About two years later, I was having a conversation with the popular journalist Soledad O'Brien. She was still a daily morning host on CNN at the time. During our conversation she told me that even though she was always one of the most well-known employees at whatever company she worked for, that she sometimes decided to ask her white male colleagues to pitch her best ideas to the bosses because she knew that they'd be much more likely to accept the ideas coming from them instead of her. In an environment dominated by white men, she had learned that the biases she was up against were so fierce that she had to craftily maneuver around them.