By Khadeeja Safdar and Keach Hagey
For Kamau Witherspoon, it was the night that police arrived at
his Minneapolis home, guns pointed at him, shortly after a jog. For
Mike McGrew, it was the realization that a manager was tailing him
as he shopped at a store supplied by the company where he's an
executive. For Kim Seymour, it was the way she instinctively holds
merchandise aloft in clothing stores to make it clear that she's
not shoplifting.
After years of keeping silent, many top black executives are for
the first time sharing their experiences of racism widely with
their co-workers and employees. Since the killing of George Floyd
and protests sparked a national conversation about race and
society, many black business leaders say they feel the time has
come to open up to colleagues about the difficult, sometimes
traumatic encounters they face in the world outside work.
These experiences stayed private, some said, out of concern that
calling attention to their race would hold back their careers or
that white colleagues wouldn't understand or listen. While some
black leaders are still choosing to keep their personal lives out
of the work sphere, others said they feel compelled by the moment.
Black people are dying disproportionately from coronavirus. A
series of unarmed black people have been killed by police. An
unusually graphic video documenting the last minutes of Mr. Floyd's
life has gone viral.
Mr. Witherspoon, senior vice president of operations at Target
Corp., had just returned from an early-evening jog and was loading
the dishwasher when he noticed flashlights in his window. His heart
began racing, until a floodlight switched on. Four police officers
were standing in his backyard. When Mr. Witherspoon reached for his
window to talk to them, three pointed guns at him. He told the
story of the incident, which happened in 2008, at a meeting with
about 200 fellow Target executives earlier this month.
"I was standing behind my kitchen sink with my hands up," he
recalled. "It was prompted by a neighbor saying there was a
suspicious black guy running through the neighborhood," he said he
later found out.
Mr. Witherspoon, 46, a former Navy officer with an M.B.A.,
wanted his co-workers to hear directly from someone they know. "The
education, the degrees, the fact that I'm a veteran -- none of it
matters," he said. "I'm a black man and someone could perceive me
as a threat."
The world-wide protests against racism and police brutality have
sparked a wave of activity from big businesses, which have issued
statements condemning racism, pledged millions to support black
communities and, at some firms, vowed to hire and promote more
black executives into leadership roles.
Black people make up 12.4% of the U.S. population, but only 8%
of professionals, a number that has stayed steady since 2013,
according to a study by the Center for Talent Innovation, a
nonprofit research group. Only 3.2% of senior executive positions
are held by black people. Some black executives said that they felt
a sense of responsibility to use their platforms for people who
don't have one, and that their goal was to change perceptions in a
way that someone without their position may not be able to.
"For Black America, this is a reckoning moment," said Crystal E.
Ashby, interim president and CEO of the Executive Leadership
Council, which represents over 800 black corporate executives and
board members in the U.S. and abroad. "They have been pushed so far
against the wall that they don't have any choice but to help people
understand what this feels like through their lens."
'A Burden'
There was a silence during a June 2 videoconference call when
Constellation Brands Inc. Chief Executive Bill Newlands opened the
floor to about 60 of his executives and staff, asking them to share
their thoughts on Mr. Floyd's killing.
Mr. McGrew, 46, Constellation's communications chief and the
only black member of the executive team at the beer and wine maker,
spoke up about an experience he had the previous summer. He had
been pushing a shopping cart around a store that Constellation
supplies in the affluent Chicago suburb where he lives.
Wearing shorts and a T-shirt, he selected six bottles of wine.
Then he noticed the store manager trailing him through the store,
as if he were a potential shoplifter. On the call with his
colleagues and boss, he said he was tempted to identify himself as
a Constellation executive, but instead paid and left.
In an interview, he recalled how he became emotional on the call
as he explained it was the kind of experience he had been having
his entire life.
Mr. McGrew hadn't ever shared a personal anecdote of that nature
at work, but "as an African-American leader in this business," he
said he felt a duty to "help people understand stuff that they
didn't understand before."
Target's Mr. Witherspoon said he opened up not for himself, but
to prompt lasting change at the company, telling the other
executives, "I'm sharing this story with you to get you to
understand how significant of an issue it is, how much of a burden
that I carry, the black leaders and team members carry in our
stores....We're exhausted, and this is why we're exhausted."
Jill Sando, Target's chief merchandising officer, who was in the
audience, said hearing his story moved her to educate herself about
racial inequity. "Never in a million years would I have guessed
that Kamau had this experience," she said. "It's so fundamentally
wrong."
This month, Target promised to invest $10 million in black
communities, provide consulting to black-owned businesses and
create a task force to drive racial equity at the company and more
broadly. Target said it has been hosting listening sessions for
employees for four years, but the largest one took place following
Mr. Floyd's killing and involved 7,000 employees.
'Unwritten Rules'
After hearing another person tell her story at a company forum,
Courtney Dornell, 41, executive director of sales and marketing for
the Americas at Otis Elevator Co., decided that, for the first
time, she would tell her own. She wrote an essay, shared on
LinkedIn, about what she considered the "unwritten rules" of being
a black professional in corporate America -- don't stand out, don't
wear bright clothing, don't gather in groups of more than
three.
She wrote about a work trip in China, where she said staff at a
restaurant made gorilla gestures and noises at her, while her
colleagues didn't even notice it was happening. Later, when she
told some of them, they were horrified and vowed never to patronize
the restaurant again.
Sharing the story with her wider professional circle was met
with support -- including from Otis CEO Judy Marks, who wrote,
"Courtney thank you for sharing your personal journey. We are
listening and we are learning."
"I have been with this company for 18 years," Ms. Dornell said.
"These are people who really know me, but they didn't really know
my experience."
Jide Zeitlin, chairman and CEO of Tapestry Inc., which owns
fashion brands Coach, Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman, recently
wrote a memo to the firm's about 18,000 employees. It details a
summer he spent in apartheid South Africa in his 20s and how a
political gathering turned violent with armored vehicles, tear gas
and rubber bullets.
"I sat down several times to write this letter, but stopped each
time. My eyes welling up with tears. This is personal," starts the
memo.
Mr. Zeitlin, 56, said he consulted with other Tapestry
executives who discussed the possibility of softening the letter,
which states "Black Lives Matter" in bold type, before posting it
publicly this month. Mr. Zeitlin resisted, despite realizing he
could face blowback.
"If you can't speak to your conscience at a moment such as this,
when can you?" he said. "If there are some that are upset by that,
or disquieted by that, so be it."
Many employees and customers offered their own personal stories
and expressed gratitude to him for speaking up, though some
complained that he dismissed the looting that occurred at stores. A
few threatened to boycott and stopped following Tapestry brands on
social media.
Mr. Zeitlin said his main focus now is to drive change and
challenge companies that issued buttoned-up statements -- without
mentioning words such as racism or black. "Until you acknowledge
the reality, it's awfully hard to talk about how you are going to
lead change," he said.
For Mark Mason, 51, chief financial officer at Citigroup, Inc.
it was his teenage son who spurred him to speak up. "You're the CFO
of the entire bank," his son said, according to Mr. Mason. "If you
put something out, people will read it."
He warned Chief Executive Michael Corbat he planned to write
something "raw." Mr. Corbat assured him he had his back. Mr. Mason
addressed the issue of police brutality in a blog post on May 29
about what it was like to watch the video of George Floyd's
killing, opening it by repeating "I can't breathe" 10 times, the
words Mr. Floyd said in the video before dying.
"Even though I'm the CFO of a global bank, the killings of
George Floyd in Minnesota, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna
Taylor in Kentucky are reminders of the dangers Black Americans
like me face in living our daily lives," he wrote. "Despite the
progress the United States has made, Black Americans are too often
denied basic privileges that others take for granted."
Sara Wechter, Citi's head of human resources, said she teared up
and could only think, "wow," when she read Mr. Mason's words. "Mark
is a very private individual and a private leader," she said.
"Writing something like that must have been tremendously
painful."
She said Citi invited its entire 200,000-person global workforce
to a Zoom call in which Mr. Corbat discussed his long friendship
with Mr. Mason -- the two had played golf together and knew each
other's families well. Mr. Corbat said he had always considered
himself colorblind, but told employees he regretted not asking Mr.
Mason more questions about his life, Ms. Wechter said.
"Even our CEO was willing to say he probably got parts of this
wrong, and it's OK to get parts of this wrong," she said.
Since the post, Mr. Mason said many colleagues have asked him
what they can do to help. He said he has proposed ideas, but also
emphasized that relying only on black executives won't be
sufficient. "There aren't enough of them in most companies to
change the fabric of the organization," he said.
'Put Up This Wall'
Nathaniel Patterson, Jr., 64, a leadership coach who serves on
board of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce and other nonprofits,
didn't even tell his mother about the time he was 14 years old and
walking home from school when a police officer pressed him up
against a car and asked what he was doing in the neighborhood.
"When I didn't answer, he threw me to the ground and put the gun
in my mouth," he said. "He told me that 'I could kill you' and
nobody would blame him. He told me that before I could go, I had to
suck on the barrel."
He buried it away from his colleagues during his years as a
marketing executive and later running his own marketing firm until
earlier this month, when he told the story in a LinkedIn post to
hundreds of contacts and colleagues. "You put up this wall," he
said. "If you are labeled as a person bringing up the race card,
you are going to have your career blocked."
Lynnwood Bibbens, 48, the co-founder and CEO of streaming video
network ReachTV, said he never brought up his run-in with police to
his wider professional network before. "You hear people saying
already that black people think they are victims," he said.
On June 2, he wrote a letter -- opening with "Dear America" --
describing the 2004 encounter with police officers who pointed a
gun at his head after pulling him over in his Mercedes. He said
they held him in handcuffs for nearly an hour on the side of the
busy street in Cherry Hill, N.J., near the office where he ran a
business with 40 employees. Police later told him that his car
matched the description of a stolen vehicle.
"I honestly thought I was going to die; I thought about the
things I wanted to tell my son and wouldn't have the chance," he
wrote in the letter posted on Instagram and later on LinkedIn.
According to the police report, the license plate had been
incorrectly entered by another police department as stolen.
"There's a lot of white people that look at me and a lot of
successful black executives as not 'black,' " Mr. Bibbens said.
"They see black people on TV, and they see me, and they say, those
are two different types of black people. They can't have similar
experiences. They must have done something different. The truth is,
we have similar experiences."
Cara Robinson Sabin, 50, the CEO of Sundial Brands, said
employees at the beauty company, which focuses on black shoppers,
were already having candid conversations about race. Those
conversations are now happening at other brands owned by Unilever
PLC, which acquired Sundial Brands in 2017. The depth of the
conversations feels different this time, she said.
The pandemic -- and the fact that many people are working
remotely, sharing their stories in video chats and conference calls
-- is making it easier for some to open up, Ms. Sabin noted,
adding: "There's something about looking at people's faces on video
that feels more intimate."
'A Turning Point'
After he saw the Floyd video, J.D. Redmon, a 29-year-old vice
president of marketing at TTN Fleet Solutions, said he couldn't
sleep or concentrate on his job at the trucking-software company in
Argyle, Texas. He decided to post a seven-minute video on LinkedIn
to urge his co-workers to call out racism and to share his own
encounters, including a painful childhood memory of white neighbors
moving away when his family moved nearby.
"I was fully prepared to wake up the next day without a job," he
said.
A few days later, Mr. Redmon's employer asked him to speak on a
Zoom call where other black employees told stories of their own.
"It was actually a turning point for black employees at my
company," he said. "I think they felt comfortable speaking up
because they saw how I was being embraced by my peers."
After he posted another video on Juneteenth pointing out that
the trucking industry is led mostly by white men, he said some
people inside the company told him he needs to be careful about not
offending anyone and warned him that LinkedIn is a professional
site, and not for personal views.
But his boss, Tyler Harden, an executive vice president, sent
him a text: "Don't ever let anyone or anything change you! That is
not a request!"
"If being me costs me my job, so be it," Mr. Redmon said.
Kim Seymour, 50, chief people officer at WW International Inc.
(formerly Weight Watchers), said she has long been vocal on issues
of race, equality and inclusion as a human-resources professional
and became even more so after some cancer scares.
After the killing of Mr. Floyd, she said she immediately felt
compelled to post a message to employees on WW's internal
social-media network about racism and Black Lives Matter. "I'm
prepared for someone to be offended by this," she wrote in a post
she later put on LinkedIn. "I'm lucky that my leader is not one of
them," referring to WW CEO Mindy Grossman.
Ms. Seymour said she still finds herself accommodating bias in
daily life. She instinctively raises her merchandise high in the
air when she goes shopping in a department store so that store
workers know she's not stealing.
She said she believes most black executives in her generation
have succeeded in a similar way, going out of their way to make
white people feel comfortable around them. Many in her cohort feel
they can only tell the truth after reaching a certain level, she
said, but younger employees aren't waiting for that moment. "Now
more people are getting there and getting there faster, willing to
risk the comfort of their positions for the power of their
convictions," she said.
After recently becoming a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers
LLP's deals team, Crystal Wright, 38, said she has allowed herself
to become more vulnerable with co-workers by expressing the fear
she feels for her husband and what it would mean for her family --
she has a 16-month-old son -- if she were to lose him.
She said the U.S. chairman of the firm, Tim Ryan, has created a
platform to talk openly about the topic of race, and white
employees are sharing their stories, too. One of her white
co-workers recently told her that he's trying to talk with his
children about race and how interactions with the police might be
different for people of color.
She said she hopes employees will also become more candid about
their experiences within their own companies. "An issue with the
police is one story, but it's another thing to listen to someone
tell a story that 'I feel like I didn't get a promotion here
because I was discriminated against,' " she said. "If we want
change within corporate America, those conversations are
pivotal."
--David Benoit and Jennifer Maloney contributed to this
article.
Write to Khadeeja Safdar at khadeeja.safdar@wsj.com and Keach
Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 26, 2020 10:51 ET (14:51 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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