A path to ending systemic racism from Bill Lewis, former NAACP LDF co-chair | Homeroom with Sal

Hi everyone, welcome to the daily homeroom live stream. We're doing it a little bit earlier than normal, uh, because we have a guest that we really wanted to talk to who was available a little earlier than normal.

First of all, for those of you wondering about this new location, they are cutting down trees outside of my normal location and my kids are getting a little bit loud downstairs as well. Uh, before we get into the conversation, I will make the announcement that I always make, uh, reminding folks that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. We only exist because we have, uh, support from folks like yourself. Special call out to several corporations who've stepped up in the last several months, especially when they found out we were running it as a deficit and, uh, we were trying to step up for the COVID response and our costs went up. So special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, Fastly, AT&T, and Novartis.

So with that, I am excited to jump into our conversation. We have Bill Lewis today, someone who I've known for some time and have always enjoyed our conversation, and I think there's a lot of things going on in the world that I would love, uh, to get Bill's perspective on. So Bill, great to have you.

Bill: It's my pleasure, great to be here.

Thank you! So I guess just to introduce you, you're the co-chairman of Lazard, a very well-respected, uh, investment bank on Wall Street. And, uh, you know, I think there's a couple given your background, there's so many things we can talk about today. You know, there’s the economy, there's obviously what's going on in America around race relations and with policing.

But maybe a good place to start is, you know, tell us a little bit about your journey. You know, did you always think that you would one day become co-chair of Lazard?

Bill: Yes, no, um, look, um, I know we don't have a lot of time and in my estimation, you're right, there are a lot of things we can talk about. I guess I gotta get, yeah, I guess there are a lot of things that we can talk about. Um, I hope we spend a fair amount of time talking about, uh, race in America because I think, uh, we have not seen anything like this since, uh, since 1968. That's probably a good place for me to start.

Um, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, uh, the capital of the Confederacy. I went to segregated schools in Richmond, uh, for, uh, the first, uh, eight years, actually nine years, kindergarten through the eighth grade. Uh, as most people know, Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court in 1954, um, and Richmond really didn't comply with that until 1970. So 16 years later, um, in 1970, um, the journey that I'm on now, uh, really took a different turn.

I received a full scholarship through an organization called, um, A Better Chance (ABC) to go off to boarding school and I went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for four years. After Andover, I went to Harvard College, majoring in economics, and then I went to Wall Street where I started Morgan Stanley in a two-year analyst program. Then I went to Harvard Business School and then I came back to Morgan Stanley. I spent 24 years at Morgan Stanley, ultimately running their global banking business, um, and then I joined Lazard where I've been for the last, uh, 16 years.

So that's sort of one part of the journey. Along the way, I've been, um, involved in lots of not-for-profits, many around, uh, um, education. I've sat on the board, I sat on the board of Andover for 16 years. I now sit on the board of Uncommon, uh, charter schools, the largest, uh, charter in the Northeast. Uh, I sit on the board of the Posse Foundation. I sit on the board of the Research Alliance for New York City public schools.

Um, I’m about to go on the board of the Foundation for Child Care Child Development, and most recently, I joined the board of the City Fund, an organization that has been founded by Reed Hastings and John Arnold. In addition, I sit on the board of the New York City Police Foundation, uh, which is an interesting contrast to the organization that I chaired as co-chair some time ago called the Legal Defense Fund, which is actually the organization that started, was started by Thurgood Marshall.

So I've sort of gone full circle, uh, in that regard, and I still sit on the board of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, which, um, has become the largest hospital system dealing with COVID in the United States. So, um, in a nutshell, that has been my journey. That is how I'm spending my time these days in addition to talking to our CEOs on a regular basis.

Me: I can't hear you.

Sorry, I had muted it because my five-year-old was screaming downstairs, so I didn't want to. But no, I was saying, no, that's I think that that's really helpful for people to appreciate just the breadth of your perspective that you've had, especially in some of these organizations you're now on.

Maybe, you know, maybe getting straight to the moment we're in, you know, you mentioned that we haven't seen something like this since 1968. What do you think it is about now, uh, that that is different maybe or that everything is culminating to a head? And what do you think this moment will mean?

Bill: Um, I think, not to be flipped, but we really have, uh, Steve Jobs to thank to think in terms of why this moment is different—the iPhone. Um, we saw two terrible, uh, incidents, two very different incidents that were captured on videotape, but two very powerful incidents. Obviously, the callous murder of George Floyd by the police officer in Minneapolis was different. I don't think any of us, or certainly not a lot of us, have ever seen someone, uh, killed, um, on live television.

Um, I don't care who you are, um, where you are, uh, that was a moment in time that, um, was a modern day lynching, um, and, um, and that has touched a nerve unlike anything else that we've seen in this country.

The second incident that was captured on, on video was the, was the, uh, the scene in Central Park, which is literally, uh, right across the street from me. Um, that in a lot of ways was just as powerful, not to downplay the significance of a murder, but there was an African-American man who went to Harvard like I did, like my son does now, my youngest son does now. That was a man who was talking very peacefully and very respectfully, uh, to a woman who was violating our laws here in New York.

And there was a woman who is known figuratively by virtually everybody, uh, in New York City, everybody in the world of finance. This was a 40-year-old, well-educated, highly educated woman who worked for a major financial institution. So this was a person that all of us, um, metaphorically deal with, uh, every day.

And she was very thoughtful; it was all premeditated. She told this African-American man what she was going to do, how she was going to lie, um, and use and weaponize race, uh, if you will. And watching those two videos made us all realize in very different ways that we are in a moment in time that we need to stop and take stock of who we are and what we're trying to accomplish as a country and why not a lot has changed, uh, since 1968 when we last had very, very violent, uh, social unrest in our country.

And I think that is a really powerful way. I haven't, you know, we were all aware of all the different things that have been happening over the last several weeks or months, or frankly years. But I think those kind of the bookends of those two issues, because I think that's right, that second one, it didn't result in someone's death. But it, it, very transparently showed that people, people that we would expect much better of, frankly, uh, that they were in many ways.

I mean, you know, just to add context to it, you know, this is a woman who's threatening to call the police, and she knew that, you know, in a, in kind of this he said, she said, she would get the benefit of the doubt. And if she, if she told the police that he was threatening her, that, you know, it would be, it could be a scary thing for him.

The question is, what do you think, you know, to your point, the, you know, having everyone having smartphones, it sheds some light on this. But obviously for every incident that is recorded, there's probably another hundred that don't get recorded. How do you think this plays out? Like, you so, the first step is to be able to recognize it is happening to have documentation, and so we are there. Where do you think this goes? What are the reforms that you think need to happen? You know, some of them could be legal reforms. Is it something in how policemen are trained, but there's other things that are, I guess, I guess you could only describe as cultural reforms?

Bill: So, Sal, that's a great question, and let me sort of ramble a bit. First of all, let me say that I don't think—and I could be naive and I could be proven wrong—I don't think for every one incident that is captured on video, there are a hundred that are not. Because that would suggest that, um, that we've only seen one percent of the sort of violence, um, and indifference, uh, that exists, and I don't think our country is that bad.

But, but I take your point. We are not, but almost by definition, um, we can't possibly, uh, see and know everything, uh, that is going on. And even as we saw in the case of the jogger in Georgia being murdered, even when there is video, there's no guarantee, uh, that, that we're gonna see it.

Um, so look, I think, um, in terms of framing where we go from here, um, I think there will be several versions of actions of a transformation of our society. And I'm not a big tech person, witness how difficult it was for me to dial into your call. Um, but what we saw, um, in some cases, uh, what we are seeing, um, is what I call version 1.0 of a reckoning. And that is our leading institutions—whether they're colleges, high schools, businesses, political offices—we're all putting out statements of support and acknowledgement that this time is different, and our voices must be heard.

And that is a bare minimum. You look at every professional sports organization in this country. I think 31 of 32 NFL football teams have put out statements and so forth and so on. So version 1.0 largely revolves around words.

Um, version 2.0, which is also underway, um, involves checking the box around monetary donations, um, encouraging, um, employees to give to their favorite charity that could address some of these issues with companies matching, uh, those donations.

Version 3.0, uh, involves really substantial financial contributions—Morgan Stanley, uh, where I worked for a long time, uh, sent a five million dollar check over to the Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood's organization, uh, last week, and we're going to see a lot more of that. Bank of America announced that it's going to spend a billion dollars on doing this.

But ultimately, version 4.0 is going to involve more than simply writing checks and more than speaking words. It's going to involve taking substantive transformative action around, uh, change and it's gonna have to be something that can be measured.

I will make a small wager to anybody that in, in one year's time, every media outlet, every television station, streaming service, every newspaper will have a highly promoted, um, feature program, and it'll be—and it'll be some version of the following title: "Memorial Day 2021: The One-Year Anniversary of the Death, the Murder of George Floyd. What Has Changed?"

And I can guarantee you that everybody will look back and ask what has changed. And I think forward-thinking leaders will start thinking about that now. The one thing that the business community does extremely well, probably better than any other institution in our country, and that is, uh, we measure stuff. We measure everything. If it's important to us, we measure it. If it's important to us, we hold people accountable.

If people sort of accomplish their goals and do, uh, what we have set up to measure, then they get rewarded. They get promoted. They get paid. They get rewarded. If they don't, uh, then they're dealt with as well. They get fired, they get demoted, or what have you.

And so the business community is already, um, having some soul-searching discussions around what are we going to measure and how we're going to look different a year from now, what will be our contribution to continuing the dialogues that have started? I should have said also that, uh, even before version 1.0, the most basic thing that has to happen, uh, before we can go anywhere, will be honest conversations and getting out of your comfort zone.

I have told all my partners at Lazard—there are only three African-American partners at Lazard, the rest are white. I've told every single one of them that they need to go through their contacts and identify seven or ten, seven to ten, uh, African-Americans, uh, whom they know. They may know them well, they may not know them well, they may have been high school classmates; they may, you know, see them occasionally in church or somewhere, but they need to call them and they just need to listen and hear and try to understand what is going on at this moment in time.

It's a very, very uncomfortable conversation to have. It's probably not uncomfortable for the first two or three people you call because you've known them for a long time, but to try to reach out to somebody that you haven't talked to in 10 or 15 years and say, "Tell me what you're experiencing right now," is something that I think should be a required moral exercise for, uh, for everybody in this country.

And by the way, I'm in turn reaching out to the hundreds and hundreds of people that I have interacted with, the thousands of people that I've interacted with over my lifetime to say, um, I'm calling you because I know you're thinking about these issues and I know you're wondering what can you do.

And when it is super helpful and, you know, if we imagine ourselves a year in the future and we're, you know, we're having this conversation again—and I agree with you, there probably will be shows to that nature—you know, we're getting questions off of Facebook and YouTube on, on, you know, what are the levers that hopefully will change by then.

You know, Maya Balarama says, you know, what are your thoughts on people reacting to this in the other extreme, defending police?

Actually, Susan Garcia Dominguez—and obviously you have a relationship with, uh, some of the, uh, police groups inside of New York. You know, what is—obviously emotions are running very high right now. What are the levers that you would like to see changed a year from now or two years from now or ten years from now?

Bill: Um, well first of all, um, let's just talk a minute about, uh, defunding the police. I think, unfortunately—excuse me—that's a charged word. Um, I think people need to appreciate that by default, our police departments have been asked to do a lot of things. And fundamentally, our police are here to protect and to serve us.

Um, but our police are not social workers, and our police are not health care workers. Um, early in New York City, we asked our police to enforce social distancing. Uh, we asked—out—and that's a charged word, and force. Police aren't trained to enforce social distancing.

And so if you look at the budgets of the police department and you look at some of the things that police have been asked to do—so for instance, a lot was made of us shutting down our subway system for the first time in a hundred plus years in order to clean it every night between the hours of one o'clock and five o'clock in the morning.

Police were asked to go into the subway to to assist the homeless and to remove the homeless in order to disinfect those trains. It's questionable as to whether or not that's a job for the police. What the police decided to do was to take nurses into the subway stations with them and homeless advocates with them to, uh, to figure out what to do with the homeless people in the subway stations.

That is money that the police department is spending on services that fundamentally aren't policing. And, and so when we say defunding, what we're really talking about, what I think people are talking about, is reallocating money that has been parked with the police department to cover a whole range of services that aren't policing, uh, in their orientation.

By the way, as an analogy as well, the largest part of the New York City budget is on education. We spend 30 billion dollars of our 90 billion dollar budget on education, but we do a lot more in our public schools than educate. We serve more meals in the New York City public schools than any other institution other than the U.S. military.

So we are a huge provider of food. We provide, in effect, shelter. We provide daycare. And so, uh, one could argue that those funds should really be under health and service, health and welfare, um, housing, or what have you.

So, um, I don't think defunding in and of itself of the police department or the education department is what we're, we're talking about. We're really talking about allowing the police to do what they're supposed to do, um, in a smart, intelligent, and thoughtful way, in a respectful way.

Now, having said that, um, there are very, very, very specific things that should be, uh, addressed as they relate to policing reform. Um, the current head of the, uh, Legal Defense Fund is a woman named Cherylin Eiffel, I-F-I-L-L. She just wrote a very detailed article in Slate magazine; it's about three days old.

She lists probably 15 very specific and reasonable reforms for our nation's police department. I would encourage everybody to read those reforms. They’re very sensible, um, they are in the best interest of our country. Um, if you ask what should change, uh, within the next year, I would start there because those are actionable items and those acting on those items, um, will tell us what side are you on. Um, and, and not acting on those items similarly will tell us what side are you on.

That's super valuable. And you know, just to—I mean, as a nature, I'm definitely going to take a look at that right after this. Is it the nature of it, is you know, things like improving training? Is it things like, um, making it easier for a sheriff to let someone go who's under disciplinary action? Things like that.

Bill: You start with the most sensible and the most basic. There should be a database—a national database—on all law enforcement officials. If you get fired for killing somebody illegally in New York City by using a chokehold, you shouldn't be able to go across the river and get rehired in Newark, New Jersey. Um, right now, there is no way for us to track, um, those kinds of offenses on a nationwide basis—that's a huge loophole in the enforcement of civil rights in dealing with injustices.

Um, we have something in New York, um, that's called, uh, Section 50a. It revolves around, um, uh, disclosing certain information—certain disciplinary information on all cops. Right now, that is private information. Many cities make that information public.

Um, we are talking about training. We are all talking about de-escalation. I like to say that every cop should wake up every morning and before he or she brushes their teeth should repeat the word de-escalation ten times. That should be the mantra. The vast, vast majority of encounters between the police and our citizens should result in some sort of de-escalation.

And New York City spends a lot of time training its officers on how to de-escalate. And by the way, de-escalation is much easier when the police officer looks very much like the community in which they're policing. And so it looks very different when the police officer does not look like the community in which they're policing.

Police officers are meant to be guardians, not warriors. And that is sort of a critical part of our training. But I don't have the list in front of me, um, and I haven't committed it to memory, which I probably should. But I would just advise people to just pull it up; it's very—you could easily pull it up online.

That's super helpful. And you know, we have some questions here, um, where, uh, you know, Maximilian Bissonnette—uh, about, well, they're asking for a question around systemic racism.

Uh, a lesson on systemic racism—one Khan Academy. But this term systemic racism is something we're hearing a lot of now. What—how do you think that manifests itself in this? And it's obviously broader than the notion of policing because a lot of what you just described are kind of, it seems like, very pragmatic policies to help better accountability, better transparency, better training for police officers.

You know, the whole de-escalation thing makes a lot of sense, but that still doesn't seem to necessarily get at the heart of, of potentially, you know, systemic racism. And, and, and how systemic racism—and it depends how you define it, you know, pervades more of society. What does that term mean to you and, and how do you get at that?

Bill: Um, what we saw in the case of the Central Park Birder was systemic racism. Um, there I am sure that that 40-year-old graduate of the University of Chicago, um, uh, living in one of the most liberal communities in the United States— the Upper West Side of Manhattan, working at one of the highest-profiled financial services companies in the world—um, exposed on a regular basis to a very, very diverse community and population, very, very thoughtfully announced in advance how she was gonna lie to the police department about what was unfolding, uh, in that park in broad daylight, by the way.

Um, that could have resulted in a death of that African-American man because if the police had shown up and it was sort of his word against her word, um, and if he had done any things—moved his hand very quickly or what have you—he could have been dead. That is the raw definition of systemic racism.

And, and, and so I don't know how we deal with that until we have had an ongoing and sustained national conversation around race. Um, and I know the people like Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Institute and Darren Walker at the Ford Foundation are trying to facilitate that.

But in this moment in time, I think we are talking about a series—an ongoing series of discussions, um, around racism and how do we get here. Coming back to what you do so well, and that is education, um, I think there is a huge opportunity, a huge must-do for us to think about how we, uh, put this topic into our classrooms, um, early. How do we instruct our teachers to have this discussion with four-year-olds and five-year-olds and six-year-olds?

We are amazingly creative and thoughtful about using technology and the like to solve some really, really, really tough, uh, education, uh, questions. I think that we're gonna have to think really, really differently about how we get the discussion and how we get exercises and how we teach the whole concept of systemic racism.

I don't know; I don't have an answer for that. But I would say that I believe the vast majority of parents, um, were shocked when they heard the videotape of the woman in Central Park. And I believe that the vast majority of parents would be appalled if, if, if they knew that they had friends who could talk like that.

Well, God forbid their children could talk like this. And so I pose this as a real opportunity and a real challenge for our educators.

Me: I can't hear you.

Oh, sorry. No, my bad. My kids are making a ridiculous amount of noise downstairs. They're just playing the piano and screaming. And anyway, this is, you know, [Music] [Laughter] my five-year-old is under the impression that the police are, you know, and this goes maybe to your previous point, maybe the police are invoked a little bit too much, but I've definitely threatened him sometimes.

Um, the—I guess maybe, you know, some final words. There's obviously a lot of people with a lot of energy right now, um, around it. What, you know, I like this idea of the very tangible things mentioned in the Slate article, and I think our team has just put the link to that article in the message boards on Facebook and YouTube for everyone to look at.

But what should happen to the energy around the protest? You know, there is a world where they say, "Hey, you know, here are the five reforms we need to see." There's a world where they say, "We're just going to keep doing it because people need to see it." You know, there might be elements in the protest of even also economic, um, anger or displacement that are mixed in with the, the racial, um, systemic racism.

How do you think the protests are going to evolve, and what advice would you have for the people who are on the streets? Where—how should that evolve?

Bill: Um, excuse me, we had, um, massive protests, civil unrest in the early 60s, and that led to the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, one in 1964 and one in 1965. Um, the immediate result of these protests should lead to people coming out to vote in November and making changes from top to the bottom.

Um, people chose not to vote in 2016 for, for any number of reasons, and there were consequences to not voting. The most basic right that we all have and the most basic obligation that we all have is to translate protests into action.

And the most basic action that we can take revolves around voting, and voting at the federal level, voting at the state level, and voting at the local level. The voices are there unlike any that most of the people in this call have ever seen. Um, and the will is there, and the vast, vast, vast majority of the protests—protesters, in excess of probably 99%—are protesting peacefully, and they need to continue these peaceful protests, um, right up through Election Day, uh, in November.

The other thing that people around the country should be doing is going to visit in mass their police chief and their mayors, and demanding an answer to the following question: How can we be assured that what happened in Minneapolis will never happen in our city?

It could be a city of 10,000 people, it could be a city of 100,000 people, but people need to get into the nitty-gritty and understand if what they saw happening in Minneapolis could happen in their hometown.

But I think, so the most important thing that that everybody can do is translate protests into voting. The business community will be doing a lot of things, uh, and I'm sure the not-for-profit world will be doing a lot of things, and the education community will be doing a lot of things. They will all be very, very different.

But the one thing that we can all do, which is identical and it is a requirement, it is a right, it is an obligation, is to vote.

Me: Yeah, no, I think those are very actionable, doable things for anyone listening.

Well Bill, you know, whatever these conversations—and you know, I've, I learned a lot in the last 25-30 minutes that we've had the chat to chat, and I know a lot of the folks, uh, watching on YouTube and Facebook have as well. Um, it's always, you know, I think you have a gift for, uh, kind of cutting through issues quite, um, incisively, so thank you for that.

And I hope we can do this again, especially as, uh, you know our world continues to evolve. I really appreciate this conversation.

Bill: It's been my pleasure. I guess I've got a question—I didn't realize we were on YouTube or Facebook; how do I send that to my kids?

Me: Oh, well we'll send you the link for sure. My apologies if I didn't tell you that we are—we've been live for the last 25 minutes.

Bill: Yeah, I knew, but you've been doing great.

Me: Yeah, I knew it was live; I just didn't know what it was live to, so I appreciate that.

Bill: Okay, okay. Well, you know, sometimes the best conversations are the ones where you don't think, uh, there's a lot of folks watching. But, no, I, from the feedback on Facebook and YouTube, I think a lot of people have really appreciated your thoughts, and I think, you know, it's interesting because we've been hearing about this, you know, almost continuously on the news for several weeks now.

But, you know, a lot of what you said in the last 20 or 30 minutes, um, was, you know, it kind of sparked some ahas in my mind, and I don't think I'm alone. So, and it was very actionable and tangible, which I think is really, really valuable right now. So I appreciate that.

Bill: Well, I enjoyed it. Thank you very much for having me.

Me: Thanks so much, Bill.

Okay, take care.

So thanks, thanks everyone for joining today. Uh, I don't know if you heard some of my kids screaming, uh, downstairs, my apologies for that. But you know, we're, we're keeping it real here. Uh, then we're cutting trees outside of my other place, so I am, that's why I'm in the noisier place right now.

Uh, but you know, I, if you're like me, I always find I've had, you know, the privilege of having several conversations with Bill over the years on things like education and equity.

Uh, and, uh, as, as I would have guessed, you know, he really cut through the issues I thought in a very, uh, useful way.

Um, so hopefully you enjoy that. Uh, tomorrow we're going to continue the conversation. We're going to have Fareed Zakaria; I'm sure that conversation will also, uh, get into a lot of what's going on in the world. And then on—let's see, tomorrow—and then I think on Thursday, it's all a blur to me—we're going to have, uh, well, later this week, we're going to have Francis Ford Coppola to talk about, uh, creativity and probably things like narratives and how to make sense of the world as well.

So, uh, thanks everyone for joining, and I look forward to seeing all of you on future live streams!