To everyone who’s asked me some variant of “how’s it going?” over the past month, I’ve probably lied. Or lacked the words to articulate it fully, but I’m giving it a shot.
Obviously, my experience is just one along a continuum of black experiences, and I don’t presume to speak for all black people — or even all black people at Goldman Sachs, where I have worked for six years. But the past few months have been demoralizing, and family/friends/colleagues I’ve spoken with and listened to across the firm and country seem to share this feeling.
Being black has been nothing if not instructive. I’ve learned history — and why people live where they do and why those in positions of power often don’t look like me. I’ve learned that bad things are more likely to happen to black people solely because they’re black. I learned which of my friends’ parents didn’t want me in the house when I was growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and who would be blamed if my friends broke the law.
I’ve learned how to prove I’m intelligent, to prove I’m not threatening, to prove I’m innocent after being assumed guilty. To prove human as this country litigates my personhood in case after case. It is as if our lives are expendable but we could never rebuild a burned storefront. As if Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent philosophy allowed him to opt out of death by white supremacy. As if the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging communities of color is an acceptable, inevitable cost, and our lives just aren’t worth the points off GDP. It’s a lot to process.
My family immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 from Nigeria. We were living in New Orleans while both my parents studied at Tulane University. My earliest memory in this country was the assault on Rodney King, when a group of Los Angeles police officers brutally and repeatedly beat an unarmed citizen on March 3, 1991. The officers involved lied about the attack, which was captured on film by an amateur photographer.
On March 16, 1991, Soon Ja Du, an L.A. convenience store owner, shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the back of the head. Du accused Harlins of attempting to steal a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, grabbed Harlins, and then killed her as she attempted to leave the store. Harlins had the cash in hand, and the police concluded that she had intended to pay.
On Nov. 15, 1991, a jury found Du guilty of voluntary manslaughter and recommended the maximum sentence of 16 years’ jail time. The trial judge overruled the jury recommendation, stating that Du behaved “inappropriately” but understandably. Du was instead sentenced to five years’ probation, 400 hours of community service and a $500 fine.
At the end of April 1992, an appeals court upheld the Du sentencing decision and, separately, a jury acquitted all four officers in the King case. That combination kicked off six days of protests, which resulted in 63 deaths — 10 due to shootings by law enforcement — eclipsing the toll in the city’s Watts protests of 1965.
At the time, I remember seeing the video and footage from the protests, and hearing Rodney King’s famous “can we all get along?” statement repeated over and over.
Then, as now, the central issue was violence against people of color with seeming impunity.
A decade later, in April 2001, while I was living in Cincinnati where my parents were both teachers at Xavier University, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas was killed by a Cincinnati patrolman during a police pursuit. Officers were looking to arrest Thomas for traffic violations and other minor offenses, and he was shot point-blank by one of them. The officer claimed he believed that Thomas was reaching for a gun, although subsequent investigations determined that he was likely adjusting his pants.
As is common in these cases, Thomas’s life and death hinged on an officer’s distinction between being uncomfortable and being afraid. And like many of these cases, the officer’s claimed belief of bodily danger legitimized the use of deadly force. I always did well in school, and this lesson was clear: People’s fear of me as a black male could be fatal.
The protests after Thomas’s death lasted five days and centered around Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district, which was a predominantly black, heavily policed community where the shooting took place. The median household income in Over-the-Rhine was about $8,600 at the time (the community has since become whiter and wealthier through gentrification).
Thomas’s murder also kicked off a local debate sometimes described as “respectability politics,” with some black leaders blaming black culture for Thomas’s death and advocating behavioral changes. The issue was not the extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen for “driving without a license” citations; it was a lack of respect for law and order.
If we as black people changed our behavior, pulled our pants up and were respectable, all our problems would be answered. If our parents took a firmer hand, beat us when needed, and policed our behavior, law enforcement officials wouldn’t have to. But this didn’t save Amadou Diallo, for instance.
Fast forward another 10 years, to November 2011, when I was living in Chicago and working at the proprietary trading firm Getco. As I was leaving a recreation league dodgeball game one evening on the Near North Side, I was approached by two police officers. They asked where I was coming from, and I explained.
The officers told me that I matched the description of an individual who had reportedly stolen from a residence in the area. The description was of a black male in shorts and a T-shirt, with no other details. No color for either article of clothing, and in a city with just under 1 million black people, I was obviously the culprit.
I’d clearly spent too much time around hyper-rational people who respected me and knew where I went to school and how much money I made. In a lapse of judgment, I tried to explain how absurd it all was while presenting my ID. They slammed me against the hood of a police cruiser. The officer who shoved me looked afraid more than anything, and while I was confident I could have taken both in a fair fight, guns are scary so I worked to de-escalate the situation.
I was basically living out my nightmare of at least the past 10 years, where I’d need to defend myself from a potentially lethal encounter with law enforcement. My plan had been, if things went left, to fight, rush to my apartment, call the legal counsel at my employer and negotiate turning myself in. Fortunately, my de-escalating worked. The officers patted me down, jostled me a bit, emptied the contents of my wallet into the street item by item, and detained me for another 20 minutes, while I shivered in shorts and a T-shirt in the November cold. They finally let me go when another officer (possibly their superior) asked what they were doing and said, “That’s not him.”
I went home, and I cried for the first time in years. Then I filed a report with the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority, complaint #1050215. Then I flew to London for a work trip, noted how well the Brits treated class-signaling blacks (obviously not the full story), and considered never coming back to the U.S.
But I returned to Chicago and gave an in-person statement. And I waited.
I was still waiting in Chicago in February 2012, when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in Florida. Zimmerman was acquitted in 2013, the impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement. And I had more interactions with police officers. And the head of IPRA resigned in 2013. And IPRA closed my complaint file, claiming that their “findings of the events that occurred differed from the account provided” without further detail.
In June 2014 I moved to New York to start a new job at Goldman Sachs. And in July 2014, Eric Garner was killed by NYPD officers who approached him on suspicion of selling “loosies” (individual cigarettes) without the proper tax stamps. In August 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, after allegedly stealing a box of Swisher Sweet cigarillos. Several weeks of protests followed.
In 2015, news broke that the Chicago Police Department had been running a “black site” undisclosed interrogation facility in the Homan Square neighborhood, where over 7,000 civilians had been detained since 2004; 80% of the detainees were black Americans.
And the new head of IPRA resigned. And a City of Chicago lawyer resigned after burying evidence related to the killing of Darius Pinex by two police officers in 2011. The previous ruling (in which the shooting was deemed justified) was later thrown out, and a retrial was ordered.
Years pass, and the same story plays out again and again.
On Feb. 23, Ahmaud Arbery was ambushed and killed by a former police officer and his son in Glynn County, Ga. On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor was killed in Kentucky by Louisville Metro Police officers serving a “no-knock warrant” related to two individuals already in police custody. Kenneth Walker, who was Taylor’s partner, fired on the officers with a licensed firearm, and then called 911 to report the home invasion and shooting of his girlfriend while officers stood outside. Walker was initially charged with first-degree assault and attempted murder of a police officer; charges were dropped in May 2020.
George Floyd was killed on May 25 after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down. Floyd was extrajudicially killed on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local market.
So as to the question — “how’s it going?” — it’s not going great. While I appreciate how many colleagues and others have reached out and expressed solidarity, I would appreciate it more if people in finance and business would instead do the following:
1. Reach out to and support diverse analysts and associates within your firms and businesses; a common bit of feedback from junior colleagues at Goldman Sachs is that while there is a commitment to equality and social justice up top, they don’t necessarily see commitment and support from their direct managers.
2. Donate money to advocacy organizations. There are six times as many white Americans as black Americans. The more people who get off the sidelines, the better.
3. Donate time to advocacy organizations and directly to members of disadvantaged groups.
4. Support minority-owned businesses. Policing is closely tied to class, just as socioeconomics are closely tied to race.
The interracial wealth gap is huge. Our society naturally defends vested economic interests, and while it won’t solve everything, economic empowerment and sociopolitical empowerment are closely linked.
Frederick Baba is a managing director at Goldman Sachs.
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