United States Diplomatic Mission to Germany

As prepared for delivery.

Diversity in Education and the Workplace
Berlin, November 18, 2010
Ambassador Philip D. Murphy

It is a pleasure to visit one of Berlin’s newest and most innovative institutions of education, and how appropriate that I’m here during International Education Week, when we celebrate the enormous opportunities for student exchanges. International educational experiences and exchanges promote mutual understanding and bring people of different nations together to share ideas and compare values. They also nurture leadership and interpersonal skills that prepare students for the challenges of the 21st century. And that I believe is what the Cross-Cultural Mentoring Program here at the Berlin School of Economics and Law is all about. Mentors and mentees, if you have not already considered an exchange opportunity in the United States, please do so this evening. You may think you already know a lot about the United States, but I can assure you there is no substitute for actually living and studying there.

I would like to see more German students in our schools and more American students come to study in this country, so that we can continue to maintain and forge new ties between our two countries. Our common security and prosperity will depend on how you, the generation of tomorrow, work together across disciplines, across oceans, across borders, and across cultures.

Like President Christian Wulff, I, too, believe that the future belongs to those countries that are open to cultural diversity, to new ideas, to people from different backgrounds, and, yes, also to the unknown.

Just a little over two years ago today, on November 4, 2008, one of the most extraordinary national political campaigns in my country came to an end. Senator Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America. His election was exceptional for a number of reasons but today, I would like to focus on the message it sent about diversity – both in the United States and around the world – and the question of what role "identity" ought to play in our politics, and in our lives. President Obama’s father was black and came from Kenya; his mother was a white Midwesterner from Kansas; he has one half-sister who is partly Indonesian and who is married to a Chinese- Canadian; and he has Kenyan half-sisters and brothers in Kenya and Europe, including one who studied here in Germany. And he spent parts of his childhood in both Hawaii and Indonesia. As the President says, Obama family gatherings sometimes look like the United Nations.

In the United States, we believe that one of our great strengths is our very diverse culture. We learn from different histories, traditions and ideas, and that has made us a much more dynamic society. You may have heard America compared to a melting pot – ein Schmelztiegel; or you may also know the national motto of my country: e pluribus unum, which means "out of many, one." This motto originally referred to the 13 original colonies that joined to form one country, the United States of America, back in 1776, but it has taken on an additional meaning to describe the pluralistic nature of the American story as a result of immigration. I like the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s metaphor. He compares America to a vegetable soup where each ingredient retains its particular flavor and shape; but as the soup thickens, it gains in flavor because each vegetable adds a unique taste.

President Obama has said, "We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress." The United States has a long history of doing the hard work on diversity and integration and I would like to talk about some of that work tonight. I will not list here the history of racial injustice in my country. Many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the legacy of slavery. While not comparable to slavery in terms of either brutality or tragedy, successive waves of other immigrant groups throughout American history have also had to struggle to overcome obstacles, sometimes formidable, to find success and happiness.

My own ancestors came to America from Ireland. In the mid-1840s, a blight struck potato farms across all of Ireland. Out of a population of eight million, one million died of starvation and disease, and at least another one million emigrated – most of them to America. U.S. immigration records indicate that by 1850, the Irish made up 43 percent of the foreign-born population. They were the refugees, the poorest of all the immigrants. The going was tough and theirs was a daily battle for survival. In 1847, Boston, my home town, had a population of about 115,000. When 37,000 Irish Catholics arrived, the city grew by more than a quarter; it probably seemed like it happened overnight. Many of the original residents of Boston were descendants of English Puritans who could proudly list their American ancestors back to 1620. Some two hundred thirty years later, in the 1850’s, their city underwent a "social revolution." Proper Bostonians pointed and laughed at the first Irish immigrants, who, wherever they settled in those early years – whether in Boston or other cities like New York, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, or Chicago – often kept to themselves. They recreated the close-knit communities they had known in Ireland, enjoying a daily dose of gossip, conversation, story-telling, music, and ever-present jokes and puns. They were occasionally slow to assimilate, or as we say today, to integrate. By the same token, other Americans were also sometimes slow to accept them, preferring instead to judge them by cartoon stereotypes of Irishmen. Irish immigrants were described at times in the press as 'aliens' who were mindlessly loyal to their Catholic leaders in place of any allegiance to America. These problems were not quickly or easily overcome -- large problems rarely are -- but overcome they were.

The most extraordinary descendant of that wave of Irish immigrants was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose great-grandfather left Ireland in 1849. Although other Presidents had Irish roots, John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic President. To millions of Irish Catholic Americans, his election in 1960 signaled an end to the century-long struggle for full acceptance in the United States.

By the time of Kennedy's victory, descendants of the potato famine immigrants were leaving the old Irish working-class urban neighborhoods and settling into the new suburbs sprouting across America. People like my parents could start looking forward to a future for their children that could include a Harvard education or a top position in a corporation or the honor of representing their country abroad as Ambassador – based on their talents, their abilities, and their hard work.

Certainly, many Americans have failed in the face of discrimination. The United States is still an imperfect union. To perfect our union, as prescribed by our Constitution, we are still travelling that journey. But part of the struggle to extend rights to all of our citizens is also to accept that although we may have different stories and we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, we all want to move in the same direction. And so what's remarkable is indeed not how many Americans have failed, what's remarkable is how many women and men have overcome the odds and succeeded and made a way for those – like President Kennedy in 1960 and President Obama in 2008 – who would come after them.

Often exceptional individuals have indeed laid the way for change – not only Presidents but also "ordinary" people like Rosa Parks, a black seamstress who, tired after a long day's work, refused to move from her seat in order to accommodate a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. From the perspective of today, her actions back on December 1, 1955, hardly seem extraordinary; but in effect, they set in motion a revolution in the United States, a revolution that would eventually secure equal treatment under the law for all black Americans.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the pastor in Montgomery, Alabama at the time. To back up the principle of Rosa Parks’ simple and dignified actions, he led a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. It was the start of Dr. King’s civil rights activities, which led to the 1963 March on Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. The following year, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through nonviolence. By the time of his death in 1968, he had broadened and refocused his efforts on ending poverty.

In the 1960s, extensive civil rights legislation, initiated during the administration of President Kennedy and passed during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, opened up new opportunities and brought more minorities and women into the workplace. As with the Irish immigrants of the 1850s, their integration was a slow process. Women and minorities were hired and promoted far less frequently than white males, and paid less for the same work. So-called affirmative action measures were implemented to level the playing field in both educational institutions and the workplace, measures that granted modest advantages to minorities and women.

President Obama has re-opened the discussion on this topic and broadened the spectrum to include a wider swathe of socioeconomic issues. In an interview during the election campaign, he was asked whether he thought his daughters should get affirmative action protections. Obama responded, "I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged." He added: "I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."

President Obama’s commitment to the cause of leveling the playing field is unwavering. The very first bill that he signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. The law upheld one of America's founding principles: that we are all created equal, and that each person deserves a chance to pursue her or his own version of happiness. Lilly Ledbetter was a hard worker who did her job – and did it well – for nearly two decades before discovering that for years she had been paid less than her male colleagues for doing the very same work. She decided that there was a principle at stake, a principle worth fighting for. So she set out on a journey that would last more than ten years and take her all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and in the end, that would lead to legislation that bears her name. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act upholds the implicit promise made in the American Constitution that I referred to earlier of a union that can and should be perfected over time.

In pursuit of that perfect union, major advancements have been made in the United States. As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said, no country in the 21st century can advance if a large part of the population is left behind. The talents of everyone must be used, because the challenges we face require all of us. When we invest in women or minorities, we're not just investing in individuals. We are investing in families and we are investing in the next generation and we are investing in communities.

Diversity in education and the workplace in the U.S. is becoming the "status quo." This is not only because it is a morally sound decision, but also because it makes good business sense. Businesses that have a diverse workforce can harness the ideas and experiences of a wider range of individuals. In a recent study, based on the American experience, researchers compared a traditional, homogeneous workforce with thirty years experience to the paradigm of a more diverse workforce. A workforce composed of employees with a broad set of experiences, viewpoints, backgrounds and skills was clearly more innovative and, over time, more productive than a more homogeneous team of employees with the same skill sets. Again, using a sampling of American firms, another recent study demonstrates that firms that had successfully cracked the glass ceiling separating women and minorities from white males had significantly higher growth rates than firms with teams consisting only of white males.

Researchers are looking at the best solutions to the real-world difficulties of managing diversity in the workplace. They found that while diversity training was a popular approach, it was also the least effective at getting companies to hire and promote women and minorities. They also found that voluntary programs were better than mandatory ones, and those that focused on the threat of bias and harassment lawsuits were worse than those that did not. But even the better programs led only to marginal changes. What worked the best, as you probably know, Professor Schuchert-Güler, is exactly what you have instituted here at the Hochschule fuer Wirtschaft und Recht, i.e, measures such as mentoring programs.

Whether in business, government, or academia, the organizations that have allowed and proactively encouraged exceptional women and men of all backgrounds to realize their dreams and take their places at the top of their fields have the advantage.

The key word here is exceptional. I believe that the most important challenges and opportunities which confront us today do not derive from our ethnicity or our race, or our cultural or sexual identities. The particular features of one’s social condition, the external givens, set the stage for our lives, but they do not provide a script. The script is up to each one of us to write. That is why you have come to this university: to learn and discover, to grow as human beings, and to give meaning and substance to your lives.

In closing, I am going to once again return to my Irish roots and quote the writer James Joyce who in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, says this about Ireland and Irish nationalism: "When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight." He was talking about how nationality, language, and religion can be burdens. Wearing one’s cultural identity too heavily can hold young souls back from flight into the open skies of opportunity and discovery. The trick, as Joyce knew, is to turn such "nets" into wings, and then to fly.

And that is my advice to the students of the Berlin School of Economics and Law:  using your talents and your dreams, learn to fly, learn to soar.