Tackling Race Relations & Demolishing Barriers with Karen Fleshman Esq.

Karen Fleshman is a mentor, activist, entrepreneur, attorney, author, educator, proud San Franciscan, and a single soccer mom. In 2014, she founded Racy Conversations, a workplace workshop facilitation company, to inspire the antiracist generation. Hundreds of workplaces nationwide have benefitted from Racy Conversations workshops. She is currently seeking a publisher for her first book White Women We Need to Talk: Doing Our Part to End Racism.

 

As a white woman, Karen experienced sexual harassment, wage gap, and glass ceiling from white men in the workplace, but she noticed the most harmful workplace behavior came from white women who viewed her as a threat to their proximity to white men in power. She worked for diverse organizations leading diverse teams, largely reporting to women of color, who were excellent mentors and role models. Emulating them, she learned how to relate across difference as equals and build relationships based in trust.

 

Mentoring young adults of color launching corporate careers in tech, Karen came to understand that racism is the underlying problem in our society, everything she had learned growing up about race and racism was harmful and inaccurate, she was part of the problem, and she needed to change.

 

Inspired by Mike Brown, BlackLivesMatter, and her mentees, in 2014, Karen vowed to stop preparing young adults of color for the workplace and start preparing the workplace for young adults color by sharing what she had learned. This was the genesis of Racy Conversations.

 

Karen's passion projects are police accountability activism, building interracial sisterhood and raising antiracist children. She serves on the workgroup overseeing implementation of the US Department of Justice recommendations for ending bias at SFPD. She hosts interracial sisterhood events throughout the United States. Her 2018 video Dear White Women: No More Permit Patties received 7MM views. Alongside her Women’s March sisters, she was arrested five times disrupting the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. In June 2020 he was featured on Nightline speaking to other white moms about how she talks with her kids about race.

 

She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College (BA), the University of Texas (MA) and New York Law School and is admitted to practice in New York.