John Rogers is the chairman, co-CEO and chief investment officer of Ariel Investments, an investment firm with some $10.2 billion in assets. He is a relentlessly patient and thorough investor and applies a rigorous approach to company analysis —in addition to considering environmental, social and governance variables. Ariel’s international fund has earned five stars on the mutual fund rating site, Morningstar.
Yet because he is one of the few Black investors operating at his level, he is primarily asked for his thoughts on diversity and equity, not the economy or trends in business. Since he’s typically as tireless in his social justice advocacy work as he is with his investment analysis, he’s always gracious about it.
That said, during a recent Coins2Day-led Zoom call with Rogers (along with McKinsey & Company diversity chief Lareina Yee), it did sound like he was running a bit low on his trademark patience. We were there to talk about the widening Black wealth gap, and the Black-company founder dropped a fundamental truth. “Black companies need customers,” he said simply.
And not the small allocations reserved for now outmoded “supplier diversity programs,” which typically cater to the lowest margin businesses like catering, janitorial, and construction. The good juice, the money that creates actual wealth, is in professional services — technology, financial, legal, and other high-margin businesses that scale. “That’s where the cash flow is. That’s where the jobs are,” he says. And as a Black man running a $10 billion business, he knows that’s where the bias is. “People continue to think that we’re not qualified to do the complicated tasks, the legal services, the counting services, money management, things like that,” he says. “When people close their eyes and think about an African American leader, they think about someone in sports or entertainment, not an investment banker.”
I was thinking about his comments when I read the news that Netflix, which seems to be doing so many things right lately, is committing some $100 million to lenders that serve the Black community, many of which are Black-owned themselves.
Black companies need customers. Black customers need companies who will actually meet their needs. And when it comes to growing their wealth, Black people need lenders they can trust.
Netflix says they will start by shifting $25 million into the Black Economic Development Initiative, a new fund that’s being managed by Local Initiatives Support Corporation, or LISC, a unique nonprofit that acts as a bridge between under-resourced communities and governments and for-profits. The initial investment will be allocated as bridge loans, participation loans, and bank deposits in Black-owned institutions, which in turn will be made available to Black businesses and borrowers in communities across the country.
Going forward, the company announced plans to steer 2% of its cash on hand, or around $5 billion, to financial institutions that serve Black communities—and then issued a call to action.
“If every company in the S&P 500 allocated a modest amount of their cash holdings into efforts like the Black Economic Development Initiative, each 1 percent of their cash would represent $20-$30 billion of new capital,” Netflix said in a statement. “And that would help build stronger communities, offering more Black families pathways to prosperity and a more equitable future.”
At this scale, a collective 1 percent investment turns a rounding error into a revolution.
Somewhere, I like to think, there’s a future John Rogers (or Ariel co-CEO Mellody Hobson) patiently sitting in a bank office looking for the next big investment idea. Maybe they’ll find it in Detroit, Atlanta, Newark, Tulsa. With some care and capital, a company prospers, taking families and communities along for the ride. With lots and lots of Johns and Mellodys making good loans and smart investments… who knows?
It kind of sounds like a screenplay, right?
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
[email protected]
Enjoy your holiday weekend! Be safe, be joyful. We are grateful to be part of your lives and part of the work. RaceAhead will return to our regular schedule next week.
On point
MIT pulls the plug on the online data set that turned AI racist The training set had been used to teach machine learning systems things like how to identify people and objects. In a much-used example, if you showed the system a photo of a park, it should be able to identify things in the park, like swing sets, trees and people walking dogs. “Thanks to MIT's cavalier approach when assembling its training set, though, these systems may also label women as whores or bitches, and Black and Asian people with derogatory language,” reports The Register. “The database also contained close-up pictures of female genitalia labeled with the C-word.” The database, called 80 Million Tiny Images, was simply too vast to manage. “We, therefore have decided to formally withdraw the dataset. It has been taken offline and it will not be put back online,” said MIT in a statement.
The Register
Twitter takes on the racially-coded language in tech I have absolutely no coding chops, so I suppose I could be forgiven for being shocked by this story. But I’m having a hard time understanding how terms like "master," "slave," "whitelist" and "blacklist" could have survived this long when discussing things like databases and software. It has fallen to people like Regynald Augustin and Kelvin Oliver, two Black techies at Twitter, to reset the norms. "This has to stop. This isn't cool. We have to change this now."
CNET
Asians in tech show up for Black Lives Matter Michelle Kim, a very busy diversity and inclusion advocate and co-founder and CEO of the consultancy Awaken, is back with a detailed call to action for Asian tech employees. “We, especially overrepresented East and South Asians in tech, continue to enjoy relative privilege that gives us access to spaces and resources that exclude our Black colleagues,” she writes. But standing up doesn’t have to be challenging. She offers advice for company founders and investors, but reminds peers that they have a role to play, too. “Make sure your Black coworkers are included in meetings, in conversations, in all opportunities,” she writes. “Call out your company if your Black coworkers are shouldering a disproportionate amount of emotional and educational labor burden without their explicit consent and additional compensation.”
Medium
Investors ask Nike, Fedex, and PepsiCo to end their association with the D.C. Area’s football team Investment firms and shareholders with some $620 billion in assets have asked the companies to end their business arrangements with the Washington Redskins because of its racist name and logo. “This is a broader movement now that’s happening that Indigenous peoples are part of,” said Carla Fredericks, director of First Peoples Worldwide, one of the firms who signed and sent a letter. “Indigenous peoples were sort of left out of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s in many respects, because our conditions were so dire on reservations and our ability to engage publicly was very limited because of that. With social media now, obviously everything is very different.”
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On background
To be "Wasichu" is to be part of an important story I first heard the term on one of my visits to the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is not far from the Black Hills in South Dakota. "Wasichu" is the Lakota term for non-Indian white person, I was told. It also means "the one who takes the best meat for himself." This pervasive history of greed, violence, and treaties made and broken is the subject of this TEDx talk delivered by Aaron Huey, a Wasichu photographer who has spent a remarkable part of his life documenting poverty in the U.S. And ultimately within the Lakota-Sioux community of Pine Ridge, “which is sometimes referred to as Prisoner of War Camp Number 334,” he says.
TED
The “American dream” meritocracy thing is bad for everyone This study shows that the belief that society is inherently fair is particularly damaging to poor and disadvantaged youth. The findings are in Child Development, a peer-reviewed journal, and are pretty clear: “Traditionally marginalized youth who grew up believing in the American ideal that hard work and perseverance naturally lead to success show a decline in self-esteem and an increase in risky behaviors during their middle-school years.” A series of educators are interviewed and validate the findings with anecdotal evidence of their own. But what becomes clear is that the entire education system needs to be reviewed and re-thought. “We have to ask different questions around school,” said one educator. “Does [school] contribute further to our [students’] marginalization and oppression?” A must-read and share.
The Atlantic
Reminder! Cities are segregated by design Housing segregation and discrimination have shaped the lives of people in the country for decades – since 1934, to be exact – when maps drawn up by the government-sponsored Home Owner’s Loan Corporation tried to identify neighborhoods most likely to default on a brand new product called a 30-year mortgage. This invention of the New Deal also invented “red-lining” or the identification of neighborhoods with “foreigners,” “low-class whites,” and “Negroes.” This excellent, seven-minute video, narrated by NPR’s Gene Demby, draws a straight line between the Depression-era discriminatory lending to the creation of ghettos, environmental racism, poor schools, over-aggressive policing and the unique phenomenon of Martin Luther King Boulevards. Check it out, and then check out this curated Pocket reading list by raceAhead's own Aric Jenkins on how race shapes the American city.
Aeon
Speaking of: raceAhead is edited by Aric Jenkins.
Today's mood board
