Jamal Simmons: Black Leadership is Stalled at 4%

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement saw corporate American commit to more diversity in their ranks. Less than 4

percent of executives at major companies like Facebook or Apple and Google are black. And this figure holds true across nearly every sector. Political

analyst, Jamal Simmons, talks to Michel Martin about the 4 percent problem and how corporate America needs a radical rethink if it really is committed

to reckoning with systemic racism.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN: Jamal Simmons, thank you so much for talking with us.

JAMAL SIMMONS, AUTHOR, “THE 4 PERCENT PROBLEM”: It is good to be here. Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: So, let’s go through some of the numbers in your piece. Amazon, second largest private employer in the United States, one black senior

executive out of 25 people, which is 4 percent. Apple is the world’s most valuable publicly traded company, 3 percent of its executives are black. At

Facebook, 3 percent. At Google, 2.6 percent. 4 percent of all publishing executives are black.

Oh, let’s go to the army, shall we? The U.S. military is commonly held up as the most successfully integrated institution in the United States.

African-Americans are about 17 percent of the military but there are only two black commanders of the 41 most senior officers across all four

branches who could even be considered for Joint Chiefs share. That is 4.9 percent of the military’s most senior leaders. 4 percent.

One of the points in your piece is that institutions across the board have a problem. It is not just one company. It’s not just one sector. What is

the problem here?

SIMMONS: There are a lot of things are happening. One of them is a friend of mine, Al Tori (ph) at Northwestern University, talks about this. White

people oversee black people, right. So, they see one black person there, they think there are a lot more black people that must be somewhere around.

But what happens inside the companies from some of the business school professors I talk to is there’s this idea of prototypicality threat where

people think their experience is the prototypical experience. So, anybody else that’s going to fill their role must have a similar experience that

they did. So, they went to the same schools, they’ve had the same jobs. But what we know is, African-Americans don’t have all of those same

experiences, so you end up cutting out a lot of people were being able to participate.

The other thing that happens is this idea of threshold diversity. Some great professors from University of Pennsylvania and NYU did a study where

they looked at women on boards. And what they found is that for a long time there was one woman on a corporate board. And then people started

complaining about there being one woman on the board. So, then they found that people with a 45 percent chance that there would be two women on a

board. Because what happens is people look around, they look at their peers, they imitate their peers and do just enough work to escape negative

scrutiny.

So, their perspective was — so they went from tokenism, to two-cannism, and at some point, there will be three-cannism because people will decide

that two women isn’t enough either, there should be three women on boards. The same thing was happening in racial diversity, and that was creating an

incredible homogenous amount of percentages across these many sectors.

MARTIN: Why is it that — let’s just go back to the military as an example. Why didn’t a Colin Powell beget more Colin Powells? Because

African-Americans — because people are always talking about a pipeline problem. But as you pointed out in your piece, African-Americans are over

indexed in the military. African-Americans are like, what, 13 percent of the population.

SIMMONS: Right.

MARTIN: They are 17 percent of the population in the military. So, why doesn’t a Colin Powell beget more Colin Powells?

SIMMONS: Well, it’s hard to know what’s happening inside the military, but I think this idea of people assuming they are doing better than they are

matters. But leadership also matter. Colin Powell, again, is a great story. The reason Colin Powell got to be a general is — you may know the story,

Cliff Alexander, who was the — a secretary of the army under Jimmy Carter got presented a list of generals when he was secretary of the army and

said, how come there are no black people on this list. Go back and find me somebody. They went back, found Colin Powell and that’s how he got his

first star in the army.

Leadership matters. We need people to care about this because it we are going to, again, have a country where we can tackle these big questions,

we’re going to need everybody on the field to be able to do it.

MARTIN: So, you talk about a 4 percent black participation rate and America’s leadership cohort is just not diverse enough to successfully

tackle systemic racism. Here’s why I use that term is that in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police last year, a number of major

companies like, you know, Apple, Facebook, Google, all made commitments to diversify their work force and recruitment process. Like last June,

Microsoft and Apple committed to focusing on the hiring and retention of black employees. Apple pledging $100 million to support that effort.

Twitter committed to having at least a quarter of its executives to be under representative minorities and women by 2025. Amazon, saying — I

mean, I understand that most of your data comes from 2019, which is the first year a lot of these companies, you know, started reporting these

issues, right, under pressure.

SIMMONS: I used 2019 for a reason too. Because 2020 was such a crazy year. So, I kind of look at it as the last normal year, the closest normal year

before the world went haywire with COVID. So, the trends were already in place.

MARTIN: But you’re saying that a 4 percent — you’re saying that 4 percent black registration in leadership, you’re not just talking about in sort of

line. In leadership is just not enough to dismantle the system. Tell me why.

SIMMONS: Here’s an example. Amazon says that they have 26 percent of their team is African-American, of their company employees are African-American.

But, again, only 4 percent of the leadership team. So, the question is, of course, yes. 26 percent is probably right because, you know, you look

around, the warehouses and all the other things that Amazon does and they have got a lot of African-Americans that way.

The telecom companies do the same thing. There are a lot of African- Americans who work on, you know, telephone poles and cable companies, right, that aren’t necessarily in the leadership suite. So, that’s the

place where you got to look because I have been doing this for a long time. You know this. I’ve been in politics. I’ve advised corporate leaders. And I

know that rules are important. Rule makers are critical, right? If you don’t have the right people at the top who are helping to make decisions,

it’s not going to work.

Here’s one example. In Hollywood they tend to have a — their numbers — it’s hard to tell because they don’t break them down exactly by race. UCLA

(ph) report they do. They do minorities. But one thing they do point out is that the place where they are doing better is when they have African-

American directors and producers, they tend to have an over sample of African-Americans behind the camera.

So, Ava DuVernay, Ryan Coogler, those folks are hiring a lot of black people. That doesn’t mean necessarily that a Martin Scorsese, let’s say, is

hiring a lot of black person, right? So, what you have are places where African-Americans are in charge of the production, they tend to hire more

African-Americans and people of color. So, that is the thing I am saying ought to happen inside a lot of these other institutions.

We should be looking at how we stage integration, how do we laterally transition leaders into — people into leadership positions so that they

can make the pipeline work better. There will be — people — their workers can emulate, there will be people there who give them opportunities.

And important, I think in the opportunity to succeed is people need the opportunity to make a mistake and not have it be fatal, right? You need the

opportunity to make a mistake and then get a chance to try again and get it right. And too often in mainstream institutions, black people are

overpoliced, over punished, under rewarded and overlooked. And so, we’ve got to find a way to get more people to leadership structure to help those

people in the pipeline be able to succeed.

MARTIN: So, how did you get to data that got to you the 4 percent analysis? Is this publicly available?

SIMMONS: Yes. This was all publicly available data. It came from the companies. It came from news organizations that had done background

research on the company. Some of it was academic and people had examined what was happening inside of some of these industries. The publishing data

came from their association. So, it is interesting. Some of the people have questions about it but it’s their data, right? I didn’t have to make this

up.

The educational data required a little bit more effort because there is a data set National Center for Economic Statistics and you have to go in

there and kind of play with it. But the organizations, the universities are required to submit data about race and diversity. You know, that’s another

place where we have to really take a look at these numbers.

You know, I went to HBCU. I went Morehouse College. And people often ask whether or not these schools are still worthwhile. But I have got to tell

you, there is no way for us to get to parity with African-American professionals that doesn’t involve HBCUs. The numbers just don’t bear it

out. In 2019, there were 50 black men that graduated from Harvard University. In 2019, there were 387 black men that graduated from

Morehouse. There were 68 black women who graduated from Harvard. There were 450 black women who graduated from (INAUDIBLE). That’s part of what got me

to this question of staged integration and talking to black-led organizations, black leaders, and talking to them about who they are

nurturing and using some of that cohort to go into mainstream organizations.

MARTIN: Why is this 4 percent sort of ceiling a problem? I mean, some people might say, well, you know, so what? I mean, the NFL is, you know, 75

percent of the players are black. Is anybody complaining about that? So, what would you say to that?

SIMMONS: I would say the 4 percent is problem because there are not enough people at the table to argue the diversity of experiences. I interview a

woman who advises boards and she said, she hears from some of the white chairs of boards that the African-Americans who center her boards don’t

speak out enough. Well, one of the things that happen is many of those African-Americans are on 6 or 7 boards, right. So, they are actually

stretched really thin. They also maybe only — the only African-American or one or two on the board. So, you’re asking a lot of somebody to constantly

be your diversity police, constantly be the person telling everybody they are making — you know, they’re doing the wrong thing, they’re making the

bad choices.

If you have a multitude — not multitude. Give a few people — let’s just go with three or four people around the table, then you have the

opportunity for people to exert their discretion around issues that they actually know something about without having to feel like they always have

to be the skunk at the garden party. There is Korn Ferry report where they talk to a lot of executives who moved up the line. And they say, they’re —

they give — they are giving harder things to do. They are judged based on performance, not just based on promise, right, like their white colleagues.

And so, sometimes what happens is because they are being over punished and under rewarded, they may become more cautious. And so, by the time they

make to it the C suite, the idea of speaking up and saying something just is — it seems like a high price to pay in order to continue to keep your

seat at the table and be able to do the things that have to get done.

MARTIN: Do you think that was true of Obama?

SIMMONS: I think that Barack Obama did very well on the policy front. He – – there were people like Melody Barnes and Eric Holder and there were a lot of people who came through the organization on the policy front which are

very helpful. I think that Obama’s political organization was too white, right? And I think the people who were in charge of his political

organization, the communications team, the people who did his politics, I think they had a level of — they weren’t willing to step up and be more

adventurous. And perhaps the president was too focused on solving an international crisis or dealing with health care to be worried about this

sort of more functional jobs.

But I would say, it was always a concern the me that the first black president did not give us the first black White House press secretary or

the first black White House chief of staff, or, you know, somebody who would have come through a more political part of his organization and had a

bigger broader portfolio than the African-Americans who were there.

MARTIN: And do you think that that might be because of some of the factors you have cited here, which is a certain — I don’t want to call the former

president timid, but I don’t know what other word to use right now, a certain timidity that arises around getting burned a lot around issues of

race and therefore — I don’t know. What do you think?

SIMMONS: Yes. He wrote about it in his book about the — you know, the event with Skip Gates, and how he lost white voters, you know, around the

Bere (ph) Summit question. You know, one thing that I did find in the research is that people — there’s an assimilation expectation, right?

White people feel like they would be happier if there is an African- American they think will assimilate into the organization and the culture. And then they are more open to that person coming.

But if that person shows up and they are not really assimilating, they are pushing questions that folks aren’t comfortable with, there’s a pushback

against them that’s even more severe. There is another question around scarcity. That if people feel like they have a limited number of resources,

they become — race becomes much more of a factor in how they distribute those resources.

And so, as we start to see people talk about the fact that America is becoming majority/minority, and there will be more majority group over the

next 30 years, that is actually triggering more nativist or racist behavior from whites because they begin to feel a loss before they even experience

it. The very fact that they think the loss coming is causing them to react negatively.

MARTIN: Let’s just talk about kind of some of the icky sticky aspects of this. First of all, let’s just talk about other so-called minority groups,

right? Latinos who may or may not identify as white or black are as — you know, the leadership will tell you, this country’s largest minority group.

OK. Asian-Americans, people of Asian descent are vastly overrepresented in some of the elite institutions that are pipelined to these elite jobs, as

they will tell you, and yet, are also not represented in many of these leadership positions.

I think the leadership and activists within these groups will say, OK, well, why should we focus on black folks when you have got other groups

here who have reasons to want a seat at the leadership table? And what would you say?

SIMMONS: Well, here’s why. Because America’s fundamental social fault line is the black/white fault line. It’s the fault line that’s existed from the

very inception. Before the country existed, we had black/white social conflict, right, and economic conflict.

So, when we try to address that black/white fault line, we actually do things that help other people. You think about the 14th Amendment had the

equal protection clause in it, that has helped women, it’s helped LGBTQ. In the 1960s, when we passed civil rights laws, that also helped immigrants.

When we passed affirmative action rule, that also helped women, right?

So, when you address the black/white fault line, you tend to do things that are going to help everybody. But if you try to help everybody, you don’t

always fix the black/white problem. And so, we got to be really specific about dealing with the black problem because that’s the one that is at the

heart of the American social conflict. And after George Floyd, we see how dangerous that can be not just to the people who are on the other end of

the night stick or the gun, it is also dangerous to the entire community when we are not including everybody and being focused on our positive

aspects and not having these assumptions about negative behavior.

MARTIN: Is it also partly true that there’s a, how can I put this, sort of pariah aspect of blackness that just simply doesn’t attach to other groups?

I mean, could it be that, that other groups simply don’t evoke the same hostility among white decisionmakers? Could it be that?

SIMMONS: Well, yes. Yes. It absolute could be that. In the report I was telling you about that talked about scarcity, there was a biochemical

reaction they found in participants in the study that when white people were told they had only limited resources to distribute, they saw black

people as being darker and “more menacing,” right. And that was — they were able to do this by showing them different pictures of faces.

So, somebody who, you know, may have been a fair skinned, you know, thin featured face, they would be perceived as being darker skinned with fuller

features. So, there is something that happens inside the psyche that social psychologists will tell is hurting us. The problem here is — the reason

why this is important is because it is not just — you know, it’s tempting for us to focus on the anecdote to psyche, we’re going on witch-hunts, but

there are witches everywhere, right?

And so, we have a systemic problem. We need systemic solutions. And while it is important to have accountability for individuals, it is also

important for the system and for our society to have some accountability and deal with this in a broader way.

MARTIN: As we pointed out in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a lot of huge companies committed to diversifying their work force and their

recruitment process. Are you seeing any evidence that it’s making a difference?

SIMMONS: I think that it is making a difference and that people have an expectation. You know, one of the things that this report — the threshold

diversity report about the two-cannism and three-cannism, one of the things they recommend is that you to police, give a set clear diversity goals, and

then you have to police those goals. Because people will not do more than they are made to do.

So, we have all got to pay attention to the standards that these companies have made and then make sure that they are living up to the standards that

they claim. And that means some people are going to have be made uncomfortable.

For me, the first part of this was being real and telling the story of what the 4 percent really was, right? It is not the broad diversity that we all

think is happening. It’s a pretty narrow slice of African-Americans who are at those tables, and we need to broaden that slice out.

MARTIN: Jamal Simmons, thank you so much for talking to us.

SIMMONS: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

(END VIDEOTAPE)