I’ve had the benefit of having several careers in my life. Understanding how certain systems work within organizations in lending, finance, hospitality, healthcare, marketing, advertising, blogging, and podcasting has given me a pretty well-rounded understanding of how the world works. The world is a very broad term. I’m gonna focus more on the United States and more specifically, how people engage and interact with all of these sectors that I’ve had the privilege to work in and lead.

I remember getting my first start working for a securities firm in finance in Greenwich, CT. It was something I could never imagine or thought was possible for someone like me. This was in the late 2000s, around 2007 or so, when this opportunity presented itself. What’s ironic is that at the time, I was in lending for a company and I was also promoting nightclubs. Ironically, the director of this financial securities firm was at a party that I was hosting. From there, we interacted and, as you can imagine, hit it off. I’m sure this person in our short interaction had to determine – “Does this person have what it takes to make it?” At least, I would imagine that’s what this individual was asking themselves as they were talking and recruiting me for an opportunity, all within a nightclub environment.

Fast forward, I got the opportunity. I pass the required tests, get licensed, and there we have it. I’m working in Greenwich, CT. Now, there’s a lot in between, but one thing that I want to illuminate to everyone is that I never experienced any type of discrimination. Now, there’ve been other challenges within organizations, without a doubt, but discrimination itself was something I never sensed, not once. This was around 2007-ish. Later on, we witnessed the financial markets crashing and then the great recession—just trying to outline this time in history.

During this period, many women were in leadership positions at the very top of the organization. Also, more broadly, we already saw leaders in the Senate with Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate run. Later on, we saw politicians like Elizabeth Warren and others coming to the forefront, and we fast-forwarded to Amy Klobuchar and Tulsi Gabbard. The obvious are great leaders like Colin Powell, former president Barack Obama, and First Lady Michelle Obama. So, what am I getting at?

As a country, I’m trying to understand how it suddenly went from my personal experience of being treated fairly. I am a first-generation American with a community college education, the son of immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic—having all that and still not feeling a level of discrimination that people often talk about in mainstream media. How is it that we have become so divided recently, and all we seem to focus on is race?

We have to consider Dr. Martin Luther King and his “I Have a Dream” speech. This wasn’t just rhetoric. This was a moonshot idea of a world that does not see race, where young Black women and men can go to public areas where White and Black and every shade in between will be accepted not for the color of their skin, but for the content of their character. I’ll repeat it, the content of their character! And yet, since that speech in 1963, we hit a peak and apex, if you will, and then suddenly we’ve been on a decline on that thought.

And the ones to blame are both left and right from the political aisle. Because the truth is, to really create a society of equality, it does have to be colorless. It cannot focus on whether Black Lives Matter or white lives matter or brown lives matter or yellow lives matter, and so on. When you do that, you are doing the very thing that you say you want to eradicate, and that is creating further segregation or more segregation. Because that’s all people think about.

I just want to illuminate a few things for you to consider, including where we are as a country and when we had the incident with George Floyd. It’s extremely unfortunate what happened to him from a bad cop. That is not the ideal type of officer we want to serve our neighborhoods and our country. But we have to think clearly as a nation about who we are becoming when we raise statues for people like George Floyd compared to when we raised statues for people like Dr. Martin Luther King. Now, I know many are going to say that’s not the point; the point is to shed light on the constant discrimination and killing of African Americans in America. And there is absolute validation in that point.

However, I want to be able to bring back the ideology and the thought behind the civil rights movement and Dr. King’s message. Because that was the trajectory for improvement. I have an old episode that I produced in a podcast that talked about slavery. It also spoke about the eradication of slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation that was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 (100 years before King’s speech). However, that did not fix things immediately. What ended up happening is that we created black laws or black codes and Jim Crow laws that instilled segregation and imprisoned African Americans at an alarming rate.

We’ve come a long way from those times, and even after Dr. King’s unfortunate assassination, his message held strong for women, African-Americans, and every other minority in the United States. Where we saw and continue to see the country on an upward trajectory towards equality. 

The path forward isn’t through division by color or creed but through unity in our shared beliefs with humanity. When we focus on our differences rather than what we share in common, we move further from Dr. King’s vision, not closer to it. True equality means recognizing that all lives matter equally, without qualification or ranking. Only then can we truly judge each other based on the content of our character.