An Open Letter in Response to Ben Hecht’s “Moving Beyond Diversity to Racial Equity”

One of the curses of our technological age is that brutal hits are delivered innocently and with great speed into your smartphone on a daily basis, sometimes while you sleep. Such was the case for us when we woke up to read Ben Hecht’s June 16, 2020 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) titled, “Moving Beyond Diversity to Racial Equity.” HBR, known for astute takes on management issues, doesn’t usually serve as an outlet for gaslighting or promoting a sanitized and dishonest account of harmful events. But that’s what we found when we read this article.

Who is Ben Hecht? Ben Hecht is the long-time, white CEO of Living Cities, a national intermediary “nonprofit focused on closing income and wealth gaps in America.” Who are we? We are former employees. All of us left or were fired from Living Cities as a result of the toxic and racist culture Mr. Hecht downplays in his article. We have never confronted Mr. Hecht or spoken about these issues in public because of Mr. Hecht’s peculiarly powerful position. Living Cities is a philanthropic intermediary representing 18 foundations and financial institutions; as such, his current and past board members are a “who’s who” of philanthropic leaders. He wields enormous informal power in the social sector and with the over two dozen cities where Living Cities is active.

Why are we writing this article? The degree of whitewashing showcased in this article is dangerous. Even here, as we write this response, we are respecting confidentiality by not detailing specific incidents, outlining actions taken by Mr. Hecht or his proxies, or “naming names.” Our goal is not to tear down Mr. Hecht or the organization, but rather to say: The work is not done as long as you do not tell the truth in the fullest way possible. In short, we write to invite Mr. Hecht and “his” organization into more rigorous self-examination and restorative dialogue.

For those of us who lived through Living Cities before or during the first phases of its racial equity makeover, the HBR article can only be read ironically. When Mr. Hecht writes, “It certainly made me uneasy when, six years ago, members of my staff told me that Living Cities was a hard place to work for people of color,” many of us know first-hand (and he knows) that this “telling” was not a telling, but a confrontation. And he knows and we know that this confrontation wasn’t a surprise. People had tried to raise the challenges outlined below with him repeatedly (and suffered the price for doing so). And when he writes, “In short, our workplace was unable to acknowledge the lives they [people of color] live and value them for who they are,” he knows (and we know) that the harm went way beyond not acknowledging our lives and that harm also extended beyond the walls of the offices to the community leaders Living Cities worked with.

We’ve heard from the current Living Cities staff of color that some things have “changed” at the organization. There’s been training and learning. And some very brave people of color, specifically Black employees, have risked a great deal to fight for change. The changes they’ve managed to achieve are important, but none of those gains undo the harm Ben Hecht and Living Cities caused before the big shift, harm that was caused to former employees and to the community leaders who were mistreated, either because their work was appropriated (undue credit taken or efforts and insights extracted), or because they were subjected to the condescension Mr. Hecht so consistently displayed in his interactions with local partners before he began to get right with the world.

Over the last few years, Living Cities and Mr. Hecht have made it a practice to tout their equity work frequently, “sharing their learning with the field” through tools and blog posts. Sometimes, those learnings are useful. More often, they are vanity pieces. Up until now, those products and postings have been easy to scroll through or delete without opening because they’ve been minor hits. This HBR piece is “next level.” It’s a bold proclamation of values, commitment, and expertise in a journal of record. And it comes at a time when across our country and the world, hundreds of thousands of protesters are making demands for broad systems change and asserting unapologetically that Black Lives Matter. In the midst of the uprisings, when lives are on the line, asking us to accept without comment Mr. Hecht’s self-congratulatory, fake-humble positioning as an anti-racist white leader is simply too much to ask.

To put it mildly, his HBR article offers a sanitized version of reality both before and after Mr. Hecht’s “racial awakening.” Here are some key points the article whitewashes:

1. The pattern of Black employees exiting was repeatedly raised with Mr. Hecht and executive leadership, and those who raised it were chastised, marginalized, or even pushed out. (And the exits continued even after the call out.)
2. Before the equity makeover began in earnest, both white and people of color employees who raised concerns about Living Cities’ approach to race and equity, or who took an explicit stance on those issues, were ridiculed as immature and unsophisticated and were, on more than one occasion, dressed down in public.
3. Staff of color had to sit through countless meetings and informal conversations during which Mr. Hecht ridiculed nationally recognized leaders of color as being “stuck on race” or in some other way deficient because of their racially explicit leadership stance, even as, in other instances, Mr. Hecht sought out these very same leaders as partners.
4. Mr. Hecht advanced an elitist culture in which Ivy League-educated candidates were defined as the ideal hire and others were denigrated, and efforts to diversify hiring away from this elite standard were seen as putting sentiment over effectiveness.
5. Staff of color who left were scapegoated internally in absentia and spoken about externally in ways that jeopardized their careers.
6. A pattern of favoritism cultivated by Mr. Hecht created and protected an insider group of mostly (white or white adjacent) young women who served as his cultural enforcers, policing what was appropriate and inappropriate in-house. In the article, Mr. Hecht thoroughly minimizes this dynamic and the central driving role he played: “I had to reckon with the fact that I had allowed our culture to, de facto, authorize a small group to define what issues are “legitimate” to talk about, and when and how those issues are discussed, to the exclusion of many.” He did much more than allow. He generated that culture.

Yes, a few years ago, staff confronted organizational leadership, in part pushed by leaders in the field, and yes, concessions were made, and yes, new practices were introduced. And: great harm was done and has never been repaired. (For a more complete though still thickly veiled version of Living Cities’ process, see Nadia Owusu’s article in Catapult, Hiring a Chief Diversity Officer Won’t Fix Your Racist Company Culture.)

Instead of pursuing repair, Mr. Hecht has assiduously rebranded himself and Living Cities as a racial equity organization, sometimes as an economic racial justice organization, credentials now further burnished by this HBR article. But here’s the catch:

White men who have learned difficult lessons and transformed their racial consciousness don’t write solo byline articles about their journey in prestigious journals like HBR. They share the byline with the people of color who risked their careers (and continue to do so every time they have to hold the line on racial justice in-house) to drive the change recounted so superficially in this article. Or, better yet, those white men use their connections to place articles written by staff of color and claim no piece of the limelight.

White men who have learned difficult lessons and transformed their racial consciousness don’t whitewash their accounts of the events or their contributions to those events. They don’t explain away, for example, their failure to notice the pattern of Black staff leaving the organization on the weak “racial competencies of those conducting exit interviews.” Instead, they begin by reflecting on their own actions and leadership contributions to those exits. And then, they and their boards follow up that reflection by investing in a restorative process that opens up conversations with those former staff, repairing the harm, and sharing the insights that emerge from that process.

White men who have learned difficult lessons and transformed their racial consciousness don’t hold on to the seat of power from which they have caused harm after they have understood the depths of their transgressions. They do their best to clean up their mess and right the ship, create ways for people of color to assume the highest leadership positions in the organization, and then they exit to make way for transformational leadership.

It’s time to build a world where white male social sector leaders aren’t praised for doing their job: creating the necessary and healthy multi-racial organizational context for good work to be done. It’s time to live in a world where a white man who harmed so many people doesn’t get to rehabilitate himself as a born-again, anti-racist leader without going through the fire of making amends with those he harmed. Mr. Hecht, stop praising yourself and do the hardest work. And Living Cities Board Members, do your work of organizational oversight to make sure that Living Cities’ shift into racial equity is complete. The time is now.