COMMITMENTS : It’s Not Easy, Making Diversity Work Like It Should

Last semester, when my daughter Jessica enrolled in an African American literature course, she was shocked to discover that she was one of the only whites in the class.

“I have to admit it felt weird, Ma,” she said. “I think it’s the first time I was ever part of the minority.”

“Do you raise your hand?” I asked my outspoken daughter, wondering if she felt inhibited by her minority status. “Well, I talk,” she said, “but not that much. They really know the history and the culture.”

“Are you at all uncomfortable?” I pressed.

“I don’t know if that’s the word,” Jessica said. “But I’m aware of myself as the minority.”

That awareness is probably more valuable than anything else Jessica took out of that class. In fact, the self-awareness she felt as a white minority in one tiny slice of her life is one that most of us who grow up middle class and white can only imagine. Our experiential deficit--at being a minority or being with minorities throughout our lives--is at the heart of many of the problems with which corporate America is wrangling in its diversity efforts.

Management may know the right things to do. It can work with recruiters and send top-down messages and make bonuses contingent on minority hiring and take a thousand other measures, all good, all necessary and all solid down payments on a better future. But all the proactive measures in the world along with the finest sensitivity-training seminars don’t do the trick in teaching a work force how to understand what it’s like to be different. What it’s like to be the only minority person on a sales force, in a department, around a conference table or a cafeteria table.

Jessica got a semester’s dose of what minorities may experience for their entire tenure on a job. Will that experience heighten her sensitivity in her future workplace? I hope so, but who can know for sure? I remember vividly what it felt like to be one of four Jewish kids in my fifth-grade class the year I moved from the Bronx to the suburbs.

*

I always thought that the persecution I experienced in elementary school sensitized me. I know that my mother started trying to do the same early on, and I thought she had succeeded. Which is why I nearly fell off my chair a few weeks ago when a close colleague of mine, an African American, told me I had hurt her feelings.

There were four of us at the meeting, all members of our company’s Diversity Task Force. In the middle of our business agenda, which was to determine next steps in our diversity effort, we started talking more personally. What emerged was a conversation in which the minority members revealed they are aware, at all times, that they are African American in the same way that Jessica was always aware of her whiteness in her class.

So if someone passes in the corridor and doesn’t greet them, the question comes into their heads: Did she ignore me because I’m African American? If they get asked to be on a committee, the question comes into their heads: Was I chosen because they want a diverse committee or because they think I’m the right person? If someone says, “Hey! Wanna go to lunch?” they wonder if the invitation is for real or to be polite. Does a good review mean the boss is pleased with performance or doesn’t want to rock the boat with a minority person?

These feelings emerged in a company dedicated to diversity. Does this mean we’re failing? I don’t think so. We seem to be on track because we’re taking measures to bring diverse talent into the company and create an environment that encourages everyone to stay.

“So what did I do that hurt your feelings?” I asked the woman who told me I did. “I’m sick about it before I even hear what it was.”

“You once came into a conference room and didn’t even greet me,” she said. When stuff like that happens, she explained, the question of color always comes first to her mind.

My guess is that I didn’t greet anyone--probably just walked into the room thinking about a million other things, my head already into the next meeting, and sat down. But that doesn’t matter. Maybe she was being hypersensitive. That doesn’t matter either.

It’s not easy, this diversity issue. Jessica’s classmates will be part of the workplace struggle that, even among the best intended, is going to take time to resolve.

I think I saw a glimpse of the solution when I visited a middle school in Brooklyn to talk to a couple of classes about what it’s like to be a journalist. Just before I left, I was invited to hear the school’s chorus sing a well-choreographed ‘50s medley. In front of me were about 40 kids, of all different colors. Dark hands held light hands, Asian arms encircled Latino shoulders. There was no majority, and therefore there was no minority, and therefore no one had to feel different. And that’s real harmony.