Gaston's brand of compassion included a fearlessness and focus on making sure there was equality within the full business structure, including vendors, not just consumers, employees, and owners. Suzanne Smith, associate professor of history and art history at George Mason University, offers some thoughts on the significance of Gaston:
A. G. Gaston: he's really a corporate kind of guy, and the way in which he navigates his power as a businessman and the rising civil rights movement is utterly fascinating to me. He's able to both appease the White business community in Birmingham while also letting Martin Luther King Jr. stay at his motel; he just really is sophisticated in how he uses his power. And he uses this economic power to kind of fight in the movement in all of these fascinating ways. He got criticized by White people who thought he was being too supportive of the Black movement and then Black Power people thought he wasn't doing enough.
He was so ahead of his time, and he had such a vision. He was able early on, I think, to figure out how to use that economic power. He put pressure on car dealerships in Alabama. He's buying all his hearses from these car dealerships, but then they're not hiring Black people to work in it to sell cars. So he goes to the White car dealership and he says, “I'm not going to keep buying my hearses from you unless you hire Black people as salespeople,” and he pushes integration into this car dealership because they needed his money. He bought a lot of cars every year. He bought a lot of hearses and he knew he could do that.21
Despite multiple tiers of complexities in being Black-owned businesses, compassionate service to and knowledge of their markets led to successful and profitable enterprises. This focus on genuinely serving consumers, employees, and suppliers is now in vogue. Business leaders need to be on notice. We're moving away from—as Michelle Obama told the 2020 Democratic National Convention—a “greed is good and winning is everything because as long as you come out on top nothing else matters,” mentality into a culture of prioritizing the good of the whole business, including those inside the business. We're moving, slowly yet vehemently, toward a business culture in which prioritizing people inside the company and ensuring inclusivity across all levels of the business is winning.
Black workers remain skeptical when businesses don't readily adopt this culture. We have proof positive that skepticism is well-founded when looking at the numbers of Blacks and other people of color making up leadership positions at firms.
Scholar Doug Bristol of the University of Southern Mississippi explains how competition between Black entrepreneurs was carried out in a healthy way:
In the 19th century Black barbers had what were called first-class shops. John Merrick [Durham] and Alonzo Herndon had a shop on Peachtree Street where they employed 20 barbers. I mean, there were only two other barbers operating on that scale. They beat their competition just by offering services and a number of employees that nobody could meet because these were palatial accommodations. They had bathhouses, you'd get a massage, people shaving your face while you're sitting in the chair; they competed with services.22
People of Color in Leadership Today
The 2018 Board Diversity Census of Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards, issued by Harvard Law School in February 2019, noted a critical need for inclusivity in C-suite leadership and company boardrooms. People of color in corporate America are still largely invisible. According to the report, only 16.1% of board seats in the Fortune 500 are held by people of color.23 See Table 2.1.
Furthermore, the wage gap between White senior-level executives and other groups is significant. On average, Black men earned 87 cents to every dollar earned by a White man in 2019; Black, Latinx, and Native American women earned 75 cents for every dollar; and Asian women earned 93 cents.24 Hispanic men earned 91 cents for every dollar earned by White men and White women earn 81 cents for the White man's dollar. Interestingly, Asian men earned $1.15 for every dollar earned by a White male in 2019.25
Table 2.1 Breakdown of Fortune 500 Total Board Seats by Race/Ethnicity: 2018
Source: Data from DeHaas, D. (2019) Missing Pieces Report: The 2018 Board Diversity Census of Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards, The President and Fellows of Harvard College (February 5, 2019).
| Race/Ethnicity | Percentage of Fortune | 500 Board Seats |
|---|---|---|
| Caucasian/ White | 83.9 | 83.9 |
| Black | 8.6 | 16.1 |
| Latinx | 3.8 | |
| Asian/ Pacific Islander | 3.7 | |
| Other | 0.1 |
The lack of diversity at the senior level creates an environment in which people of color must deal with mental gymnastics not required of their White peers at work. They are not represented, they are paid substantially less than their colleagues, and they often feel that managers don't even put forth an effort to understand their points of view. If you think about what it's like to deal with these inequities, combined with such psychological mistreatment as being isolated by colleagues or having your insights and contributions to meetings ignored, it's obvious how an employee's sales and production numbers can be negatively affected.
Looking at the data makes it clear that a compassionate culture where leadership and employees actively promote inclusion is necessary for a firm to keep pace and lead in the new evolving global corporate era. Compassionate culture today is a necessity, not a luxury.
Colorism Infiltrates Global Corporate Environments
In the United States, we're dealing with the remnants of centuries of slavery, resulting in systems designed to oppress people of color socially and economically. Fruits of that system continue to thrive today. For starters, let's take the stratification of races based on a color hierarchy and differential treatment based on skin color. Known as colorism, this prejudicial or preferential treatment of people occurs solely based on their skin color. And although the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws may be unique to the United States, colorism definitely is not. In Westernized societies well beyond the United States, color and colorism is intricately related to race and racism.26 If there is a hierarchy, then darker-hued people fare worse than lighter-skinned people, regardless of their ethnicity. Where a person lands on the “Blackness” scale could determine social and economic standing. This is our backdrop for disproportionate bias, microaggressions, and racism filtering down to current corporate culture.
Taking this a step further, Blacks have often been set against other minority groups. Most notably, the model minority myth used to wedge a divide between Asian Americans and Blacks. The perceived high level of success among Asian Americans is used as a weapon to downplay racism and the struggles