In 4th grade, my family moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, an all-white NYC suburb. In my senior year, Glen Ridge voted 90% for Goldwater. My house backed up on an all-black neighborhood in the town next-door, Montclair. Our rear fence literally demarcated segregation.
When I began playing in my back yard with the black child from Montclair whose home abutted ours, our next door neighbor called my dad. It was not appropriate, he asserted, for me to be playing with that black “so and so” in our neighborhood. My father told him to “pound sand”.
That began my social justice journey. In college, I led the movement to integrate my fraternity, I was inspired by Martin Luther King who spoke on campus and I marched with our black community when he was assassinated. While in law school, I worked for both Newark and Camden Legal Services and read a great deal of black literature during down time in the Army Reserves. I admired Muhammad Ali’s stand against the draft. As a young associate in a corporate law firm, I regularly staffed the firm’s poverty law office in West Philadelphia. I advocated to our partners that integrating women and blacks into our law firm was not only right but made economic sense. I was proud when assigned to mentor our first black lawyer, now a college president. I have supported diversity on governing boards I’ve joined, and in organizations where I worked; and I have volunteered for 40 years with a social service agency serving minorities.
I patted myself on the back.
Then, a few years ago, I attended a racism conference which included self-awareness exercises. I later read a book about white privilege.* I began to understand – for the first time – just how much deep-seated institutional racism, poverty and white privilege have negatively impacted our fellow black citizens. On a personal level, I recognized my own buried biases and realized how often white privilege had benefited me over my life at the expense of minorities. I began to wonder what this revelation meant for organizational leadership.
I concluded that the calls of well-intentioned leaders for board, executive and employee diversity are not enough. Neither is hiring a minority person to a top HR position. Recruiting people of color (and other minorities) to board and executive positions isn’t either. White leaders must first learn about and appreciate the underlying causes and effects of racism, poverty and white privilege in this country, and they must honestly identify and confront their own subliminal biases. Without these foundational understandings, there will be no personal leadership commitment to, or basis for, transforming organizations to eliminate discrimination and capture the full value that comes from a diverse board, executive team and creative workforce.
That transformation will require an organization-wide culture change, one that will take commitment, understanding and persistence.
* Debby Irving, Waking Up White, and Finding Myself in the Story of Race (2014)