• Host – Michele Heyward, Founder, PositiveHire
• Guest – Krystal Atha, Founder, CEO, Sembramos

We want to take an introspective look at Black Panther. We just lost Chadwick Boseman, who is like me and sock liner native who’s the same age so this is a huge loss for me on a different level than a lot of people on being from South Carolina him having risen to fame, and just how the characters he’s played, not just Black Panther. 

He also played James Brown, is also a native of South Ilana and was born 12 miles from where I’m sitting. So for me, it is a different type of loss from other fans because of what Chadwick bought to a lot of natives, especially in rural areas here in South Carolina. So I wanted to talk about the lens of Black Panther when it comes to protecting me inclusion.

KC added some things and let’s go through them.

1. Afrofuturism

Black Panther is Afro-Futurism. She admits that she doesn’t know that much about, but it has been very intriguing since Black Panther came out. It was big in the black community, but KC is in the Latino community, and she just wasn’t introduced to it. Black Panther introduced her to more Afrofuturism understanding, understanding that it’s imagination, plus liberation plus the future plus technology. 

      2. Optimism

 When you watch that, you feel the optimism. Because we see outcomes and belonging, which is something that we are striving to bring more of into the workplace, into our lives into the way that we show up. We want to feel belonging, we want to feel optimistic about the potential outcomes that can come into our lives.

      3. Inclusion

It breaks from the anti-black white settler narrative. What that means is that we have just been brought up in this society globally. Colonialism spread out all over the place, so it’s not just the United States but we have this colonizer mentality. Like if you’re powerful, or white is right, or whatever it is, that is, our condition. Whenever we think of something unconscious bias tells us you know, think of a doctor, boom, you’re thinking of a certain stereotype. 

       4. Colonizer

Afro-futurism breaks that colonizer brain that taught us to think in concrete ways that keep us in our place. “Maybe I’ll be called in for this, and I’ll take it, but it normalizes the word colonizer for me, and I got to say it, I got to say colonizer as a pejorative. Like very openly that just felt liberating to me.” Like a way that is understood because so many people watch the movie, so many people are hopefully being reflective about it and saying what it is. 

       5. Power of Black Women

Just normalize black power, people in power and to tie it into the workplace. I think we need to normalize seeing black people in power. So whenever it happens, people don’t just think, Oh, you were the diversity hire because our brains have been so conditioned to think in one way.

Watch the full video to see how Krystal and I discuss it more one by one with this topic!