In Black America; Dr. John P. Fernandez

😉 From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. If you look at the history of humankind, if you go beyond the United States, there are some real tragic stories. If you look at what's going on in Yugoslavia, you look at what's going on in the Middle East,

you look at what's going on in India, you look at what was going on in Indonesia, you look at what has gone on in Africa. I think one can get there, but you're going to have to have very strong leaders. You're going to have to have a society that doesn't tolerate, you know, bases and sexes and hateful speech and stuff like that. And we have free speech in the society, but the question is that there's a law if I'm in a crowded theater and I have a hall of fire and people get hurt, if I'm responsible for them, well, if I'm a basis and I'm hollow and kill this one, kill that one and all of that and people get killed, I think you should be held responsible for your words too. John P. Fernandez, president, advanced research management consultant. Recent news headlines about sexual and racial harassment suits have focused on the need for companies to take steps to adapt and embrace the changing workforce.

Some of the major questions facing companies as they are, what is the future for affirmative action and is it necessary? Are these law suit frivolous or justified? What should minority workers do to succeed on the job? And are most companies doing enough to foster teamwork and trust among employees? Statistical predictions for the year 2000 shows 85% of new job applicants in this country will be women, minorities or immigrants and only 15% will be white American born males. I'm John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, advanced research management consultants, president John P. Fernandez, in Black America. The reason I'm sitting here talking to you today was not that there were black males, white women, Hispanic males, Hispanic women, who were my mentors and coaches because they weren't up above me. And I ran for whatever reasons where I was born and raised. The schools I went to except for Berkeley, they were white male dominated organizations.

AT&T, when I joined, was a white male dominated organization. The people who helped me were white males. So they were good and bad in everyone. And we have to recognize that and we have to form those alliances with everyone. And too frequently I hear some of us say, well, you know, that's a white person. I said, what do you care if they're white or what? If they're supportive of your causes? Well, I don't trust them. I said, then go about trying to build trust in respect. You know, because if people in our media families, we don't trust in respect. In this decade, numerous articles have been written about reverse discrimination and how affirmative action and diversity efforts have hurt whites, especially white males opportunities. Once you know that white women have been by far the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action. According to a training magazine in 1994, nearly half of all companies in this country with at least 100 employees invested in cultural diversity training.

The reason companies executives are now learning they can increase their bottom line by learning about the diverse world of customers and workers. In short, it's good business. As president of the Philadelphia based consulting firm, Fernandez specializes in survey research, market research, and corporate training. He spent 15 years at AT&T and holds a PhD degree in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley. In Black America recently spoke with Dr. John P. Fernandez. If you can tell by my name, I'm an African American with a Spanish surname. My grandparents come from the Cape Red Islands, which are off the coast of Africa. In these small towns where I was born and raised, there were very few African Americans. There were a lot of Cape Verdeans like myself, okay? Who tried to distinguish themselves from African Americans. But I always considered myself an African American or a Black person.

Many of the Cape Verdeans always considered themselves Portuguese. But growing up, I was the only Black kid in my classes from the first grade through the 12th grade. It was pretty difficult. You had to struggle to fight and kids that you grew up with from the first grade through the 12th grade. Even in the 12th grade, they didn't like it because you were Black. There were some tough times especially in the social area where there were very few. I think there were about 600 kids in our school and there might have been 12 Blacks. It was pretty poor. People say, how come you turned out to be what you were? Because my parents only had eighth grade education and no one ever went to college and what have you, what made me turn out to be differently. I told them one thing, we were very poor. And I didn't like being poor.

And the other thing I noticed is that as I began to do well in white society, more people liked me. So I didn't know that until I got older. But those were the two motivating factors. Didn't want to be poor and wanting to be accepted in a way that seemed like you would get accepted as if you did. You went to school, got an education, worked on those types of things. Understand you work for AT&T? Yes, I did. I worked for AT&T for 15 years. And what did you do for AT&T? I started off in human resources and then because of some people that I knew who had a lot of respect for me and all of that, I went into operations for a number of years. And then as I wrote more books, got me a more trouble. I got transferred over into labor relations, which is a no-win job because whenever you make a decision in labor relations, it doesn't. Someone is going to be disappointed. Yeah, and then I went back to AT&T. I was in Bella, Pennsylvania, I know two jobs.

And then I went back to AT&T and I was in charge of human resources for people at corporate headquarters. When did you come to the point that there was an necessity for you to find advanced research management? I was doing research and trying to understand the issues that corporations face in terms of human resources and marketing issues and stakeholder issues for a long time. And I had some friends who were very senior executives and other companies and they would ask me to help them out on some problems here and there. And so in 1983, I incorporated, but I did not go full-time until 1988. Could you give us a layman's definition of diversity? Well, diversity to us is just a way of trying to get a lot of different people from different backgrounds to understand, appreciate, value, and respect each other because the key ingredient of any high performance team of people in an organization is trust and respect. But if you don't have that understanding, you don't value and you don't appreciate differences, you're not going to be able to build that trust and respect that's necessary for high performance teams.

Now if you can't develop high performance teams of employees internally, then as you look to the external market, you're going to have a much more difficult time trying to provide products and services to a diverse population of people. In addition to that, if you look at stakeholders, every company has stakeholders out there. Those are people that you try to influence who can have impact on decisions made about how your industry, your products are looked upon by the government, by the community, and what have you. That if you can't develop those high performance teams internally, you're certainly not going to have a good customer relations and you're also not going to be able to have good stakeholder relations. So that's diversity to us. How do you get us to put aside our differences, get some understanding and trust and respect so we can move forward and be better than our competition? Why is it important for corporate America to embrace this particular train of thought?

Well, the reality is that, you know, today anyone can come up with a new product or a new service in a very short period of time. And so you're in a very highly competitive marketplace and the population of the United States is changing drastically that by the year 2050, which isn't too far away, you know, the white population in the United States is going to be a minority. And if you look in states like California, Texas, New Mexico, New York, you know, within by the year 2005, the white population is going to be a minority in those states. And if you consider California is about 24% of our gross national product, you understand that if you're going to be a competitive company in the United States today, you need to understand the issues of women, people of color, different age groups, people with disabilities, gaze and lesbians and what have you. And also, if you look on an international basis that, you know, growth in the United States is not going to be what it has been recently.

And so if you look for new markets and new places for your products and services, much of that is going to be overseas and the white population in the world is only approximately about 11% of that population. So there are many good reasons to look at the market and say, hey, you know what, we better get on the bandwagon. We do know that in this country at least, women, people of color, people of different age groups keep on looking in a more serious manner at organizations and their ability to, you know, hire and promote people who are like them. And when they don't see that, they're unwilling to do business with those organizations and the corporations. Are affirmative action programs a component of achieving diversity in corporate America? Absolutely, you know, when you hear what Conlay, this black man running around the country saying you get things on merit in this country and that's what you should get everything on qualifications.

Is that possible? The reality is that it isn't possible when the human being is involved in there. You know, with, I've worked with so many people, we've done so many training sessions over the years, it's very clear that you can give everyone the same information and they come, many people come to different conclusions on the skills and ability of that individual. Regardless of their race and gender, and then if you throw in race and gender, that really throws more problems into the equation. I mean, white males over the years discriminate against white males. There are certain types of white males who have more advantages than other types of white males. And those white males tend to be six to six for conservative Republicans, went to Ivy League schools like myself, you know, came from middle and up a class family background to Protestant and what have you. If white males are varying to discriminate against white males based on that criteria, what makes people think that they will discriminate against other people.

And it isn't just to say that white males discriminate, there is a thing about humans that we can overcome that we tend to prefer people who are like ourselves. We can overcome that tendency, but we have to admit to it. So if we went around saying people get things on merit alone, that's a lot of bull, you know. I personally have not gotten everything on my own. I'm intelligent, I'm a hard worker, you know, but certainly the many of the things I've got is because people somehow decided that John Fernandez was better than other people. And a lot of those decisions were based on that feel uncomfortable with me and liking me. A perplexing scenario situation here in America, of course there was discrimination in the past and you would think that at some point there would have to be some type of redress for those deficiencies that occurred 15, 20, 30, 40 years ago. We find ourselves here in the latter part of the 20th century, 1998. And everyone wants to forget what's happening in the past and what I didn't do it.

So I shouldn't have to not benefit from what my qualifications are allowed me to achieve in today's society. Is that particularly fair or right or that's just a human nature? The reality is that if you and I control this country for hundreds of years and I'll land about 66% of the population, and we're only 33% of the population, about 66% of the population, which is what women and people of color makeup say, hey, we want to share in that. We're not going to sit there and just give it to them. They're going to have to fight for it and we will come up with every excuse under the sun not to share that wealth and power. And so, you know, the reality is that when men and whites say that they have not benefited in any way because of past discrimination, that's bull, because they had, because many of them would not have been in those positions. If indeed, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and women were provided equal opportunity and education and all of those other things.

When you go into a corporation, what are some of the things you look for in addressing their diversity, training, or the lack thereof? Well, you know, when we go into companies, what we try to go in is to try to help them become more efficient, to help them run their organizations more efficient, by developing better into personal skills, better communication skills, better listening skills, more effective programs, internally, more effective marketing strategies, market segmentation, and those types of things. So, when we go in there, that's our ultimate goal is to help the organization impact that bottom line. Now, in the process of doing that, we need to understand all the things that they have done and that they plan on doing so we can come up with an overall strategy to help them. Because indeed, there are similar things that go on in companies, but indeed, companies are also quite different, too.

How do you address the different perspectives between gender and race on the issue of affirmative action and diversity? Well, when you talk about that, you have to say, when you talk about gender, that is white females. And that many white females are not supportive of diversity compared to the opportunities. Reason why? Well, certainly the reason for that is that, you know, white females are primarily married to white males. They have white male sons and they feel like their children are going to be discriminated against. But you see, most of them are not most, but many of them do not recognize that they would not be in the positions they are today if it were not for the civil rights movement back in 1964, so they get in the civil rights act path that said you could not discriminate based on race, gender, and all of that. Many white women today do not recognize that the only reason gender became part of that bill is because southern white congressmen thought if they had a gender, it would kill the bill.

But indeed, white women have been very much more successful because of affirmative action and anti-discrimination laws than people of color. Recently, we've read and witnessed on television a rash of racism and sexism behavior. Is that a direct response to what's going on in corporate America and how the majority culture see the erosion of some of the opportunities that they have? Well, you know, I guess my views of that is that those overt types of things that happen have occurred in our society and occurs in many societies. And that's a small group of people. The more dangerous things are those people who claim they're not racist, who claim they're not sexist, but then they don't want you to move into their neighborhood.

They don't want you to really go to school with their kids. They don't want to really work with you and all of that. They don't want to really hire you and promote you. They perceive you as being inferior, but they don't say that. That is more detrimental long term to many more African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans than these individual incidents that go on around this country in terms of the violence, etc. The other thing I would say about that is that I believe that the Republican party has to take some responsibility for some of the violence that occurs because, indeed, at times, there have been Republican leaders who have played the race card too much. And I am a Republican, but I get really concerned about that. And Democrats do it also, but to a lesser extent.

And whenever you have a society that its political leaders play on racial ethnic issues, there are going to be people in that population who are going to interpret that in an inappropriate manner and act out on it. Are people of color contained to certain job categories in corporate America? Well, I would say that, indeed, if you look at the numbers, etc., people of color have been channeled to different types of jobs, much more so than to some mainstream. What type of jobs are there? Well, you know, if you look at the Asian population, you know, they can be technical people and all of that, but they really can't manage. That's a stereotype about them. You look at Hispanics, African-Americans, the Native Americans, well, they can be in marketing that relates to their group, they can be in human resources, public affairs, public relations, some of those soft areas.

But when it comes to finance, running frontline organizations, operations, and all of that, there's some skepticism about them. We still look at probably anywhere between 80 to 85% of upper level management in corporate America are white anglos. How do we get to the point where the old boy network and the old club is more inclusive? Is that something that you attempt to work on when you go in? Absolutely. And the companies that hire us hire us because they want to break that syndrome. They know that it exists and they want to overcome it because they know it isn't a good for their organization. The reality is that, you know, when you try to break that, you're trying to break years and years of practices that were quote-unquote intentionally not to exclude people, but indeed do exclude people.

And as I said before, we have to remember that that old boy network excludes some white males if they don't fit that specific image. The way you overcome that is that you have to have dedicated leadership at the top of the organization that says, look, market for different, stakeholders are different. Employee body is becoming more different. We should be representative of those people that we are trying to sell our products and services to throughout the organization and all types of jobs. And we're going to make that happen to employ an effective human resource policies and practices and by holding managers accountable for making sure that they fully utilize and develop all of their people. With the current backlash on affirmative action programs, particularly here in Texas, Proposition 209 in California and probably by the time this program airs at the University of Michigan and Michigan, how is this particular tie will have a devastating effect if any on higher education systems around the country?

You know, when you bring that up, there are a couple of things that really have to be done. We can point the blame to white people all we want for our situation, but in part we have to take ownership for our situation. And what I mean by that is that African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans have to use their political power, their economic influence to bring about change. We complain about companies discriminating against people of color, but yet we go and buy their products. Why change? We complain about the school system, you know, and how it isn't doing a good job. But what do we do about getting out there and being proactive to change it? We don't do very much. We sit and complain about it.

So things are not going to change unless we do that. You have this anti-affirmative action movement out there. You know, it's sort of lost a little steam now. But you know, where were the people who were supportive of affirmative action? How were they trying to mobilize, et cetera? There was some there and I think that's why the movement has stopped somewhat. And you know, one of the things we need to really recognize is that our allies should be our allies because they believe in what we are doing and what we're trying to accomplish in terms of making us a free, equitable society. And one should not care what color those allies are. And the reality is that the way we got that civil rights act passed, the way the people who made the decision about the brown versus Topeca. Topeca. Remember, they were all white males. The reason I'm sitting here talking to you today was not that there were black males, white women, Hispanic males, Hispanic women, who were my mentors and coaches because they weren't up above me.

And I ran for whatever reasons where I was born and raised, the schools I went to except for Berkeley, they were white male dominated organizations, AT&T when I joined was a white male dominated organization. The people who helped me were white males. So they were good and bad in everyone. And we have to recognize that and we have to form those alliances with everyone. You frequently I hear some of us say, well, you know, that's a white person. I said, what do you care if they're white or what? If they're supportive of your causes? Well, I don't trust them. I said, then go about trying to build trust and respect. You know, because there are people in our media families, we don't trust them, respect. What can people of color and other minorities do that are already a part of the corporate culture?

Well, I think, first of all, they should recognize that if they want their organization to change and if they really want to have an impact on their organization, as they move up the corporate hierarchy, they have to bring along those people who they perceive have the skills and ability to move along with them. Two frequently what we do is that we get there and say, well, I got there on my own, so you have to get there on your own. And the reality is that none of us, as I said before, have gotten to where we are on our own. You know, we've had, we've had people who have been supportive. So the key thing is you have to help coach mentor and develop people. And one of the things that you do is that you don't just limit that to your own race or what have you, because that isn't how you build power bases. When minorities and people of color were allowed to expand their housing options, a lot of moved out of the inner cities or predominantly minority neighborhoods.

In the past, doctors, lawyers, whatever occupation, they basically stayed in a similar conclave. And the important are those who have made it out for them to come back for a younger generation to see their success is possible. And certain things that you dream about, think about, read about our attainable in this society. Well, I think when you talk about coming back, does that mean moving back to where? I mean, everyone wants to have a certain lifestyle, but being visible coming back to your old school than which you attended, being involved in certain programs in your own neighborhood. Yeah, I believe that is extremely important. Dr. John P. Fernandez, PhD, President, Advanced Research Management Consultants. If you have questions, comments or suggestions asked your future in Black America programs, write us. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin.

Until we have the opportunity again for IBA technical producer David Alvarez, and production in-term Stephen Craig, I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today, and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America Cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America. Two frequently what we do is that we get to say, well, I got there on my own, so you have to get there on your own.

And the reality is that none of us, as I said before, have gotten to where we are on our own. I'm Pete Fernandez, President Advanced Research Management Consultants this week on in Black America.