“For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night,” is a quote that is dear to Dottie. Its author, the late James Baldwin, and the recipient of the letter in which it appeared, Angela Davis, are both Black, lending it a multitude of meanings. Both embraced it as a statement of the interconnectedness of all human beings.
We’re now in a time when people and their governments worldwide are moving into silos. Fear, power and control, forever popular currencies, are braided and are being wielded with brutal efficiency in deportations, firings and threats. Silence is deafening and deadly. President Trump’s executive orders attacking Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and policies in both the private sector and the government have been highly successful. Public and private institutions and businesses that pledged support of DEI after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 are folding like cards while our government implements a special EZ Pass to residency here for Afrikaner farmers from South Africa, some of them likely beneficiaries of that country’s shameful legacy of apartheid.
We wondered what effect the DEI clampdown might be having on Gallo and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, which are large, influential, multi-generational companies in the beverage alcohol realm. Privately owned, they are not beholden to stockholders. We tried to speak to Stephanie Gallo, chief marketing officer of the company her grandfather and great uncle founded, because in the past she has spoken forcefully in support of DEI. Chasity Cooper quoted her in a 2021 article in SevenFifty.com as saying, “For our industry to grow, we have to reflect what America looks like today and what America will look like tomorrow. It is essential for our industry to adapt and evolve in order to be relevant to the next generation of alcohol beverage consumers. Diversity and inclusion encourage innovation and creativity, leading to a stronger company with better results.”
But we were told that she was too busy to speak to us or respond in writing the first time we asked and were directed to the company’s website. We were ignored the second time we asked for her to respond to our questions. The same thing happened when we asked to speak to Ted Seburn, Gallo’s chief officer of U.S. sales and international business, who spoke earlier this year at a conference presented by Southern Glazer’s about young consumers.
On Gallo’s website, among other things that indicate support for diversity measures, we found “Our Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion”: “We value the diverse skills, backgrounds, experiences and cultural differences every individual brings to the workplace. We believe that seeking diversity in all its dimensions encourages innovation and creativity, leading to a stronger company with better results. Our initiatives will focus on ensuring equity and opportunity for all. We are committed to Diversity and Inclusion and fully acknowledge it is a journey.”
The company has seven Employee Resource Groups, employee-driven organizations that are open to all but focus on specific populations like veterans, African-Americans, women, the LGBTQ+ community, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, BIPOC, and people with disabilities.
We got more response from Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, a powerful distributor that was co-founded by the Chaplin family. Its long and deep partnership with Florida International University in Miami resulted in the naming of one of FIU’s schools Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management.
On Nov. 29, 2021, the company released this press statement: “Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits (Southern Glazer’s)—the world’s preeminent distributor of beverage alcohol—and Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management, the leading diverse hospitality school in the country—today announced a groundbreaking Alliance focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management. This initiative is part of an ongoing commitment to address gaps in underrepresentation and inequity across the hospitality industry. The Alliance will create a broad range of opportunities including educational programming, academic research, recruiting, mentoring, career pathing, scholarships, employee training/micro-credentialing and other partnerships. The Alliance includes the first-ever DEI-Endowed Faculty Chair at FIU—of which Southern Glazer’s was the charter supporter. In July, the FIU Chaplin School announced it had appointed Brian Barker as the school’s endowed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Professor.
“In addition to the Alliance, Southern Glazer’s announced a new Marvin and Hazel Shanken DEI Scholarship, named in honor of the publisher and founder of M. Shanken Communications and his wife—who have donated millions of dollars to support various causes in the hospitality community over a 40-year timespan. The scholarship will benefit students enrolled at the FIU Chaplin School,” the press release said.
However, in 2024, the South Florida chapter of Meeting Professionals International, an education and advocacy organization for the meeting and event industry, posted an announcement that Brian Barker had left FIU, stating, “Unfortunately, his ability to continue this valuable work was impeded by state legislation.” We looked further because Florida and Texas are among the states going full-throttle in choking DEI and hospitality is such a huge industry. As the Chaplin school cites in its literature, a degree in hospitality and tourism management offers opportunities in beverage management, restaurant and hotel operations, event and entertainment management and tourism.
It turned out that by September 2023, Barker had left FIU and become first a visiting professor of Travel and Tourism at New York University and in 2024 he became a Marriott Foundation Endowed Professor in the NYU’s Tisch Center of Hospitality and Tourism Management. He’s also the executive director of Tisch’s Apprenticeship & Workforce Development Program. The Alliance he founded, incorporated as a nonprofit, is now known as Alliance for Hospitality Equity and Diversity.
We cited the statement that Barker’s work had been “impeded by state legislation” in asking Southern Glazer’s what happened and if Barker had been replaced. “The program at FIU no longer exists. The organization has been separately incorporated as an independent 501c3 organization and is now based in NY,” Amy Kickham, chief human resources officer, responded in writing. Michael Cheng, dean of the Chaplin School, passed our question to Ivonne Yee-Amor in public relations, and she did not respond then or when we contacted her directly about Barker and the status of the Shanken scholarships.
For his part, Barker sounded…well, like you would expect someone in the hospitality industry to sound. “As we all know, the national climate around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I.) has changed rapidly,” Barker said in an email. “Our mission remains unchanged: To transform the hospitality industry by intentionally uplifting and amplifying a culture representative of untapped talent. However, we have evolved our strategy to focus on recruitment from two key perspectives: helping high school students gain access to college and exposing non-traditional college students to a variety of careers in hospitality and tourism.
“Florida is a wonderful place, and we have a deep appreciation for our founding institutions, FIU and SGWS [Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits],” he wrote.
Kickham of Southern Glazer’s wrote this: “To address your initial comment, we are not curtailing our programs. A culture of belonging has been a core strength of our company and a key driver of our innovation and success. We are of course cognizant of the evolving regulatory landscape and recent executive orders that impact corporate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
“Our legal and compliance teams are actively monitoring these developments to ensure that we align with all requirements while staying true to our values. But to be clear, despite the evolving external landscape, we remain steadfast in our commitment to a culture of belonging. We recently published our 2024 Corporate Social Responsibility report which highlights a number of our initiatives…you can find that here: CSR Report 2024.”
We had some specific things to ask about and here’s what we found.
In December 2020, a few months after Floyd’s murder, Southern Glazer’s announced it is the first U.S. alcohol beverage wholesaler to join the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC). “The NMSDC advances business opportunities for certified minority business enterprises (MBEs) and connects them to corporate members. Southern Glazer’s membership is part of the Company’s efforts to expand its relationships with qualified minority-owned businesses,” it said in a press release.
“Southern Glazer’s is committed to supplier diversity and developing diverse suppliers across our national network,” commented Mark Calimlim, Vice President, Corporate Procurement, in its press release. “We look forward to accessing the NMSDC’s full breadth of resources to help enhance our supply base relationships with more certified Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American business enterprises.”
The company told us it ended that relationship. “We are no longer a member of the NMSDC. Our procurement team wanted to use a more comprehensive service provider that had the capability to provide more robust reporting. They now use a company called Supplier IO that is able to generate diversity reports that cover all Socioeconomic categories including Women, Veteran, Disabled and LBGTQ. The procurement team actively uses this tool to measure the diversification of the Company’s vendor base,” Kickham wrote to us.
Southern Glazer’s had partnered with EVERFI, an online education resource, to fund diversity education through online high school courses in Florida and Texas, specifically offering a free course called 306 African American History.
That’s no longer happening.
Kickham wrote: “The 306 History Course and Scholarship was part of a three-year program that concluded in 2023. During that time, we had 11,349 students at 87 different schools participate in the 306 course (as well as a supplementary Honor Code course) and dozens of students participate in the scholarship contest. In 2023, EVERFI decided they wanted to begin rebuilding the 306 course to update the content and make it more relevant and engaging for students, as they were seeing lower school interest/participation in that course, so we did not renew at that time when our program concluded.”
Southern Glazer’s sponsors Black Hospitality Initiative Scholarships as part of a larger regional effort started in response to a successful Black tourism and convention boycott of Miami in 1990. Students studying hospitality, tourism, culinary arts or aviation management and attending FIU, Miami Dade College or Florida Memorial University may apply. “This was an initiative that started in 2021 and is a 5-year program. The Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits Scholarship program will provide scholarships over the course of five years to students who meet the Initiative’s scholarship criteria,” Kickham wrote. “Southern Glazer’s total contribution to BHI will award 15 hospitality student scholarships over the course of 15 semesters.” When their participation ends in 2026 they will reevaluate, she explained.
In 2024, the company mentioned its 2020 $1 million agreement with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which provides, among many things, financial aid and support to students pursuing degrees in subjects such as medicine, engineering, agriculture, mathematics and law at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Is Southern Glazer’s participation ongoing, we asked? Was it capped at $1 million?
“Yes, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund is ongoing. We are halfway through the 10-year agreement. Yes, it is capped at $1 million and once we achieve that we will revisit. In terms of number of interactions, yes, we’ve had thousands since inception. Each year at Thurgood Marshall Leadership Institute, we have representatives that we connect with at different schools/events across the country,” Kickham wrote. “To date, we’ve interviewed over 200 students during the Leadership Institute and scheduled almost 80 follow-up interviews for Intern, NextGen and Full-Time roles. We’ve hired 2 for NextGen and 18 Interns since our partnership began. NextGen employees are converted to full time after their two year rotation.”
How about the Social Injustice and Racial Inequality Scholarship at Florida A&M University?
“This fund was established in 2020 and it grants 4 scholarships a year for 5 years to deserving candidates that have an unmet financial need,” Kickham wrote. “This ends after five years [this year] and we will reevaluate.”
As we’ve long said, diversity is not charity. It’s good business sense. Keep an eye on the products you support. It has always mattered.
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher conceived and wrote The Wall Street Journal’s wine column, “Tastings,” from 1998 to 2010. Dorothy and John have been tasting and studying wine since 1973. In 2020, the University of California at Davis added their papers to the Warren Winiarski Wine Writers Collection in its library, which also includes the work of Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. Dottie has had a distinguished career in journalism as a reporter, editor, columnist and editorial writer at The Miami Herald, The New York Times, and at The Journal. John was Page One Editor of The Journal, City Editor of The Miami Herald and a senior editor at Bloomberg News. They are well-known from their books and many television appearances, especially on Martha Stewart’s show, and as the creators of the annual, international “Open That Bottle Night” celebration of wine and friendship. The first bottle they shared was André Cold Duck. They have two daughters.
