America Behind the Color Line (14 page)

Even when we spend in the community, we don’t save enough and we’re not producing enough for our future. We need to begin to educate our young about capitalism and investment. Wall Street is trying. It’s a big supporter of an organization called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. The number of summer internships offered to undergraduate students of color through the SEO Career Program has reached nearly three hundred. I would estimate that between 60 and 70 percent of the professionals of color on Wall Street have come through SEO.

Education is the key, and there’s an onus on those who have already made it to make sure they are helping to open up the pipeline. It’s very important that we have Frank Raines, Dick Parsons, Stan O’Neal, and Ken Chenault because they show that it can be done. And there are other African Americans on Wall Street who may not be CEOs but who are working as managing directors, as chairmen, and as executive directors and are doing extremely well. The pipeline is slowly filling.

Some people distrust the notion that a handful of black CEOs could mean anything positive for the black community overall. They say these people are just a few tokens scattered around Wall Street. There is such a thing as people of color that come into your organization to fulfill a diversity count. We have to reject the mind-set that this is tokenism and ensure that the young people we bring into these businesses have the tools and support they need to ascend the ladder. But when you’re talking about the Frank Raineses, the Ken Chenaults, and the Dick Parsons of the world, it’s about money. They would not be in those seats if the board did not think they were going to get their return. Some of these exceptional men have been nurtured. Harvey Golub at AmEx took a liking to Ken Chenault and made it happen. All of us who are successful have been nurtured by somebody. What was traditionally missing in corporate America was the CEO who was going to be willing to nurture that African American to make him a CEO.

When you have Stanley O’Neal at Merrill Lynch, Dick Parsons at AOL Time Warner, Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae, and Ken Chenault at American Express all coming from various diversity initiatives, suddenly there’s more than one agenda, and that’s good. I think it allows young people to understand that they can make it. When everyone’s in the same place, it’s almost like, well, if I’m not Harvard caliber, I’ll never be a scholar. People are reading about these guys who are black CEOs and seeing them dispersed across different kinds of companies, and I feel that you get a lot of mileage out of that.

The notion that you’re somehow less black if you’re upper middle class and comfortable with yourself and with your accomplishments makes no sense to me. I’m not less black. I have white friends, I have African-American friends, I have Hispanic friends, and I have Asian friends. I enjoy people, and I accept them for who they are and what they bring to the table. I don’t know what the phrase “less black” means. I am who I am, and it took me a little while to come to grips with it. I’ve worked hard. My father worked two jobs, a sixteen-hour day, just to make sure that I could get a decent education and that I understood who I was as a person. He’s a much smarter person intellectually than I am, and the way I followed in his footsteps was just by achieving those things he was unable to achieve.

I am of African-American descent. I’ve worked very hard for everything I’ve gotten. I am a product of the Civil Rights Movement, and I do believe in affirmative action. Anybody in our peer group that doesn’t believe in affirmative action is not as good as they think they are, in my opinion. We needed some breaks. All people have to do is look back at their parents. Are you going to tell me your parents weren’t smart and that’s why they didn’t get to X, Y, Z school? They were just excluded. It took some affirming action for us to get the opportunity to prove that we could do the same as our white peers.

At my firm, there’s a handful of black people at my level. Not enough, let’s put it that way. But there’s a reasonable handful. I think the firm recognizes that it has to do more, and we’ve had David Thomas from the Harvard Business School meet with our board, a meeting I was able to put in place. So I think that the company understands it as an issue. But to David Thomas, it’s a global workforce issue.

I don’t say I feel vulnerable as a black man in my firm. I think that in the investment banking business, everybody is vulnerable. So while they make it hard to achieve in that business, if you can begin to achieve, they understand that more than anything. If you are really bringing some value added, that goes a long way. Your peers may be running the low hurdles and you’re running the high hurdles and you’re in the same race. But if you get to the finish line, you get rewarded. That’s how I would put it. I think they make the hurdles high. They still question you about that. But if you go through that maze, once again it’s the black tax. If you can’t figure out the black tax, then you have a different dialogue. And I think that what we as a people have to get better at is just embracing that in its totality. Our kids don’t have to pay the same black tax, but there’s still that notion of “prove it to me.” They still have to pay a tax.

In essence, what we have to do as a people is just continue to move forward. We have to put ourselves in a position where we’re comfortable and we can make our kids comfortable, but to a certain extent we still have to be pioneers. Everything comes back to the black tax, at least for our generation. The Talented Tenth has not been able to carry us as a people. We’re seeing a Talented Tenth, but most of the agenda is still dominated by 90 percent of the people, which is what you’d expect. It’s all a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement. Economic empowerment is a part of it. It’s what we’re building now.

So you can look at it in a couple of ways. You can look at African Americans and major institutions moving forward in terms of the Talented Tenth, and you can look at the issue of economic empowerment for the remaining 90 percent of our people. Progress for both the top 10 percent and the rest of our people should be evolving in parallel directions. As a member of the community in which I live, as an African American working in a primarily white organization, and as an individual who has integrated two country clubs in the town of Summit, I do feel that I am part of the African-American movement for economic empowerment.

I’m optimistic about the long-term prospects. In the short term, I’m disappointed that members of my peer group are having so few kids. So many of my friends haven’t had any kids, and many have had only one kid. And yet African Americans in urban centers, in places like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, are having so many kids at such a young age, and then their kids are doing the same. I think it will take a generation before we fully understand the implications of that.

We may be unable to reach the current generation of urban blacks who are having so many children so young. Ultimately, we’ve got to get rid of the projects and build town homes. That’s already starting to happen. If you can improve the housing situation and get more focused on the economic issues, and get people like Walt Pearson and other successful blacks to take an interest in a community, then I think there’d be reason to believe we could begin to see change. And I think when our children realize what an easy road they have, compared to us and our parents, they’ll start thinking about giving back more. They still don’t necessarily relate to what happened in the Civil Rights Movement. But it will dawn on them one day that they had an easy road, and all of a sudden they’ll have this feeling that they have to give back.

I’ve had some success, but I’m not on the front cover of magazines and newspapers like Ken Chenault, Dick Parsons, Stanley O’Neal, or Franklin Raines. I consider myself an average individual who has done well with the tools I had to work with. And I hope that young people who are reading this book or watching the PBS series will understand that you can be a Ken Chenault but you can also be a Milton Irvin and have a good life and contribute to society.

Melody Irvin

When we first moved to Summit and our son was three or four, I thought it was absolutely great. Everybody was open. When the kids are young, they have a nice base of friends. Everybody plays. There’s no big deal. All the parents get their kids together. You have huge birthday parties and whatnot. But once you get to middle school, kids start to be a little more selective. And in the teen years, they get to be more picky and cruel, and as black students in a mostly white school, the kids get isolated a little bit more. They lose some of the fun they had in primary school.

I think we imported most of our friends. We provided a base of support for our children that was not dependent upon Summit, or at least we tried to. The reality is that as middle-class or upper-middle-class blacks, we cross two worlds, and I think we cross them very well.

I like Summit. I told my husband that my preference would be to renovate a townhouse in Newark or a home in Newark. But if we were to move to Newark, we’d have to buy a whole block with other African Americans. We’ve talked about this with some of our friends, and we need to go out there and just buy the block and be together and make it happen.

My kids are in private school already, so we don’t have the benefit of going through the public school system right now. We chose not to have our daughters attend public school. It’s hard for me to explain why. There’s a problem, and it’s hard to articulate. My children just didn’t fit in. I think the economics piece is part of it, as far as relating to the black children in this environment is concerned. It’s almost like our children were discriminated against by black children who weren’t from middle-class homes.

I grew up in a small town in Ohio. Very few of the blacks from that town went on to college. I’m from a family where education was valued. My parents basically said, this is what you’re going to do. Forty years ago, if you valued education and wanted to excel, people would consider that you wanted to be white, or that you thought you were better than everybody else. Forty years later, I think our children are experiencing the same thing. It’s like we’re not going to get away from it.

It’s almost as if we have two identities within the black world. Our son, who is twenty, articulates it very well, the growing up here. He experienced things differently from our daughters. We took them out of public school earlier. Brandon went through the public school system up through eleventh grade, and then he finished in an independent school.

This sounds terrible, but even though the private school our children are in is much smaller and the number of black children is smaller, they have more in common with the children there than they did with the children in the public school. It has to do with motivation. In the private school, you’re not teased because you want to do better. We’re dealing with that in the Summit public school system. I’m involved with an advocacy group that is trying to eliminate the gap between the performance of black children in the school system and the majority of children in the school system. So it’s an issue that’s recognized within the community, and that’s why Summit is a good place to live. We are dealing with it. It just takes a long time to do the right thing.

I look at other communities, like South Orange and Maplewood and Montclair, that have larger populations of middle- and higher-income blacks, and I think there’s a better networking opportunity. Even though a lot of the parents of means there might send their children to private schools, it’s a better environment for the children than a community like Summit. There are more support networks for African Americans, and I think more commonality. Summit is not quite there yet.

A lot of our friends have seen their children bring home someone white that they’re dating, and some of us have been talking about how we want to respond. If my daughter brings home a white boy and says, Mama, this is the one, I’m not going to refuse to support her. I value what’s inside, and if that is the choice of my daughter, I know it will be the right choice for her, because it’s what’s inside, not outside, that matters. My preference would be that she marry someone of our own color. I think there’s a comfort level in that; there’s more support. We have a great history, and I want that to be built on and continued. Not that marrying white would change that. We have interracial marriages in my family and they’re great. I think it just depends. I think if my daughter married someone of a different race, he would be very sensitive to being fair and equal and giving, and all those good qualities, because my daughter was well raised.

I think being successful has always been equated with being white. It’s hard to change what’s always been. It’s important that we have more people working on Wall Street. Things are different for some of the young people that Milton has brought into the industry. But things are also still the same.

I work on the other end. I’m dealing with the low-income population in the nonprofit world. The community development corporations that I work with have fiduciary education courses. In some of these communities, people have the Lexus and the Mercedes in the backyard, but they don’t own a house. This is where the education process comes in. We’re encouraging home ownership, so people need to know how to qualify for a home and how to save for one. The changes have to take place both on Wall Street and on Main Street.

Viola Irvin

I’m sixteen years old, and I’m in the eleventh grade. I’ve been going to an all girls’ school ever since sixth grade. I’m interested in applying to Morgan State, American University, and Sarah Lawrence. I love the Sarah Lawrence campus. I like the atmosphere. I think I read in
100 Best Colleges for African-American Students
that Alice Walker went to Sarah Lawrence. The only thing deterring me from Sarah Lawrence is its size. It’s a small school. So I need to look at Morgan State, a Historically Black College, and American University to see which one I like better.

I’m considering Morgan State because I want to get that sense of black community again. I’m also interested in Howard, but I think I’m going to look at Morgan before Howard. I’m not going to Spelman or any all girls’ school, because I don’t like that all-girl classroom anymore. I need that male-in-the-classroom experience for college, I think, so I can get that male’s point of view.