Teaching and Listening
We just finished teaching "Race and Money in America, Contemporary Business Applications" at Yale's business school. It was a great mix of teaching and listening. Here's a taste of what we covered...
The course we developed and taught at The Yale School of Management combined history with present-day case studies. Each week, we studied historic events that contributed to the racial wealth gap, and we challenged the students to find ways that companies and industries today could be more equitable. We brought in many of the disciplines of an M.B.A. degree (finance, economics, marketing, leadership) and also our own knowledge as reporters and business leaders who have led diversity initiatives.
Here are a few of the areas we covered …
Slavery’s Grim History of objectification.
Whenever we begin presentations or courses about the racial wealth gap, we pause at the beginning to reflect on some artifacts that show the objectification — and financialization — of slaves in the United States. Here are some of these grim artifacts we showed about of slavery’s past.
Race in Models
We studied an aspect of the Jim Crow era that hasn’t received much attention: race as a pricing and modeling input. At the same time American states and cities created laws barring Black Americans from various jobs and facilities, businesses were creating ways of pricing products that used race as inputs into their models. This aspect of segregation still lingers in a sense today because businesses continue to make consumer offers based in part on factors that are correlated with race. We evaluated the historic and current examples.
Race as a business focus
There are a lot of businesses throughout U.S. history focused on selling to specific racial groups. We talked throughout the course on what it means for a business to be focused primarily on one group of consumers. How should that trickle through the DNA of the organization? How important are the makeup of the ownership, employees representation, the customer mix and the product features?
Race and earnings
When people examine whether Black Americans are making progress economically, they often point to Black Americans who have “made it” as proof that things have improved. And it is true that at the top of the distribution, above the 90th percentile of Black Americans, the income gap with white Americans has narrowed significantly.
But, as you know, most Black Americans aren’t living above the 90th percentile, and the income gap for the median Black male earner hasn’t budged.
We discussed this throughout the class and enjoyed a visit from a leading economist in the race and economics space, Kerwin Charles, who is also the dean of the Yale School of Management. His paper about earnings of Black and white men can be read here.
Race and redlining
More people are talking about what a problem redlining was in the 1930s and 1940s. But what about today? We reviewed examples of modern day redlining and challenged students to think about ways of solving redlining issues in several cities across the country.
Have you looked at the redlining maps from where you live or where you grew up? It is a thought-provoking experience. You can examine your city’s historic redlining on National Geographic’s mapmaker site.
Black Women Best
One of the most common questions we get about the racial wealth gap is: what can be done? We examined many different possible remedies in the course. One interesting proposal is called “Black Women Best.” This framework argues that U.S policymaking should be centered on the well-being of Black women and that doing so would create more collective well-being. One of the authors of the framework is Janelle Jones, was the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor during the first year of the Biden administration.
DEI Practices
We focused part of the course on ways managers and business leaders can improve diversity in workplaces. We anchored the course around Louise’s “Diversity Triangle” framework and talked in-depth about each aspect of the triangle: customer make-up, team members and culture, and product offerings.
We also ran the course itself with an eye on inclusivity. Our class participation was facilitated through a Google Form. This approach allowed us to include thoughts from students who didn’t want to share those thoughts in front of the class. It also helped us to make sure we were fair in grading because it provided a way to record class participation. (Louise wrote about this approach here.)
Thought-provoking speakers.
We had many thought-provoking speakers, including Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City; Amy Nelson, the executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana; and Jared Ball, author of “The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power.” You can read more about their visits there in our Twitter handle @RaceandMoney.
Our final speaker was Antoine Bethea, a 14-season NFL player. Among other things, we talked about ownership in the N.F.L. Diversity at the ownership level, he said, would have an immediate impact on management ranks. “If we can have more diversity at the top that would trickle down,” he said. People tend to hire people who look like them, he said.
One M.B.A. student pointed out that many students go to business school to pivot their careers and asked Antoine, who is now an entrepreneur, for advice on pivoting. Antoine talked about selecting his current ventures as things that he sees helping his childhood community.
In sum, in all of the aspects of the course, we showed the connections between history and modern-day practices. It was rewarding to spend the time with our students — and they brought experiences from working in the private and public sector that drove a great conversation. We taught, and we also listened and learned.
Broadly speaking, we think more business leaders could benefit by studying this history and pondering change in the ways they do business.
Additional Reading. You can read a Yale University interview with us about our book and course here.
Summer Break. We are heads down this summer working on writing our book, The Black Dollar, to be published by HarperCollins. (More on that here.) We’ll be back in your inbox down the road.
Be well,
Louise and Ebony
