What You Can Do Right Now to Help the Black Community
From the life, professional experiences, and research of former Harvard Business School professor Steven S. Rogers comes his boldly stated, A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues. This informative epistle investigates the causes of racial wealth disparity in the United States and provides solutions for addressing it. Through extensive data and historical research, anecdotes, teaching, and case studies, it presents practical ways White people can work with and help the Black community. It teaches readers that eliminating the $153,000 wealth gap between Black and White people is the solution to over 75% of our problems and offers solutions to help improve Black-White racial relations in the United States.
In straightforward language, filled with facts, stories, advice, and sometimes even humor, A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues encourages every White person to share his/her wealth with the Black community—plain and simple. This book recommends that you spend a portion of your annual household budget with Black-owned companies. If more money is spent on Black-owned businesses, those companies can grow and create more jobs for Black people. Rogers also proposes White people make large savings deposits into Black-owned banks. These are the financial institutions that are the backbone of the Black community that provides loans to the Black community for businesses, education, automobiles, and home mortgages.
And finally, he resolutely encourages White people to support government reparations to Black Americans who are descendants of Black men and women, who were enslaved from 1619 to 1865.
During our introspective conversation, Rogers educates our audience on the following:
- Disrupt the societal norms that have been so pervasive and implement simple changes to close the racial wealth divide.
- Understand the root causes of racial disparities in America
- Discover how they can personally contribute to reducing the inequality between Black and White people in the United States today
- Understand why it is important to redirect their spending to Black-owned institutions to help decrease the racial wealth gap
- Understand the politics of financial apartheid by sharing real-world examples of why simple things are made unnecessarily difficult because of skin color
- Why many in the black community are feeling racial fatigue and how to help turn this around
“Steven Rogers is a brilliant and courageous thinker who makes us unsettled in order to get us to be real forces for good!”
—Cornel West
“Steven Rogers brings a unique perspective to America’s long-standing challenge over the issues of race. Educated at Williams and Harvard Business School, he has leveraged his education, his intellect, and his ambition to achieve great success in both business and academia. From his professional perches, Rogers offers highly valuable advice to help diminish, if not erase, racial bias in our society. We can and need to do better, and Rogers’s prescriptions for the privileged among us is a solid roadmap to do just that.”
—John A. Byrne, former Executive Editor of Businessweek magazine and Editor-in-Chief of Fast Company magazine, currently CEO and Editor-in-Chief of C-Change Media
“This book is a comprehensive accounting of the ongoing effects of racism. Rogers brings his finance and business expertise to explain the legacy of systemic exclusions on the current gaps in wealth. Not only does he cover the facts and the history with meticulous care, but he also proposes solutions for businesses, individuals, and governments focused on tangible remedies. This book is a must-read not just for Rogers’s white colleagues, but for anyone interested in being a part of the solution.”
—Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money and Professor of Law at UC Irvine School of Law
“Steven S. Rogers established the act without hesitation in plain language. Not surprisingly, I and many of our marginalized advocates will take action, calling for the well-deserved reparations to be made. It is time for our ancestors to receive justice for all the financial burdens that systemic racism in America has created. I am literally in contact with Congressman Ritchie Torres as my thumbs firmly press on the smartphone glass.” —Vaughn Lowery, President of 360 MAGAZINE, an NGLCC certified LGBT business enterprise.
Listen to Steven S. Rogers and Vaughn Lowery digest the plight of Black America on 360 MAG Spotify/Apple podcast HERE.
