While the film is amateur, straight up, its message hits home and has a lot of heart. It’s palpable and original, and T E A ☕ 🐸. I commend the director, Travis Wood,  for emphasizing the perceived insensitivities of Black applicants when businesses prominently and proudly feature (mostly) canine pets on their company’s “Meet the Team” webpages. Not only does the film highlight the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on pages that tout “openness to diversity,” it underscores the huge gap in the diversity of T H O U G H T that continues to plague multiple industries that assumes the only inclusivity they need to consider deals with phenotypic attributes.

And, I know I’m not the only Black who has experienced being the diversity hire, or during the job hunt noticed that the workplaces for which I was applying lacked diversity across the board (in ethnicity, in racial identity, in queer representation, differently-abled hiring, or spanning age across generations). Not ONE sect of “diversity” or “inclusion of people from diverse backgrounds” is enough.

And while I understand there’s no way to definitively assess, just by looking at pictures of employees, that the companies Travis highlighted did not fit other sub-groups, the point he’s making deals with the lack of  racial (he specifically calls out “Black”) diversity  in the industry he’s pursuing.

Pets as “fluffy companions” on company webpages is sweet, and I’m guessing is marketed to show that the company has a “fun” environment. But I don’t think I completely get it. It seems a tad unprofessional, unless the business you’re pursuing is pet-focused. Totes my opinion—maybe I’m biased because I’m a Black, I don’t have pets that are mammals, and I don’t care enough about mammalian pets to begin with?? Might be a Mr. Fantastic-level stretch, but whatevz.

The lack of diversity is enough. The lack of diversity, plus the statements about “diversity and inclusion” is more than enough. But to slap on the fluffy office companion is overboard, and I feel his pain.

Also, this may be a little too on the nose, but I think one thing that could have elevated this feature would have been scoring it with Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, K. 626: Lacrimosa. It needed the constant crescendo as the discoveries went on, that weeping, nah mean.