The Gorilla & the Deep Blue (Ocean) Sea

This is a tumultuous time in the US. The Sanford, Florida, trial that let a murderer walk free reinforced various laws designed to protect assailants and insure the silence of targets of violence. In blatant opposition to public discourse, the judge in the case did not allow racial discussion to enter meaningfully into the proceedings. The outcome of the case has been contested in the media and public discontent stands in stark opposition to the court’s ruling indicating a most troubling disconnect between the public and the laws that govern our lives.

Part of a Larger Trend

This disconnect is part of a larger trend. Our human capital is our most valuable asset. We do ourselves a great disservice when we fail to recognize the potential of our diverse US population in bridging obvious gaps in the cultural capital we need to broker multinational deals in emerging market areas. The world is round, brown, young, rural and poor (by Western economic standards). Global access to the market economy is conduced largely via mobile transactions. This is why Facebook, Apple and Google have been in a push to open Internet access and sell cheaper versions of their devices in emerging market areas. It’s no surprise that multinationals see and appreciate this value; potential for new customers is an ocean that is vast and blue. Blue oceans represent continued growth for multinationals, longevity. However, so many of us don’t see similarly; we are not swimmers, we are afraid of the water and of the enormous gorilla sitting at the shore but more on that in a bit…

Population & Income

Neil Ungerleider notes, “tens of millions of American [US] Android and iPhone owners are struggling to make ends meet – and there are even more who are senior citizens, who live in rural areas, lack college or high school degrees…”

Income & Age

These people most closely resemble the billions of people in emerging market areas. Yet, the startup technology sector tends to preach to the choir – creating apps and opportunities for the “suburban/urban, and middle-to-upper class.” Neil insightfully notes, the “technology world is missing out on a lot of innovation” and tech companies are “missing out on potential profits.” Tech companies simply and unimaginatively create for each other and seem content investing in each other’s ideas; splashing around rather merrily in the backyard pool, they are oblivious to the big blue ocean.

The 800lb Gorilla

Diversity is a term that has become cliché and that’s unfortunate because we miss its nuances and so its value. The history of racial heritage bias in the US is so long and deep that it obliterates more complex discussions, such as the conflation of racial heritage and economics. We are left with relatively simplistic discussions of race that not only lack intellectual nuance but also that leave the structures of division unchallenged and so firmly in place, reinforcing socio-economic stagnation. These days and certainly with the re-election of the nation’s first President of African descent, discussions of race and racially realized power are considered outdated or irrelevant.

The 800lb gorilla blocking our access to sustained progress is race and its myriad combinations (gender, sexuality, power, etc.). Our efforts to ignore the gorilla are directly proportional to our delusions of grandeur. We simply cannot be effective players on the global stage if we refuse to engage matters of race in a brown world. So when an adult, whose father was a judge and served 10 years at the Pentagon, carries a concealed weapon and murders an unarmed teenager, the presiding judge’s decision to prohibit discussions of race from courtroom proceedings makes good sense – if you don’t think about it.

Youthful Future

In “Killing our Competitive Edge” I lamented the killing of our human capital. That our youth is our future is not simply a cliché; it’s a matter of fact; and, as the population expands, so does the growth of the nonwhite US sector. Likewise, the world’s population is growing steadily, particularly in emerging market regions. Internationally, growth is projected to be most robust in high-fertility countries such as India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Additionally, the populations of several African nations are expected to increase by at least five fold between 2013 and 2100. Young brown people, those under 25, comprise approximately 40 percent of today’s overall population and the number of people older than 60 is projected to triple by 2100. Despite this, technology companies create for the relatively few moneyed and well educated, seemingly blind to the existence and so the demands of the 800lb gorilla.

So What Gives?

We discuss diversity in terms that eliminate mention of race and so leave race and its related discussions void of complexity and nuance. We dance around the gorilla. In her well-meaning, thoughtful and even insightful article “Innovation Needs a Lingua Franca” (and by the way, that lingua franca? it’s called jazz) Whitney Johnson discusses the benefits of foreign language (Spanish in this case) and travel (to Uruguay) and describes how being on the “margin of culture” and “reaching out into unknown territory” were invaluable personal and professional experiences. Innovation, Johnson “discovers” happens when we put ourselves in “unpleasant” situations because it “opens a space for truly new ideas.”

Indeed, people of color no matter their socio-economic status live at the margins of culture everyday; and at least since W.E.B. DuBois articulated the notion of two-ness in his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), we’ve had a language to describe and critique this allegedly newfound condition of being. When, like Whitney, we acknowledge and then disrupt our largely self-imposed segregated communities by daring to venture into realms unknown – like so many native-born, forced and willful immigrants who courageously integrate into “majority” societies the world over – we encourage creativity and position ourselves to “discover” all things anew. Through “two-ness” (three-ness, four-ness…), we discover the complexity that brings with it the benefit of helping us see more of the spectrum of human endeavor, behavior and desire. Through complexity, we build the confidence and the capacity to face the beast (otherwise known as the blues) and move beyond it into the vast blue oceans that await (knowing all the while there will be other predators to face).

Where Do We Go From Here?

When foreign travel and in-country language training become the recommended solutions for experiencing so-called diversity; when technology companies create apps, products and services for those within their own elite communities; when justices silence racial commentary from entering into legal discourse, we feed the gorilla while continuing to deny its existence and so reveal the breadth and depth of our delusions and essentially admit to the world our inability to partner effectively on matters of global consequence. We also perpetuate “otherness” and relegate diversity to a trendy “add-on” experience for the moneyed and well-educated and distance ourselves from the global reality of a growing youthful, brown and non-moneyed population. So when, as Mary Driscoll notes, we discover “major supply-chain disruption” in multinational corporations due to “unforeseen events” the problem is indeed blindness, cultural blindness to “many crucial strategic risks.” Ralph Ellison wrote eloquently on the dangers of these so-called “sleepwalkers” in his 1952 classic, The Invisible Man. Sleepwalkers are ill-prepared to contribute effectively to matters of global significance. I know it’s scary but it’s time to acknowledge the gorilla and call it by name — these are the first steps of change.