasn't built to onboard people. From a virtual standpoint, the only reason she was able to keep the job is because she had already quit her job.

forward. Here comes March of: 2020

He wanted to build a relationship with me. We wasn't going into the office, so he said, hey, let's go hiking. He lived in Connecticut, I lived in, you know, he picked a place. We went hiking just to be able to spend time with him. He was our chief revenue officer, so we did that, and then him and know, we left.

And then I got home, and we saw how everybody was going off over the George Floyd thing, right. And I was sitting there watching the television, and I can tell you flat out, all of a sudden, this emotion started coming to the forefront. Those years, of all the things that I had to deal with, that I repressed, that I held within.

Right. It's hard to explain. Nobody said nothing to me. Nobody said, oh, I can't. It was just and I just became disgusted. And then I remembered it never went away. What happened when I was ten years old? Yeah, I carried that for a long period of time, and I carried it because my mother said, don't never let race become an excuse.

So I didn't say a lot.

Didn't say a lot. So at that moment, Les, I wanted to do something. I didn't know what to do, right? So I went upstairs in my office, and I wrote it on a Microsoft Word document of what happened to me when I was a kid. Because this is the thing, when that happened, I changed.

I immediately knew do Everybody knew me in my neighborhood as Tony. Once that incident happened, I was no longer Tony. I was the black kid, right? And this is the thing that people don't recognize. We have kids. All of our kids grow up with different issues. And as a parent, you're trying to build their confidence.

We go to school. We have self esteem issues. We want to fit in, and we have insecurities. I'm too fat. I'm this my nose ain't right. You have all those things that you're developing through as a kid. So then now I was called the N word, and mom, my mother told me how people are going to look at me differently.

That had a huge effect on me. Huge. I never said anything, but a lot of the things that I did after in terms of how I looked, worrying about white people are going to think this. I wasn't thinking that before, but now I was thinking it, right? So I wrote that story, and I posted it on Facebook, and I wrote this story.

My wife didn't even know anything about my kids, didn't know anything about this story, put it on Facebook. Everybody started reaching out, right? Now, here's the irony. Jason Kyler became the CEO of Warner Media that week. He had just started, so he sent an email to know and for our audience at that time, Warner Media, which you probably know, owns CNN, Turner, TBS, HBO, the whole nine yards, 25,000 employees, right?

He became the CEO, and he sent the email out to all the employees and said, I'm here, and I don't like what happened, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So all of a sudden, I was like, I'm going to send this to him. So I remember me and my wife were going on a walk, and I was like, you know my wife Gail?

And I said, hey, I'm thinking about sending this to Jason Kyler. And she said, you should, right? And I remember going up to my office, and I wrote the email, and I put that, and it took a minute to hit send.

Well, I'll tell you why. Because I got no leverage. I don't know nobody. I'm emailing the CEO, right? I don't know him. So I'm like, this could be it easy. Nice knowing you. I'm great to meet you. Nice knowing you. Right? I don't know. But I didn't care. So I sent it to him.

And since he's in La. I think he emailed me back at two, three in the morning. Go ahead. Fact that he emailed you, emailed me back. So home such a good dude. I mean, there are so many things I can say about Jason. Kyler. I don't know where he is right now, but he was awesome, exceptional leader, and he was all about and you said it.

He was an exceptional leader. He was all about culture, right? Email me back. Tony, thank you for sending this. Really sorry what happened to you as a kid. I'm here now. I want to make things change. I want to make changes here. I want to make this an inclusive organization.

And trust me, he put stuff together, right? So NetNet then my boss, Jason Brown, who him and I went on a hike. I sent it

I sent it to JB. JB. Called me and he was crying. Tony, I'm so sorry. He was like, I had my head in the sand, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he said, what do you want to do? And at that time, all I was thinking, I just want to share this, what happened?

So I can just let people know what happens to black people, what we go through. We don't tell you all these things. We hold these things in. And what happens is because

most white people think that everything is equal because they see us succeeding, but they don't understand the underlying, all the hoops, all the stuff, right? So he said, what do you want to do? And I was like, I just really want to share this story to the company. Right?

And he said, Let me think about it. Let me get back to you. And a couple days later, he said, hey, man, would you be open to chatting with everybody? And I was absolutely

So and you may not know this, and let me introduce our executive producer is Adrian Alvarado. He's sitting behind the background, right? He's the one that makes all this happen. His name, we call him A. So remember, we're virtual.

So we need a place where me and JB can meet together and we know chat and do this. So my wife knew AA, and she said, hey, you should get with

know. He has a podcast studio. He's working with a company that has studio, blah, blah, blah. So I got with him and we went into their office. They let us be able to broadcast for fee.

Wait, it cost to be the boss? Yeah, for fee. Right. But it didn't matter. So I remember we was going to do this, and we had like, ten minutes before we're going to go on. So

we were just going to chat. So I was like, no, we got to have something. So I created this deck, and on the deck I wrote an open conversation on race. Okay. And then because I knew it was important to make people feel comfortable, because we never talked about race at work at all.

Can I interject? Go ahead. Let me interject here.

Similar with me, but I didn't have the same type of you had a lot more connections. And so grew up right on the border of Ferguson and Florescent in Missouri. So the. That happened with Michael Brown and Ferguson was very dear to my heart. There was a lot of things that went on with that that the media was showing, but was not about the community itself.

There were a lot of, I would say, red herrings there, because that community, even though the police force was a racist police force, the community was mixed. But you didn't see that on the media. Only saw the black folks in the media. But there were white people that lived in that community, too, businesses that white people owned that had been in that community for years.

And there were actually people coming in from other states to cause ruckus know the city was on fire. Ferguson was on fire. But coming back to this discussion on race, at the time when this whole incident happened with Michael Brown and this huge implosion of racial chaos that was happening in our country, people were hurt.

There's no question. People were in pain. And I'm not just talking about I'm not just talking black people. I'm talking about white people. There's no question. So you would not have been able to have that format if people were not because they were like, okay, obviously we've been living in a bubble here.

Exactly. We are totally not aware of what's going on. Exactly. And that space was created for you by white people. There is no question. They themselves were like, I did not know this was going on in the community. You hit it right on the head. The majority of people were white, and they really I told you, JB cried.

And he said, I had my head in the sand. Great guy, nice guy. Right? None of that, but just not aware. Not aware. Right? So we started this. I wrote an open conversation of race. But one of the things and you notice one of the things I thought ten minutes before we were supposed to go on is that for this to really work, where people can open up where white people can open up and feel comfortable talking about it without worrying about being judged as races, I came up with ground rule.

Remember the ground rule? I didn't read a book and say, this is what you do. I just thought of it real quickly. And the first ground rule was actively listen. Right? Listen. And what for our audience who may not know what actively listening is, actively listening is to listen to understand the complete message that's being said.

If you don't know it, you ask questions. Right? So that was the first thing. And then I forgot about this. JB had me because I had done training in terms of actively listening and stuff to that nature. So he said, Tony, can you train everybody on actively listening? I was like, absolutely.

So we did that first. So then it was no politics. That was one of the ground rules. Because guess what? Unfortunately, when you bring people together.

Politics, and it's a hot topic issue, and people don't listen. If you throw puffs, it was no politics, no judging. You can be open. Nobody's going to judge you here, right? It was a safe space. Judgment created safe space. Right? Now, in the beginning, I don't know how safe they thought it was, right?

Well, no, there was some hesitancy. There's no question. People were like, okay, can really right? If my manager is in this meeting, how am I going to be able to ask a question and stuff? But when they started seeing that people were having it took one person to ask a question that was uncomfortable for us to begin to have these conversations.

And what I'll say and that's where you was instrumental, is that so? In the beginning, I had to be the guinea pig. I had to share my story. I had to talk about my vulnerabilities. I had to talk about the things that I was afraid of that I never told, right?

Never, never told anyone. I had to do this because that was the only way. If people were like, Well, Tony's, oh, my God. I talked about my biases. Because as human beings, we all got biases, right? So I talked about my biases. I had to be the guinea pig.

But back to the point. The point is, you started joining, and then you jumped right in and you just said, Why? Right? The experiences you had through your life, the Michael Brown incident, the whole nine yards. But in the day, the goal was to educate white people, and let me tell you why.

Because what Les just got finished saying, the first session that we had, that's what I was hearing a lot of white people saying. I didn't know this was going on. I can't believe this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And at first, my first reaction was I didn't say nothing, but I was like, how?

Don't you know? Okay, but here's the kicker. I then thought about my wife, because, you know, and my audience may not my wife is white, okay? And she grew up in a small town outside of Boston, maynard, Massachusetts. Right? There was one black family in the whole town of 10,000 people, right?

She didn't know this was going on either until we started dating,

until we went to a restaurant, right? Exactly. That's funny, because now you just basically reminded me of the initial conversation that you and I had. I wasn't saying anything in our first meeting. And then when you told me you were married to a white woman, I said, oh, well, let's talk about the racism towards you from the black community because you're married to a white woman.

How many stares have you gotten? The Honey sisters that broke it right there. That was like, exactly. Because we were making it real. But that was the point I'm making. I had to be vulnerable. I had to throw my cards on the table. I had to. Let this is the thing, and you know this.

Let. Me tell you I'm telling you the story, but let me tell you the real motivation, because I didn't tell you. I told you that when that McDonald's incident happened to me and my brother, my mother sat us down and told us about race. When the George Floyd thing happened, me and my wife had to sit down

with our twelve and eleven year old daughters and tell them about race. 40 years later. Yes, 40 years later, I had the same conversation my mother had with me 40 years later. I had to have that conversation with my daughters. That was it. I was done. I don't care what it took.

rs. Yes, the Dow went up from: 2000

And that percentage is 0.8. Okay? Which we'll talk about that at another time. But my point is, sitting back 40 years, nothing changed. So that was the motivation to finally do something, not wait on a politician to, oh, we're going to write this legislation. No, you know what? And it don't matter if you're a Democrat, Republican, or Independent.

It don't matter who's been in charge. We've had the same issues, okay? That was it for me. So I was willing to do whatever it took to try to bring people together, because for 30 something years, I didn't say nothing and nothing changed. Right? And so, as you know, we started this thing at work in corporate America, where we can now, instead of sitting in the living room, we sat in the conference room and we talked openly and honestly about race.

Guess what? Nobody died. Nobody got into a fight. No negatives education. Now, this wasn't for to be fair, I thought it was just for a week. Oh, yeah, all right. It kept going. I started doing it each week. People kept showing up at work at a Fortune Five. We're talking a huge organization at T owned WarnerMedia Xander DirecTV.

I'm talking we put this on and people kept coming. Then the kicker go ahead. Let me just say this. The kicker is that At T sold Xander, sold WarnerMedia, and we still have people coming from those countries, those companies. Yes. Right. Still coming to have these conversations. And new people.

We're introducing new people. So right now, my space is Microsoft. We have people from Microsoft attending these meetings, because I didn't know that there was a place for us to have this conversation. Exactly. When I knew that we were making an impact is when white people started raising their hands and said, hey, I want to present something.

I want to put content together. I want Tony Kennedy. I was, like, absolutely right. And I'll tell you this real quickly. We talked about a white supremacist. We talked about everything. Right? Everything, right? And a couple of things. When the president of our or Tony Tony G, he reached out to me, and he was like, Tony, we still pandemic.

He said, Tony, I'm hearing what you're doing. Can you come and have coffee with me? Right. At Hudson Yards, right? And we couldn't even go in the office. So him and I met him outside, and he

you know, what you're doing is fantastic. He said, I want to take what you're doing and scale it all across the organization. Right? Okay. And unfortunately, we weren't able to do that because we got sold off, all right? Unfortunately, all that being said, we did this for almost three and a half years now, right?

Three and a half years. We've sat down and had open and honest conversations

with all different types of people in multiple organizations, right? And what we found out is this. It's okay to talk about race. It's okay not to know. It's okay to want to know more. It's okay to ask uncomfortable questions. It's okay because by doing that, people come together.

And this is why we've launched this podcast of black executives, Perspective podcast, because we want to scale this out, and we want to touch more lives, and we want to help educate people, because at the end of the day, unless you know this, the majority of people are not bad people.

They're not racist on both sides. And when we talk of race, we're not talking about white people. There's issues with Asians. There's all issues. There's intercooler challenges between Hispanics and blacks, and you name it, there's an issue. There's racism within our own races. That's what I'm saying. With blacks, right?

With everything. So at the end of the day, but the key is people are ignorant because they. They don't know and they're letting other people dictate to them what other groups are or what they're trying to take from you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's why me and the legendary Les Fry are going to be your host with a litany of other guests to come on here to be able to help educate, have these uncomfortable conversations that become comfortable.

I want to say that our success is dictated in all of us coming together as a workforce, as a people, and it doesn't matter what color it is. We must depend upon each other to be successful. Exactly. We need one another, right? And we can't follow the strategy that's been put in place since they started.

And Les is going to talk more about this in other episodes since they started calling people black white because there was no such thing. There was no such thing. Okay? And that was on purpose. Remember, the strategy is divide and conquer, and we're going to dive into more of that.

And that hasn't changed since this country, since it's been populated, all right? From a European standpoint. Okay? So Les Fry, my sister from another mister,

as you can see here, smart, passionate, big, heart, love. And if there's anybody that I'm glad that's going to partner with me and more importantly, that you get a chance to listen to on a weekly basis and learn from, is the legendary Les Fry. Les, final words. I could say the same about you.

I would not go on this journey with anybody else or find this. I mean, I think we are going to do great work. I know your track record. So I am in for the long haul. And I just want to close by saying, listen to this podcast, join this podcast, ask us questions, things that we may not even talk about on this podcast.

We're going to give you an authentic, honest response. And if we don't know, we're going to find out. Exactly. We'll find out and we'll come back and we'll educate you a little bit. But I think based on what we are presenting here, we are hoping or no, I am convinced that we're going to change lives and perspectives.

There's no question. And one of the other things that we're going to do, we're not in a vacuum, so there's always things that's happening from a world perspective, hot topic issues. So we're going to discuss those in real time here on a black executive perspective, right? So you can hear our perspectives and not the spin that somebody is trying to give you.

So you can find out more at our website, blackexecutiveprespective.com. And then. Also, you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts at podcast. In addition, you can follow us on Instagram X, which is now used to be Twitter, but now they call X or whatever. I don't know what.

Next thing you know is we call something else or whatever social YouTube, whatever social media platform you follow. So really, I'm so excited that we're launching this. I'm so excited that you're going to be on this journey with us. For my co host, the legendary Les Fry. I'm Tony Tidbit.

Come and join us and let's talk about it. We're out. A black executive perspective.

Look man, they didn't get a chance to play chess. They had to play checkered. Let's talk about it. T openly and honestly. There was a lot of smart kids there. Black executive perspective. Now my story is not unique. There's thousands of professionals of color who have experiences like mine.

A black executive perspective. Whether you're aware of it or not, it's a topic that is often avoided. We'll discuss race and how it plays a factor and how we didn't even talk about this topic because we were afraid.