Luke Visconti’s Ask the White Guy column is a top draw on Fair360.com. Visconti, the founder and CEO of Fair360, formerly DiversityInc, is a nationally recognized leader in diversity management. In his popular column, readers who ask Visconti tough questions about race/culture, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability and age can expect smart, direct and disarmingly frank answers.
Question:
Why doesn’t the NBA look like America
Answer:
Channeling the creative energy of a group of people into narrow categories will tend to enhance their performance in those specific areas.
Given the rampant under-funding of public schools that serve black and brown students, our country funnels entire groups of peoplewho can only be distinguished by raceinto narrow channels of productivity.
It demonstrates a waste of potential. Just as the worst NBA team could completely dominate the best basketball team of 1957 (which, due to overt discrimination, was either completely or practically all white), it is logical to assume that representative corporate top-management representation would completely trounce all white top-managed companies.
I think most white people will have to think about that for a little while, because it’s still not acceptable in our society to think of black people as being intellectually equal.
Here’s another interesting way to look at the same phenomenon: In our country, it’s commonly held to be true that Asians are intelligent. A Chinese friend of mine pointed out that, if we emptied out Yale, Harvard and Princeton and sent those students to China, the Chinese people there would think Americans were pretty smart..
