Mixing directness with diplomacy is a skill she has had to perfect over the last several decades as a trained lawyer, consultant and non-profit volunteer.  Even today, Candace often is one of the few, and sometimes the only, Black women in the room. Candace had an early influence on this project of interviewing my Black friends about race and helped formulate some of the questions.  She both encouraged me and cautioned me about the project upon which I was about to embark.  She has had quite a few white friends check in. For many, she is one of the only Black people they know.  There is a certain burden with being “the Black friend,” as many white people are discovering that they are not as anti-racist as they thought. 

Candace just turned 52, she is single with no children and lives in Northwest Atlanta on the Westside.  Candace was raised in Buckhead since the age of 6, where there were, and still are, less than a handful of Black families. 

Why did you agree to have this conversation with me yet advise that not all white people can have this conversation with their Black friends? I know that you are not coming to this as a blank slate, as issues of race and anti-racism are things that you and I have talked about before. In other words, I am not concerned that you haven’t given some thought about these issues. More importantly, I know that you have a number of Black friends, with varied backgrounds.  So I do not feel as if I’m having to be a proxy for everyone in the Black community because you will have no other perspective other than mine. The fact that the New York Times Bestsellers list is all anti-racist books at this moment is an indication that a lot of people are starting from ground zero.  Many white people are thinking about the issue of race and anti-racism critically for the first time.  Not everyone is ready to have a candid conversation.  

How often do you feel like racial discrimination affects you?  It’s not constantly front and center, but it’s always in the line of sight.  A great example is when I’m running errands on a Saturday. I might watch someone look me in the eye and put their purse under their basket.  I could go to the Garden Center and I may be helped by someone who abandons me when a white woman walks up and asks for help.  And then it happens a second time. Then I have to make a decision – how much of an issue do I want to make of this experience?  The shopper basically knew that she could get service before me (twice), and the salesperson met that expectation. But then the rest of the day will be uneventful. I might even have an incredibly positive experience somewhere else. In other words, you can’t necessarily predict when racism is coming, but then there it is.   In the everyday, it’s microaggressions, being over-surveilled or being unseen.

In the corporate space, it’s a different set of issues.  People might say when they meet me, “oh, I didn’t know you were Black when I spoke to you on the phone.”  Or it’s being mistaken for an assistant. When people learned I was a partner at law firm (or before, simply that I was a lawyer), they would ask me to recite my full resume.  They would ask me where I’m from, where I went to law school, where I went to college, where I went to high school, even what my parents’ professions were. This was (and still is) a regular occurrence, and it was clear that people were looking for some crack in the armor.  This has been an exercise I have gone through for over 25 years. 

But it’s the same situation for every Black professional I know.  My stories are not unique.  There are thousands of Black people having these same experiences, whether they are in LA, Chicago, Atlanta or upstate New York.  And something to remember is that this regular bumping upon microaggressions and not so subtle racism is happening to professionals, with college and advanced degrees, kids in fancy schools, who live in fancy neighborhoods. These are the folks with a lot of privilege in many ways, and yet, this is still something they face.  And dealing with racism is an extra, unpaid job. It’s like you are always on call and you never know when you are going to get beeped.  

Have you or your family had bad experiences with police?  I have family members who regularly were put in the backs of police cars for driving their own cars.  When I went to a party at MIT in Boston in college, I didn’t know how to get to the school, so I went to a police station to ask for directions, thinking it would be a safe place to go at night in an unfamiliar area. I was detained for surveilling or casing the police station.  I weighed all of 110 pounds, in my mock turtleneck and matching plaid skirt, and was with two similarly dressed 19-year-old Black women.  After I was released, the police followed me until I got on private property.  And I have been given a police escort out of establishments for something as pedestrian as asking for a manager. 

What do you wish white people really understood about your experience as a black person?  That it’s race, not class.  People assume that I don’t go through these things because of my background and experiences.  Racism is an issue, regardless of income.  It does not go away with an advanced degree or office in the C-Suite.  And because I work at the same job or live in the same neighborhood as they do does not mean my perspective on the world is the same as theirs.  The world does not operate for me the same way it operates for them.  There are harms in the world I have to negotiate (or try to avoid) that they don’t appreciate, much less experience. 

Have race relations changed significantly in your parents’ lifetime and in your lifetime?  My mother grew up in the segregated Deep South, where they had voting tests and sundown towns, so it’s easy to say we have progressed from that.  It no longer is legal to ask people to guess how many marbles there are in a jar before they can vote.  But you can legally disenfranchise voters by making them wait 7 hours to cast their ballots.  Do you want to call that progress or just a different kind of barrier?  Do I feel like things have changed substantially since I graduated high school?  Not really.  There are more Black kids at the school I went to, but their stories of racism are depressingly similar to my own. So while there have been inroads, it’s hard to truly call it “progress.”

Do you think this moment of recognition in the U.S. is going to stick? I do not have a lot of optimism that it will stick.  I have seen inflection points in my adult lifetime that were supposed to be the turning points:  Rodney King, Abner Luima and Tamir Rice, for example.  There are these events that are supposed to be “the thing that changes everything.”  The fact that we are calling NASCAR banning Confederate flags in 2020 progress, and NASCAR drivers calling that flag a misconstrued symbol of “heritage,” says that we are still not ready to have an honest conversation about what we’ve done as a country to be able to truly proceed forward. 

It’s the same cycle in the corporate setting. About once a decade, someone writes an article about a well known northern law firm which had a record class of Black lawyers, but years later, few, if any are left.  Despite the fact that this is a regular pattern, everyone scratches their head, but there is little talk of whether the structural barriers to their success were identified, much less addressed.  A law firm of a certain size still will have two Black partners in 2020, whereas in 1995 they had one.  The person who is that “new” partner is the LeBron James of law.  And people hold him up and ask the young Black lawyers, “why can’t you just be like LeBron?”  

There now are a lot of great corporate statements about Black Lives Matter.  But what you aren’t seeing much of is companies’ leadership answering questions like “what am I going to do to hold myself internally accountable?  What kind of work am I willing to do?  Am I willing to move beyond our typical corporate “pipeline” to find, hire and retain talent at all levels?  What kind of progress do we need to make as an institution?”  That work is hard and slow, and it can require introspection and real long-term commitment.  And often, it’s just easier to continue to hire the guy that reminds the folks in leadership of themselves. 

Structural racism is a problem that white people created. Consequently, it’s a problem for white people to solve.  If you look at who runs the institutions that create the fabric of our lives – government, business, entertainment, sports, medicine, science, education, law, tech – they are, and have always been, run by mostly white people and mostly white men. Until the people who are at the levers of power decide that things should change, and they commit to making meaningful, durable change, we will be having a conversation like this one about a different “inflection point” in another decade.  

What are some things white people can do to help create a more equitable society? 

– Cede comfort and power to create cultures (at work and in your personal life) where belonging doesn’t mean conforming to white expectations and norms, and there is a place for people who do not look like you to flourish, rather than simply co-exist. 

– Ask yourself, how welcoming are you being to the Black people in your life (be they fellow parents, neighborhood families, friends or co-workers)?  Are you truly creating community?

-Allyship is a dynamic state, it’s not a point in time.  There needs to be some regular interrogation to ask “am I advancing allyship or do I feel like I accomplished it because I did X or because I know Y in this moment?  How much am I willing to create discomfort and risk my own social or professional currency if folks to whom I am being an ally are being harmed by other people in my circle (personal or professional)?” Everybody’s good with being an ally until it means not getting (or keeping) something you want.  

– Seek out and learn history.  Books about allyship and anti-racism are great.  But it is critical to understand the systems, structures and events that got us here, as they explain why it is so hard for us to turn the page.  

– Ask yourself, “what discomfort am I willing to endure to change things?” And then push yourself a little bit further.

What should white friends refrain from doing?  While this is not an insignificant part of my life, there’s a whole lot of other stuff too.  It’s not the only thing for us to talk about. I appreciate they are excited about their newfound knowledge, but I need to be more than their Black friend. 

Your Black friends don’t want to hold your hand as you grapple with the reality of racism going on today.  People will be well served to do some soul searching and have some quiet.  Grab some books.  Read them.  Doing some things on your own (and without giving your Black friends the play by play) is a testament to how much and what kind of work you are really willing to do.  Too often white people’s need to do something quickly to “solve racism” indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of 400 years of racism.  It’s not a problem that is going to go away quickly or easily.  And moving towards anti-racism takes time.