Tomi Berry: Why Equity, Not Equality?

Susan "Tomi" Berry, Jazz Vocalist, President of EQ Consulting, and Contractor at the National Center for Civil & Human Rights

Dylan: Hey everyone, welcome to the first episode of Jazz for Equity’s interview series, where I talk with musicians, advocates, and educators about topics at the intersection of Jazz and social equity. I’m your host, Dylan Rouvier, a sophomore at Leigh High School in San Jose, California and the founder of Jazz For Equity—an organization dedicated to bridging gaps between historically marginalized and underrepresented communities through the transformative power of music.

Before we introduce our first guest, I’d like to acknowledge that April is National Poetry Month. For our first episode, I’m happy to introduce Jazz vocalist and DEI consultant and practitioner Tomi Berry.

An accomplished, classically trained singer, Tomi has performed most of her life in multiple music genres, starting formally in gospel and spiritual church choirs in Montclair, NJ., and throughout college in classical and madrigal choirs, chorale, a musical, and was the first vocalist to solo with the Lafayette College Jazz Band. Tomi performs at clubs and venues around Atlanta. Check her social media for details. Tomi has a background in corporate facilitation, teambuilding, and executive coaching. She does contract training with the National Center for Civil & Human Rights with the Cultural Connections team. She is President and Co-Founder of EQ Consulting Network, which does leadership training using the somatic nature of horses in the process. Tomi also uses her knowledge of presentation skills and her own stage knowledge as a singer to coach others in stage presence and artist development through her company, Performance Max Global. She is a native of Montclair, NJ, and a graduate of Lafayette College in Easton, PA, with a B.S. in English. You can read more about Tomi Berry at her website, tomisings.com.

Welcome Mrs. Berry.

Tomi: Thank you Dylan, I appreciate being here today.

Dylan: Yeah of course, I really appreciate you being here too. But I'll start by asking, or I guess, saying, in spite of political pushback we've seen connected to diversity, equity and inclusion, many people don't actually fully understand these concepts. Furthermore, the term DEI is also sometimes re-appropriated as a dog whistle against cultivating inclusive colleges, workplaces and communities. Can you share not only the difference between equity and equality, but also why you think some people are challenging the concept of equity?

Tomi: Yes, I'd be happy to do that. Dylan, I'm going to share a slide on my screen for you to to check out, which is going to hopefully help clarify some of this information.

And I will just say that this is a slide from my actual contract work job with the National Center for civil and human rights. So I have permission to use this from my colleagues there, but it helps explain a little bit about the differences between what equity is versus what the equality is. So equality basically implies, if you look at the picture there on the left of the screen, equality implies that everybody starts from the same place and has the same opportunities and has access to the same resources. So if one person needs a box, then everybody gets the same box. And that's what we call equality. Everybody gets the same and is treated the same, right? So even though, if you look at this, the scenario on the left side of the screen shows a fairly tall person looking over the screen doesn't seem to have any problem seeing that ball field. And then the next one is a young, young person standing on tip toes, looking, trying to look over the fence, and seemingly having a little trouble with the same size box. And then this poor individual here in a wheelchair has a box, but it's not helping them in any way. So that's the idea of it's this one size fits all. That's equality, because everybody gets the same thing versus equity, which basically calls out the idea that everybody gets what they need versus having the same thing they get what they need. So in this scenario, you see the person looking over the fence with no box because they're tall enough to see over it, the young lady that was standing on her toes is now able to just stand normally and still see over the fence with her two boxes. And we took the box away from the person in a wheelchair because it was useless to her or him, because they need a ramp. So they get everybody doesn't get a ramp because they don't all need a ramp. So that's, that's the idea. It's not one size fits all. That's what equity is, as opposed to equality.

Dylan: Thank you very much. I have another question for you, and I'm wondering if you think or like, how close do you think America is to achieving actual equality instead of equity? Because obviously we're far from achieving actual equity for all groups, but I'm wondering if you think America actually has achieved equality yet?

Tomi: No, I don't think we have even close to either one. And with what's happening and what we're seeing in in the United States, it seems like we're getting further and further away from really having the stomach for understanding differences and understanding people's needs and caring about them, the empathy is is not even there. So you can't, you can't have, you can't have equity in a space like that, because one of the one of the values about D, E, and I, and D, E, and I, meaning diversity, equity and inclusion, has to do with it's kind of from the financial world that those terms are very much around the the concept of the financial services world. So you think about a portfolio. We want to have a diversified portfolio, because that way, if one part of your portfolio starts to drop, hopefully you have things in another portion of your portfolio that are going to either stay stagnant or start to rise based on what's going on in the market. And the markets are what they are. No one controls that. So it is purely how the market is driven. But that's the diversity side of it. Equity takes into account that you have someone has to kind of provide, that somebody has to give you something in order to make things equitable for you, and that's people that are in power, people that are in control. So again, thinking about the state of the US right now. Who's in control? Who has that power? And it's not necessarily being equitably distributed. And then you have the concept of inclusion. Inclusion means I have access to different forms of of services that are available to me in my portfolio. So I have all these things that I can include in my portfolio. Same rules apply. Do we have all the things that we need to be considered included, as far as people that have disabilities, people that are LGBTQ, people that are part of the racial diaspora, all of those things have to do with D, E and I, and there's so much backlash right now against that terminology, and it's It's really crazy, because it really is for everybody. It's not designed to exclude anyone, and that's what's so maddening about where we are today.

Dylan: Yeah, I think that's really insightful, and I appreciate it. Its also a little confusing to me, because D, E and I is, like, associated, I guess, with progressive movements, and "progress" is kind of like in progressive movement. So I don't really understand how people could be so against progress. I really appreciate you talking about the differences between equity and equality too. In building Jazz for Equity, it was also important to understand the difference between these terms, and a great disparity in wealth, opportunities and equity, can even be seen in San Jose, which is where I live. You can see this from stats like the Silicon Valley Index's reports that the top 0.001% of households hold more wealth in San Jose than the bottom 50% and a growing income inequality, which San Jose has contrasts with the lessening income inequality observed both station state and nationwide. And we also know that historical conditions lead to inequalities, and since we understand that jazz is a uniquely art form, American art form born in marginalized communities, can you tell us about your experience with jazz?

Tomi: Yeah, thank you for asking that question. Dylan, because, as I think about it, I came to jazz a little later in my life than than many people did who might have started when they were kids elementary school, I really became more aware of jazz towards latter high school years, and really into my college years, when I started hearing other people listening to different albums and different music than what I grew up with. I grew up listening to a lot of R&B, a fair amount of gospel in my home, and we had jazz albums. So I remember seeing Wes Montgomery. I remember seeing that King Cole, all those types of albums sitting there, but not a lot of it was being played like the Motown stuff. And, you know, I see her in Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight and the Pips. And that was really what moved me into the music world. And it was, was really college that started to perk and percolate in terms of the jazz music. And I started to learn a lot more about it. Then I worked with the radio station on my campus, and there was, you know, just a plethora of music there, rock and R&B, a lot of that, but a lot of jazz music came through. So I got a chance to listen to and preview lots of interesting albums through that experience in college. So it's a little bit about how I kind of started moving into that.

Dylan: Thank you. I noticed that you said you became interested, or like, you were introduced to jazz at home, but a lot of it came from college, and I can draw some, I guess, comparisons to that, because I began my jazz journey in my freshman year of high school, and I had the opportunity to participate in my school jazz band. Thankfully, I had the resources necessary to foster my growth as a musician, and my mentors and peers also supported me. But my experiences with jazz also can't accurately serve as a representation of the experiences of the rest of my community, and unfortunately, today, countless youth still lack the same opportunities that allowed me to express myself musically, and they still remain unable to access instruments or musical education. And I would like to ask, was music education and jazz something you could access at school? Well, I know you said you did in college, but I'm wondering about high school too. And do you think that the federal dismantling of the Department of Education will leave low income students with even fewer opportunities to explore music? And I'm wondering if you have any data that you can offer about funding for music education?

Tomi: Wow, you can ask such insightful questions. Dylan, I love, I love what you you do with your podcast here. This is great. So yes, in terms of access, I grew up during a time I sound really old when I say this. But in the 70s, public schools offered music, art, Home Economics, something called the industrial arts. Some people call it shop, but it was like you could learn how to fix cars and things like that, things that were very practical for for becoming an adult, you know, just things that you need to know in life. But art and music were two major things that that I got to take advantage of, because it was there. It's part of public education, and it was free. If you needed an instrument, you could borrow one from the school. In many cases you not everything, but a lot of the instruments that we learned on, or the kids learned on, were provided for by the public school system. I remember, and you guys can actually go look this up. I had a flute, a phone, a flutophone, F, l, U, T, O, phone. It's a plastic instrument. Its crazy, but I actually remember we played the flutophone and we learned the basics notes of the standard scale. That was one of my first lessons in music as an elementary school student, I think it was in second or third grade, but we had that. And sadly, a lot of those things have gone away even before all of this has happened. So seeing what's gone on in the last 1015, 20 years, and I think back to my own son. He's 26 now, but when he was in school, he didn't really have a lot of music and art classes. We had to provide that as an enrichment program outside of the school environment for him to go like you say, if you don't have the means for such things, you're going to miss out unless you have other alternative ways of gathering that information or getting that experience from people in your neighborhoods, your community centers, your churches and synagogues and mosques, places like that. Unfortunately, we just are so limited because the educational system has has excluded a lot of those programs.

Tomi: I was also fortunate enough, you know, in Atlanta, to be involved in organizations and individuals who felt that the music programs were so necessary that they came up with ways to provide musical instruments. One one friend in particular. He's a concert promoter. He whatever he does a concert, most of the proceeds go to provide musical instruments in the schools in this in the city, around the city. So you know, he really is committed to making sure that students get access to musical instruments as much as possible. Another friend of mine, and he is a full time musician, he and his wife have an organization called How big is your dream Foundation, and they actually partner with professional musicians to pair up with students in K through 12, to provide at cost, or very reasonably priced, in some cases, free of charge, music lessons for for Kids, so that they can learn music, because, again, educational system is not doing, not doing justice in that area. I had a conversation with one of Quincy principals. It was a STEM program, and they were very focused on all the stem stuff. And I know you have a program coming up on that soon. But the, you know, the technical things, the math and the science and the computer stuff. And I said to him, when are you going to get some art and art and music? And he's like, art music. So they don't, we don't need art and music. I said, What are you talking about? That's the that's the other part of the brain. You have left and right side of the brain, and if you're not able to engage both sides, you're missing a huge part of the educational process. And he had to stop and think about that. Yeah, and it's, it's just true. It's just true if you're only focusing on the right brain, that left brain is, is left out, and all the art and the music, that's all part of the process, and it's part of the education. You have to have it all to be fully rounded.

Dylan: I actually wasn't aware that like music programs were declining over the years, even before the Trump administration their actions. And obviously I'm worried about the future for music programs with the dismantling of the Department of Education. But yeah, it's actually surprising to me that in the past, there are more, at least, from your experience, more music programs than there are now. Programs than there are now. And you're right, and I think that music programs, what a lot of people don't realize is that allowing kids to play instruments is more just, like, learning how to play music. It's also creativity and improvisation and allows the kids, allows kids to express themselves in general. So I think even just giving the opportunity is much better than obviously not having the opportunity.

Tomi: And where do you go when you get anxious or upset live exactly, go to music. They turn on their favorite songs, they put on a CD they like, or pull up a iPod or Mp three of their favorite music. That's what is important. But most people, you know, unless they're taking a class in it, don't understand the structure of the music they're listening to. Don't understand where it comes from. What is the composition? How did they come about those notes? What are the chords about how did they put this together? And, you know, I'm a geek with it, so I care. But a lot of people could care less. They're just listening to it, but some people would actually benefit from knowing more if they were given that opportunity.

Dylan: Yeah, exactly. And even aside from the obvious expressive benefits of learning music, I think learning about the history of music can be a valuable tool in learning about like, for example, with jazz, America's history and the history of marginalized black communities, which is where jazz came from. Lots of other forms of music all have their own unique history, and, while some people might not necessarily gravitate to learning history by themselves and reading textbooks, I feel like music can be a tool that can be used to develop an interest in even just learning about history. I'm wondering if there's also anything else you'd like to share about the topic of equity or jazz.

Tomi: Yeah, I have to agree with you wholeheartedly. I was never a big history fan when I was in school, mostly because none of it really related to me and my experience and anybody that looked like me in the history books, for the most part, their things didn't end well for them, at least the stuff that I was reading, the things that we were being taught. And now I sit and I spend hours researching things that I learn about primarily from from hearing people's stories on the Internet or reading these great stories about artists and and musicians that I had never heard of, whether they're in the jazz genre or classical, just music in general, when I hear stuff, I dive in. I want to learn more, and I want to learn about their lives. And I was actually reading about Billie Holiday before we started working together, because Billy Holiday was one of the three vocalists that I did a independent study on my senior year evaluating their vocal styles between Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald, and just reading about Billie Holiday and her experience. And when I think about the first times that I remember hearing jazz music. I remember thinking to myself, Man, it's just there was so much dissonant sound, whether it was just the music or even the vocals, they're not there's not this worry or this concern about being in tune all the time. Whereas, if you're playing classical, you have to be on the notes and you have to be very structured very specific. That's not Jazz. Jazz is kind of you're playing the notes as you feel them, and when the band is really connected, they're playing off of each other, and there's this give and take, and there's this whole communication system that exists within that song, within that sound. And it may not sound great to the ear. If you're used to listening to classical music, or if you grew up listening to R&B and gospel, which are a lot more harmonic in nature, in many cases, but they're, they're, it's part of the feeling that, that feeling that was going on for the people when Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit, one of the people that talked about hearing her seeing that in concert, said it was like she was living the experience in that moment. That's how deep it came across. That's the feeling that she exuded. And I've unfortunately never got to hear her. She was well before my time, but listening to her albums and hearing that voice and just imagining what she was delivering, because in a lot of ways, she was still dealing with that. She was still dealing with lots of racism. They were after her the the not, it wasn't the FBI, it was the Bureau of Narcotics was had focused on her because she had a drug addiction. She had a drug addiction because she was sexually abused as a child, and she was trying to deal with all that trauma and agony and and that was her way out get getting high from the drugs and the alcohol, unfortunately, is also a big part of how we lost her, because that was part of her health issue. But I mean, just knowing that about this music is is so critical, and I'm, I'm excited when I hear people like you, you're, you're a high school student, and you have this passion for jazz, of all things, I am so delighted to hear that you got to it earlier than I did. I hope you'll stay in that space. I hope you will continue to do your thing when it as it relates to to jazz and to music, whatever genre you land in. But one, one thing that I will say to you and whoever else is watching is, this is a rough time for a lot of us, and if we can just find ways to gravitate towards intentional joy and find moments that are meaningful, and music is my, my Space, and as far as D, E and I, it's all in there. There's diversity in terms of all the different kinds of music that's available. There's equity in the fact that you can choose whatever you want for whatever moment you need in that and that's not a one size fits all. There's plenty of stuff out there that you can can choose from, and inclusion is about all the things that are in there. You've got you've got your different genres, you've got your different artists, you've got the different types of songs and music, different instruments that you can work with or play around with, or hear lyrics that you can listen to. So there's so much diversity in all of that music. So again, I just, I feel like, if there's times that you're in in the weeds about anything, just just find that song and and play it.

Dylan: Yeah. Thank you so much. I think that was really beautifully spoken, and I think that was really important to hear.

Thank you for joining us and sharing the importance of equity and your experiences with jazz. If you're interested in donating and volunteering, you can find out how to do so, jazzforequity.com. Our next episode will feature professor, Professor Kolo Wamba, an educator and advocate who studied physics at both Columbia University and Stanford and who is actively working to address the stem gap in the Bay Area. Thank you so much for joining us and being my first guest, I really appreciate it.