(Reuters) - Frederick Baba, a managing director at Goldman Sachs who is black, sent the following email to colleagues at the bank on June 2:
"To everyone who's asked me some variant of "how's it going?" over the past month, I've probably lied. Or lacked the words to articulate it fully, but I’m giving it a shot. Obviously my experience is just one along a continuum of black experiences, and I don't presume to speak for all black people (or even all black people at Goldman Sachs). But the past few months have been demoralizing, and family/friends/colleagues I've spoken with and listened to across the firm and country seem to share this feeling. Being black has been nothing if not instructive. I've learned history and why people live where they do and why those in positions of power often don't look like me. I've learned that bad things are more likely to happen to black people solely because they're black. I learned which of my friends' parents didn't want me in the house growing up and who would be blamed if my friends broke the law. I've learned how to prove intelligent, to prove not threatening, to prove innocent after being assumed guilty. To prove human as this country litigates my personhood in case after case. As if our lives are expendable but we could never rebuild a Louis Vuitton store or a burned out Target. As if MLK's nonviolent philosophy allowed him to opt-out of death by white supremacy. As if COVID ravaging minority communities is an acceptable, inevitable cost, and our lives just aren’t worth the points off GDP. It’s a lot.
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