Accomplished, but not insulated
Some successful blacks find Gates’s case all too familiar
A financial adviser at a leading wealth-management firm, Dan Rivers often identifies himself proudly but simply: “I’m a Dartmouth guy.’’ But thinking about the times he was scrutinized by security coming in and out of corporate events, about the less-than-welcoming glances he has received at a venerable men’s clothier, Rivers said he is sometimes seen by others in an entirely different way: as a black guy.
Likewise, Colette A.M. Phillips, chief executive of a Boston marketing firm, recalled the fellow business traveler in the American Airlines Admirals Club at Logan International Airport who presumed she was the help and asked for coffee.
There are legions of others who can share similar stories, affluent, accomplished, and academically distinguished African-Americans in Greater Boston who have suffered indignities that they doubt would befall their similarly successful white peers. It demonstrates, they said, that racism cannot be escaped by climbing the ladder.
Sometimes the slights are stark, other times subtle, and occasionally they fall into a gray area that leaves them wondering whether they are real or perceived. Rarely do they make local headlines, much less global news, or end with them in handcuffs on the doorstep of their homes, as was the case with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the renowned Harvard scholar, in Cambridge last week. In that case, Gates denounces racial profiling by what he has described as a “rogue cop,’’ while others see a respected police officer who says he was simply answering the call of duty, a report of a burglary in progress at Gates’s house.
Ted Landsmark was a young, Yale-educated lawyer on his way to a meeting at City Hall in 1976 when he had the misfortune to cross a group of young white demonstrators who tried to spear him with an American flag, an assault that was captured in a photograph that symbolized the rage over school desegregation in Boston.
Three decades later, Landsmark is president of the Boston Architectural College. He has built a distinguished career as an academic and social activist. While the distant past is just that, a far subtler incident befell him when he took his first drive in the Mercedes wagon he bought three years ago, driving a few blocks to get an inspection sticker. An officer pulled him over, he said, just to check that he owned the car.
“We have all learned that there are sometimes stereotypic responses that police officers and others in authority have toward African-Americans,’’ Landsmark said earlier this week. “And we sometimes comment to each other about how careful we have to be when we are doing things that would bring no attention to others who are similarly situated as professionals.’’
Stephanie J. Anderson, head of public relations for a billion-dollar lighting company, said she tries to oblige when fellow shoppers at
“I obviously try to give the benefit of the doubt and be as helpful as I can, because I sort of have clueless moments, too,’’ said Anderson, 35, a Midwest native who now lives in Dorchester’s Ashmont Hill. “But it is the accumulation of those small instances again and again and again that can culminate in situations like what you saw happen in Cambridge.’’
She considers the location of Gates’s arrest particularly jarring. “If my neighbor in Michigan saw me struggling with the front door, they’d help me out, not call the police,’’ she said.
Encounters with police are a common thread. Phillips, the public relations executive, told of the officers who approached her Mercedes from both sides, flashlights blinding, when she was pulled over recently on a quiet Weston road driving the speed limit. They let her go with a $35 ticket for misusing her high beams.
Ask Daniel E. Coleman, a 59-year-old managing principal at an investment bank, if he has faced slights because of his race, and he answers: “Have you got hours?’’ In the 1970s, he was turned away from nightclubs. In the ’80s and ’90s, he often heard fellow executives at the Bank of Boston describe black candidates for jobs with the underhanded compliment of “articulate,’’ then disqualify them with the presumption that they lacked the math for high finance.
“When you’re black and you’re 50, there are almost too many to mention,’’ said Wayne Threatt, 55, Coleman’s fellow managing principal at T & C Associates in Boston.
The good news, Threatt and Coleman said, is that indignities are suffered less frequently and less dramatically, with more boardrooms, tennis courts, and neighborhoods open to African-Americans. But a triggering incident, often an encounter with police, can cause built-up frustrations to bubble over, they said.
“Racial profiling by the police has long been a subject of discussion by academics, lawyers, and ordinary citizens, and sensitivity sessions have clearly not yielded a transformed police,’’ Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, chairwoman of Harvard’s department of African and African American studies, wrote in a letter to Gates expressing outrage on behalf of their colleagues.
While successful African-Americans may share their frustrations with each other, many do not feel comfortable discussing them with a wider audience. As Gates was declaring his outage and as local police were dropping their charges, a dozen successful Boston executives who are black declined to comment or did not return phone calls when approached for this report. “That’s a touchy one,’’ a female winner of the Boston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40’’ said. One high-profile chief executive signaled his reluctance to discuss race in Boston through a spokesman.
But for those who would avoid it, there are others who see the Gates situation - a sequence that began when a woman nearby mistook the professor as a possible burglar, included a charged exchange between Gates and the responding officer, and ended with his arrest - as worthy of public dialogue.
“It’s an opportunity for us, as a community, to reexamine why does this happen and do something about this, so it ends up [having] a positive result going forward,’’ said Rivers, a 42-year-old who last year founded the Nexus Alliance, a network for black male professionals aimed partly at changing the way black men are perceived in Boston.
Fletcher H. “Flash’’ Wiley, a lawyer and retired executive, said he rarely considers his race when affronted or confronted. Among other things, he said, it may be because, at 66, he is increasingly cantankerous or an inconsistent driver. “You know, I’ve got some bad habits,’’ he said.
Years ago, race defined the way others saw Wiley: as a standout student at a newly integrated Indianapolis high school, the first African-American from Indiana appointed to a service academy, the first black football player at the Air Force Academy. So he made a point of not letting it define how he saw himself, through a distinguished career in law, business, and civic affairs.
Wiley said he viewed Gates’s arrest through the lens of one who had lived through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, busing in Boston, the Charles Stuart affair. He sees a more pluralistic society now, if not a postracial one.
“I look at it as a vestige of the past,’’ Wiley said of the arrest, “but not a defining point of who we are now and who we will be.’’
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com. 