CHAPTER 4

SHARED CONTEXT

The Evolution of Race

If we want to talk about how we got here, it’s important to remember that we got here on purpose. It’s about a structure built on systemic racism that the United States created intentionally and now needs to dismantle intentionally and replace with one that takes into account the needs of the people that it actually serves.

JOHN OLIVER
White British-American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television show host¹

A White consultant shared with us how the Black Lives Matter movement isn’t well understood by some White people: “I was working with an organization last year right after the murder of George Floyd. We were all wearing masks because of Covid, and a White person came up to me and said, ‘I don’t understand Black Lives Matter. All lives matter.’ And I said, ‘You need to be careful who you say that around or in front of. Let me tell you why we have this movement called Black Lives Matter.’ When you give people the history, they start to get it.”²

Unfortunately, most people in the United States didn’t learn the country’s history of race and racism in our schoolroom classes. Liz Rowan is a biracial millennial who is a marketing professional at Amazon Web Services. She shared with us an exchange she had with one of her White friends: “She couldn’t believe what she was seeing [referring to the murder of George Floyd and other unarmed Black people]. She said to me, ‘I was so naïve. I never totally understood just how big this problem is.’ People think because slavery ended and the Jim Crow era is over that wide-sweeping racial equity already exists. They don’t realize that there are Black men who are afraid to go outside, afraid to get pulled over by police because they will be racially profiled.”³

Or worse, murdered by police officers with little or no accountability. Most recently, some people have described the trial verdict of former police officer Derek Chauvin as a “victory.” The jury found him guilty on all three counts, for the murder of George Floyd. The verdict in the Chauvin murder trial is right, but it’s not justice. Also, it is extremely unusual.⁴

The Staten Island police officer who put 43-year-old Eric Garner in a chokehold that killed him on July 17, 2014—the incident was filmed by a bystander—was later fired but never prosecuted.⁵

The officer who fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9, 2014, was cleared of wrongdoing, based on dozens of eyewitness reports. However, the DOJ report was scathing about institutional problems in the Ferguson police force and racial disparities in the justice system.⁶

In December 2020, the BBC reported that “the US Justice Department says it will not bring charges against two White police officers involved in the 2014 fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy in Cleveland, Ohio, who was holding a toy gun.” The Justice Department said that prosecutors had “found insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges.”⁷

One of the two police officers who fatally shot 37-year-old Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on July 5, 2016, was suspended; the other was dismissed. Neither faced criminal charges.⁸

The police officer who fatally shot 32-year-old Philando Castile on July 6, 2016, while he was out driving with his girlfriend in St. Paul, Minnesota, was cleared of murder charges.⁹

In March 2019, authorities announced that the two officers who fatally shot 22-year-old Stephon Clark on March 18, 2018, in Sacramento, California, would not face criminal prosecution, as the officers had feared for their lives. Only a mobile phone was found at the scene, and Clark was unarmed.¹⁰

On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was shot eight times when officers raided her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. A grand jury charged one police officer not with Ms. Taylor’s death, but with “wanton endangerment” for firing into a neighboring apartment. Three officers involved in the raid have now been dismissed from the police force.¹¹

On September 12, 2017, the US Justice Department announced in a press release that “the independent federal investigation into the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, Jr., on April 19, 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland, found insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges against six Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officers.”¹²

Four police officers were tried on charges of excessive use of force in the March 3, 1991, beating of 25-year-old Rodney King in Los Angeles, California. On April 29, 1992, the jury acquitted three of the officers and failed to reach a verdict on one charge for the fourth.¹³

Like the Chauvin verdict, another rare exception to the pattern of no charges brought—or if so, acquittal—is the White police officer who on April 4, 2015, fatally shot 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back five times in North Charleston, South Carolina. The officer was later fired and eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison.

At the time of this writing, there was yet another fatal shooting of a biracial Black man by a White police officer in Minnesota, just 10 miles from where Chauvin’s trial was in progress. On April 14, the police officer was charged with second-degree manslaughter in the death of 20-year-old Daunte Wright.

Clearly, this is a pattern. So how did we get here? There are two narratives of how the system of US policing developed. Both are true.

“The more commonly known history—the one most college students will hear about in an Introduction to Criminal Justice course—is that US policing can trace its roots back to English policing,” writes criminal justice researcher Connie Hassett-Walker.¹⁴ She is an assistant professor of justice studies and sociology at Norwich University in Vermont. Centralized municipal police departments in the United States began to form in the early nineteenth century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere. “This is the history that doesn’t make us feel bad,” says Hassett-Walker.

“At the current rate, it will take Black Americans 95 years to reach workforce parity in all levels of US private industry—having 12% representation at every level of a company, according to a February report from McKinsey & Co.”

In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered on the preservation of the slavery system. That’s the second historical narrative about the origins of law enforcement. “Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols, squadrons made up of White volunteers empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.”¹⁵

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written about members of slave patrols forcefully entering anyone’s home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.¹⁶

As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants, and the poor. Through the early twentieth century, there were few standards for hiring or training officers.¹⁷

Beginning in the 1870s until 1965, Jim Crow laws mandated separate public spaces for Blacks and Whites, such as schools, libraries, water fountains, and restaurants. Enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws or violated social norms often endured police brutality. “The authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African Americans were lynched,” writes Hassett-Walker. “Nor did the judicial system hold the police accountable for failing to intervene when Black people were being murdered by mobs.”¹⁸

Since the time that Floyd died under the knee of former police officer Chauvin on May 25, 2020, “more than 80 companies in the S&P 100 have promised to improve hiring for Black, Brown and other historically underrepresented workers,” writes Jeff Green, managing diversity reporter for Bloomberg News. “Almost half have goals for improving representation in management, according to data collected by Bloomberg. Twenty-two S&P 100 companies have joined the OneTen Coalition, a pledge to add 1 million middle-income jobs for Black workers in a decade.”¹⁹ Corporations such as Microsoft Corp., Target Corp., and Starbucks Corp. have made specific promises for hiring more Black workers. That’s the good news.

However, a majority of large companies still haven’t set quantifiable racial diversity goals. Many companies remain reluctant to disclose details about the racial composition of their workforce, says Green. “At the current rate, it will take Black Americans 95 years to reach workforce parity in all levels of US private industry—having 12% representation at every level of a company, according to a February report from McKinsey & Co.”²⁰

In isolation, without the context of history, the Chauvin verdict lets us off the hook for the real work: institutional reckoning; and across society’s institutions, structural change. Green says, “The jury is still out on whether US companies will make a measurable, lasting change to their system of governance, and thus whether the status quo will shift.”

It is our hope that this book, The Business of Race, will influence that shift.

THE FUNDAMENTALS

The language of race is always changing in tandem with the culture that shapes it. That is why we must be in sync with how it has evolved over time, from its origins to modern day, to reflect the racial dynamics of the twenty-first century. We all need context and a common language when creating cultural change, aligning around a business strategy, or advancing goals. The same is true in our conversations and race work. If we don’t share basic education in the history and evolution of race and racism, we will make little headway. And another reason to have at least a working knowledge of race, racism, and diversity? Some employers are now asking these questions in job interviews for values alignment, as you will see in Chapter 10.

You have a business to run or a job to perform, which means your time for amassing large volumes of historical knowledge is limited. However, assimilating the basics of racial history will help you be more proficient. The two fundamental concepts to know before embarking on race work are (1) race is not biological and (2) race is a social construct.

We’ve recommended four resources on the history of race and racism to provide you with a shared lexicon and context for your organization’s journey. All are available online. Three are free and one is nominally priced. And we provide their links in the back of this book under Additional Resources. Two are documentaries—one from Frontline: “A Class Divided”²¹ and the other from California Newsreel: Race: The Power of an Illusion.²² The remaining two resources are free online courses. One is produced by the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign: Race and Cultural Diversity in American Life and History.²³ The other is produced by Microsoft: Global Diversity and Inclusion: Beyond Microsoft.²⁴

RACE IS NOT BIOLOGICAL

The idea of race as biology assumes that simple external differences such as skin color, eye color, and hair form are linked to other, more complex internal differences. Like athletic ability. Musical aptitude. Intelligence.

Legal scholar and microbiologist Pilar Ossorio says, “We have a notion of race as being clear-cut, distinct categories of people that are deep and unchanging. All of our genetics now is telling us that that’s not the case.²⁵ We can’t find any genetic markers that are in everybody of a particular race and in nobody of some other race.”²⁶

We (this book’s coauthors) both studied anthropology and biology during our undergraduate days, so this information—that there are no distinct genetic or biological markers for race—is not new to us. However, this information may surprise you and others. Evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves explains that understanding race means understanding how different people perceive and define it.²⁷ And most people assume that there are biological races and that “these racial categories align with physical features.” In other words, we can see differences among populations, but can populations be bundled into what we call races?

Graves further explains that “the measured amount of genetic variation in the human population is extremely small. Genetically, we aren’t very different.” Humans are among the most similar of all species. Only one out of every thousand nucleotides (the building blocks of the nucleic acids RNA and DNA) that make up our genetic code is different among individuals. Though penguins look very much alike, they have twice the amount of genetic difference, one from the other, than humans do with each other. In fruit flies it’s ten times the amount. So how do you explain the differences in skin color, eye shape, and hair form? Geography.

People who trace their ancestry back to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, or the early Americas lived isolated from each other for long enough periods to evolve different physical traits in response to their environment. People who trace ancestry to the Southern Hemisphere adapted to their geography with darker skin to protect them from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. People who trace their ancestry to the Northern Hemisphere tend to have lighter skin to better absorb the sun’s vitamin D. Humans have migrated around this planet over the last 200,000 years, resulting today in multitudes of skin color variations.

There hasn’t been time for the development of much genetic variation, other than what regulates superficial features like skin color and hair form. Most importantly these superficial features do not represent differences in overall genetic variation.²⁸ Meaning by the time these variations arose, more complicated traits such as speech, abstract thinking, and physical aptitude had already evolved.

RACE IS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

Human beings are tribal at their core.³⁰ Since the nineteenth century, social psychologists and cultural anthropologists, and now more recently neuroscientists, have studied this phenomenon. Our brains are like digital folders or analog filing cabinets. We love to make sense of the world we see by performing a function that US journalist Bill Bishop calls “the big sort.” In his book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart,³¹ Bishop is referring to modern-day humans, noting that this sorting goes back to our early survival. Forming bonds with others who looked like us helped us feed our families (think hunter-gatherers) and protect ourselves from danger.

Tribalism goes back millennia. Both slavery and indentured servitude have existed for thousands of years and span many cultures, nationalities, and religions from ancient times to the present day. The social, economic, and legal positions of slaves have differed vastly in different systems of slavery in different times and places. The concept of race, though, is a relatively recent human invention, only hundreds of years old, and it’s deeply tied to the development of the United States.

“The term ‘race,’ used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection,” write the authors of the Smithsonian’s website for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “The modern-day use of the term ‘race’ is a human invention, a shorthand to describe and categorize people into various social groups based on characteristics like skin color, eye shape and hair form.” In Western countries, this social construct of race gives or denies benefits and privileges. It is embedded in Western institutions, invented to disproportionately channel resources, power, status, and wealth to the dominant group, White people.

US society developed the social construct of race early in its formation to justify its new economic system of capitalism, which depended on the institution of forced labor, especially the enslavement of African peoples. As explained on the homepage of the “Talking About Race” section of the website for the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, “To more accurately understand how race and its counterpart, racism, are woven into the very fabric of US society,” including the workplace, “we must explore the history of how race, White privilege, and how anti-blackness came to be.”³²

The social construct of race, as we understand it today, evolved alongside the formation of the United States and was deeply connected with the evolution of two other terms, “White” and “slave,” writes the Smithsonian. The words “race,” “White,” and “slave” were words Europeans used in the 1500s. And they brought these words with them to North America. However, the words did not have the meanings that they have today. Instead, the needs of the developing United States, would transform those words’ meanings into new ideas. Four hundred years ago in the US colonies that would come to be known as the United States, land was plentiful. Labor was not. A new human resources model had to be created. It would provide workers to plough the fields, pick the cotton, dry the tobacco, and eventually construct the railroads. It was called slavery and indentured servitude.

The Seeds of Racism

For those of us who grew up in the United States, what we did learn in history class was that Thomas Jefferson was one of the country’s Founding Fathers.³⁴ Specifically, he was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, the document that demanded independence for the United States from the rule of Great Britain. Also, he was the third president of the United States; Jefferson penned the revolutionary words “All men are created equal,” proclaiming human equality in the Declaration. However, the contradiction between the claim that all men are created equal and the existence of US slavery (Jefferson himself owned 225 slaves) garnered criticism when the Declaration was first published.

Jefferson also wrote a lesser known yet influential document, Notes on the State of Virginia. Written in response to questions from France about the American colonies, the book reads like a sales pitch for the newly forming country. Notes on the State of Virginia was not about race.³⁵ But among Jefferson’s descriptions of rivers, seaports, mountains, and climate, he expressed his views on the people of the new land, from America, Europe, and Africa: “I advance it as a suspicion only that the Blacks whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the Whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”³⁶ Jefferson’s words appear to justify slavery at a time when many were admonishing the Declaration’s authors for espousing freedom while continuing to support a system of human bondage.

Historian Robin D. G. Kelley writes that “the problem that they had to figure out was, ‘how can we promote liberty, freedom, democracy on one hand and a system of slavery and exploitation of peoples who are non-White, on the other?’”³⁷ The only way to justify owning slaves, while at the same time espousing “All men are created equal,” was to create a plan—a business plan. In that plan it was necessary to define one of the key stakeholders—the laborers who were Black Africans—as inferior to the White stakeholders.

We’re not suggesting that Jefferson was alone in justifying and perpetuating this social construct called race and its counterpart, racism. Slavery, upheld by the necessary rationalization of the construct to support a way of life, was an institution—intentionally systematized. Alongside Jefferson, many of the Founding Fathers owned numerous slaves—among them George Washington, the first president of the United States; James Madison, Jefferson’s secretary of state and the fourth president of the United States;³⁸ Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania, one of the drafters of the Constitution and founder of the University of Pennsylvania; and John Hancock, first Massachusetts governor from 1780 to 1785. Hancock was also the first member of Congress to sign the Declaration of Independence. Other Founding Father slave owners included John Jay of New York, Samuel Chase of Maryland, and several more. Some of those who didn’t own slaves themselves, such as Alexander Hamilton of New York,³⁹ married into large slave-owning families.⁴⁰ Former commanding general of the Union Army Ulysses S. Grant was the last president to personally own slaves. He served two terms as president between 1869 and 1877.

Similar logic rationalized the taking of Indigenous lands—people who were non-White were inferior to those who were. In 1830, a year after Andrew Jackson became president, he signed a law he had proposed during his first State of the Union address in 1829—the Indian Removal Act. Shortly after Congress approved the Indian Removal Act, Jackson and his War Department began enforcing it, targeting tribes in the southeastern United States. By Jackson’s second term in office, his administration was already relocating the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek tribes to lands west of the Mississippi that had been designated “Indian Territory.” The Muscogee and Seminole, established, autonomous nations like the other tribes in the southeastern United States, would soon join them.

The Indian Removal Act forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Indigenous people from their homelands east of the Mississippi.⁴¹ Their removal gave 25 million acres of land to White settlement and to slave plantations. Jackson defended Indian removal by saying that it was not the greed of White settlers that drove the policy, but the inevitable fate of an inferior people established “in the midst of a superior race.”⁴²

The operational force behind Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 was Martin Van Buren, the eighth US president from 1837 to 1841. Van Buren, who served as secretary of state during Andrew Jackson’s first term in office and vice president during Jackson’s second term, pledged to continue enforcing policies established by his predecessor.

Just as the scarcity or abundance of resources—people, products, or services—drives your business today, the need for land and labor was the rationalization for and driver of the creation of racism in America. But seeds must not only be planted in people’s minds; they must be nourished to turn them into deeply held beliefs.

The United States has a long history of systemic oppression justified by the social construct of race. “Since the 1840s, anti-Latino prejudice has led to illegal deportations, school segregation and even lynching—often-forgotten events that echo the civil-rights violations of African-Americans in the Jim Crow-era South,” writes Erin Blakemore.⁴³

Blakemore continues, “Though Latinos were critical to the US economy and often were American citizens, everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination.” This was a pattern of welcome until you are no longer useful as a source of cheap labor. Or if you were perceived as a threat to the economic opportunities of Whites such as access to the wealth yielded by Californian mines during the Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855. Also, forced deportations were common during the Great Depression. When the stock market tanked and unemployment grew, fears about jobs and the economy spread. In response, the United States forcibly removed people of Mexican descent from the country—about 60 percent of whom were US citizens. Euphemistically referred to as “repatriations,” the removals were not voluntary. Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and kicked them out. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering places, or offered free train fare to Mexico.

Blakemore writes:

Colorado even ordered all of its “Mexicans”—in reality, anyone who spoke Spanish or seemed to be of Latino descent, including Mexican immigrants who had already become US citizens, and US-born children—to leave the state and blockaded its southern border to keep people from returning. People with disabilities and active illnesses were removed from hospitals and also deported. . . . When deportations finally ended around 1936, up to 2 million Mexican-Americans had been “repatriated,” including nearly a third of both Los Angeles’ and Texas’ Mexican-born population. . . . Unlike the South, which had explicit laws barring African American children from White schools, segregation was not enshrined in the laws of the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from restaurants, movie theaters and schools.

Latino students were expected to attend separate “Mexican schools” throughout the Southwest beginning in the 1870s. At first, the schools were set up to serve the children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches. Soon, they spread into cities, too. By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County, California, attended segregated schools.

THE 1904 WORLD’S FAIR: THE ULTIMATE RACISM MARKETING CONVENTION

By the mid-nineteenth century, race and racism had become the accepted, “commonsense” wisdom of Whites in the United States, explaining everything from individual behavior to the fate of human societies. Academic journals legitimized race “science,” which was also popularized in the new monthly magazines of the day such as Harper’s. Its advancement took a giant leap forward in the “remarkable Indigenous people” displays at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri.⁴⁴ Here, US popular culture reinforced and fueled racial explanations for the country’s progress and power. These ideas of racial difference and White superiority were deeply imprinted into the US consciousness and that of Western culture overseas.

The 1904 World’s Fair was positioned as a triumph of civilization, imperialism, and a new century. The organizers wanted to show the United States’s unbridled progress. Attendees go to have fun, to be sure, but world’s fairs are not about entertainment; they’re billed as the world’s universities. In what was hailed as “palaces of progress,” fairgoers wandered through technological and cultural exhibits. But on the other side of the fairgrounds, visitors were captivated by human exhibits—people on display in their so-called natural habitats. Human beings were organized (there’s that “big sort” again) on a continuum from savagery to civilized. Savages were portrayed by Brown and Black people, civilized by White people. Some White fairgoers had their photo taken next to so-called savages to show their friends back home how “civilized” they were—an example is shown in Figure 4.1. The seeds of racism that were planted then, flourish today.

FIGURE 4.1 From the Philippine Exhibit, 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis. (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Transfer from the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Photo President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2.2002.3160.)

On display for all to see at the fair were the subjugated people of the United States’s recent past. An exhibit titled “Old Plantation” served up a bucolic view of slave life. At another exhibit titled “American Indians,” and described as vanquished people, sat a man dressed as Geronimo, the legendary and recently defeated Apache warrior, signing autographs for a fee. Fairgoers saw an enormous number of people who perhaps they had only read about, maybe never even heard about. The fair was an opportunity to showcase Manifest Destiny—the nineteenth-century cultural belief that the expansion of the United States throughout the continent was both justified and destined by God—and the country’s burgeoning drive to expand overseas. One of the largest and most popular exhibits was the Philippine Exposition. Created to demonstrate the benefits of the United States’s civilizing presence, the exhibit gave fairgoers a chance to see the people they had recently conquered: The United States had taken possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines after defeating Spain in war.

The St. Louis World’s Fair closed on December 1, 1904. Its grand exhibit halls were demolished soon after. But race, a story first told to rationalize and justify deep divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality, would be carried forward into the twentieth century and beyond.

In the seven months the fair was open, nearly 20 million people attended. Visitors received an object lesson that connected this social construct abstraction called race to a concrete, literally hands-on vision of the United States’s future. Newspapers around the world also promoted this enduring narrative for all the world to see: Whites are the superior race, Whites are the shapers of history, Whites are the symbol of progress.

The St. Louis World’s Fair closed on December 1, 1904. Its grand exhibit halls were demolished soon after. But race, a story first told to rationalize and justify deep divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality, would be carried forward into the twentieth century and beyond. Most US citizens believed that race was one of the most important parts of national life; that race mattered because it guaranteed the United States’s future in the history of the world. The United States would rise toward glory, toward history, toward its destiny.

DO NOT PASS GO OR COLLECT ANY MONEY . . . FOR 400 YEARS

In the weeks following the police killing of George Floyd, protests brought to the forefront of US consciousness the perspectives of numerous Black leaders, artists, intellectuals, and authors. Among them is young adult author Kimberly Jones, whose nearly seven-minute video, How Can We Win, gained national media attention with more than 2 million views.⁴⁵ The content of her video will be expanded and published in book form by Henry Holt and Co. in November 2021 (How We Can Win: Race, History and Changing the Money Game That’s Rigged). In her video, Jones passionately describes one among countless historical episodes when Black people were able to break free of the grips of oppression and advance both economically and educationally, only to have that freedom taken away again.

“Economics was the reason that Black people were brought to this country,” Jones says midway into the video. “We came to do the agricultural work in the south and the textile work in the north.”

She continues the metaphor of the 400-year wealth-building advantage of Whites in the United States that began by enslaving Black Africans: “[Let’s say] right now I decided that I wanted to play Monopoly with you, and for 400 rounds of playing Monopoly I didn’t allow you to have money, I didn’t allow you to have anything on the board. And then we played another 50 rounds of Monopoly and everything that you earned while playing those 50 rounds was taken from you: that was Tulsa.”

Black Wall Street: Tulsa, Oklahoma

In 1906, O. W. Gurley, a wealthy African American from Arkansas, moved to Tulsa and purchased over 40 acres of land that he made sure was only sold to other African Americans. By 1921, Tulsa’s Greenwood District, which would come to be known as Black Wall Street, was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. In this district, the average hourly wage of Black families in the area exceeded what the federal minimum wage is today. This community prospered with banks, hotels, cafés, clothiers, movie theaters, its own school system, and contemporary homes with indoor plumbing.

Gurley created this community as a refuge and economic opportunity for those migrating from the harsh oppression of segregation laws in Mississippi. This movement was part of the Great Migration, the exodus of 6 million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West, from the time of World War I in 1916 until the 1970s.

This Great Migration was not simply relocating from one part of the country to another like we might today, say, for a new job. Isabel Wilkerson in her book The Warmth of Other Suns weaves a beautifully-crafted yet brutal story, based on more than 250 personal interviews, of what the Great Migration was like; the courage it took for African Americans to leave the familiar for the unfamiliar; the escape from violent attacks, lynchings, and economic oppression; and the desire for a better education for their children and future generations.⁴⁶ Those that fled the South, often under false pretenses for fear of retribution, sought economic and social asylum, much like immigrants do today. The big difference? The Great Migration was within the borders of their own country. African Americans were escaping a caste system known as Jim Crow—an artificial hierarchy in which everything that you could and could not do was based on the color of your skin.

The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia explains, “After the Civil War (1861–1865), most southern states and, later, border states passed laws that denied Blacks basic human rights. The minstrel character’s name ‘Jim Crow’ became a shorthand for this racial caste system—the laws, customs and etiquette that segregated and demeaned African Americans primarily from the 1870s to the 1960s.”⁴⁷

The name “Jim Crow” was popularized by a White entertainer, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, well before the Civil War. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Rice performed a popular song-and-dance act supposedly modeled after a slave. He named the character Jim Crow. Rice darkened his face, acted like a buffoon, and spoke with an exaggerated and distorted imitation of African American Vernacular English. In his Jim Crow persona, he also sang “Negro ditties” such as “Jump Jim Crow.” By 1838, the term “Jim Crow” was being used as a collective racial epithet for Black people. Rice was not the first White comic to perform in blackface, but he was the most popular of his time, touring both the United States and England. As a result of Rice’s success, “Jim Crow” became a common stage persona for White comedians’ blackface portrayals of African Americans. The popularity of minstrel shows aided the spread of Jim Crow as a racial slur. It represented the legitimization of anti-Black racism and a system of laws and customs that oppressed Black people as a way of life. This system was fortified by the rationalizations that Whites were superior to Blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior.⁴⁸

And it was regularly enforced by violence, actual and threatened, as a method of social control. As author Ijeoma Oluo says, “The way in which systemic racism works, and has always worked, has not necessarily always been this reign of terror.”⁴⁹ That’s an enforcement of the system itself. The most extreme forms of Jim Crow violence were lynchings. Blacks who violated Jim Crow norms, for example, drinking from the Whites-only water fountain or trying to vote, risked their homes, jobs, and lives. Any White person could physically beat any Black person with impunity. Blacks had little legal recourse against these assaults because the Jim Crow criminal justice system was all White: police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials.

The Black Code laws known as Jim Crow, began their foothold during the period known as Reconstruction. This is a period in US history, from 1865 to 1877, that followed the Civil War. During this time, the nation attempted to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social and economic legacy.

The Equal Justice Initiative’s website cogently connects the dots between Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction period, Jim Crow and where we are today:

After the Confederacy’s 1865 defeat in the Civil War, Reconstruction amendments to the United States Constitution abolished slavery, established the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people, and granted Black people civil rights—including granting Black men the right to vote. For the Reconstruction period, federal officials and troops remained in Southern states helping to enforce these new rights and administer educational and other programs for the formerly enslaved. As a result, Black people in the South, for the first time, constituted a community of voters and public officials, landowners, wage-earners, and free American citizens.

The federal presence also addressed deadly violence Black people faced on a daily basis. Continued support for White supremacy and racial hierarchy meant that slavery in America did not end—it evolved. The identities of many White Americans, especially in the South, were grounded in the belief that they were inherently superior to African Americans. Many White people reacted violently to the requirement to treat their former “human property” as equals and pay for their labor. Plantation owners attacked Black people simply for claiming their freedom. In the first two years after the war, thousands of Black people were murdered for asserting freedom or basic rights.

Congressional efforts to provide federal protection to formerly enslaved Black people were undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned laws that provided remedies to Black people facing violent intimidation. In the 1870s, Northern politicians began retreating from a commitment to protect Black rights and lives, culminating in the withdrawal of troops in 1877. In response, racial terror and violence directed at Black people intensified and legal systems quickly emerged to restore racial hierarchy: White Southerners barred Black people from voting; created an exploitative economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming that would keep African Americans indentured and poor for generations; and made racial segregation the law of the land.⁵⁰

During the post-Reconstruction era of the South, the biggest fear for Black people was economic terrorism: the very real threat felt by people whose jobs could be taken at a moment’s notice, whose homes could be taken out from under them, who couldn’t get any medical help, who had no security for themselves and their family, who couldn’t get their kids to school. “Yes, terror helped push Black people out,” says Oluo “But it was economic opportunity that propelled them north and west during the Great Migration.” And that includes the parents of coauthor Gina Greenlee. Her mother and father migrated from Virginia and South Carolina, respectively, in the 1950s. They met and married in New York City, where Gina was later born.

The Game Is Fixed

Tulsa was a place “where we built Black economic wealth,” continues Kimberly Jones in her video How Can We Win, “where we were self-sufficient, where we owned our stores, where we owned our property, and they burned them to the ground. So that’s 450 years. . . . So if I played 400 rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to give you every dime that I made, and then for 50 years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it, like they did in Tulsa . . . how can you win? How can you win? You can’t win. The game is fixed.”

A century ago, on May 31, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune reported that a 19-year old Black man, Dick Rowland, attempted to rape a White woman, Sarah Page, 17 years old. Whites in the area did not wait for the investigative process to play out, sparking two days of unprecedented racial violence. Thirty-five city blocks went up in flames, 300 people died, and 800 were injured.

Accounts vary on what happened between Page and Rowland in the elevator of the commercial Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. Yet as a result of the Tulsa Tribune’s racially inflammatory report, Black and White armed mobs arrived at the courthouse. Scuffles broke out. Shots were fired. The outnumbered Blacks headed back to Greenwood. But the enraged Whites were not far behind, looting and burning businesses and homes along the way. As a result of mass migrations to the area, driven in part by increased job opportunities, Tulsa became the city with the most African Americans in the state. Tulsa’s rapid change in racial demographics made the city ripe for a riot motivated by White animosity against Black economic progress.

THE BOOTSTRAP MYTH

A common dominant-group narrative about underrepresented groups sounds like this: “I’m sick and tired of people who act like victims and complain about not being able to get ahead. Nothing was ever handed to me. I’ve worked hard my whole life. Why can’t they?” This narrative perpetuates what’s called the “bootstrap myth,” rationalized by people who have, yes, made it—but only in part—by hard work; they also made it in part by another dynamic. “For centuries, White households enjoyed wealth-building opportunities that were systematically denied to people of color,” said Amy Traub, one of four coauthors of the 2017 racial wealth study, “The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap—How Past Racial Injustices Are Carried Forward as Wealth Handed Down Across Generations and Reinforced by ‘Color-Blind’ Practices and Policies.”⁵¹

The researchers’ analyses show that individual behavior is not the driving force behind racial wealth disparities. Typical Black and Latino households in which the children attend college and live in two-parent households still have much less wealth than similarly situated White households. Black and Latino households that include a full-time worker have much less wealth than White households with a full-time worker. Differences in spending habits also fail to explain wealth disparities between Black and White households.

Additional research traces the causes of the racial wealth gap to its origins in historical injustices, from slavery to segregation to redlining—this third injustice being the practice of denying creditworthy applicants a house loan because they lived in certain neighborhoods even though these applicants may otherwise be eligible. Further, the great expansion of wealth in the years after World War II was fueled by public policies such as the GI Bill, which mostly helped White veterans attend college and purchase homes with guaranteed low mortgages, building the foundations of an American middle class that largely excluded people of color. The outcomes of past injustices are carried forward as wealth is handed down across generations and are reinforced by ostensibly color-blind practices and policies in effect today. Yet many popular explanations for racial economic inequality overlook these deep, systemic roots, asserting that wealth disparities must be solely the result of individual life choices and personal achievements. The misconception that personal responsibility accounts for the racial wealth gap is an obstacle to the policies that could effectively address racial disparities.

Those policies continue to impede efforts by African American and Latino households to obtain equal access to economic security. “Research shows that racial privilege now outweighs a fundamental key to economic mobility, like higher education,” says Traub. US policy makers have been slow, at best, to acknowledge this one, of many, structural inequities and to create policies that address it.

Even more recently, a 2020 study by the financial giant Citigroup found that the failure of the United States to address wide gaps between Black and White communities has cost the economy up to $16 trillion over the past 20 years. The study focused on existing gaps in wages, education, housing, and investment. The 104-page report by Citigroup’s economists highlighted the residual effects of slavery in the United States that are still with us today despite legislation: “The dual health and economic crises resulting from the coronavirus lays bare long simmering racial tensions and inequities that have plagued the United States for centuries.”⁵² The economists connected the dots between the economic impact of the pandemic, repeated incidences of police brutality against unarmed Black men and women, and the ensuing protests, claiming this trifecta proved “too great to ignore” and calling for a general reassessment of the “very soul of the nation.”

The findings in the Citigroup report make clear that the United States has made some strides in addressing inequality. Still, huge gaps exist today. These gaps are restraining the economy at large. “Societal inequities have manifested themselves into economic costs, which have harmed individuals, families, communities, and ultimately the growth and well-being of the US economy,” the Citi report said.

This is not only an issue in the United States but also in other parts of the world, such as the United Kingdom.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST AAPIs: MURDERS, ATTACKS, IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS, AND MICROAGGRESSIONS

When we began writing this book, our focus was on the Black and White experience given what was happening in the world and our own racial identities. In the time it has taken us to finish the book for publication, we are compelled to write about the increased violence, hatred, and microaggressions targeted toward Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) living in the United States and Asians living in Western nations. An increasing number of Asians have faced a rise in verbal and physical attacks as a result of racist scapegoating over Covid-19. In the period between March 19, 2020, through February 28, 2021, there were 3,795 hate incidents reported against AAPIs. Stop Hate AAPI is a nonprofit organization that tracks and reports incidents of discrimination, hate, and xenophobia against AAPIs in the United States.⁵⁴ The 3,795 incidents reported likely represents a fraction of the actual number. Incidents include verbal harassment (68.1 percent); shunning—the deliberate avoidance of Asian Americans (20.5 percent); physical assault (11.1 percent); civil rights violations—workforce discrimination, refusal of service, and the barring from transportation; and online harassment. The primary location of these hate incidents may surprise you: 35.4 percent occurred in businesses, not in public places or online.

On March 16, 2021, eight people, six of them Asian American women, were shot and killed by Robert Aaron Long at Asian-owned businesses in the Atlanta area. The names of the eight people murdered are Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng. Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz was also shot, but survived.⁵⁵

“After his capture, the police noted that the shooter said he was seeking to address a ‘sexual addiction’ and ‘was not racially motivated.’ But for Asian women, racism and misogyny are deeply intertwined,” wrote Cady Lang in Time magazine.⁵⁶ Lang continued, “A 2018 report from the American Psychological Association outlined the ways in which Asian-American women are exoticized and objectified in media and popular culture, depicted as ‘faceless, quiet and invisible, or as sexual objects.’ The survey said these stereotypes ‘contribute to experiences of marginalization, invisibility and oppression’ for Asian-American women.”

“Anti-Asian racism also surged during the pandemic in Britain and Australia, with incidents of discrimination and xenophobia reported last summer by Human Rights Watch in Italy, Russia and Brazil,” says Mai-Anh Peterson, cofounder of besea.n (Britain’s East and South East Asian Network).⁵⁷ She goes on to say, “We know that this isn’t just a problem for North America.”

This recent violence against Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders who live in Western countries is not new and not isolated. It is yet another part of a long, historical timeline of oppression by the dominant group against people of color. In 1864 the United States brought in thousands of Chinese workers as a source of cheap labor to build the transcontinental railroad. When their usefulness was over, US politicians, journalists, and business leaders demonized them racially to appease White workers who felt threatened by Chinese competition. “The result was White mobs lynching Chinese immigrants, driving them en masse out of towns, and burning down Chinatowns. Racism against Chinese immigrants climaxed when the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was passed.” It was the first racially discriminatory immigration law in US history. Political scientist and director of Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Janelle Wong says, while “European immigrants were confronted with widespread hostility, they never faced the kind of legal racial restrictions on immigration and naturalization that Asian Americans experienced.”⁵⁸

Cady Lang notes: “This brutality runs through more than two centuries of US history, from the incarceration camps of World War II, when over 100,000 Japanese Americans were rounded up and imprisoned because of xenophobic fears, to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, who died after being beaten by White men in a racially motivated attack in Detroit.”⁵⁹

This most recent wave of racial violence against Blacks, Asians, and people of color has been repeatedly referred to by US elected officials as “un-American.” At best, this statement represents denial, as racial violence is deeply rooted in the country’s history. Ending anti-Asian racism in the United States means confronting centuries of discrimination, violence, and oppression and recognizing how it manifests in the present day. In her comments about the March 16, 2021, Atlanta shootings, Dr. Michelle Au (Chinese American), the first Asian American to be elected to the Georgia state senate, told Time magazine, “This is a new chapter in a very old story.”⁶⁰

JUST WHO WE’VE BECOME

The United States is long overdue for a new story—a business model founded on a different set of principles: not oppression but expression; not deficits but assets; not treating humans as resources but treating them with humanity; not fears but hopes. We believe innovative businesses can lead the way.

If race is a social construct and not biological, you might be wondering why we are continuing to focus on it. The answer is this: because our systems, from employment and education, to housing, healthcare, business, law, and government, were constructed with intention on a flawed narrative. “In order to write a new story,” writes Cady Lang, “we have to acknowledge the ugly past that brought us here.”⁶¹ The belief that non-Whites were less smart, less able, less civilized, less overall than Whites. To this day, that narrative shapes and reinforces every societal institution, including the workplace.

We asked EVERFI’s cofounder and president Ray Martinez what his hope was for the future. He offered this perspective: “My hope is that many years from now, we’re not having this conversation; that racial equity and diversity are ingrained in the institutionalization of every organization across the globe. This is the moment where we can make sustainable change so that in the next generation or two it is just who we’ve become.”⁶²

WHERE TO BEGIN

Having a shared understanding of the origins of race and racism in the United States, or your own country, is essential to productive discourse on these topics. However, if you Google the phrase “race resources,” you’ll receive over a billion results (yes, that’s a “b”). No wonder it’s difficult to know where to begin, but you already have. You’re reading this book. Yet we have only scratched the surface. Now what?

We believe race is core to your business, but it is not your core business, unless you are in the DEI consulting industry. You don’t have time to sift through volumes of information. We’ve done the job for you. As part of our own race journey, we’ve curated the scholarship to four educational resources, mentioned briefly at the beginning of the chapter and presented in more detail below, to help deepen your knowledge of race and racism:

•   Race: The Power of an Illusion. Produced by California Newsreel and originally screened on PBS, this three-hour documentary investigates race in society, science, and history. Of the four educational resources we suggest, this is the only one that has a cost. However the online, four-day streaming rental is under $5.00. Also, you may also purchase the video in disc format for repeated viewing. The documentary challenges the biological idea of race by examining contemporary science, including genetics. It also explores the roots of the race narrative in North America, the nineteenth-century science that legitimized it, and how it came to be so fiercely held in the Western imagination. And it uncovers how race resides not in nature but in politics, economics, and culture. Few of us in the United States learned this in school, unless your family was actively steeped in social justice or civil rights. We certainly didn’t. Likely, during race talk at work, some people may disagree with these facts and even pointedly attempt to dispute them. Though a skilled facilitator will navigate these dynamics, what’s inevitable is that without participant awareness gained from exposure to the same history, race conversation and race work will grind to a standstill.

•   Frontline’s “A Class Divided.” In 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Jane Elliott, a teacher in the small, all-White Iowa town of Riceville, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This episode of Frontline (first aired in 1985) is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power 50 years later. Initially Elliott tried discussing issues of discrimination, racism, and prejudice with her third-grade class. Her efforts were not getting through. These students did not normally interact with any people of color in their all-White rural town. So Elliott got bolder. She devised a two-day “blue eyes/brown eyes” experiment. The first day, she gave students with blue eyes profuse preferential treatment and positive reinforcement. She consciously made them feel superior to the students with brown eyes. Day two: Elliott reversed the treatment she had given each group the day before—preference to brown-eyed students so they could now claim superiority over the blue-eyed students. The result: whichever group Elliott favored in class, those students engaged with enthusiasm. They answered questions quickly and accurately, and performed better on tests. Those who were discriminated against appeared downcast, were uncertain in their answers, and performed poorly on tests. In the documentary about her experiment, Elliott says, “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.”

•   University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s online course Race and Cultural Diversity in American Life and History. Coursera, the giant online curator, offers it for free. This self-paced, 12-hour course, led by African American Studies scholar Dr. James D. Anderson, picks up the baton from the PBS documentary Race: The Power of an Illusion. It guides learners through a deeper understanding of ways in which race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity have shaped US institutions, ideology, law, and social relationships from the colonial era to the present. The primary focus is on the historical and social relationships among European Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian/Pacific Americans. Through a series of video lecturettes, Dr. Anderson prompts you to examine your own beliefs, relationships, and individual experiences.

•   Microsoft’s online modules, Global Diversity and Inclusion: Beyond Microsoft. This self-paced course includes four modules focused on building greater awareness of diversity and inclusion. Recognizing that systemic racism is bigger than any one individual or organization can address, Microsoft has made these modules and hundreds of videos available free of charge. The modules were developed in collaboration with a Japanese American and openly gay man, Kenji Yoshino, who is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at NYU School of Law and the Director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. Beginning with inclusion and bias, the modules also cover three other constructs related to inclusion: covering, allyship, and privilege.

Together these four resources create a shared context (history) and lexicon necessary for productive race talk and race work in the workplace. Our hope is that you will devote time to learn from these free resources (three of the four are free) and perhaps share them with others in your professional life and maybe even your personal life.

THE FINE POINTS

REFLECTION

•   How have you or your family been oppressed by or benefited from the United States’s economic system?

•   Think of a time when understanding context was critical to making a business decision, launching an initiative, or solving a problem. How did understanding the context help you?

•   What’s one small step you can take to educate yourself and others on the United States’s history of race and racism?

•   If you live or work outside the United States, how would you describe the evolution of race in your country?