Diversity’s Champion : When Elsie Cross Takes on Racism and Sexism in Corporations, She Strives to Free Everyone--Even the White Men at the Top

IT’S A SIMPLE FACT OF DEMOGRAPHICS AS WELL AS SIMPLE JUSTICE: WHITE men must figure out how to share power with women and people of color.

According to the Hudson Institute’s 1987 report, “Workforce 2000”: “Only 15% of the net new entrants to the labor force over the next 13 years will be native white males.” And according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, job discrimination and sexual-harassment complaints just keep rising. The agency’s job-discrimination lawsuits increased 30% from 1981 to 1991, and that amid charges that the commission prosecutes too rarely.

“Do the right thing” may be the order of the day, but the question is how? Twenty-five years of affirmative action and equal-employment opportunities have helped women and ethnic minorities crack the door, but they haven’t helped them climb the ladder. Instead, by and large, the traditional power groups that run America’s corporations continue to hire and promote people who look, talk and act like them. Forget bootstrap theories. Forget Horatio Alger. America keeps polishing the mirror principle: If you look the part, you still have the best shot at landing--and succeeding in--the part.

Statistics are a dime a dozen, but here’s the one that hurts us all: Women and people of color compose 65% of the work force, yet these groups still don’t have the clout to match their numbers. Women have surged into middle management (an increase over the last decade from 27% to 41%) but they’ve been blocked from senior executive jobs. Only 3% of those top jobs are held by women, up from 1% in 1981. Minorities hold about 2% of the corporate management positions.

Some of America’s white male CEOs are shaken by these sobering numbers and the implications for their companies’ productivity. How will these men attract and keep top-quality women and people of color? How are they going to utilize this talent? How are they going to dismantle the racism and sexism that prevent this talent from flourishing?

Enter Elsie Cross. This 63-year-old, soft-spoken black woman from Philadelphia is one of the most persuasive and potent “diversity consultants” in this country. Her clients include Eastman Kodak, American Express, G.E. Silicones, Corning Glass and Ortho Pharmaceutical. Her 20-year-old business, Elsie Y. Cross Associates, is at the top of a fast-growing field that includes other independents (such as her main competition, the Kaleel Jamison Group in Albany, N.Y.) and corporations, which sometimes launch internal diversity programs. Cross’ company has more work than it can handle and a Fortune 100 waiting list.

Working with Cross has turned Jim Rose, white male vice president of human resources at Ortho Pharmaceutical, into an eloquent and cogent advocate for her program. “Has Ortho reached utopia? No way,” he says. “But have we changed the dynamics of this organization so that women and people of color want to stay and grow into new responsibilities? I say, yes we have.”

As hard as it is to picture, Cross and her converts claim that top-dog, kick-ass, five-star members of the white ruling class can not only learn to recognize the sexism and racism in themselves and the organizations they have created but also can learn to change it.

Cross has seen the necessary, inevitable future of power sharing, and it works.

THE FUTURE BEGAN FOR ME WHEN I WAS JOLTED FROM MY OWN STEREOTYPICAL view of Elsie Cross. In my mind’s eye, I had imagined a large, angry, boisterous black woman who wasn’t interested in what a white guy had to say. But the diminutive woman I met was at once abrupt and expansive, casual and sophisticated, sardonic and yielding, her conversation rich and inventive. At every turn, she was The Teacher.

We met in a converted railroad-station inn halfway between Philadelphia and Raritan, where I’d spent a day with one of Cross’ clients. It was three days after the Los Angeles riots, and the upheaval was an unavoidable topic. “White people cannot understand the anger and pain that we feel from being constantly reminded that we are not welcome here, that we are despised, that we are seen as inferior,” she said.

It was midafternoon. The room was empty except for a cleaning crew. “Right now,” she said, looking around, “I know some people in this hotel think it’s wrong for you and me to be sitting together at this table talking to one another.”

But Cross mixes hope with anger. She still believes in the first lesson she ever taught to a roomful of abashed white men: Everyone is a member of this broken family called America. Everyone will eventually look into the chasm of our collective wounds of race and gender. Everyone, whether they admit it or not, wants the giant wound healed.

Cross calls her version of the healing process “Managing Diversity” and subtitles it “Valuing Differences for Organizational Effectiveness.” The first step is to confront the pain and practice of racism and sexism at the personal and group level in a corporation. The second step is to define “barriers and enablers”--in Cross’ management-consultant jargon--that encourage or block individual, group and corporate success, and for individuals, called “champions,” to build broad, internal coalitions around this awareness. Champions lead action groups in every division of the corporation, identifying discriminatory practices and policies and seeking specific routes of change.

By then, the company is primed for the third, giant step, which Cross labels “culture change.” Individual awareness and the overhaul of policies and procedures, difficult as they may be, are only warm-up acts for the main event of culture change. To get at the deepest levels of racism and sexism, Cross takes the organization through focus groups and workshops that aim to define its most basic assumptions, its unwritten codes and its rituals, and, in the form of a specific mission statement, to revise them. The idea is to radically change how a corporation measures its success--to make corporate fairness and employee morale as important as profits.

“Most people in this society,” Cross says, “are not willing to look at the systemic issues. We almost always put the burden on the victim rather than on the perpetuation of a system that helped create the victim. But if you can get to the systemic level, you get to the source.”

The cornerstone of Cross’ “intervention” in a corporation is a three-day workshop. Through role-playing, lectures and directed discussions, the workshop helps individuals see how racism and sexism operate in their lives, lets them experience the shame, defensiveness and fear surrounding their attitudes, prompts them to examine the myths and stereotypes that support these “isms” and provides specific tools--as well as a new belief in risk and hope--to combat them.

“Our work is based on the fundamental belief that racism and sexism are deeply rooted in our culture,” Cross said. “We have never resolved these problems because people are not given an opportunity to talk about these issues in a safe environment.” The workshop becomes that safe environment.

Cross’ clients are told upfront that successfully redefining the corporate culture and managing diversity requires a major commitment of time and money. If a client won’t commit for five years, Cross recommends they hire someone else. But the greatest commitment must come from the top brass. “Because of the nature of the power hierarchy,” her trainer’s manual states, “the CEO and his staff must ‘own’ the intervention and be the first group to attend a workshop. Without the ‘buy in’ at the top, this work degenerates . . . and will be absent the focus on change at the system level.”

What makes the Elsie Cross process stand out among others in the hot new field of managing diversity? Where most consultants concentrate only on achieving palpable increases in productivity, Cross tackles the abstract and often taboo realities of power distribution throughout a company.

Underlying all her efforts is the idea that everyone in corporate America suffers from oppression. When power is distributed in a lopsided way, she argues, no one thrives--not even white males sitting in leather chairs behind fine-grained mahogany desks. While they squeeze everyone else out, they also coerce one another into a prescriptive behavioral box. It’s fundamentally unsafe, Cross believes, for any employee to bring his true self to most American workplaces. Opinions, beliefs and the creativity and commitment that accompany them are checked at the door. Littered with psychological and structural barriers, America’s corporate culture is a wasteland of squandered talent.

Since corporate culture is actually white male culture, Cross focuses much of her work on helping white males take responsibility “for the prerogatives around power and their privileges as majority-group members.” The hardest first step for white males, she says, “is for them to shift from their individual experience to the group behavior level.”

Where white men find it excruciating to talk about their whiteness and their intergroup patterns, Cross says, women and people of color automatically associate themselves with their group because they’ve always been on the outside looking in. White men tend to assume--with the dominant group’s blithe conviction--that they are solo players. The system may discriminate, they will admit, “but I don’t; I am separate from the system.”

Critics of managing diversity regard it as “brainwashing” or the latest plot to advance quotas for women and people of color. But Cross insists that it’s not a quota concept, it’s a human concept: the right to be different and to be valued for that difference. That it begins to redress the statistical disparities, she claims, is just icing.

Still, as Cross and I sat together in the dimly lit room, I voiced my doubts about how much the white male Establishment could change, no matter how clear the evidence that racism and sexism are at the heart of America’s malaise. I thought I should know: I had spent 14 years working for small corporations, rising to vice president. And the men I had known at the top were great originators of the mixed message--unwilling to follow positive words and policies with positive behavior. To their employees, these men remained frozen, aloof, shortsighted.

Cross smiled and said, “I’ve seen white men in organizations be the ones to take this work on, and they take it on knowing full well they’re not going to be liked by other white men, but ultimately, they prevail and become very powerful leaders.”

A LITTLE BEFORE 9 A.M. ON A TUESDAY MORNING LAST MAY, THE PERFECTLY manicured grounds around the headquarters of Ortho Pharmaceutical shimmered emerald beneath a glancing rain. I sat in my rental car in the visitor’s parking lot and watched the employees arrive. Two images struck me: the large number of women heading for the main entrance and the profusion of multicolored umbrellas. I had never seen so much racy, vibrant color this close to a corporate headquarters. Those umbrellas twirled over the sidewalk like a favorable omen.

Ortho, part of Johnson & Johnson’s $4-billion pharmaceutical sector, manufactures, distributes and markets women’s health-care products such as Ortho-Novum contraceptives and Retin-A skin ointment. It is also Elsie Cross’ most progressive client, a showcase for the how and why of corporate culture change.

Today, 60% of the salaried employees who work in Ortho’s Raritan headquarters are not white males. Upward mobility at Ortho is a track now traveled by women and people of color--they are promoted in numbers that mirror their representation in the work force. And their turnover rates have dropped. Women hold 25% of the management positions, compared to 22% in 1985, one year prior to managing diversity. For blacks, managerial positions have increased from 6% to 13%. Other minorities jumped from 10% of the management ranks to 18%. In some ways, those numbers are not all that impressive--white men still hold 63% of the top spots at Ortho--but few other major companies in America can match them.

In 1986, Cross was called in by then Ortho President Gary Parlin. Why, he wanted to know, were his affirmative-action policies failing? He was recruiting, hiring and training women and people of color, only to lose them after a few years. It was costing him dearly, and Ortho was still a white man’s club, with a revolving door for everyone else.

Cross and her staff started by studying the company’s systems, group interactions and individuals’ feelings. White males, they quickly discovered, breathed freely about their futures at Ortho. Women and people of color, on the other hand, felt like they were suffocating.

At the system level, Cross found that, more often than not, recruiters didn’t seek a diverse slate of candidates. And once in the door, women and minorities received almost none of the feedback, mentoring or promotions offered white men. At the group level, Cross could see that white men dominated meetings, made all the key decisions, chose their own successors and established exclusive information loops. And not surprisingly, at the individual level, she heard women and people of color say they felt at best ignored and at worst harassed.

Six years later, Craig Ruffin, a black marketing-research manager at Ortho, summed up the qualitative change Cross has brought to the company. “This is a safe harbor,” he said. “Here I can be myself. I can say what I like, do what I like. I can disagree with people. At other companies, just to disagree meant political suicide. If I perceive a roadblock for some unfair reason, I can talk with my supervisor--a white woman--and she won’t look at me like I’m crazy.”

“It’s so apparent that people outside here don’t work on diversity issues,” echoed Lanetta Lyons, a black manager. “You can just look at how groups are formed. How topics are discussed. Who takes over at a meeting. How many women are present. When my staff and I go out to other companies, someone always says to me, ‘I’ll be glad when we get back to Ortho.’ ”

But managing diversity at Ortho, Cross says, has been anything but a smooth road. Four years into the process--with most staffers already through the workshop step and with champions and action groups trouble-shooting diversity problems--excitement began to wane and progress stalled.

In response, Cross developed the deeper process of culture change. She had focus groups, representing the entire company, list the basic assumptions of the organization’s culture and then list the ways these assumptions created barriers for some people and advantages for others. Social networking around golf, for example, was identified as an enabler for white men. At country clubs where whites predominate and women have separate tee times, white men created an exclusive information loop. Ortho’s stock “images of success” insured that tall, athletic, clean-shaven white men were automatic winners.

Cross also went back to the top and formed a focus group with the board of managers, to show them how their own behavior prevented more progress. She asked them to assess their own daily behavior when it came to race and gender, how they personally extended or denied opportunities to white women and people of color. And they were assessed by their colleagues at the same time. Not surprisingly, many of the scores showed that while an individual might think he was making progress, the observers were not so sure.

When the focus groups compared notes, another powerful revelation hit home. The groups, working independently, had reached nearly unanimous agreement on what were the barriers and enablers at Ortho. The board was convinced that more work was needed. It formed a committee to shape the focus-group data into a working set of goals for Ortho called a “culture vision and values” statement. That document specifically outlines how power will be shared along race and gender lines.

Jim Rose of Ortho’s human resources department, a white male champion in Cross’ program, admitted that the process had its detractors. “The perception among some white males is that managing diversity is unfair and that it jeopardizes their chances for promotion. In reality, white males have been historically favored. Our intent, now, is that white males will not get favored status. In other words, the white male model will no longer be the only image of success.”

Ortho puts real bite into the implementation of culture change. Managers are evaluated and held accountable for their efforts to nurture the new culture. If they fail to walk the talk, Rose and others claim, they are shown the door.

Yet by its own admission, Ortho still has far to go. Many women there cannot easily sustain a career as well as a family, according to new employee Martha Drennan. Drennan cites a woman, a mother who works part time, and says that this woman’s career has hit a plateau. “She feels,” Drennan says, “that she can’t move ahead unless she comes back 9 to 5.” Ortho is proud of its on-site, subsidized day care--a result of the Cross process--but other women employees still wonder if babies are really on a boardroom agenda. Only one woman sits on the board--and no people of color.

Responding to Drennan’s disappointments, Jim Rose said, “What we do here isn’t easy. But if you value differences among people, incorporate those differences into the team and then reward the team, change happens. Never fast enough, but it happens nonetheless.”

ELSIE CROSS GREW UP IN PHILADELPHIA IN THE ‘30s. SHE DESCRIBED IT AS “that little period in American history when there were not many blacks living in the North.” Her father worked as an undertaker. Her mother and aunts and uncles became entrepreneurs, schoolteachers and nurses. One aunt managed a vocational school and became an early role model for Cross. Learning, teaching and W.E.B. Du Bois caught the imagination of her middle-class family, who shared with other blacks a vision of the professional working life.

“I can’t believe it; I’m just two generations out of slavery,” Cross says. Her father’s mother was the “product,” as she puts it, of a master and a slave. Her mother’s grandmother was the child of a master who granted her freedom before the Emancipation Proclamation.

The Cross family lived in predominantly white Philadelphia neighborhoods, where they found initial acceptance, until the white families gradually moved away. Elsie Cross experienced a parallel pattern of acceptance and rejection from her elementary school teachers. They welcomed her ambitions while simultaneously calling her “nigger.” Back home, her extended family of strong women and men countered the slurs with the one-word message of the era: Overcome. Cross did.

When she entered Temple University in 1948, she was one of only two black women who enrolled in business administration.

In 1951, with a BS in business in hand, Cross was shocked that no American corporation would hire her. Throughout the ‘50s, she worked as a secretary, a statistician in a medical facility, a PR agent and as an accountant in her own small business. The closest she came to a corporate job was when she scored 99 on a test at Bell Telephone, but she was told she was overqualified. The message also scored with Cross: If you’re black, it doesn’t matter how hard you try.

Then Cross arrived at the first turning point in her life. In 1960, she became a teacher at an all-girls school in a black-Latino section of Philadelphia and returned to Temple for a master’s degree in education. “The ‘60s,” she says, “became a catalyst for me to put the concerns I had about social justice into action.” Education, she decided, was the answer.

In 1968, Cross was appointed a “change agent” in the Philadelphia school system, working with students, parents, educators and the school system to update curricula, renew teacher commitment and increase community involvement. Then, in 1970, Cross reached another turning point.

To gain hands-on training in organizational behavior, Cross was sent to a nine-week summer internship program at the National Training Laboratory for Applied Behavioral Science, a nonprofit institution in Bethel, Me. In workshops that emphasized experiential learning and personal insights, Cross explored group dynamics: why and how people act the way they do, where they get stuck, how they can evolve. “That summer at NTL,” she said, “I saw an approach to change that I’d never encountered before. It was completely new. And everything I do now is just an extension of what NTL started a long time ago.”

Two years later, Cross finished another master’s degree, this time in psycho-educational processes. By then, she had also opened a management consulting practice emphasizing the issues that most interested her: race and gender. Guess who was her first big corporate client.

In 1972, 12 years after having been rejected as a telephone-operator trainee at Ma Bell, Cross launched a breakthrough program at Bell Laboratories. “Men and Women in the Work Environment” was a workshop she designed in response to a $30-million lawsuit won against AT&T; for discrimination against women--in its time, the largest EEOC suit ever filed and the first to focus national attention on the issue.

At Bell, Elsie Cross began to shape and define her process. If organizational change is to grab hold, racism and sexism must be subverted at the system level. “I realized you can’t just work one-on-one through workshops,” she said, “because the problem of racism and sexism is bigger than individual bias and prejudice. And besides, I’ve never met anyone yet who told me upfront they were racist or sexist--and yet all these terrible behaviors persist.”

In order to better examine the underlying causes of discrimination, Cross pressured Bell executives to shift the focus away from individual-education workshops to an organizational-change program. But Bell was not yet ready to take the plunge.

In 1978, Cross continued to break new ground with a multi-year contract at an Exxon refinery in New Jersey. This time, she did get a chance to broaden the focus. She looked at recruiting, hiring and promotional practices and at the subtle, often subliminal codes that prevented women and people of color from gaining their share of the corporate pie. “What made the difference,” she said, “was that top executives at Exxon got involved and helped drive change. Suddenly, real progress was made at system level.”

In the last two decades, Elsie Cross has never advertised her services. News of her work travels from human resource departments through the classrooms of the NTL, where she teaches, to corporate boardrooms. In the last six years, she has handed over much of the training work to her 50-person staff, which includes her one child--a son, Barry, now 40, from a brief early marriage. He is a trainer as well as the firm’s business manager. Cross’ role now is to manage client contacts, work with new staff members and take part in the early stages of intervention at the top of an organization.

Today, companies spend more than $500,000 a year for Cross’ program, and Cross is extending her ideas well beyond corporate America. She is writing a book, starting a publication and exploring university workshops that would make her methods available outside the business world. But hefty paychecks and spreading the word don’t seem to be the final motivations for Cross’ 12-hour days. “I don’t understand it when people say they can’t walk in another person’s shoes,” she says. “I have no choice but to try to help people understand the pain and struggle of others.”

LET’S GET MY LINEAGE ON THE TABLE: I’m a WASP whose ancestors stepped off the Mayflower. My historic dispensations--including 24-hour-a-day affirmative action 365 days a year--are gifts I don’t even have to open. I’m certain they are the qualifications that got me my corporate job, right out of graduate school, English degree in hand. Now, in my staid, nearly all-white Midwestern suburb, I realize I’m struggling to define a place for myself in America’s diversity. What could a managing-diversity workshop do for me?

Cross arranged for me to join one of the three-day events for a relatively new client of hers, a New England-based company I’ll call Corporation X. Corporation X had chosen an idyllic off-site location for this three-day workshop--a sprawling estate-turned-conference center perched in the mountains. With so much beauty nearby, I wanted to relax, but from the start, the atmosphere was agitated, charged and chillingly familiar.

I had labored in a similar environment, bailing out after I had achieved a hefty income, a peptic ulcer and chronic neck pain. As soon as I walked into the meeting room, I found myself once again talking with people who lived intravenously on silence and rage. In the words of the 24 employees attending the workshop, Corporation X is “secretive,” “cynical,” “intimidating,” “cold,” “overly structured,” “authoritarian” and “non-supportive.”

The Cross model may finally be about unlocking the potential of all employees, but the workshops begin by unlocking the human anguish that blocks that potential. At Corporation X, the signs of that anguish are clear: a watermelon left in a black man’s locker, “nigger” written on a windshield, obscene graffiti scrawled on a women’s restroom mirror, slashed tires on the car of a man who intervened on behalf of a woman who’d filed harassment charges, striptease shows paid for as business entertainment on the company credit card. True to Cross’ model, no group at Corporation X, including white males, is satisfied. No group feels it receives quality job-performance feedback. No group operates with a license to speak freely.

Consider Susan, a woman of color (all corporate participants’ names have been changed). Twenty-five years ago, she became one of the first minority women to work at Corporation X, but she is still periodically excluded from the weekly memo route. Despite a demonstrated wealth of knowledge, she is not consulted by whites on crucial matters. (Women of color, oppressed by race and gender, remain the most vulnerable and disenfranchised people within an organization, according to Cross.)

Mary, a white woman, has worked at Corporation X for 10 years but feels blocked from further promotion by the men in her department. She routinely hears sexist jokes but says nothing. She knows women who have been physically harassed, but she fails to act. (As a means of survival, white women internalize oppression, Cross says, and become listless or isolate themselves from other women with their silence.)

While earning an advanced degree, Joseph, a man of color, was told he would have to work three times harder than any white student. Half of his friends from his old neighborhood are dead, he said. His first marriage ended in divorce. His zealous work ethic exhausts his emotional reserves, but the people above him don’t seem to notice his efforts. (Men of color are patronized, says Cross, instead of trained; they are passed over for promotion because they don’t look the part of a leader. They often burn out and leave to start their own businesses.)

Mark, a white man, admitted that he never speaks his mind in front of his paternalistic white male boss, who times Mark’s presentations to the minute. Mark told me over dinner that he seldom ventures forth with “what if?” ideas. Clenched teeth, silence and creative frustration were his private burdens. (White men are oppressed by having to become clones, pressured to fit a mold--in appearance, management style, speech and behavior. “As victims of oppression,” Cross says, “they become agents of oppression for new entrants into an organization, and each successive generation of newcomers is oppressed by the group above them.”)

During the workshop, Joseph, Mark, Mary, Susan and the rest of us sat facing each other, always in a circle. The sessions started in the early morning and sometimes went through the evening. The stories emerged slowly, through whispers, tears, laughter and halting phrases. The trainers, equally mixed by gender and race, coached participants from confrontation to dialogue and then to the challenge of taking action back at Corporation X.

The three days began with workshop director Carol Brantley’s introduction to the process and Corporation X’s reasons for hiring Cross Associates. One white man mumbled to me, “It’s our program du jour. It’ll be gone before you know it.”

Brantley asked us to define ourselves by our work style--Friendly Helpers, Logical Thinkers or Tough Battlers. Only one woman defined herself as a Tough Battler. I strolled over to the Logical Thinkers group, whose ranks were the largest. Then Brantley launched the first fireworks, asking each group to describe how it “felt” about the other groups. We mocked and denounced each other without hesitation. It was a neat introduction to our easy intolerance.

Another unsettling and enlightening first-day exercise was a simulation that underscored how difficult it can be to understand and value differences. We split into two distinct cultures, each with its own language and rules, and then interacted in meetings full of confusion and finally distrust. Brantley used our collective group failure to shift the workshop back to a discussion of various cultures at Corporation X and the misunderstandings their differences caused.

In another exercise, Brantley asked us to make drawings of our earliest memories of at least two different races. The idea was that the images would reflect the first racial messages we had ever received.

I remembered Samantha, a black woman who worked as my family’s maid. She and I talked major-league baseball while she folded laundry. I remembered thinking that all black women must work as maids and like baseball. When I asked my mother where Samantha lived and if she had ever seen her house and met Samantha’s family, my mother shook her head. I was convinced that all black women vanished when they stopped working as maids.

Other white men in my six-person group could not summon up any appropriate images from their childhood. Words and images about race were blocked in their memories. These men weren’t hard cases, but they were extremely guarded about their feelings. “Not everyone,” Brantley had said at the start of the workshop, “will travel at the same pace. We’ll each have to accept that.”

On Day 2, we watched a tape of a Diane Sawyer TV report. She had arranged for two men, one black, one white, who had recently graduated from the same college, to spend two weeks under camera surveillance in St. Louis. They applied for jobs, shopped, inquired about rental housing, walked around town. Routinely, the white man was given courteous service while the black man was discouraged, patronized and rejected--even after Sawyer intervened on his behalf. The workshop discussion that followed was initiated by a black man. More than angry, he spoke with an enormous, unappeasable sadness. Most of the white men sat in silence. Their shame, I thought, would either propel them to action or repel them into a deeper shame.

The resistance in the room hummed like an electric fence, but finally one white man opened up. In college, he had had two close friends, one black, one Asian. Together they were invincible--funny, resilient, inseparable. Now his relationships with people of color at Corporation X were difficult. For the first time in 20 years, he said, he saw that his unwillingness to pursue friendships with people of color had contributed to the strained corporate culture. He wanted his old “easy” conversational freedom back.

Later, Brantley shifted the focus onto sexism at Corporation X by having men and women break into separate groups to brainstorm about how this issue plays out in the workplace. The pain level escalated.

When the men were confronted with a rundown of blatantly sexist acts, their responses included “Yeah, but that’s not my experience,” “I’ve never seen anything like that happen,” and “I know some terrible things go on, but not in my department.” We didn’t want to admit we had helped bring about the little, unchallenged acts of sexism that could fuel larger, abusive acts of harassment and criminal assault.

The implausibility of such a blanket denial, though, started to pry us loose from our individual silences. We began to question the incongruities and face our own complicity.

The next step, the workshop teaches, is to use “discretionary power” to consciously interrupt your own business-as-usual silence. The man who refuses to laugh at a sexist joke and says “I don’t think your joke is funny” is using his discretionary power. The manager who writes a letter to the company president outlining how the enforcement of a particular policy does not apply equally is using discretionary power.

In our workshop, the challenge to act made everyone nervous. “Will it work?” “Will I get shot down when I try to take action?” If one can assume the risk involved in confrontation, Cross believes, then a renewed feeling of self-control takes over. And something remarkable happens: A critical mass of discretionary power can set off organizational change at every level.

The hard work of risk, transformation and empowerment doesn’t fall only to white males. According to Cross, white women generally have not joined white men in looking at race because they want to be seen as victims of gender. And men of color have not joined white men in examining sexism because they want to keep the focus on race. Women of color can get stuck in personal prejudice, but they can also release tremendous power and become the “linchpin for organizing coalitions, since they experience the same sexism white women do and the same racism men of color do.”

The closing exercise of a managing-diversity workshop is a five-minute skit designed to help individuals spot racism and sexism at work and to see where and how they might use their vital discretionary power. The rules are simple: Present a business situation that uses as many examples of racism and sexism as possible; make the examples subtle and make sure everyone in the eight-person, mixed group plays a part; take 10 minutes to prepare.

My group created a brainstorming session to launch a hair-care product. A few touches were scripted in advance. As the quintessential white male, I would run the meeting. The other white men would sit near me.

When the idea-woman started talking about the product’s exciting benefits, I interrupted and asked the white men to list its commercial appeal. They huddled on market share, reviewed spread sheets and withheld information from others. One of them sent a woman out for coffee. Another asked a woman to photocopy a list of selling points. When a black man said that the product would appeal to those with tight curls, I ignored him. I later reminded him that he was new to the company; he didn’t really know our market or grasp our product’s unique selling points. Another white male told him the product’s high price made it “all wrong for blacks.”

In a harsh and increasingly familiar light, I saw myself acting on white-male automatic pilot. I made eye contact only with other white men. I leaned toward them when making a point. I waved off a woman in the back and never let the black man finish a sentence. I winced when a woman interrupted a man. None of those actions had been scripted. My body instinctively reacted.

Like the other skits, ours was a tragicomedy. But I had played this game before with finesse, when there had been no follow-up insights from onlookers. Now, in the midst of that recognition, I felt ashamed of my group and myself and the ease with which we had shut others out. Vividly, I saw the myriad opportunities in my past corporate life where I could have shared the power or challenged the stereotype but instead had hung back in silence. Intervention had not seemed worth the risks.

On the last night, I spent a heated five hours with John, talking over a couple of beers. We seemed to connect on many subjects: travel in the Caribbean, basketball, the novels of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin. But then back at the conference center, the connection started to fray. We talked about the workshop on sexism. He thought the whole critique of male behavior was overblown--the machinations of weak women unable to fend for themselves.

Our verbal fireworks illuminated how bumpy and twisted the road will be for Corporation X. John couldn’t understand why taking clients to strip shows with a company credit card might be perceived by women colleagues as an unacceptable expense-report item. On one occasion, a woman he worked with had planned to join John and the clients for the evening. At the last minute, he arranged for her to go shopping with his wife while he and the clients--all males--ducked inside a strip club. As John and I tracked through First Amendment rights and slippery definitions of morality and pornography until 3 a.m., John slowly came around to acknowledging that strip shows might send the wrong message to female employees.

John had been stuck in what Cross calls the “intent and outcome dynamic.” John’s intent may have been to have some fun with the boys, but the outcome perpetuated the sexist culture of Corporation X. I knew all about the gap between this particular intent and outcome. I too had patronized a strip joint on the company nickel and later lied to a woman co-worker and my wife when asked where I had taken an out-of-town visitor.

That night, I walked into the middle of a dark, black field. I realized there that the long, circuitous talk with John had also been a man-to-man conversation with my trickiest self--my words awkward and slow at first, growing steady and strong with conviction at the end. I also realized in that hushed field that the process of individual transformation is just that--a process.

A generous power--that’s what I felt the next morning as the workshop came to a close. We stood in a circle, and Brantley asked us to summarize our workshop experience in one word. Mine was “humbled.” Others said “encouraged,” “curious,” “empowered,” “nervous” and “hopeful.”

TOWARD THE END OF MY MEETING with Elsie Cross, she said something that stopped me cold: “I don’t believe there is such a thing as race. Race is artificial.

“Racism is real,” she continued. “It’s an artifact that was created so that one group can oppress another and maintain power. So this discussion about racism and sexism always comes back to power. What does it mean to be a powerful company or a powerful country? A culture that supports different people will also be one that knows how to manage conflict, improve communication, increase morale and build coalitions between diverse groups. That sounds like a more workable definition of power.”

When I first met Cross, I was skeptical of her efforts to knock down the walls of racism and sexism in corporate America. But then, after visiting Ortho Pharmaceutical and emerging from a managing-diversity workshop with more confidence to speak from my gut, I didn’t care about motives.

I cared instead about the people who work all those hours in my old corporation and at Corporation Xs around the country. They and I want something greater than gold. We all want to feel safe in our differences and to speak our minds with the belief that our ideas will be judged on their value and not on the skin color or gender or age or religion or sexual preference of their creator.

For those people and myself, Elsie Cross offers a blueprint for our desires, a plan that brings forward those historically positioned at the edge and also frees those at the center. It is a simple process at heart. It requires only this to start: listening and talking, at the feeling level where we all walk the same ground. For those who do, the result is a burnished social contract, a bright, warming ray of hope.