Chief executives must advocate for racial justice: AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson

Well, you heard Tom Friedman, I was listening to a moment ago, and talked about how this legitimate cause for protests is being hijacked by a violent, riotous element. And he's right. But what we don't think is appreciated and what we don't talk about enough is if you go talk to the African-American employees in our companies and if you ask them, 'Be honest with me, how do you feel about this?' you're going to be surprised at what you hear. They relate to this injustice. They relate to this situation of law enforcement and how black people are treated differently. Becky, after that talk that I gave in 2016, a very prominent CEO of a company, and this individual, if I were to say his name, everybody that is in your viewership would know him. I'll never forget him coming up to me with his wife, talking about his instructions to his teenage children: if they're driving home at night into a very prestigious neighborhood they're in, New York, they're black, and he tells them, 'If it's after dark, roll up your windows, turn down the music, and if you happen to get stopped by police, get out of the car and immediately put your hands on the roof.' Now, this is a very prominent African-American businessman, and then well-to-do. And I'm thinking to myself when he told me that, you know, I never gave that instruction to my kids. I never told my kids to behave that way and then to respond that way to law enforcement. In fact, I always take great comfort in law enforcement being around if my children were out at night. But I'm just, the only point being, the African-American community is viewing this consistently and it's a pervasive view. And so all of us CEOs have large African-American employee bodies that we owe it to them to make sure that we're speaking to this and that we're asking our policy makers to step up, asking our political leaders to step up and recognize and just say it: we got a problem. We have a big problem and it needs to be dealt with.

No, we starting in 2016, we initiated a number of initiatives and programs that have had a significant impact within AT&T. But I would actually suggest to you that companies like AT&T and others, you know, we're very adept at effecting change in Washington if it's a priority. And I think we are now looking at an area that is a priority for business. And look, business, let's just be honest, we have a moral imperative to address this. But business doesn't work, free markets don't work in an environment where a large class of our people are perceiving and experiencing injustice. And social unrest is not exactly conducive to a functioning free market economy. And so we have an imperative to begin to use our muscle and our influence to begin to affect policy change to address this. And I think we as business leaders are going to need to put our shoulder into this and begin to try to move the needle.

Look, I'm not a social scientist and I don't think we can begin to think about public policies that correct racism. I mean, racism is what it is. But what we do and the way our system works is we enact laws to control the bad angels in our human nature. And I think it's time that we begin to ask those questions about what are the laws that need to be implemented to address this. And I just give you a classic example. And by the way, Cory Booker put out a piece that I thought was very thoughtful, very balanced, very rational. But one of the key proposals in it, and I will articulate it this way: there's a philosophy that Rudy Giuliani made prominent about broken windows policing. And what's the whole premise of this? You walk into a neighborhood and you see a lot of broken windows, it just sends a signal that we are tolerant of crime. And the question I have is, do we have policies within law enforcement that send a signal that we're tolerant of discrimination? And a classic example is racial profiling. If I were to use those kind of policies at AT&T, I would rightly be terminated, fired, and probably sued. But we allow, we actually have systems, we have procedures that allow for racial profiling. And what does that say? That says, just like broken windows, we have a tolerance for racial discrimination in law enforcement. Those kind of policies need to be challenged. Every mayor, every chief of police in the United States ought to answer to their constituency whether that is good and proper and best serving the communities where they operate.