The task that the Western Pennsylvania Diversity Initiative has set for itself sounds simple: to assist area employers in attracting and retaining employees with diverse backgrounds.

		See a graphic showing Pittsburgh's racial breakdown

But even with a bevy of local heavy hitters and backers, including the Allegheny County Bar Association, the Allegheny County Medical Society, the American Institute of Architects, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and the Urban League of Pittsburgh, the consortium's task is not an easy one. Here's why:

The city continues to lose population, and has been for decades. It's really hard to put a positive spin on something like that, unless you want to say that we're shedding dead weight. Would "Pittsburgh: getting lean and mean" work as a marketing slogan for the city?

Pittsburgh is strikingly non-diverse. The proportion of blacks living in the city -- 27.6 percent -- is much higher than the proportion of blacks in the national population. But the proportion of other races and ethnicities, especially Hispanic/Latino, is much lower. Not only is the city almost entirely black or white, it is also highly segregated and becoming more so, according to data from the Fair Housing Partnership of Greater Pittsburgh Inc.

The city's largest minority group, as a group, continues to fare poorly in Pittsburgh. The jobless rate for blacks here is catastrophic -- in 2000, only 51.9 percent of black men and 47 percent of black women had full-time jobs, and their median earnings were among the lowest of any major U.S. city. Black professionals coming into the city notice these conditions, and do not find them attractive. I suspect that the same is true for other professionals of color.

So the real challenge that the initiative has set for itself is to assist area employers in attracting and retaining employees with diverse backgrounds, in a non-diverse city that has been losing population for 10 years, and whose largest extant minority is living in a full-fledged Depression.

I wish them luck, grace, and success. But perhaps the best hope of diversifying Pittsburgh's professional work force lies less with attracting new people to Pittsburgh than with doing more for those already here -- first, by helping more minority citizens to achieve professional status, and second, by giving international students who flow into our institutions of higher learning more reasons to stay here after they graduate.

Pittsburgh has many amenities, but the biggest single amenity that any city can offer to professional people of color is a community of professional people of color. It may be possible to find that here, but it is a heck of a lot easier to find it in Atlanta, New York or Washington D.C.

Until Pittsburgh reaches a critical mass of diversity, the only people of color who can be expected to come and stay are those who have a bit of the pioneer spirit in them.

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