| DELIVERING ON DIVERSITY, GENDER EQUALITY, AND INCLUSION
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| In this issue, we consider the distinction drawn by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. between jobs and economic security, and we reflect on what it meant to see Sidney Poitier on screen. |
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| In his 1966 article, “The last steep ascent,” the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that economic security was essential to Black Americans’ freedom—and he emphasized that a job did not necessarily confer security. Layoffs were all too common, and Black Americans were “traditionally the first fired and the last hired.” Black workers, King observed, “lack the seniority other workers accumulate because discrimination thwarts long-term employment.” The jobs available to Black Americans were “still substandard and evanescent.” |
| Today, nearly six decades later, the median annual wage for Black workers is approximately 30 percent, or $10,000, lower than that of White workers—a figure with enormous implications for household economic security, consumption, and the ability to build wealth. Black workers are concentrated in low-wage jobs and underrepresented in higher-paying professions. Black workers are also paid less, on average, than White workers in the same occupational categories, especially in managerial and leadership roles. |
| McKinsey estimates a $220 billion annual disparity between Black workers’ wages today and what they would be in a scenario of full parity, with Black representation matching the Black share of the US population across occupations and the elimination of racial pay gaps within occupational categories. Achieving this scenario would boost total wages for Black workers by 30 percent and draw approximately one million additional Black workers into employment. |
| What will it take to achieve this? Increasing Black representation in professional roles is part of the equation. It is equally important to improve the quality of the jobs held by millions of Black workers today—focusing on schedule predictability, workplace safety, benefits such as sick leave, and the wages paid for truly essential work. |
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| Wil Haygood remembers what it was like when Lilies of the Field came on TV. His mother and grandmother would call him into the house, and his whole family would sit on the sofa to watch Sidney Poitier in the 1963 classic. As Haygood explains, “Even if I had seen it three times, it was still a big moment in my family when it came on.” The Haygoods “knew how rare it was to see a Black face on screen.” |
| In his latest book, Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, Wil Haygood takes us back to the beginning. Haygood told McKinsey that he was struck by the depth of the pain that Black actors experienced. In interviews, many spoke to him about people he had never heard of—talented actors who throughout their lives had been told “no.” |
| Haygood observes that even today, Brown and Black filmmakers are the ones more likely to say “yes”: “Film sets with African American directors tend to be more multiracial.” This coincides with McKinsey’s finding that Black talent tends to be shut out of projects unless senior team members are Black. McKinsey research shows that films with a Black producer or a Black director are significantly more likely to have a Black writer than films without a Black producer or Black director. If a film’s producer is Black, the film is far more likely to have a Black director, too. |
| Poitier was outspoken about the discrimination that he and other Black Americans faced in show business—both the lack of representation and the lack of opportunity. In 1962, he told Congress that, to his knowledge, he was the only Black man then making a living as an actor in the motion-picture industry. In fact, he was often the sole Black person on set—including the extras and the technicians. At one studio, the only other Black man on the studio lot sold coffee from a tiny stand. At another, two Black men worked shining shoes. Most of the time, Poitier said in his testimony, the motion-picture companies only hired Black Americans for the nighttime cleaning crews. Meanwhile, the star actor was “too often used as a symbol”—held up as evidence that the industry was “making efforts to rectify the disgraceful situation of discriminatory practices in hiring.” |
| The racism in show business, Poitier told Congress, was the racism that existed all across America—“in the automobile industry or in the book-publishing industry or the dishwashing job in Georgia.” But the film, television, and theater industries were “years behind the fact of our reality.” |
| By then, Poitier had already made it, but at the front of his mind were those who had not—often after years of trying. “There are actors who are infinitely more gifted than I who have never had an equal opportunity for a job in their lives.” |
| As Haygood writes in Colorization, Sidney Poitier “got Hollywood to make movies with more diverse casts.” He “got producing and directing jobs.” And he “got Black stories up on the screen, stories that had previously been ignored.” |
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| — Edited by Gwyn Herbein, an assistant managing editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office |
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