Darren W. McDew

"I became a champion of diversity, and not just of race, gender, ethnicity, but also underrepresented career fields. Every command I've ever had, I've looked out for the people that are underrepresented in logistics and all those career fields that don't get understanding, and also for race, gender, ethnicity. You just can't do diversity of thought because you can't measure it. That's the end goal. But I would recommend you look at some other diversity metrics."

"Diversity scares people. Just the pure talk of it scares some people because some people take it as I might lose something, an opportunity that was there for me before might be gone away because of diversity. I guess if I were in the majority, I might understand that feeling better, but I grew up with the majority. I mean, I was in a situation of 420 young men with 20 of them African American. There were no women. So I understand some of that. But let me tell you what I believe about diversity. It's an imperative, it's an understanding that we make better decisions when people around us don't always tell us yes. It's not necessarily about race, gender, or ethnicity. However, in this country, the only way to measure it is through race, gender, and ethnicity. People would like to say, I would like to get diversity of thought. Sure, measure it. I will tell you this. If you have different race, gender, and ethnicity on your table, your likelihood of having diversity of thought goes up, not down."