This is the second part of Kevin Comeau’s opinion piece. The first part was published in yesterday’s Royal Gazette:Racial inequity in the business worldLet’s begin our examination of racial inequity by looking at the world of Bermuda International Business. This may seem like a strange place to start because racial inequity in the business world is not Bermuda’s biggest racial problem. In fact, it is relatively minor in comparison to racial inequity as it relates to generational family dysfunction, education and gang crime.But the business world — particularly International Business — is an area in which many white Bermudians and expats are intimately involved yet they are unable to see any racial inequity. They generally see two types of IB companies: (i) those that go out of their way to be colour blind, hiring employees based only on their credentials and promoting people based solely on their performance, or (ii) those that go out of their way to hire and promote black Bermudians wherever possible. On that basis many white Bermudians and expats conclude that there is either no racial inequity in International Business or, if there is any, it’s against whites.The problem is that racial inequity is often difficult to detect except when it is happening to you. That’s because although racial inequity can pose difficult hurdles to climb, it is usually very subtle, blending in to our daily lives like the flow of traffic, yet leaving behind accident victims few of us can see.To illustrate the point, let’s look at an example where racial inequity arises in the business world yet, as we will see, no one will have acted improperly.Let’s assume there are two Bermudian boys of exactly equal high intelligence. One is white, the other black. They both come from loving parents that instil in their children a strong work ethic with a heavy emphasis on education. The white boy’s parents have substantial inherited wealth (they were part of the group pejoratively referred to as the Forty Thieves) and the black child’s parents have no inherited wealth but they both work at mid-level jobs that provide them with enough money to buy a house but not enough to pay for private school. So the white boy attends Saltus from P1 to the completion of high school at the same time that the black boy goes through the public school system. Both boys graduate at the top of their class.Based upon private and public school test scores of Bermuda students over the last ten years, we can assume at this point that, academically, the black boy will probably be at least a year behind the white boy because public schools are typically that far behind private schools even when the student is an excellent student, as in our present example. (This point is discussed more fully in Part 3 — Some Programmes that can Help, which will be published in The Royal Gazette late next week.)Upon graduation from high school, the white boy goes to an Ivy League school, and the black boy goes to a mid-level American college, which is the best that his parents can afford with their limited savings, education bank loans and some scholarship money the boy has earned.Several months before college graduation, the white young man’s father informs his Mid Ocean golfing buddy (who is the CEO of a major reinsurance company) that his son is about to graduate from Harvard. The CEO is thrilled to hire such a bright young Bermudian with excellent education qualifications, and after an interview the young white man is hired with the expectation of grooming him for great things in the company.The young black man sends his resumé to a number of reinsurance companies, and because they want to hire well qualified Bermudians, particularly black Bermudians, he obtains a job with a large reinsurance company, in this case, the same reinsurance company that hired the young white man.The young white man does wonderfully well in the company. He is soon completely at ease with his co-workers, knowing how to act and what to say (and not say) because that is the world he has always lived in. He is also great with clients, often taking them golfing at Mid Ocean where he has been a member all his life. He is everything the company hoped he would be, and the company is everything he hoped it would be. Their future together is as solid as a rock.The black young man is less at ease within the company. He must be more careful about what he says and sometimes faces awkward moments, such as when some boss casually asks him in passing why so many young black males are joining gangs and shooting each other, or why so many young black girls are having babies out of wedlock.How does he answer those questions? He could point out that whites are never asked to defend their race when some white serial killer murders a dozen young women. But then he would be seen to have a racial chip on his shoulder, a career limiting trait that he wishes to avoid. So instead he says something safe and unthreatening like, “I don’t understand it. If these kids would just apply themselves and work hard, they could have great lives too.”But then he feels like a traitor because he knows his answer is simplistic and ignores the difficult reality that so many of his school friends faced — kids who were born into families of generational dysfunction who never received the time, love and guidance that we all need to grow into loving and productive adults; kids whose parents never read to them, taught them the alphabet or how to count before they started school; kids whose parents never made sure they did their homework or gave them guidelines enforced with love and consistency that helped them make the right choices in life.The young black man also notices that he is still paying off student loans so he can’t afford a membership at Mid Ocean to take clients golfing and he can’t afford to buy a house, unlike the young white man who has no student loans because his dad had lots of money to pay for his entire education.Both men go on to have long careers with the company; the white man eventually becomes the CEO and the black man becomes an executive vice president.No racism, yet there is still racial inequityThroughout this example, there were no racists. The company hired the young white man before the young black man based purely on the strength of the schools where they were educated. Further, the company promoted the young white man over the young black man because he truly fit in better in the Euro-American world of International Business — he was great with clients and got along with everyone in the office, always knowing the right thing to say and do.On that basis, it is easy to come to the simplistic conclusion that there was no racial inequity. But, in fact, it goes to the very heart of what racial-equity advocates are telling us and many whites find difficult to understand — just because there is no racist act occurring today does not mean that there is no racial inequity today.For the most part, today’s racial inequities are the result of yesterday’s racial injustices. And it is for that reason that even at the highest levels of black integration into the world of International Business, there are more complex hurdles for young black executives to jump over on their road to the top, while there are continuing advantages for whites.And to be clear, these advantages are not limited merely to those families referred to as the Forty Thieves. In racially segregated Bermuda, all whites gained economic and educational advantage because they had better access to jobs, housing, schools and bank financing. Further, even Bermudians of Portuguese decent, who themselves were the victims of discrimination, were granted access to better jobs in Bermuda long before the racial glass ceiling was lifted for blacks, which gave many of these Portuguese men and women the ability to earn and save enough money that they can now afford to send their children to private schools to eventually take advantage of the great opportunities in International Business.These lingering white advantages and black disadvantages are something that the black community is very aware of and something that the white community often fails to see, and it can be particularly galling for blacks to hear the repeated myth that the end of segregation brought an end to racial inequity.An integral part of the racial-equity struggle in Bermuda is about making whites more aware of the connection between the lingering advantages from 400 years of institutional white affirmative action and the lingering disadvantages from 400 years of black slavery, segregation and racial glass ceilings. Without that increased awareness, it will be difficult to develop the community-wide understanding and commitment needed to address the racial-equity problems in Bermuda, of which the International Business example is but the smallest part of the problem.The future for many others promises little hopeThe above example illustrates how high intelligence and hard work does not equate to equal opportunity in Bermuda. Centuries of racial injustice have resulted in economic disadvantages for today’s blacks and, given the wide gap in effectiveness between our private and public schools, those economic disadvantages usually translate into educational disadvantages because many black parents can’t afford to send their kids to private schools and expensive colleges. This, in turn, perpetuates the cycle because the weaker the school attended, the lesser the chance of getting a higher-paying job in International Business or elsewhere.But in many ways two other disadvantages of racial inequity — psychological and social — can be even more difficult to overcome. For centuries the white community, in need of moral justification for the enslavement and segregation of an entire race, proclaimed blacks less than fully human, with higher thresholds to pain and lower thresholds of innate intelligence.It therefore should be no surprise that hundreds of years of constant denigration, through both actions and words, has left many blacks with lingering doubts about the inherent intelligence of their race, which make the normal doubts of one’s own personal intelligence and self-worth all the more complex and difficult to resolve.While these psychological disadvantages can be found at all socioeconomic levels in the black community, they can be particularly crippling to those blacks immersed in generational family dysfunction with limited economic, parenting and education support.Had the bright young black man in our example been born into a single-parent family where the father provided minimal or no economic, education or parenting support, and the mother worked long hours just to pay the rent and put food on the table thereby leaving little time to give the child the nurturing and consistent guidelines needed to do well in school and make the right choices in life, the chances of that young man completing high school, graduating from college and having a successful career in International Business are next to none.Conversely, his chances of joining a criminal gang are many times greater. Not only are Bermuda gangs targeting their recruiting efforts at young black teenagers from single-parent homes (they are considered the low hanging fruit) but even if a teenager were to stand firm and say no, he becomes vulnerable to physical attacks from rival gangs who simply assume he said yes.Further, if a young man ever wants to leave the gang life, the jobs he can realistically obtain are extremely limited not simply because he has minimal education but also because he is often unable to work at a job that takes him far beyond his neighbourhood — for instance, if he were a 42 gang member, he can’t become a plumber or even a delivery truck driver because if he goes west of Warwick he risks getting shot.To be clear, this is not simply a poverty issue. Young white males from poor, single-parent homes in bad neighbourhoods do not have the same bleak future as their black counterparts. They are not the target of gang recruiting, they are not assumed by rival gangs to have joined their neighbourhood gang, and they don’t face the threat of being shot if they travel past Warwick.It’s more than a black problem; it’s a Bermuda problemThis gang culture, which is responsible for a dramatic increase in violent crime and murder over the last few years, is now adversely affecting the lives of everyone in Bermuda. We are now a less safe tourist destination, a less safe International Business domicile and a less safe place to raise our children.In other words, the so-called “black problem” in Bermuda is more than a black problem, it is a Bermuda problem. It was caused, to no small degree, by white Bermudians (through hundreds of years of slavery and segregation and the propaganda that supported it) and even though black Bermudians disproportionately suffered and continue to suffer from its harmful effects, now all Bermudians are being affected.But once recognised and accepted as a Bermuda problem, a great shift can begin. The white community can change the way it listens to racial-equity advocates, moving from a position of “I don’t want to hear this” to “how can we all work together to solve this?”It is this shift in the white community that can give racial-equity advocates the opportunity to build the coalition needed to heal this lingering wound that lies at the centre of just about every problem Bermuda faces. But the big question remains — will racial-equity advocates take advantage of that shift by adopting a more inclusive approach to the way they present the racial-equity issue?And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, brings us to another important topic, which I will discuss in next Tuesday speech, “Changing the Way the Racial-Equity Issue is Presented.”