Right now there is a small group of us who are working on rebuilding and addressing all these issues. It’s like seven of us, and we made sure that the few people of color that are on the team are always in that room.
Originally, the statement [from the Bon Appetit staff] started out stronger, much more direct, and made more concrete promises. But we did have to negotiate with corporate, and HR, and PR… so we did lose a lot of like the umph. But we, internally, are holding ourselves accountable to our original statement and our set of goals. We just for legal reasons can’t say all that, we can’t be like, “Yes! Bon Appetit’s racist!”
We were in meetings with them until 11pm, like fighting over words. And I also understand that a lot of the stuff we’re asking for is really radical for a company like Condé Nast… We want to increase the pay for the people of color on staff. So we just wanna make sure that there’s no one on the team that doesn’t make a livable wage, which I don’t think is wild.
…
I’ve experienced some of the highest highs of my life this week. When Adam resigned, when Duckor resigned, and when that Business Insider article came out. I finally felt like I wasn’t just screaming in the wind anymore. So I feel like now, finally, things might change.
I don’t know, I always grew up believing that I would always experience casual racism, and that’s just a fact of life. And that there’s just no way around it. But I finally think that maybe we don’t have to anymore.
Sohla El-Waylly in an interview with The Sporkful, “A Reckoning At Bon Appetit”