NNPA Columnist
Years ago, the grandfather of Time Warner Chairman Dick Parsons worked as head groundskeeper for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. Two generations later, his grandson served as the New York governor’s lawyer and counsel.
“Why wasn’t I working in the gardens? What changed?” Parsons said during a speech he gave at the National Urban League’s 2006 annual conference in Atlanta last month. “Well, the answer is – the world changed. I have no doubt that I have no more ability or get-up-and-go or ingenuity than my grandfather or, in fact, my father, I just had greater opportunities to put that ingenuity and get-up-and-go to work on a leveled playing field.”
When Parsons says he stands on shoulders, he means it. We all do. The foundation laid by our predecessors has enabled us to attain a certain level of success. However, we must resist resting on those laurels because we have so much further to go.
While we’ve achieved three of the four stages of development – enslavement, emancipation and enfranchisement, we still have one more – empowerment – to tackle if we hope to narrow the divide that separates whites from minorities in the United States.
While we’ve made great progress, we’ve got to speed this empowerment phase up to keep pace with a rapidly growing global economy, notes Parsons. Not only are we competing with Americans but also Indians, the Chinese and many other nationalities.
“Speed here is of the essence. Increasingly in the world, the pace of change or the pace at which the game is played is accelerating,” he said. “We’re not closing a gap on a stationery target or a set of competitors. We’re closing the gap on a set of competitors that is moving away from us at an accelerated rate of speed.”
The longer our community waits to narrow the gap the more difficult it’ll be, he warned. So we need to be about the business of accelerating change, especially in light of our “flattening” world, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls it.
“We are being buffeted in this marketplace, which is the richest and most diverse and most competitive in the world, with people from all over the globe coming here to seize opportunity,” the Time Warner chairman said. “The job is only going to get tougher the farther down the road we go. We’ve got to get down that road and get down that road fast.”
He cites three keys to accelerating the process: 1) improved public education; 2) greater access to capital and; 3) a stronger culture of achievement.
“Education is the sine qua non,” Parsons said. “It is the thing without which nothing good happens. We don’t live in a world anymore where you can think in any sort of positive or long-term way about on-the-job training.”
In this rapidly evolving world in which the jobs of yesterday are going overseas, American workers must come equipped with a more advanced set of skills when they enter the workforce than they did 50 years ago.
In the manufacturing economy, all you needed was minimal language skills. You learned the rest on the job. Nowadays, you must not only have basic literacy skills – but computational skills, without which you are permanently disadvantaged in the labor market.
“The fact of the matter is that education is not a silver bullet. It’s not an overnight phenomenon. It takes a long time to educate an entire population but it does pay dividends,” Parsons said.
While minority-owned small businesses have gained ground in the past decade, their access to capital could stand to be improved. Corporate America could play a stronger role in not only beefing up its direct use of minority firms but also use by its major vendors and contractors.
Fortune 500 companies in 2005 alone did $90 billion in business with minority-owned enterprises, according to Parsons, citing Fortune magazine. “The numbers are starting to mount up, and the effort is getting traction but we need to give it more traction,” Parsons said.
The final strategy to expediting the empowerment phases is creating a culture of achievement that demands nothing less than greatness. Too frequently African Americans have labored under a tyranny of low expectations – not only from the majority community but our own. Parson had no choice but to succeed because that is what was expected of him. He was expected to go to school and be a good student. He was expected to graduate from college. He was expected to succeed.
That is something that needs to be instilled in our entire community. According to Parsons, it requires: 1) increased visibility of successful blacks; 2) the use of advocacy groups to create and drive home the message that African Americans can achieve anything they want to; and 3) individual accountability – whereby we take responsibility for aspiring to greatness.
“We have to talk about the creation of a set of expectations and a culture of achievement. We must make sure that it’s not the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about,” Parsons observed. “If we wait for someone to do it for us, we’re going to be waiting a while.”
Parsons stands as a great example of empowerment. He proves that with a strong education, high expectations and a more level playing field, it is possible for an African American to reach great heights in business, even in a society where some profound economic disparities between whites and minorities still exist. Accelerating the empowerment phase of development will pave the way for more African Americans like Parsons to emerge from our community in our future.
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO, National Urban League.