After Californians passed Proposition 209 more than 20 years ago, preventing hiring managers and admissions officers from considering race in public education, contracting and employment, Walter Wilson co-founded the Minority Business Consortium. Based in San Jose, the group aims both to support minority- and women-owned businesses across California and to increase diversity at major companies, government agencies and academic institutions.

That task has become even more crucial amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has hit Black and Latino residents of the Golden State especially hard and forced many businesses to shutter or scale back dramatically.

Q: Tell me about the Minority Business Consortium. 

A: We all know that the racial disparities, particularly economic disparities, are real and they always have been, historically particularly for women, Latinos and Blacks. Women in the state only get paid about 80 cents on the dollar of White men and these are White women. Minority women make roughly half of that. That’s tragic.

Our whole goal is to try to level the playing field across the board. We help underrepresented individuals and businesses successfully obtain employment opportunities in management positions, as well. You look around Silicon Valley, you don’t see very many Black people at all on these boards.

Q: How has the coronavirus changed your work?

A: Covid has exacerbated and really highlighted the types of inequities that are already here, affecting Black-, women- and minority-owned businesses. The lifeblood of any business is credit. When you look at White-owned businesses who seek credit, (many) of their applications are approved. With Black businesses, (few) are approved for credit and this is across the country. It’s even worse in places like Silicon Valley.

If this administration right now doesn’t come up with another plan to help, economically, minority — particularly Black — businesses are the ones that are going to go out of business first.

Q: Which businesses are being hit hardest?

A: I think restaurants are in great peril. Their lifeblood is people coming into their businesses and being able to sit down and eat food. People right now say, “Oh, you can get it to go.” But when people are sitting in a restaurant, they’re likely to spend 15-20% more money than if they just buy food to go. The other thing is, with buying food to go, when you’re dealing with DoorDash or people like that, you’re losing 20-25% of your profit. If you’re a minority-owned business, you don’t have the credit, the financial capacity to withstand something like this. Many businesses have gone out of business and will never come back.

Q: What are the long-term impacts?

A: There’s been decades of inequality and that’s made it hard for many of these businesses to flourish in the first place. The setbacks are dramatic because businesses — particularly Black- and minority-owned businesses — face a wave of uncertainty in this economic era. And we don’t have the wealth, we don’t have the access to credit, we don’t have access to the capacity to withstand another wave of this.

Black people have been leaving the state of California in droves for years. Racism is just below the surface and it still continues to exist, even here in Silicon Valley. The number of Blacks in (large tech companies) is dismal. I’d say, “How many Black people do you have?” They’d say, “We believe in diversity.” Great, how many Black people you got?

One of the big things that’s happening with these big developments, high tech companies and so on is displacement. They are displacing people of color at a major clip. When you look at places like downtown San Jose, where the Google village plan is coming in, Google’s plan in theory is designed to really begin to try to address some of the disparity. They want to make sure that even in building their project downtown, they have minority construction companies and others involved with that, and we applaud that.

We’ve been working with people like Google and building and trades (groups). Any opportunity to engage is going to begin to address some of the disparities and keep some of these small and minority-owned construction companies and construction-related companies in business through this tough time.

During this covid era, all of these things become really magnified, because all businesses are now struggling and suffering to survive, so the dominant businesses with all the money to begin with make sure their business will survive at the exclusion of those smaller, weaker minority-owned businesses.

Q: What are businesses telling you they need to survive?

A: They need money, they need business, they need access, they need support…just come support our business as much as possible under the circumstances. If you have a restaurant, for example, recently you can eat outdoors, and all the sudden the fires happen. This is one of the craziest years I’ve ever seen in my life.

Q: What else would you like to add?

A: The pandemic has been devastating not just our businesses, but our lives. The numbers of minorities dying from this, it’s off the charts. We have to find a way for these businesses to come back and thrive and at the same time protect the lives of the people who are most impacted by this. If we can save these minority-owned businesses, we can save everyone and therein lies the key. All ships must rise together. If we don’t rise together, we fall separately and that’s not where we want to be as Americans.

Walter Wilson

Age: 66

Position: CEO and co-founder of Minority Business Consortium

Hometown: San Francisco

Residence: San Jose

Education: Attended DeVry University

Five interesting facts

  1. Wilson has a computer consulting background.
  2. The Minority Business Consortium launched 11 years ago and has around 3,500 members, mostly in California.
  3. When he’s not working, Wilson enjoys fishing.
  4. He used to build office furniture.
  5. Wilson remembers visiting San Jose’s many orchards as a kid to get fruit.