By Ed Adler
The world repeatedly saw the video of the life being kneed out of George Floyd. When the jury found Derek Chauvin guilty, most people felt relieved that justice was served.
In the 24 hours after the verdict, six Black people were killed by police officers.
Nothing is new here. The problem of racism in our country goes back hundreds of years, and it is something Black people at all levels of society deal with.
Historian Ibram X. Kandi titled his book on racism “Stamped from the Beginning,” taking the words from a speech by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who said “the inequality of whites and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”
The racial disparities of Black and white, Kandi writes, are still, so many years later, systemic in American life.
He defines the term “anti-racists” as a group that has positioned itself against racism. “So many prominent Americans,” he writes, “many of whom we celebrate for their progressive ideas and activism, many of whom had very good intentions, subscribed to assimilationist thinking that has also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority.”
Many pretend that they can sympathize with the unfair treatment of Blacks but still question whether the murder of George Floyd was racist. Many liberal-minded privileged people try to be anti-racist but cannot grasp what Black people experience.
A prominent friend of mine opined that George Floyd was faking when he gasped, “I can’t breathe,” and that Chauvin didn’t really mean to kill him.
A person I know said after watching Orpah Winfrey interview Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, “They are rich, they lived in a palace. What ingrates.” Therefore, no racism. Case closed.
CNN’s Don Lemon, the only Black anchor with a show in prime time, says Prince Harry didn’t understand racism until he saw it affect his family. Lemon, who has written a provocative new book, “This Is The Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism,” says: “That is what privilege is all about. If you don’t have to deal with it, then it didn’t exist for you.”
In the past year, I discovered some disturbing attitudes about race among my friend group that made me rethink my own history with racism. I’ve concluded that, as a Jew, perhaps I can understand better what Blacks have experienced.
I’m a child of the Sixties who has had a long corporate career. I was a kid with long hair when the police hated hippies, and I abhorred racism and supported justice and equality. I am an empathetic person and have realized that it may be hard for others to recognize suffering.
I cried when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and understood the anger and the protests that followed. Bobby Kennedy, who tried to understand racism, was my hero. I wept when my father awoke me to tell me RFK had been shot and killed. We thought he could heal the country’s wounds and bring us together.
And I cried tears of joy when Barack Obama was elected, because I thought the world would finally change.
I’ve observed firsthand how even the most prominent Blacks have had to deal with subtle and unsubtle prejudice.
I had the privilege to work directly for Dick Parsons, one of the first African American CEOs, who led Time Warner, then the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate, through a tumultuous time. He became my mentor and friend. Working closely with him, I learned that he overcame prejudice to forge a career at the top of the business world. He has had to duck the slings and arrows of racism his whole life, as every Black man in our society does.
As a young man, he was the top lawyer for Nelson Rockefeller, then one of American’s richest men and the governor of New York. When Parsons was summoned to a meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to represent Rockefeller, the other attendees assumed he was someone else, perhaps a messenger, and asked when Mr. Rockefeller’s lawyer would be arriving. But Dick handled the situation with his career-defining grace, aplomb and humor.
All three personality traits defined Parsons as he kept moving his career forward in a white man’s world. Many people in our open-minded media company would often treat him disrespectfully, not even realizing that they were innately prejudice. He would often laugh it off, but occasionally those hidden racists were moved aside, and the boss kept moving ahead. His hallmark was caring about the 90,000 people in the company and not worrying about what he had to overcome.
And there are scores of others like Parsons, men and women who must work twice as hard as their white male counterparts to be successful.
In recent years, I have also worked as a consultant to a prominent successful African American executive. My client must work much harder than his peers to prove himself, despite a long and distinguished career.
The Black journalists I’ve worked closely with throughout my communications career also have had to be better, sharper and more rigorous than their white counterparts. Sources often would treat them badly, bully them and challenge the veracity of their stories.
In an interview with CNN recently, Parsons said, “You had to be twice as good to get half as far — if you wanted success you had to over-perform.”
Don Lemon agrees, “It was easy for me to be the weekend anchor but not the main anchor. People did not believe I could carry a show.”
Dick Parsons, Don Lemon, Meghan Markle, Kamala Harris, my Black executive client, my journalist friends, and scores of others in all walks of life all faced hidden racism as they made their way into a whiter world. Still, people I know may feel they are anti-racist, yet they cannot see what Blacks go through.
Actress Regina King remarked at the opening of the Academy Awards, “I know a lot of you feel like reaching for the remote when Hollywood is preaching to you, but as a mother of a Black son I know the fear that so many live with, and no amount of fame or fortune changes that.”
The world is changing, and established white people will inevitably have to change to make this world better and start to understand the Black experience
Lemon says, “The only way to solve the race issue is if we have relationships with people who don’t look like us and we have someone we can give honest feedback to.”
Lemon is optimistic about possible change and writes in his book, “We are capable of releasing the burden of racism … We are capable of educating future generations with self-honesty and shared humanity.”
I hope he is right.
Ed Adler, a resident of Southampton and New York City, is a partner in Finsbury Glover Hering, a global strategic communications firm. He spent 36 years at Time Warner.
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