Trudi Lebron - The Antiracist Business Book: An Equity Centered Approach to Work, Wealth, and Leadership

The Antiracist Business Book

An Equity Centered Approach to Work, Wealth, and Leadership

Trudi Lebron

Forward by Arlan Hamilton

For everyone using their vacation time, sick time, and lunch breaks to work on their side hustle.

I see you.

You have to act as if it were possible to

radically change the world.

And you have to do it all the time.

ANGELA Y. DAVIS

I often say you should always be yourself so that the right people can find you. When Trudi Lebron and I found each other, it felt like a true connection. Trudi has been investing in her community since she was a teenager. Her impressive history took her from being a single teen mom with two kids to teaching equity and diversity coaching on how to build antiracist business models. And now, she is adding revolutionary author to the list.

The Anti-Racist Business Book is an informative, empowering tool that will benefit everyone who reads it, whether youre a CEO or an aspiring entrepreneur. Having worked with Trudi, I am amazed by her commitment to racial justice and equitable leadership. Her passion toward bringing antiracism to business has brought a new lens, focusing on how we can transform how we think about work, wealth, and leadership.

As a Black, gay woman who was once homeless and sleeping on airport floors, I am all too familiar with the disparities we, as underestimated members of society, face. Ive seen firsthand how racism and capital are linked. Its the reason I built a venture capital fund from the ground up and turned it into a multimillion dollar initiative. In a few years, I went from sleeping in the San Francisco airport to jet-setting from its gates all across the country

Like Trudi, Im determined to have a massive influence on the business world. My way of doing that is investing in startup companies led by underestimated founders. It was insane to me that 90 percent of venture funding was going to white men. As a person who had no background in finance, even I could see that innovation, motivation, and intelligence were being squandered. The truth is, we dont have to put up with that shit anymore. As the founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital, I am working to minimize these unjust funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are BIPOC, women, and LBGT. Trudis work goes hand in hand with my philosophies on business, opportunity, and talent, which is why I was excited to work with her.

This book isnt just about why we need to create antiracist business practices; its a deep dive into remixing business, rethinking and reframing how we interact, negotiate, develop, discuss, and define our economic relationships. As Trudi says, Its not business if its not personal.

Trudis vision aligns with my mission, which is to create a world in which generations of wealth are attained and enjoyed by BIPOC, female, and LGBT communities. Our equity in this country is worth trillions of dollars, and its time to get that money where it belongs. Trudi and I share the common goal of liberating and uplifting the untapped potential in the business world. When we invest in and empower these underestimated sources of innovation and intelligence, we will experience a rich and diverse market full of growth and opportunities for everyone. Just as privilege begets privilege, growth begets growth. We dont have to work for white male bosses for pennies on the dollar anymore. We are becoming the bosses, the deep thinkers, the investors, and the changemakers. And its about damn time.

By picking up this book, you are uniting with us in our mission to finally paint the future we want to see. You are contributing to a bold, empowered force for change that is unapologetically declaring, underestimate us if you dare.

And The Antiracist Business Book will show you how.

F rom the time I was seventeen years old until I graduated at twenty-three, I attended college classes every single semester, including summers. The first few years I took classes part-time, on nights and weekends, because I didnt have childcare during the day. Once my kids were old enough for preschool, at the age of nineteen I enrolled in full-time classes and got a job on campus. My days were grueling. My father would watch me stress out over childcare, money, and my future, offering the best advice he could: Trudi, why dont you just take a break from school, and get a job at TSA?

I would look at him totally confused. This man raised me and should have known that there would be no way in the world that I would work for TSA. But his advice was sound. He was watching his daughter, a single mom of two boys, cry at the beginning of every semester because she didnt know if she could do it. He knew, like everybody else, that the chances that Id actually graduate were slim to none. Out of his best intentions, he was trying to give me an out.

As far as he was concerned, the most secure and stable path he could see was a federal job with the Transportation Security Administration. His selling points were job security, great benefits, a solid health-care plan, and, if I started when I was twenty, early retirement. Hed remind me that once my kids were older, I could go back to school and maybe even get the government to pay for it.

But I knew that if I took even one semester off, I would never go back. I also knew that I was not built to work for people. I was actually a terrible employee, and what made me a terrible employee were the same things that made me a terrible student in school. I asked too many questions, I didnt conform to the status quo, I confronted any perceived injustice, and I had a very low tolerance for arbitrary rules. So, no, TSA was not going to work.

When I was still in college, I started side-hustling as a teaching artist. I taught theater workshops to schoolchildren all over the state of Connecticut for fifty dollars an hour plus mileage. But there is a difference between side-hustling as an artist and building a business. And for a long time I was afraid to build a business because I thought that being a business owner would turn me into a bad person, a money-focused capitalist who would abandon her community. I thought that was the inevitable trade-offthe price of success.

After I graduated and entered the workforce, I found that this narrative was reinforced at every level. My whole career I was constantly doubted and patronized, confronted with advice about dressing more professionally if I wanted to be taken seriously, and working in places with racist and homophobic colleagues. I didnt have the power to speak up because my livelihood, and that of my children, was dependent on whatever institution I was working for at the moment. Throughout my career, there were times when I was responsible for upholding an unjust policy and my job was on the line if I tried to do the right thing. Like the time I was written up by my supervisor for feeding a pregnant student who had arrived to school late. I had violated a school policy that said that students who arrived at school after the bell could not eat breakfast. Conventional success in a corporate institution, or the nonprofit space, required a major compromise of my values. And I just couldnt do it anymore.

In 2008, I started doing diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting and training for national organizations, and I saw how even institutions whose central missions of diversity and inclusion also fell into the traps of toxic capitalism, bias, discrimination, exploitation, and compromising the very values that they were trying to instill in others.