Gotta start somewhere
In the weeks following the horrific murder of George Floyd, I watched with amusement as brands large and small scrambled for a politically correct response. Anecdotally, I heard and read about their near-daily schedules of townhalls, AMAs, and “candid conversations.” They packed their social feeds with “unequivocal” stances against racism. There were pledges to “do better” and offers of matching donations to BLM charities. Many still have some type of “Commitment to Anti-Racism” on their websites today.
Amidst all these corporate acrobatics, I noticed that a bunch of big companies went ahead with hiring or promoting a bunch of white guys to their senior ranks (update: they’re still doing it). Considering there are only 4 black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, it’s a safe bet that these hires would be joining a room full of other white guys (well, except for the lone woman usually in charge of marketing or HR.)
Normally this wouldn’t bother me. But the timeframe was fishy. Anyone hired in August meant that the vetting started months prior and overlapped with all the hand-wringing over race in June. Which suggests there was time to reverse course and do right by their pledges.
So why didn’t they?
We know why. If pressed, the hiring committee would surely say how they looked far and wide to find the perfect person. That there was stiff competition, many hard decisions, etc. They made the right choice with the conditions they had.
Right. It’s hard for me to believe that all these companies couldn’t find a single younger, non-white person in today’s job market that was as qualified as their final candidates (“lack of qualified candidates” is often the cop-out in these situations, which is bunk considering how many mediocre white men I’ve encountered in positions of power). My guess is that they didn’t even lift a finger to try. Either it was easier not to, or they are so far removed from the issue that they’re oblivious to how words and action should work together.
The former assumes that they knew what they should be doing and consciously chose not to, and the latter tells me that taking action is moot because they know there’s no one to hold them accountable. I’m not sure which scenario is worse.
One could argue that nearly every industry on the planet needs a hiring makeover, from the boardroom to the break room. Yet when I look around my own life or absorb the news, all I’m seeing are shallow attempts at change that are really just table stakes now that brands are trying to out-woke each other. Yet these gestures are often touted as if they’re a form of radical activism. Donations and anti-racism book clubs are not radical. Neither are town halls, diversity committees and mentorship programs that only focus on recruiting students rather than getting underrepresented groups into real positions of influence.
You know what’s radical? Sharing power.
Eric Liu, the writer, civic activist and cabinet member of the Clinton and Obama administrations, says there are three rules of power:
It compounds, meaning the powerful will only keep increasing their share once they have it
It justifies itself, meaning that people will make up stories to fit their narrative about why they need to hold onto it
It’s infinite, meaning that anyone can create it because it’s not a zero sum game
That last point is an important one. Because it’s basically saying that there’s more than enough room at the top for everyone who wants it (well ... except for the tippy-top because hello, capitalism.)
Which made me think something crazy: what would it take for even a tiny percentage of leaders to willingly either create top-adjacent positions to theirs, or step aside completely to make room for someone who doesn’t fit the status quo? What a gangster move! Even just a handful of people doing this would seriously shakes things up. What they lose financially would be offset by a wave of good PR, which puts them in a position of getting snapped up by some other corporation.
The other alluring part about this idea? It’s instantaneous. It can be done in a single moment of a single day. It doesn’t hinge on lawyers or HR people or all the other extraneous bullshit processes we use to keep up the illusion of diversity. All it takes is one person to decide, and I bet it would have a domino effect (see point above re: brands out-woking each other.)
I’m actually laughing as I write this because it seems ridiculous to think that anyone at the top would even consider doing that. But why?
Have we also become so accustomed to the status quo that we’ve stopped demanding better?
Take the Voting Act of 1965. It’s an extreme comparison I know, buuut ….. consider that it didn’t happen because a bunch of white politicians woke up one day and had a change of heart (well maybe some did, but definitely not a majority). It happened because of relentless pressure from the bottom up. That’s the way change, large or small, always happens.
It’s totally possible that some version of this would happen anyway as a response to cultural demands, but even so that’s a long ways out. Because let’s be honest. The easiest thing is usually the hardest thing. We just need to remember that that goes both ways. So I’m staying optimistic for now. The only way to get steam is to keep tweeting, keep writing, keep exposing. The conditions are there. All we need is a match.