Black people in banking

Hello,
I am a black person, and I was visiting other investment banking websites and have noticed that there are very few of us in these jobs.
I was very discouraged by this because I believe we deserve a fair chance wherever we are at. What is going on? I have not seen a black MD on many investment banking websites, and it seems to be a white-dominated world.

I don't mean to play the race card, but what is going on?

 
Best Response

I know a black senior director who works for a top PE firm with a long career in banking before that. I know its anecdotal, but I think that if you are driven to do it you will succeed just fine.

I WOULD think in this day and age there is a lot more emphasis on equal opportunity. I honestly couldnt tell you though since I am a middle-middle class italian-american raised by two parents with no idea what it is like to grow up from a disadvantaged background. I guess of you take the %of black people who grow up with a support structure to give them a better chance at success in an early age, and the % of those who take that opportunity to be successful in high school to then go to a top undergrad, and then have the drive to break into banking, get a top MBA, and the go back into banking, the numbers dwindle each step of the way. There are a lot more whit people who come from a priviledged background and hit the ground running from an early age--and learn in high school what they need to do to get into finance.

In high school I thought wall street was just buying and selling stocks and taking risk. I had a friend who went to Wharton undergrad on scholarship and I thought I had the better deal going to the Air Force Academy--because I had no idea about finance, and if you wanted to be successful you needed to learn a technical skill like engineering. I thought finance was for dummies. I was the dummy.

 

I'm not even a banker yet but I'll give this question a shot Disclaimer: this might be a bit biased because I am a minority too

  1. African Americans make up about 10% of this country, so right off the bat you can reasonably expect that ratio at investment banks
  2. Banks recuit from only certain schools. In my target school, for example, the percentage of african americans is even lower than the national average. like 8%
  3. African Americans have an average lower socioeconomic status than whites. So many who do make it to these target schools might want to do more proactive, useful things to give back to their community if they came from a poor background, rather than simply go into wallstreet and try to get rich. Example: Obama becoming a community organizer after graduating from Columbia
  4. Wall street has traditionally been a white dominated community. So there is probably some racism still around, especially when people view us minorities as a quota they have to fulfill

so all in all this gets us down to, what, ballpark 4 out of 100 bankers should be african americans?

I might be wrong but it's something to think about

 

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