Tissa Hami is the Founder and Principal of Korsi Consulting. A former investment banker turned stand-up comic turned DEI consultant and trainer, Tissa works with clients across industries on their DEI strategies and goals. Her clients have included Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, non-profits, and universities. Her mission is to build inclusive workplaces where all employees belong and can thrive. Tissa speaks on a range of DEI topics including DEI 101, bias, allyship, and microaggressions.
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New Orleans Review
Your work spans a myriad of industries from finance to comedy to working in diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). How did your experience across these different professions lead you to where you are now as the founder of Korsi Consulting?
Tissa Hami
The common thread for my career is activism. Not that it was present in every job. I don’t think it was there for the Wall Street jobs, which is part of why I only stayed three years on Wall Street. As an Iranian immigrant, having an Iranian identity in the United States was hard. I was a kid in the late ‘70s during the hostage crisis and the Iran/Iraq War, so I grew up in the shadow of those events. It was a long time ago, but you don’t forget what it was like. I always felt the need to stand up for myself against the bad things people thought about me and us, and eventually that led to a career in comedy. Before that, I did the more “supposed to” kinds of things. My parents and I were immigrants, and they heavily pushed for education. My father has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and my mother is a dentist. They wanted me to be a doctor, and I didn’t want to do that, but I was expected to go to an Ivy League school. So I studied hard in high school, and I went to an Ivy League, and I was supposed to do something money-making after that. I went to Wall Street only to find it was completely wrong for me. From there, I went into stand-up comedy and eventually pivoted into DEI consulting and training.
NOR
You started Korsi Consulting as a way “to bring people together through shared experiences and stories.” Storytelling seems to be a prevalent skill you have applied across various professional roles throughout your life. Why do you personally believe it’s important for minorities and immigrants to voice their stories and personal experiences?
Hami
If we don’t tell our stories ourselves, who will? Others will do it for us. I don’t remember that much about being a little kid. But still, I was six years old in 1979 during the hostage crisis and the Iranian Revolution, and I’ve been reminded a lot about it with the current revolution in Iran. I was just a kid watching TV. I didn’t really understand, but I understood enough. I understood my parents were worried, and then I got hatred from my classmates, teachers, and broader society, and I thought, I’m not bad. I didn’t do this, and people were making me feel like I had done something bad. After 9/11, those same types of feelings came up, and I thought, not all Muslims are bad. Not all Muslim women are oppressed and voiceless. It was 2001, over 20 years ago, but at the time we thought ourselves relatively modern. I would look at all the Middle East experts on TV, and almost all of them were older white men with the occasional white woman in the mix. I would think, where are we? Where are our voices? Why aren’t we speaking for ourselves? Why is someone else speaking for us?
I started my comedy career after 9/11 as a way to speak up, speak out, and have a voice for Muslim women and Middle Easterners to show that we are not all the bad things that people think we are. The next time there was a big news story about the Middle East, I was actually approached for comment as a comedian and a speaker by NPR, NBC and The Boston Globe. I thought, “Wow, this thing that I was looking for post 9/11, I’m finally one of the people doing it.” For me, getting our voices into the mix is important because we need to speak for ourselves. We shouldn’t always have others speaking for us.
NOR
What about comedy made it a powerful medium to voice your experience, and also bring awareness to audiences on social issues?
Hami
People always told me, “You’re so funny; you should be a stand-up comic.” I heard it from my friends at school and my co-workers on Wall Street. I thought Ivy League graduates were supposed to have a serious career, but when I saw comedy as a way to speak out, I became interested in doing it.
When I thought about being an activist, I felt that I could go to law school and become a lawyer or a journalist. There are different ways to get your voice out. What I liked about comedy was that people saw something in me [that was funny], so I wanted to listen to that. Also, with comedy comes the freedom to say whatever you want as long as it’s funny. I knew that being a lawyer or a journalist, I would have to be very careful with my words, but as a comedian, you really get to say whatever you want. I loved the freedom it gave me to do that. I loved that there was an audience that maybe wouldn’t hear this issue talked about in another way. I don’t know how much a comedy club audience overlaps with NPR or The New York Times [audiences], but I thought it might be a way to reach a different audience through humor and storytelling.
NOR
As a Muslim woman doing stand-up comedy, what misconceptions did you face and do you feel your time on stage has helped to combat them?
Hami
I got a whole range of reactions, especially early on. My first time on stage, I was lucky that the audience got it, or I might not have made it past that first night. In that first performance, I went on stage the way I had dressed on visits to Iran, veiled with a long coat. That audience got it. There were comedians who got it; the booker, that night of that club, got it, which was very fortunate, and there were comedians who didn’t get it. They were like, “Why do you wear that thing on your head?” They just didn’t connect with it, they didn’t know why I did it, so I got a range of reactions. This is true for any comedian, but there were audiences who really connected with it and some who didn’t. Once I started getting a little better known, I started getting hate mail from people who didn’t like what I was doing, and it was almost exclusively from the Muslim American community.
NOR
Was that a particularly hard time for you? Did the negative reactions ever make you feel that this was something that you needed to stop doing, or did it encourage you to voice yourself more?
Hami
A couple of instances were actually scary. I had a comedy website at the time, and all my shows were listed there, so people knew exactly where I would be, time, place, and everything. So sometimes I thought, am I doing the right thing? But it never stopped me from getting on stage. Luckily the incidents never got too bad. Extra security was called in for one performance, but for me, there was a motivating factor to try to make sure my voice was louder than the voice of the detractors. I probably got one piece of hate mail for every 30 pieces of fan mail, but the hate mail stands out. It’s long, ugly, and it stays with you differently. Fan mail is like, oh, they like me and thought I was funny and great, and then it’s forgotten, but the hate mail kind of stays with you.
NOR
What was the most important lesson you took away from that time in your life that still resonates today?
Hami
One is to keep going. Comedy is often not booked far in advance, so you’ll have a lot of shows for the next month, maybe two months, three months, and for the three months after that, only a few. After six months, you might not have any, and you think, “Does that mean my career is going to end?” But you have to keep having faith that more opportunities and shows will come and that if you keep doing the work, you will get more shows. So much of life is like that. My current business is like that. I can look at the DEI training programs I have coming up and think, “Okay, am I no longer a DEI consultant after February? Because right now that’s the date of my last upcoming training,” but you have to keep doing the work, fill up that calendar and keep going.
NOR
In previous interviews you discuss your childhood in Boston and being raised in a traditional Iranian family. Do you recall any instances in your upbringing that had a profound impact on your sense of identity?
Hami
When I was in third grade, we moved from Brookline, Massachusetts, to Lexington, Massachusetts. It was only a few towns away, but the demographics were very different. I had spent first and second grades in Brookline, and we didn’t have language for it then, but looking back, it was very diverse. My first-grade teacher was black, my second-grade teacher was Chinese American, and in grades 3-12 in Lexington I don’t think I even had two teachers that were racial minorities. A lot of the other kids in Brookline were recent immigrants, kids from Russia, China, Israel, and other Middle Eastern and European countries. When I was in first grade, we had an international week at our school where we all learned about other countries. There were booths where we learned how to do things from different countries; we learned how to use chopsticks, for example, at the booth for China. It was the late ‘70s, so it wasn’t complex or up to our current standards, but at the time, it was like, “Wow, we’re doing these things.” Then I went to Lexington. I don’t know if you know about the METCO program, where kids from the inner city are bused into public schools in the suburbs. The kids who were bused in were almost all black, so except for the METCO students in my class, I was the second darkest kid. There was one Indian American girl, and then there was me, and some of the other kids thought I was one of the METCO students. They thought I was black. One kid would follow me home and yell at me, “Get on the METCO bus where you belong.” He knew where I lived. I was even friends with his sister, but that’s what he would do, so I had these sorts of things happen. People made fun of my name a lot. They made fun of my appearance, even that I had black hair. They made fun of my parents’ accents. These were things that didn’t happen in our previous town.
NOR
Would you say these childhood experiences played a role in inspiring your professional ambition towards DEI?
Hami
Yeah. We didn’t have the words for them yet, but I always felt I didn’t belong. People made me feel that way. There were teachers who made me feel that way. My 3rd grade teacher was not kind to me, and as I’ve discovered in recent years, she was not kind to others who were different. She wanted everyone to be mainstream; if you weren’t, that was it. Those types of experiences and Wall Street were instrumental in my wanting to do this work. I remember my time on Wall Street. I thought I was smart. I’m doing good work, even top-level work compared to my peers, and I’m still getting completely overlooked. They only seem to know my name or something slightly resembling it when they need the conference room cleaned and when they need lunch ordered. I was getting all the help tasks, and I didn’t understand; I thought I went to the right schools, I did the right things, I was here, I was doing good work, why wasn’t it being recognized? And I was often the only woman in the room, never mind the only immigrant woman or woman of color. While I worked at a law firm in downtown New York, I noticed there were 100 partners. Six were women, one was a black man, and 90+ were white men. We weren’t supposed to talk about it, but I saw it. I saw zero chance for success, but we didn’t have diversity managers or DEI workshops in the ‘90s. I had never heard the term DEI, so when I did listen to it, I thought, okay, this is what I needed then. I needed this at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs. When I was at Goldman Sachs, in the summer of 2000 between my two years of graduate school, there was one day that we had a lunch just for the women summer associates, and I remember thinking at the time, “Someone’s acknowledging that the experience here for women might be different than it is for men,” and that, even at the time, was a wow moment. I had already been on Wall Street for about three years and had nothing like that, so when DEI became a field, it was very important for me to do this work because I remembered all those experiences. Even in comedy, there was difficult stuff that happened because of identity. I never want anyone else to miss out on the career they want to have because of their identity.
NOR
Are there any current events — from the pandemic to BLM to the current protest in Iran — that have shaped you or added to your mission at Korsi Consulting?
Hami
All of them. I mean, to see people in this country, in my home country, and people worldwide protesting for their rights during a pandemic, doing it at great personal risk? They’re so brave. It’s so inspirational. How can I not do my little part here, while they are going out there at such risk to themselves and doing what they need to do for the most basic freedoms? So it’s important for me to keep going with this message of equity, being yourself, and fighting for your rights. In some ways, DEI is becoming an outdated term. I don’t know if it will go in this direction, but I think it’s really about human rights in the workplace. There is a lot at work that shouldn’t happen, whether it’s sexual harassment, bullying, assault, etc. What are your rights at work, and why are our workplaces behind the times in so many ways? That’s not okay. We need to catch up. We need to do better. So what people are doing in the streets provides inspiration to keep doing the work because people need to be treated more humanely and respectfully, with more dignity inside and outside the workplace.
NOR
Whether it’s your former work in comedy or currently in DEI, you never shy away from advocating and keeping your commitment to human rights. How do you feel about the current protest following the death of Masha Amini and the many other women facing brutality and death in Iran?
Hami
The protesters are amazing. The woman and the girls going out despite the personal risk to continue to do this fight, their showing up night after night in the streets, is incredible. There is also the personal side for me. All the credit goes to the people out there protesting. It’s a different experience to watch it from a distance and feel helpless, like I can’t do anything. One thing I have been remarking on my whole life is that I was six when the 1979 revolution happened. [My family and I] were already in the U.S. We had moved here earlier, so we were watching the revolution play out on TV, and because of that, we became accidental immigrants. I never would have chosen life as an immigrant. Still, world history happened, and we ended up staying in the U.S. Over the course of my life, I have tried to make sense of how many people have had their countries’ revolutions happen during their lifetimes. No Americans now living were alive in 1776. There are no living French people who were alive in 1789, but my family and I experienced it in 1979. I was alive for my country’s revolution. I never thought I would say that twice in one lifetime, but here we are for another revolution, and I’m alive for it, but it’s still from a distance. It’s weird not to be in your home country for its revolution. It’s tough to describe, but it is strange to be far away for a time like this.
NOR
With women fighting for their rights in Iran, and the ongoing fight for women’s rights here in the United States, do you feel concerned about the future?
Hami
Oh, sure, I feel it at different levels. On one level is climate change and the pandemic. They say there will be more pandemics in the future. On another level, Iran hopefully is going in the right direction now after a very difficult 40+ years and difficulty before that too. The U.S. seems to be going backward with women’s and human rights and even natural resources like water. There are going to be water and natural resource wars, so there is a lot to be concerned about, but as humans, we also want to be hopeful. The younger generation is doing amazing things, and I think of that old saying, “necessity is the mother of invention.” The younger generations will focus on [addressing] climate change because the need will be there, and they will do it. While there is a lot to be concerned about, there are things to be hopeful for too. We know so much more than we used to. With the internet and access to information that even kids have now, it’s amazing. We had to go into a library and look things up in an encyclopedia, and now you can just google it. There’s just so much information now and so much access to resources. I think I’m naturally a pessimist, but I try to be hopeful.
NOR
Despite the adversity, what gives you hope and keeps you motivated to continue to advocate for DEI?
Hami
I think I am both a pessimist and an idealist, so a part of me is still that little kid who wanted everyone to get along and to understand one another instead of the Iranians and the Americans hating one another. I think that part of me still wants things to be better. I still am the world peace idealist where everybody gets along well in the end, and I think that kernel of hope continues.
NOR
Do you recognize a shift in younger generations placing more effort to be engaged and understanding of people of different cultures, races, and backgrounds?
Hami
The fact that we’re even talking about it now is huge. The fact that we saw people of all races protesting after George Floyd’s murder is huge, and that went to protests worldwide. Even women and girls in Iran are protesting in the streets without their hijabs. This is huge. People can organize differently. That can be bad or good, but people can come together thanks to social media, so there’s so much more available to inspire people around the world. You can put it on TikTok in one country, and your counterparts on the other side are seeing it, so there’s a lot that’s driving things. I’m not a historian, but there are, fortunately, global trends in historical events. I don’t know if the western world is going in the wrong direction, but maybe other parts of the world are going in the right direction now. I’m curious to see what will happen in Europe. They are going more toward the right. When I think about this stuff, it’s worrisome, but I think we see many hopeful things too.
NOR
What resources and recommendations would you encourage our readers and others to utilize to better support human rights in Iran and across the globe?
Hami
I’ll think about it from a workplace angle first. One of the things I hear from companies who come to my fellow consultants and me is that Gen Z job candidates are asking about DEI within the company. Some [companies] don’t necessarily have an answer, and that’s driving some people to ask about DEI efforts because this generation is demanding answers at the interview stage. The young workers in the company are asking why our leadership team looks like that. Why are our managers all white? In my generation — I’m Gen X — we kept our mouths shut. As I said, at that law firm, we never once said out loud, “Why are 90 out of the 100 partners white men?” You could not ask that back then, so Gen Z, keep doing it because it is making a difference. Keep writing those reviews on Glassdoor of your experiences at the companies and keep making the TikToks and putting them on social media because those things pressure companies. Look at what’s happened to Kanye with Adidas announcing they dropped him because of his antisemitic comments. It’s good that they did that, obviously, but I have seen many commenters asking, “Why didn’t Adidas and all the other brands drop him after he said things like ‘slavery was a choice?’” I would tell the younger generations also to put pressure on brands and to say we expect accountability. You can do different things to join the protest. Usually people who are a little older and have more money do this, but once you get to the point where you can give, give appropriately to what you believe in. At a younger age, put that pressure on your employers, on the brands and the companies because we see change.
NOR
What advice would you give to the next generation of leaders inspired to get involved in DEI and fighting for social justice?
Hami
Do what you can. Recognize that the issues will shift and respond to what the moment wants of you. We couldn’t have predicted a reversal of Roe v. Wade ten years ago, so it’s not like we could have told the young leaders ten years ago, “Hey, get ready for this to happen.” However, we can tell people today to get ready for the moment. Prepare for justice wherever those issues come up. Notice what’s happening around you and learn history because things are following trends, and sometimes it can go backward. The Iran I was born in, we didn’t have to veil, and then came the 1970s revolution. Then women had to veil. Now women are protesting for the right not to veil, but when I was a kid in the ‘70s in Iran, I don’t think anyone thought we would have forced veiling a handful of years later. So rights can be rolled back. That’s one thing to remember: [history is] not a straight line, so be ready to respond at the moment and find your niche. If you have money, your niche may be philanthropy. If you’re a storyteller, a poet, or a writer, do that to your advantage. Wherever your strength is, find that and respond.
Gabriela Barre is a freelance writer living in New Orleans. She is a recent graduate of Loyola University New Orleans class of 2022 with a dual-degree in English Writing and Finance. In her free time, she enjoys giving back to her community as a career mentor for undergraduate and young professionals through the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
