Photo: Shannon Fagan/Getty Images Corporate America knows how to talk a good game on diversity. But as America’s latest racial reckoning has highlighted once again, it has a long way to go on follow-through. On the latest episode of the Pivot podcast, entrepreneur and CEO John Rice talks to Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway about what companies — tech companies in particular — must do to combat what he terms “third-degree racism.
But I wanted to focus on the other two areas that I think are important. There’s second-degree racism — essentially not standing up to racist actions. And then the third category, which I really focused on the most in the piece, is a category of what most people would consider to be institutional racism. This is where we’re not trying to really hurt anybody, but we create the conditions where somebody else’s aspirations are really shattered for their future.
So here’s the first problem, which is: We’re in a world where — I’ll use the old axiom, when failure is not punished, failure proliferates. So there aren’t costs to being bad, and then there also aren’t really many benchmarks around what good looks like. And then the third component is that organizations and leaders actually don’t feel they have a clear way to move the needle. And that’s not just internally, but it’s also people on their boards and folks from the outside.
If you dig down, there are 100,000 folks of all backgrounds who are getting engineering degrees, B.S.s in engineering — 22 percent of those are Black and Hispanic. And then you look at computer science degrees — 60,000 nationally, and 22 percent of those folks are Black and Hispanic. And math is a similar story. So you’ve got a pipeline of 40,000 Black and Latino college graduates a year who are either engineering, math, or computer science.
When people are trying to mentor you, you’re less likely to trust them. So, not only are you competing against white peers who are spending zero percent of their day-to-day bandwidth on this, but you’re also more prone to navigate differently. So that’s the essence of the diverse experience in these organizations when you are one of a few. And so the first step is for organizations to actually understand that these things are happening.
So this analogy of feeling uncomfortable on a dance floor is like being BIPOC in a corporate meeting, the guy says “I deal with the dancing problem with vodka”. Sounds like a cheap laugh line, but people can’t drink their way through every corporate situation they navigate. Feh.