A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues What You Can Do Right Now to Help the Black Community

by Rogers, Steven S.

• ISBN13: 9781119794776
• ISBN10: 1119794773
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-05-25
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

Learn how to address racial wealth disparity in the United States today

From the life, professional experiences, and research of former Harvard Business School professor Steven 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 at 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 provide 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. Those who read the book will:

• Understand the root causes of racial disparities in America
• Discover how you can personally contribute to reducing the inequality between Black and White people in the United States today
• Get concrete recommendations on how to redirect your spending to Black-owned institutions to help decrease the racial wealth gap

This groundbreaking book provides financial recommendations that you can put into practice today, using his helpful instructions in most of the chapters, to address the systemic inequality between White and Black Americans. Read A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues and be part of the path forward.

Author Biography

Steven Rogers retired from Harvard Business School in 2019 where he was the “MBA Class of 1957 Senior Lecturer” in General Management. He taught Entrepreneurial Finance and his own course, “Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship.” Prior to HBS, Professor Rogers taught in the MBA and PhD programs at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he received the Outstanding Professor Award for the Executive MBA Program 26 times and daytime program twice.

More recently, Rogers joined the Steans Family Foundation as an advisor to develop an economic plan for a poverty-stricken Black community in Chicago. In 2020, he toured 10 HBCUs where he taught a workshop titled Entrepreneurial Finance for Black Entrepreneurs. He has also served on the Board of Directors of several corporations.

Named one of the top 150 influential people in America by Ebony Magazine, Rogers is the author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Finance and Business and multiple Harvard Business School case studies and podcasts focused on Black business and financial issues.

Table of Contents

Preface: Social Unrest, Protests, and the Podcasts

Introduction

Chapter ONE: Why Should You Trust My Advice? And Who Am I?

Chapter TWO: How the Wealth Gap was Created

Chapter THREE: Donate to HBCUs

Chapter FOUR: Deposit Money into Black-Owned Banks

Chapter FIVE: Support Black-Owned Businesses

Chapter SIX: Write a Letter Supporting Reparations

Discussion Questions

About the Author

Index