Back to the hood again, part II

One of the best parts of my job is interacting with some of the most successful businesspeople in America. In the last 48 hours alone, I had one-on-ones with the vice chairman of one of the largest banks in the country, the entrepreneur who founded a successful private jet company backed by Warren Buffett himself, and a man who owns professional basketball and hockey teams.

One of the common threads between them all, besides being filthy rich is that they're all white guys, and to a person, they're all cool with talking about provocative topics like race, which has made for some interesting conversations. Which brings me to today's topic -- actually, a follow-up to my last post about how dismal the neighborhood I grew up in in Pittsburgh looked when I visited a few weeks ago, and what could be done to change it.

I brought this up during yesterday's meeting with the bank vice chairman as we chopped it up about our backgrounds, educations, and what inspired us to do what we do. I told him how profoundly growing up in a neighborhood that hadn't seen any new jobs, homes or investments in my lifetime had affected me and influenced my ambitions in life, then he told me a story of his own about a similar neighborhood.

It was Boston, circa mid-1990s. Like my neighborhood in Pittsburgh and hundreds of other high-minority, low-income neighborhoods around the country, the Dorchester section of Boston was suffering under the weight of drugs and gang violence fueled by disinvestment. Sturdy buildings and solid houses stood vacant, almost screaming for entrepreneurs and families to make something useful out of them and make a profit in the process. Finally, the business community in Boston, the black clergy, the mayor decided enough was enough.

As the story was told to me, a crew dozens strong got together and went to Codman Square, at the time a particularly dilapidated part of Dorchester, and slept overnight in an abandoned building there -- a symbolic gesture that if a bunch of preachers and rich downtown white guys would sleep there, then maybe there was hope for the neighborhood. A few bankers, including the one I met with, made a point of lending money to entrepreneurs who would open up businesses there and giving loans to families who wanted to buy houses. A decade later, I live just about a mile from Codman Square. The neighborhood still has its problems, but people on the street tell me it's a thousand times better than it used to be. Houses around here (though overpriced and perhaps even teetering on even more steep value drops) are selling in the $400,000 to half-a-mil range.

Ok, so what's the point? Well, after my last post, I got quite a few emails from people like myself -- young, black professionals who left Pittsburgh in droves in the last decade to get away from suffocating neighborhoods like my own. And the common question I've gotten has been this: "Is Boston as racist as I heard it is? Is it as bad as the racism in Pittsburgh?"

It's a question that bothers me in the wake of what I saw at home and after my conversation with the banker -- not because I'm naive enough to think that racism doesn't exist, but because so many of the problems in our neighborhoods didn't start and won't end because of any white person's prejudices. Along Lincoln Ave., the main drag through my neighborhood back home, not even the barber shops or corner stores that were open when I grew up there survived. Vacant buildings and houses potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars get no more attention than the few cats who bother to stand in front of them and sell drugs. And half of them are my age, still in the same spot I last saw them in high school.

So sure, racism's a problem in my hometown and where I live now, but it ain't the number one problem we got if a bunch of white men are willing to sleep in abandoned buildings to help turn a black neighborhood around in one city, while in another, black males would rather pitch $20 cracks than buy and sell buildings that could turn their own lives, and so many others', into something better.

In another conversation in my senior year of college, a black investment banker who led what at the time was the only black-controlled company of its kind that was publicly-traded, told me something else that I remembered this week. He said: "The civil rights movement of your generation is economic." Truer words were never spoken. My mother's generation, and her mother's, may have had whitefolks' racism as a primary obstacle to what they could do in life, but I don't. Sure there are and will always be those who don't want to see a brotha, a sista, or a 'hood be anything good, but if there was anything that limited anybody from around my way from being successful, it had way more to do with the fact that my neighborhood was losing that economic battle, big time. A decade later, I'm in control of my own destiny because I want to be -- not because some white guy said I could or couldn't. Sad thing is, I still can't say the same for my old 'hood.