As a society, we often ask, “Why do we have so few African-American CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?” And we get answers like “Racism, Jim Crow, slavery, and structural inequality.” Perhaps we should be asking, “How in the world did a black kid from the notorious Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green Gardens become the only African-American CEO of McDonald’s?” If we want to figure out why inclusion hasn’t worked, we ask the former. As we want to figure out how to make inclusion work, we should ask the latter.
