Speaking on opportunity and race, this panel pulled no punches
A recent session at the BenefitsPRO Virtual Broker Expo explored the issue of racism in our industry.
Marlin Woods, executive chairman of BenefitsPlus, was the host of “All Gloves Are Off—Bridging the Gap of Opportunity and Race.” It was an occasion for a wide-ranging discussion covering American history, the C-suite (or the “PC-suite,” as panelist Chris Dancy quipped), and the inherent racism in your GPS. “These are discussions that lead to a place of reflection and also solution,” Woods began, setting the tone for a conversation that would reveal “where we are, where we’re headed, how to move forward with an awareness of personal accountability, and what an industry of access looks like to young potentials seeking opportunity.”
Related: The long, hard road to improving diversity in the benefits industry
“Most of us never even think, ‘Hey, if America really wasn’t established until 1776, what happened in all of that time?’” said Timotheus Pope, director of Citikidz Christian Sports Camp, before taking the session on a history lesson through those intervening years and beyond, making stops at the First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609; the arrival of African slaves to Jamestown in 1619; Jim Crow in 1870; the murder of Emmett Till in 1955; up to the present day with George Floyd. “We got here as people used the institution of racism to create a cultural racism that now manifests itself personally,” summarized Pope. ”And it affects every arena, including business – and benefits.
“Companies that are diversifying are beginning to get more of a rich understanding of all of the nuances of different environments,” Pope said. ”And as we understand those nuances, it helps us understand if we’re going to grow as a company, we need to grow our reach by growing our understanding. One of the way to do that is by including other ethnicities.”
Phillip Styles, executive vice president of Willis Towers Watson, spoke of the differences in perception of Caucasian and Black executives. “You’ll see Caucasian executive leaders float from company to company, and as they go, they rise. Marlin, we only get one shot,” said Styles. ”We’re allowed to go lateral, not vertical.”
A lack of diverse voices can have a ripple effect for the worse. “When you’re designing a benefit plan, there’s always one person who makes the final decision,” Styles explained. ”Most of the time the person making that final decision or has the heavy influence on the team is not African-American. If a company’s employee base is 20-25% African American, whoever has that influence needs to have an African-American voice on that team that they respect and value, who can say ‘I know what is in my community.’ If diabetes is in our community, and you’re not in our communities but you’re always designing employee benefits plans for our communities, how are we going to fix problems?”
Those problems go deeper than you might think, according to “the world’s most connected human” Chris Dancy, CTO of Inspireware. Dancy thinks we’re way past “the table stakes of ‘do we have enough brown and black coders?’ The systems themselves have been designed in a way that they perpetuate these second order levels of oppression and racism.” He brought up GPS as an example. “GPS will always cater you to the fastest route, not necessarily the one that will give you the most view into the diversity around you. So much of segregational oppression is hidden from white America because their GPS takes them the fastest way, not the most visible way. This isn’t systematic, this is algorithmic. And it’s powered by people’s absolute abdication of any responsibility to see anything that makes them uncomfortable.”
Changing those systems and algorithms “takes deliberate conversation about what you value as a human and placing that into the systems you want,” Dancy said. “We have to stop segregating people as on-device or off-device. People are just soul-fulfilled people no matter where they practice being human, and we need to encourage that in our children. Talk to your kids about what they value and tell them to practice that every time they pick up their device.”
In his summation, Woods said, “They say [diversity and inclusion] is all about the money. Ladies and gentlemen at BenefitsPro 2020, it is not all about the money. It’s about us taking control of our own destinies and not allowing any outside parties or affiliations to rob us of those legacies. Like those same names that are written in the Declaration of Independence, it’s about having,that same long line of legacy that we want ourselves to be solidified in history forever. So it’s not about the money. The money is only a tool. Money is not seed, it is water.”
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