NEWH - Fall 2020 - 6

GUEST PERSPECTIVE

From My Perspective
JASON REYNOLDS
Director of hospitality and A&D,
Fortune Brands Global Plumbing Group

am from Lorain, Ohio-the town that birthed Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author
Toni Morrison. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of interviews where Ms. Morrison
speaks of the way that Lorain shaped her. My favorite shared sentiment was this one:
"I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I
left Lorain. ...I thought the whole world was like Lorain." I felt this at my core. I lived on the
southside, on E. 39th Street, where I played kickball with Jason Gonzales and Jason Metzger
(three shades of Jason, all in one 3rd grade class), where Mary Kolczun taught my mom to
cook stuffed cabbage, and where Michelle Bors (Gene and Kathy's daughter from across the
street) babysat me when my parents needed a night out. Between our neighborhood and
the diverse congregation where we worshipped, at 11, I was only skimming the surface of the
harsh realities of the world.

Jason Reynolds

Who knew those harsh realities were only 15 minutes away in Amherst, Ohio. I started 7th
grade at Nord Jr. High School after my father built a house on the outskirts of Lorain but
within the Amherst Exempted Village School District. I was one of three black students in a
school of about 500 kids. By the time we hit high school where we were three out of 1000, I
came to know what it is to feel alone in a hostile environment. The surface level friendships
I had formed in junior high crumbled as the influence of upper classmen hit its mark. Shaun,
the kid I played basketball with and walked to the bus with every day, called me N***** after
an argument over who knows what. A fellow Puerto Rican classmate (freshman) was violently
thrown through the trophy case by a Junior football player requiring hundreds of stitches,
plastic surgery, months of rehab, and missed school. Upper classmen walked through the
halls wearing confederate flag shirts with the statement "You wear your X [Malcolm]... I'll
wear mine." They'd yell "Throw it up," followed by a Nazi salute when either me, Kendra
(Julian had left by then), or my Puerto Rican classmates were in shouting distance. I fought
a junior in the bathroom after he called my friend a "N***** lover" in the hall. Standing up
for myself led to KKK being painted on my house and swastikas being spray painted on my
driveway. Welcome to Amherst.
So what place do the now more than a quarter-century-old experiences of a 14-year-old Black
kid have in the context of a conversation about the hospitality industry? Like many Black
men and women, I have had to compartmentalize the racism I've experienced, as the residual
effects have the potential to negatively impact the essential interactions, alliances, and
partnerships that fuel us as people and professionals. To me, my story illustrates the stark
difference in interactions between white people who choose diversity versus those who live
in a lily-white world. I am the only Black person in most rooms I walk into professionally. In
most cases I no longer notice, but I do wonder how the younger me made it through the door
with all the baggage he carried. How did he do so well as he took the racial inventory of every
room he walked into the way Jason Bourne looks for exit points and potential threats? How
do other Black hospitality professionals manage? For some reason, even amongst ourselves,
I don't feel like we talk about it enough.
Here's what I know: despite the want of Black faces within the hospitality industry, I've
experienced a general feeling of acceptance of differences, be they in race, in sexuality, in
ethnicity or beliefs. I've worked in both single family and multifamily residential construction
in my 22 years with my company and hospitality has felt the most inclusive of the vast
array of talented, differentiated humans working in it. From the moment I started working

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NEWH - Fall 2020

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