Of all the honors a business professor might snag, an Emmy would seem to be one of the least likely. But Clarence Ball III did just that in 2014, when he won one for the documentary “Looking Over Jordan: African Americans and the War.”

That same year, he joined the faculty of the Gabelli School of Business as a lecturer in communications and media management, and in addition to teaching communications theory and corporate communications, he has worked as the college’s interim director of diversity, equity and inclusion.

We recently sat down—virtually, of course—with Ball, an award-winning competitive speaker and speech coach, to talk about we can better understand each other during these turbulent times.