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Three disasters in 2020 ‘created a movement, not a moment’: Ursula Burns

Former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns joins 'Influencers with Andy Serwer' as she looks back on the events of 2020.

Video transcript

ANDY SERWER: We're kind of in a fraught moment right now roughly a year since the killing of George Floyd and not long after corporate uproar over voter suppression bills. What do you hope your book contributes to this conversation?

URSULA BURNS: I want-- this started before this, right? And it was really good that-- this sounds crazy, it's really good that three things happened in the last year. Just going to come out wrong, but obviously not good, in the last two years.

One is this man, who is going to be known for the rest of our lives as the person who started a movement, his death, his murder started a movement. We're going to know this because we had another man who governed the country in a, what I call, it's not, more than tyranny, it's like, it was like a hateful kind of energy. It was a interesting energy. I mean, just like a bad energy that literally started the second movement.

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And then we had the third, which is this disease that literally changed the way that we live. This happened all in the same kind of sphere of time and created what I hope is a movement, not just a moment. So we had a time when we were all at home. We were all nervous, unsettled, whatever the heck it is. And we could see this man, George Floyd, being murdered by a police officer. All the world could see it.

And the response was really what the response should have been, by society, not by the government, which they said, we're tired of this. We don't even know-- I was in London. I had flown back to London when this happened. I was on the plane. And I got off the plane, and my daughter is the one who calls me and tells me George Floyd was killed, so and so. I was called that day by a lot of CEOs.

But the point here was that the world, we had marches in London. We had marches-- they had marches all over the world. London doesn't have anything to do with Minneapolis. But the people in London, the people in France, all the people who were marching around the world, the people in New York, the people in Texas, the people in California, they didn't know George Floyd. They didn't know whether he was a criminal or not. They didn't know anything about him. But they said, enough is enough.

One of the things that we did know was that he was human. And the second thing that we knew is that the person, persons that killed him were there to protect him and serve him, not to do that. And so that, really big. Same thing with finally, after 3 and 1/2 years of just a barrage of kind of like insane signals, craziness, I mean, you know, just some of them just outright lies, some of them just totally countercultural, some of them just mean, the United States was like, I am, I'm just so tired. Can we just move on?

And then on top of that, we got this pandemic and we get the beginning of a mismanagement, just a bad-- so I think what happened is that it was-- what I'm hoping is that these disasters, these catastrophes turn into good, turn out to be good starts to fundamental change. They turn out to be starts to movements. Not to, you know, to give everybody lots of money who didn't earn it. That's not what we're talking about. Not so we can have a welfare state. Not just so that we can, you know, the outcome is rewriting the tax code and just kind of beating up the rich people. That's not the goal here. At least not my goal here.

The goal here is more about acting like America, right, which is this is the land of hope and opportunity. That's what this is about, that we actually do balance it out a little bit better. We actually do make significant progress on racial justice. We absolutely have to make progress on gender justice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So my hope is from this disasters, three disasters, that we end up with corporations saying, I haven't spoken about voting rights before, but voting is what this country is built on. We have to talk about that. Police, good policing is required for a sane and organized society. We have to talk about that. Education is absolutely core to my future as a company. We have to talk about that and be engaged in it. I don't want your opinion personally, necessarily. But if we have a law that said that a woman has the right to an abortion, or whatever it is, she has the right to not have, whatever it is, that we absolutely as business leaders say that we are a country of laws. If we don't like it, let's go change it. But right now, the law says she can't-- we have to enforce that. We have to actually allow that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I just think it's a really amazing time. So we have a time where people are actually talking about things they never talked about before. And industry for sure is doing it.