A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues

On May 31st, 2020, six days after the murder of George Floyd, Stephen Roger's daughter, Ariel sent him a text. In it, she told her dad that the Black community was suffering and that he needed to talk to them-- that he needed to address the community as if he were the President of the United States. His daughter's plea led him to record a podcast that did just that, urging the Black community to both keep up the fight and take care of themselves. But Rogers also recorded a second podcast, this one addressing a white audience, telling them exactly what they could be doing to help support the Black community. The positive response to that episode led Rogers, a retired HBS professor, to write his recent book, A Letter to My White Friends and Colleagues: What You Can Do Right Now to Help the Black Community. And in this episode of Skydeck, Rogers and I talk about the makings of America's racial wealth gap, why he thinks it is a root cause of the nation's racial crisis, and the tangible steps necessary to help erase it.