Sep. 14, 2013

National, state luminaries headline diversity panel

Bingham McCutchen LLP Chairman Jay Zimmerman hosted an all-star panel of speakers with diverse backgrounds at the San Francisco Jazz Center Tuesday night in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Thurgood Marshall Jr., a partner at Bingham, spoke about the importance of successful people from diverse backgrounds giving back by mentoring underserved children. "What you find about mentoring is you learn as much as they do," he said. John Yang, an openly gay NBC News correspondent who moderated the event, said he worries that children growing up today lack perspective on the fact that people like President Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and everyday people had to work to ensure the right for African-Americans to vote. "Have we lost something?" he asked. Former Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice agreed. She spoke about her experience growing up in Birmingham, Ala., when the national guard had to enforce the end of segregation at colleges. She said her students today view that period of time as ancient history. "You have to instill in individuals a kind of toughness to take on injustice on their own behalf," she said. Rice pointed to Jason P. Collins, the first active NBA player to come out as gay, as an example of someone who never had the luxury of a mentor that had similar experiences to his. She said someone had to be the first openly gay NBA athlete, and he stepped up. Collins said his decision to come out allowed him to live his life in an honest fashion, relieving internal pressure on his own psyche, but also turned him into a role model for closeted homosexuals across the world. Collins said it was a surreal and humbling experience to have older professionals, like a teacher he met in a restaurant, refer to him as a role model. "Once you tell that first person and then the second," he said, "it just feels better and better." California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye said the diverse experiences in her life aided her professional development. She explained that she learned to read people while dealing blackjack earlier in life. "It's not just race and gender. It's also experience," she said. Rice and Cantil-Sakauye agreed that improving the education system is the most important issue of our time and that leaders have to change their mentality away from the old-school, punative view of keeping children in line. "Children who are suspended or expelled are three times as likely to end up in the juvenile justice system," Cantil-Sakauye said. William H. Swanson, CEO of military contracting company Raytheon Co., which has won a number of diversity-related awards over the years, said he discovered the importance of diversity while studying at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, where he found himself on a very diverse working group because of the international nature of the engineering field. "I found everyone came at the problem differently because of their backgrounds, and we came up with a very elegant solution," he said. Rice said she worried that many Americans were unaware of the positive aspects of immigration. "Immigrants are the lifeblood of our country, and I worry that we're losing that." — Joshua Sebold