Parsons et al: Exceptions that prove the trend

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2002 by Wynter, Leon E

Issues & Views

As I cruised the titles on display at the main newsstand in New York's Grand Central Station in March, my eyes locked on the face of a Black man that fairly beamed off the cover of Money magazine. Across his chest, the bold headline read: "How to Invest With Confidence."

That, I thought, was a news image right up there with "man bites dog."

In recent months I'd been treated to the powerful pictures of AOL Time Warner's Richard Parsons and Kenneth Chenault of American Express filling the covers of leading business magazines. Now it was E. Stanley O'Neal's turn. My first, errant thought was to wonder what went through Parsons' mind when he saw O'Neal, president and chief operating officer of Merrill Lynch, on the cover of Money, one of the many titles within the magazine publishing branch of the empire AOL Time Warner, which Parsons will officially run come May. Did it bring a smile to his lips as it did for thousands of African Americans who saw it? Did he stop to muse about how two of the preeminent multinational firms in the world, in two of New York's preeminent industries - securities/finance and entertainment/communications -- were now effectively run by Black men?

Or was it just business as usual, and in fact, a rather small bit of his company's business at that?

To be sure, a Parsons-O'Neal-Chenault CEO hat trick doesn't happen for Black men every day, or even every decade. But that doesn't mean Black America hasn't got some serious "getting used to" to do. More than exceeding our hopes, the trend exemplified by the three CEO's elevation defies our expectations for what America really holds out for Black man and womankind, and how we will seize it.

For years I've told everyone of every race and ethnicity who cared to listen that the future was not about Black people leading other Black people, but about Black Americans leading all kinds of Americans in every sphere of endeavor. As I argue in my forthcoming book, American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business and The End of White America, we already provide the nation and a good bit of the world with a measure of leadership far out of proportion to our numbers across the full range of entertainment-sports-fashion-style areas. We may be statistically underrepresented in professions like government, law, medicine and science, but we boast a fast-growing complement of impact players - from Colin Powell to Johnnie Cochran to Vernon Jordan to Condoleezza Rice to former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher - that support the image of Blacks exerting leadership across the spectrum of American life.

And though Sprite commercials would have you believe otherwise, image is something. It's perception. In a nation where what we see on television constructs the typical American's view of reality, the image of Black people in positions of leadership is the future. O'Neal (who is slated to take over the CEO post at Merrill Lynch in 2004) on that Money cover served yet another notice that that future is at hand in big business.

The first consequence of this new leadership for African America to absorb is its reflection on the old Black leadership. One of the most interesting things the three Black executives have in common, which is consistently pointed out in the media's coverage of the trio, is a sharp contrast with civil rights-era holdovers like Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The comparisons come very close to a rebuke of the Black nationalist model that succeeded the struggle for integration.

"At a time when Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, Richard Parsons of AOL Time Warner and Kenneth Chenault of American Express are coming to power," wrote syndicated columnist Clarence Page, "in the sort of companies where blacks once could barely get jobs as janitors, [Al] Sharpton seems about as anachronistic as bell-bottoms, nylon shirts and mutton-chop sideburns."

Mutton-chop sideburns? I doubt Page was alluding to the perennial style of Black Enterprise publisher Earl G. Graves. But in a sense, he wouldn't have been far off the mark. Because my second thought on seeing the O'Neal cover was to wonder if being lauded for running a business that is merely successful and Black-owned will ever again mean as much as it used to. Think about it: There are an awful lot more Black upper middle managers in the pipelines to the executive suites than there are African Americans running Black-owned businesses of sufficient scale to make the cover of Black Enterprise (BE). Parsons-Chenault-- O'Neal means those late1980s headlines about the exodus of Black managers from beneath their corporate glass ceilings and into Black entrepreneurship were, like rumors of Mark Twain's death, greatly exaggerated. Because despite the very real frustrations and outright rejections they've suffered, there are Black managers running business units at dozens of major firms.

Even if the majority of Black corporate climbers, particularly baby boomers now entering their fifties, understand that they will likely never rise much higher, they can also see that the context of their struggle has changed. They might not get to the mountaintop, but they now know there is a way, a path that merges with the road that white men travel to the top. The Black corporate boomers took it on faith that the path existed, even when they couldn't see it. Younger Blacks in corporate America take the path's existence as fact and for granted, and renew their determination to tread it every time they see another Black face with a "C-level" (as in Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, etc.) title in the photo caption. And, despite the good offices of the civil rights-era leadership, it is the individual efforts of these young managers that will determine how much wider the path gets, and how quickly.