Ursula Burns complains her historic appointment as Xerox CEO ‘shouldn’t have been shocking’

When Ursula Burns became CEO of Norwalk’s Xerox in 2009, she made history as the first Black woman to become chief executive of a Fortune 500 company. But in a new interview with Yahoo Finance, Burns complained that her corporate ascension was framed by race and gender rather than her education and professional achievements.

Burns, who recently published her autobiography “Where You Are Is Not Who You Are,” pointed out that she held a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a master’s degree in engineering from Columbia University, as well as having spent nearly three decades with Xerox before rising to the CEO position.

“If you can [look at] my accomplishments in life at that point, I’d gone to two very, very good schools, one of them Ivy League,” she said. “I had gotten a master’s degree in engineering. I had spent over 28 years in a single company (where) I had done most of the jobs in that company.

“So this shouldn’t have been shocking,” she added. “I was the only thing that was different about me and the other CEOs ”” the only thing was my gender and my race.”

In her autobiography, Burns complained that the attention focused on her race and gender resulted in what she described as a “ridiculous way to make history.”

“Was it truly so amazing to think a Black woman could lead a multi-billion-dollar company?” she said, lamenting that too much attention was focused on her unique position within the ranks of the major corporate leadership and less on how Xerox created an environment to encourage diversity within its ranks.

“Because if we want more of this, we should probably look at what happened in this company, and try to see if there’s anything we can learn,” she said. “Instead, it was this shock and awe of ‘Oh my God, look at her. She looks so different.'”

Burns left Xerox in 2016 and became chairwoman of the Dutch internet services company Veon from 2017 to 2020. She is currently a member of the board of directors at Exxon, Uber and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.