When I was very young, I regularly tested my parent’s patience with the question, “Why?” Perhaps you did too. And perhaps as you grew older, like me, the eye-opening beauty of the question was gradually tamed by the essence of most answers: “Why not?” So I came to accept the world as it is and to build a smaller one for myself, defined by questions already answered. I accepted that provocative questions were frowned upon, a source of unpleasantness to be avoided. With different degrees of comfort, you and I settled for “Why not?”
Until We Couldn’t.
I suspect that you, like me, have experienced times when the answer, “Why not?” was once again not good enough. For me the “Whys” that led to the wholly inadequate “Why nots” were rooted in answers providing little transparency and therefore obscuring the truth. Simple answers, not intending to illuminate or educate, but rather to keep the dots between one reality and another disconnected. Answers grounded in opinion, customs, privilege or bias. Answers that changed when the questions persisted.
Take the Green Book for instance.
The title of a movie currently in theaters, it references a booklet first published in 1936 and not discontinued until 1967. The 1960 edition is titled, “The Travelers’ Green Book: Guide for Travel and Vacations.” Innocent enough. The graphics on the cover go on to suggest the booklet is a listing of “hotels, motels, restaurants, tourist homes and vacation resorts” in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. Quite comprehensive. No doubt a very useful aid for planning wonderful trips.
But why was there a drawing of a young male with a happy disposition whose ethnicity was obscure but suggestive of a person of color by its shading? And why in small print at the bottom of the cover was the advice provided or even necessary?
“Carry your Green Book with you… you may need it!”
The booklet’s publisher, Victor H. Green, provides an initial answer in the introduction:
“The idea of The Green Book is to give the Motorist and Tourist a Guide not only of the Hotels and Tourist Homes in all the large cities, but other classifications that will be found useful wherever he may be. Also facts and information that the Negro Motorist can use and depend upon.”
What other facts and information? Less conspicuously, Green offers us another, yet still gentile, reason for this travel guide: to avoid the “unpleasant embarrassments” Negro travelers risked traveling throughout America.
What unpleasant embarrassments? Green was silent on the answer to this question, but other black folks who used the guide were not. It could be the difference between a hot meal and the “embarrassment” of a vicious beating.
Layers below the bland introduction lies the truth. The Green Book was far more than a guide book; for black folks it was an invisible map for safe passage through America. For thirty years, it served as a latter day Underground Railroad, illuminating for families of blacks seeking to enjoy travel without incident — however restrained it might be — a route from safe-house to safe-house and welcoming places to eat along the way.
It also laid bare the truth that this was not simply a guide for passage through the South. In 1960, my home town of Dayton, Ohio was among scores of Northern cities listed in the Green Book. My heartland town had three recommended places: the Thomas Hotel, Mr. Lawrence’s “tourist home” and the YMCA, all in the segregated west side of town. There is a good chance your hometown is in the Green Book too.
The Green Book raised many questions and answered a few, but made no attempt to address the deeper, unstated, yet obvious question: Why was it needed in the first place?
Now the answers become increasingly uncomfortable. They untangle myth from fact and reveal truths about how we as a nation systematically undermine our cherished claim that we declare is self-evident: that all “men” are created equal, and are to be treated equally as well.
The Green Book should not have been needed at all.
Its very existence spoke volumes about structural racism woven tightly into the fabric of America. And yet while it represented only a microcosm of the daily life challenges facing black folks and other people of color, the Green Book was most significant because it was tangible, visible, undeniable evidence of this truth. More than a guide, more than a map, the Green Book was an indictment of America’s willingness to let racial inequities persist, even in the institutions charged with erasing them.
Now archived in libraries and stored as memorabilia of a time past, the Green Book has passed into history, but structural racism has not. A persistent, truth-seeking set of questions will manifest the evidence of its existence today time and time again. Questions about our social organizations: schools, neighborhoods, and government policy. Questions about business: employment, benefits and boards. Questions about money: who has it, who has access to it and why.
And finally we come to the most relevant question. If you and I can agree that structural racism exists in America today, what are we doing about it?
Well, let’s start with a goal.
I very much like the one established by our Founding Fathers and restated in today’s terms by Equity in the Center: Race Equity, defined as “the condition where one’s racial identity has no influence on how one fares in society” — my identity and yours.
The problem is so endemic and the challenge so great that they recommend making race equity a central, explicit, cultural building block in all we do moving forward. The Building a Race Equity Culture approach recognizes that we are striving for the antithesis of our current dominant culture, “which promotes assimilation over integration and dismisses opportunities to create a more inclusive, equitable environment.” It calls for, “an adaptive and transformational approach that impacts behaviors and mindsets as well as practices, programs, and processes.”
That requires much more than a carefully worded guide book.
Next Steps?
For those who invest or management money, I think it means re-inventing investing. Practices and processes for sure, but even more critically, prevailing behaviors and mindsets. We need to question long held assumptions about worthiness and risk that are intentionally exclusive; we need to interrogate even more openly the “best practices” and “prudent criteria” that are unintentionally exclusive, and wholly unnecessary.
But more than anything, we need to recognize that many of our unexamined assumptions and practices — our mindsets and behaviors — have their genesis in racist cultural norms.
What are we doing about it?
For those of us seeking social equity impact — racial, gender or otherwise — through our investing, we face an additional challenge: putting our money where our mouth is and demanding that our advisers, wealth managers, investors and others help us achieve our goal rather than try to dissuade us. Absent our determined insistence, little will change.
For our part, Reinventure Capital’s approach to venture investing is challenging three “conventional wisdoms” that stand in the way of racial and gender equity in investing: 1) “we are not biased,” 2) “markets behave rationally,” and 3) “we operate within a meritocracy.”
We know that when they are released from these and other wide-spread myths severely starving them of capital, founders who are of color and who are women can successfully build companies of scale, can do it while addressing important social and environmental challenges and can spread racial and gender equity in the process. We know because our investments have provided the capital that allowed them to do it before.
We know just how to do it again, and we are actively building a coalition of like-minded investors to expand on our past successes. Specifically, we are focused on deploying equity and debt capital in expansion stage (breakeven or so) companies led by people of color and women, across the US.
If you care about social impact, join us. If you care about economic justice, join us. If you care about ending racial inequity, join us. And by the way, if you care about building great companies and generating market returns*, join us.
Why else? Avoid unpleasant embarrassments. Invest based on fact, rather than myth. Escape the unintentional, systemic biases that unnecessarily limit us all.
And finally, why ever not.
* While there’s no such thing as a guarantee in investing and no one can reliably predict the future, Ed’s prior track record provides direct evidence that it is indeed possible to consistently invest for both financial returns and social value creation. If you are an accredited investor and would like to learn more about investments that can advance social, racial, and gender equity by supporting high-value companies led by women and/or people of color, please contact us to start that conversation.
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