IN REAL ESTATE

To address the diversity issues in the Real Estate industry, Eklund | Gomes co-founder John Gomes has a conversation about inclusion with members of his team.

By JOHN GOMES

We have a problem and I’m not afraid to talk about it. So I’ve invited five Eklund | Gomes team members to have a frank discussion about the diversity problems in real estate.

I’m talking about black people, women, Asians, and Hispanics and so on; there’s just not much diversity in the real estate industry across the board. It’s an issue we all know about, but there’s a sensitiv- research, read different books and learned about racism in real estate.

We shared that knowledge every week with one-and-a-half-hour round table discussions which we invited all people in the industry to partake in our zoom. It was powerful and very moving.

While we were going through that process, I came across something that somebody wrote that I reposted and I made some edits to it, but I’d like to share it here: “Some 400 years ago, white men enslaved black then 60 years ago, white people made it legal for black people to vote and to quote, “be free from discrimination.”

While schools were segregated, neighborhoods were created for white people only. It was harder for black people to get bank loans, quality education, healthcare, or to even marry a white person, all while another two to three generations of white families got to grow and pass their wealth down to their children. Then we entered the age where we have the technology to make public ity around it and it’s a little taboo to talk about. Our hope is that the platform we have at Eklund Gomes to have these types of frank discussions will help continue that conversation.

During the pandemic while we were on lockdown, we wanted to help ourselves and our industry understand what was going on in the world around us, so for eight consecutive weeks, we ran a Black Lives Matter seminar where seven of us did lots of people and sold them for 250 years. White men built the country, created its laws and its systems of government. While 10-plus generations of white families got to flourish 150 years ago, white men “freed” black people from slavery. They created laws that made it impossible for them to vote, own land or to have the same rights as white people. Another five-plus generations of white families got to grow and accumulate wealth, gain land and get an education. And the things that were already happening in private — the beatings, the stop and frisk laws, the unequal distribution of justice, the police brutality. And only now, after 400plus years and 20-plus generations, are we starting to truly have a dialogue about what it means to be black in America.

White privilege doesn’t mean you haven’t suffered, fought or worked hard. It doesn’t mean that white people are responsible for the sins of our ancestors. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be proud of who you are. It does mean that we need to acknowledge that the system our ancestors created is built for white people. It does mean that black people are at a disadvantage because of the color of their skin. It does mean that we owe it to our neighbors of all colors to acknowledge that and to make our world more equitable.”

I’m not here to point fingers. I’m not blaming white people for where we are today. And certainly, I’m not blaming the generation of people that surround us today who are much more informed and a lot less ignorant than many people in this country were a long time ago. However, I do think it’s important to acknowledge the history and the facts, because those facts are very important to understanding where we are today and where we can go in the future, on a path together.

The one word that keeps coming up for me is representation, because it’s important to have representation of all people within our industry. But also, when I think about representation, I think about real estate brokers;