Why no Olympian effort on racial diversity?

Just after I read your Fall 2013 cover story, “No seat at the table,” an article appeared in the Boston Globe about an effort by business chieftains to explore bringing the Summer Olympics to Boston. We learned that the team has already recruited Mitt Romney as an advisor and a bevy of architects, engineers, and planners to look at potential sites and consider other issues involved in an Olympic bid. How, I wondered, can powerful leaders be galvanized to unite and work on one civic challenge while largely ignoring another, which, in the words of Thomas Saltonstall, has been “deleterious to our economy and damaging to Greater Boston’s people, communities, and reputation”?

The answer certainly does not reside in lack of documentation. Your article cites the Globe’s 1983 series of articles but there have been other reports, including one in 2007 by the Center for Women in Politics & Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Boston that occasioned a Globe editorial and spawned the Commonwealth Compact. Despite the periodic reports, as Robert Harnais says about local law firms’ efforts at diversity, “something is clearly not working.”

What’s not working, I believe, is that existing leaders have not prioritized this issue. With so many employers, diversity in hiring is simply relegated to the back burner. “There aren’t enough qualified candidates” is one lament. The Great Recession is another explanation, but it can’t account for Boston chronically lagging way behind Fortune 500 companies and other major cities. Why have executive suites and boards diversified elsewhere while we’ve hardly made a dent in Boston in 30 years?

Where local efforts fall down is in not recognizing that changing organizations involves a cultural evolution with emotional dimensions. Decision-makers who want to measurably shift the composition of their organizations need to take time to engage their colleagues on it, just as a group has coalesced around the Summer Olympics effort. Facing attitudes about race, however, is demanding emotionally. We grow up playing sports but we don’t grow up knowing how to talk about racial issues.

Mayor Marty Walsh has an opportunity to catalyze Boston organizations by virtue of his own journey toward greater racial awareness and the chance a new mayor gets to express his vision. In addition to appointing a chief diversity officer, I’d like to see him convene closed-door dialogues among high-level executives and board members from a variety of organizations—half people of color and half white—in which they candidly share challenges and successes they’ve experienced personally and professionally around racial issues. Executive pronouncements about commitment to diversity are essential but not enough. There’s no substitute for face-to-face dialogue to break stereotypes, create insight, build trust and generate solutions.

Jeff Stone
Milton
Former director, City-Wide Dialogues on Boston’s Ethnic & Racial Diversity

Letter from the margin

Just as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote a letter from a Birmingham jail in which he made the case for change in a hostile and segregated South, I am writing this letter from Boston’s margin calling for change in the city’s power structure. Your article, “No Seat at the Table,” shows that Boston’s power structure, despite its support for diversity, still excludes blacks and Hispanics. Boston’s Mass High Tech Council, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, Mass Bio, Boston’s hospitals, corporate boards, and law firms were all referenced in your article. We truly have some serious catchup work to do if we are to match other cities across this nation.

In spite of the challenge ahead, I am more focused, energized, and optimistic about our chances to improve the situation. The real question is do we have the will to make the substantive change that is required? If we think that continued evolution at our current pace is the answer to this problem, then I submit the answer is absolutely no. We need immediate change and results that demonstrate that the meter has actually moved. Hispanics, blacks, and Asians deserve a seat at the table in greater numbers.

Unlike Dr. King’s reference to the South, I am not suggesting that Boston is hostile, but I am making the case that we (blacks, Hispanics and Asians) are left out of the process. It feels the same way as segregation. For blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, gaining entrance to the Boston power structure is like pushing a rock up a hill with no end in sight. Even education, assimilation, private golf memberships, yachting, and other functions still don’t cut it. We are not invited into the power structure.

There needs to be an aggressive strategy of outreach, recruitment, cultivation, and placement. We need to increase the number of blacks, Hispanics, and women on corporate boards. We need to build a pipeline from the black, Hispanic, and Asian communities into the power structure rather than recycling the same few folks that were recommended by the existing power structure.

Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular are fascinating places to live and work, but the progress on diversity is far too slow and woefully inadequate. One of the best lessons I have learned from the Boston Red Sox is that they constantly scour the market for talent and if the talent is not there the team grows talent within its farm system. This is a win-win strategy. Being on the bench or on the margin is no fun, but Boston needs blacks and Hispanics at the table in the power structure contributing and adding value. Our talents, skills, and contributions are too valuable to be wasted.

Darnell L. Williams
President/CEO, Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts

On Boston’s past

Thanks to Michael Jonas for his review of Larry DiCara’s memoir Turmoil and Transition in Boston. Not enough has been written about Boston’s political and neighborhood history covering the last 50 years.

The desegregation of Boston schools by federal court order in 1974 and the events that followed were the most important and difficult part of our city’s history in the past 100 years.

The period does not even get called by the same name; one group refers to it as busing and the other as desegregation.

I think Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground remains the monumental book about those events, but also about the race, class, and power issues that led to the events of those years.

We are fortunate that both Boston historian Jim Vrabel and long-term community leader Hubie Jones are at work on books about the history of the community issues of the 1960s through 1980s.

Those were times of great division, but there were people who stood up heroically then and since then to make our city a better place to live. We all can name our list of remaining unsolved issues, which are the challenges and opportunities before us.

Lew Finfer
Director, Massachusetts Communities Action Network