Over his 35-year career in corporate America, Dr. Lanze Thompson has often been one of few, if not the only, people of color in the room. As a Black man working in finance at some of the largest companies in the world, he’s no stranger to conversations about diversity, equity and inclusion but notes there’s still work to be done. He says, “The diversity part, corporations are working very hard at. They wanted people like myself in the room … but the equity and inclusion part, we still haven’t gotten that right.” The desire to create more opportunities for Black students, and to help better prepare them for corporate America, was one of the driving forces behind Dr. Thompson’s move to academia. In 2018, he was named the senior vice president of financial services at famed HBCU, Clark Atlanta.
Though it took him nearly 35 years to circle back to academia, education was a constant theme in his early life. The Boston native was born the second of nine children living in a housing project in the city. Despite the fact that his mother only had an eighth-grade education herself, she pushed formal education on her children. He says, “Education was drilled into me at a very early age as being very important.” With education came opportunities and a chance to improve his situation in life. After graduating from his high school as valedictorian, the noted business leader entered Colby College, a predominantly white institution (PWI) in Maine that was trying to diversify its student body. But transitioning to that environment had its pitfalls, and the former star student was doing poorly in his classes. He says, “It was a sense of doubt … ‘Do I even belong here?’”
After a brief stint at Louisiana’s Grambling State University, the former college football player opted to finish his economics degree at Colby. His experiences there primed him to enter corporate America. He says, “[Attending a PWI] really helped me understand that I am going to be in environments where people don’t look like me, where people don’t think like me.” But that doesn’t mean the published author isn’t critical of the business world’s often feeble attempts to be more “diverse.” He says, “You notice when you’re the only one — it has this unbelievable sense of silent weight that’s on you.” Many times, being Black in corporate America means continuing to show up — even through widespread and highly visible Black violence like we experienced in the summer of 2020 with the death of George Floyd.
It was that pivotal summer that spurned Dr. Thompson to write his recent book “Black Wounds: The Pain, Scars, and Triumphs of Black America,” published in late 2021. He says, “A shift came about when I started seeing one case after another of a Black person either killed or abused in the street … I can’t turn my eyes away from that.” The book, a hybrid of original poetry and research-based narratives, is a window into the realities of being Black in America. For the respected business and community leader, this was more important than equal pay or promotion. This was about preserving Black life. He reviewed historical inequities in housing, policing, healthcare and found that we weren’t making advances — Black people are still behind. He says, “These things weren’t changing — the way policing in Black communities were, the discrimination in school and housing … one metric after another, I went back and looked, these things haven’t moved in 50 or 60 years.”
According to Dr. Thompson, it’s clear that these inequities keep Black people in “survival mode” and stop us from moving forward. He says, “Every time you’re in a mode for surviving, then you’re not in the mode of thriving and reaching self-actualization.” We end up with yet another generation of one or two of us at the table because so many never get the chance to even make it into the room.