Paypal’s Dan Schulman: Leaders have a moral obligation to address racism

I’m tuning in from the Aspen Ideas Festival, this year, a well-managed hybrid convening that is welcoming a small number of people to the Aspen Institute campus and the rest of the world online. It’s my first time out in the world in a meaningful way, and it’s been a wonderful chance to re-enter life, safely, if a bit tentatively.

What’s been reflected in many of the conversations so far has been a clear acknowledgement that the racial reckoning we’re grappling with in the U.S., while profoundly messy, is now a movement, and one that is poised to take hold in the form of new alliances and corporate activism.

Here’s one that might resonate with you.

In this conversation with Bloomberg News Deputy Bureau Chief Shartia Brantley, PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman described his commitment to anti-racist work. “To me it means leaning in and really being part of the fight…and taking a long-term stand,” he says. “We have issues that have vexed us as a country for a long, long time. And I think that leaders of corporations now have a maybe moral obligation to stand up and address these kinds of issues.”

Corporate leaders have enormous resources. At the very least, they can and should be doing a better job addressing the financial well-being of their own employees, he says. (Here is some background on PayPal’s groundbreaking decision to link employee pay to new metric called net disposable income, or NDI.) If there are systemic issues facing people across the country, they are certainly impacting people who work for you. “There’s no excuse not to address those issues inside the company.”

But when asked whether minds and hearts are changing in C-Suites for anti-racist work in the world, Schulman’s answer was circumspect. Yes, there is legitimate work being done by some, but not by all, he says. 

While actions will be expressed differently from company to company — based on stakeholder feedback, ascribed values, etc., there is enough common ground in addressing the racial wealth gap that working together will help everyone design smarter interventions. 

To jumpstart the cause, Schulman discussed a fledgling alliance with other leaders, including Rich Lesser, CEO of Boston Consulting Group. Their aim is to collect and study all the commitments made by corporations in specific underserved communities in the U.S. and see what really needs to happen to component issues like housing insecurity, education gaps, and the like. “If we really work together [in a specific city] are there lessons we can learn by the power of that collective?”

The only thing that smells sweeter than mountain piñon is radical collaboration.

If you’ve got the time, please tune in online at 5pm Mountain Time today for my conversation with Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh. Bergh has become a powerful voice for equity, and is no stranger to stand-taking or evolving his points of view. We will be talking about how he believes the role of the CEO is changing to meet the moment we’re in. We will also be taking questions online, so throw a little raceAhead wisdom our way.

Register here.

Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com

On point

What will it take for Asian American students to feel safe heading back to school? This is the fundamental question facing AAPI students, families, and educators as pandemic restrictions ease across the country. According monthly survey data from the Institute of Education Sciences, only 18 percent of Asian American eighth graders returned to school in person in April, as compared to 54 percent of white students. Fear of anti-AAPI violence remains high. “I would encourage parents and young people to make sure their administrations in school and the workplace have zero tolerance policies for any ­verbal, physical, and cyberbullying assaults on Asian Americans,” says one educator.
School Library Journal

Julliard forced to suspend virtual masterclass after renowned violinist used insulting racial stereotypes  Pinchas Zukerman, a violinist and conductor of note, apologized after his virtual coaching session became culturally problematic. During the masterclass, which was part of a violin symposium, two New York-born sisters played Spohr’s ‘Duo Concertante’ for Zukerman. While asking them to focus less on technical perfection and more on expression, he launched into an odd aside declaring that Korean people don’t sing, implying that they lack an ability to emotionally understand music? I think? Zukerman, who went so far as to mimic Asian singing, has promised to do better. The sisters are of Japanese descent.
ClassicFM.com

Penn State College Black faculty demand action Two reports produced by Black faculty at Penn State paint a dismal picture for Black academics at the school. The first installment of More Rivers to Cross was published in March 2020 and highlights the failure of the college to recruit faculty of color. The second installment, published a year later, highlights the experiences of microaggressions and overt racism experienced by Black faculty on campus. One awful nugget: More than two-thirds respondents reported that they have experienced racism within the last 3 years from students either “sometimes” (41.5%) or “often” (26.2%), including being called the n-word. Both are difficult reads. As the Washington Post points out, these reports reflect the need for a broader reckoning across academia. Last year, faculty of color began using social media to share their own stories of racism in “the ivory tower” under the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory. “We’re talking about it outside the community,” says Shardé M. Davis, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut who helped launch the hashtag. “That takes it to another level.”
Washington Post

The NCAA suspends a by-law that currently prevents scholar-athletes from getting paid for their work The interim policy would allow athletes in all 50 states to monetize the use of their image, likeness, and name as early as this week. The rule is in response to pressure from advocates and athletes to re-define amateurism in college sports. Some state legislatures have already ruled to allow student athletes to profit from the promotion of their images without losing eligibility to compete. Nobody is here to play on this issue. Last week, a unanimous Supreme Court decision said the NCAA had harmed athletes by limiting schools from competing for talent with monetary benefits.
Wall Street Journal

This edition of raceAhead was edited by Wandy Felicita Ortiz.

On background

How studying ethnography can help you be a better observer This post from Mandy Jenkins, then a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, really focuses on journalism and how it can better define objectivity and defeat the dreaded bothsiderism. But it’s really about how to be a better, less biased observer, which is something that requires “the empathetic methods of design thinking and the analysis of the social sciences.” Ethnography is the study of people and cultures, which is also what journalists, marketers, salespeople, product designers, justice professionals, policy makers and a whole host of other people do, without framing it that way. To that end, power dynamics are key. “One element of reflexivity is understanding how the presence of a researcher — or, in this case, a journalist — changes the environment,” she writes. 
Medium

Nice people can be biased, too Jennifer Eberhardt, a leading bias researcher and author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, has been conducting training sessions with law enforcement for over 15 years. She also did a great job breaking down the subject, including addressing the racial bias on policing, on this appearance on CBS This Morning. Bias is often triggered by the situations we find ourselves in, which she explains in detail. She also notes that bias is about brain wiring, conditioning, and familiarity. "If you have a social experience where we're living with each other and we're not living in segregated spaces, say, and you're exposed to faces of other races all the time, then your brain gets tuned up to that,” she says, making the brain science case for diversity in the workplace. “[E]ven though it's something that is wired in, but it's a flexible wiring," she says.
CBS News

Today's mood board

Hiroyuki Ito—Getty Images