Winn-Dixie Stores - $33 million; Shoney's - $132.5 million; Texaco - $176.1 million; Coca-Cola - $192.5 million.

No, those aren't the latest quarterly earnings of some of America's best-known companies. It's the amount of money each firm has paid in recent years to settle complaints of racial discrimination.

It doesn't take a rocket or social scientist to figure out that racial discrimination in the workplace doesn't pay. At least, it doesn't pay the corporations. On the contrary, it's costing companies millions to fend off complaints of racism; some of the defendants had even boasted of being paragons of corporate diversity.

The Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. is the most recent example. It has agreed to pay $192.5 million, the largest settlement in a U.S. race-discrimination lawsuit, in order to end litigation brought in 1999 by Black employees. As part of the settlement, Coke agreed to pay $113 million to the aggrieved African-American workers, $43.5 million to boost the salaries of Blacks so that they are comparable to those of whites; $36 million for programs to monitor the companies employment practices and $20 million for the plaintiffs' legal fees.

As is always the case in this type of litigation, Coca-Cola never admitted to practicing racial discrimination. Whether Coke admits it or not, everyone knows they are not forking over almost $193 million out of the goodness of their heart. They realize that had the case proceeded to court, they could have been out of much more than $200 million.

After vehemently denying for months that the case had no merit, in the end Coca-Cola officials had to acknowledge the obvious. "Today we are closing a painful chapter in our company's history," said Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Douglas N. Draft in a memo to employees. It is a chapter that never should have been opened.

The problems of companies such as Coca-Cola and Texaco demonstrate how companies noted for having the most sophisticated marketing strategies can be so unsophisticated when dealing with people of color. If they want to succeed as much in the future as they have in the past, they need to look at the market, not just their market share.

Shortly after the year 2053, whites will become less than half of the United States population. These changing demographics should be accompanied by a changing mind-set, one that doesn't think that white males have a monopoly on brains. Today, 95 percent of all top corporate jobs - vice president and above - are held by white males. Companies will be committing economic suicide if they continue to rely on that limited pool of talent. Not only do they deprive themselves of talent that could mean the difference between profit and loss for them, they will be unequipped to compete in foreign countries, most of whose citizens look more like African-Americans than European-Americans.

We have already seen examples of how arrogance and cultural insensitivity can hurt companies seeking to do business abroad. A diversity manual issued by Texaco prior to its discrimination case documented some major missteps by U.S. firms:

· Chevrolet marketed its Nova automobile in Spanish-speaking companies. Someone forget to tell them that "Nova" in Spanish means "no go."

· One of KFC's slogan for marketing its chicken is, "It's finger-licking good." In Japanese, that's translates to, "Bite your fingers off."

· Because of so many different languages and dialects in Africa, product labels visually represent the contents of a container. So when Johnson & Johnson placed a baby's picture on jars of baby food, parents weren't tickled at the prospect of having their kids eaten by other kids.

Insulting people in other cultures is not the recommended way to win support for American products. And insulting Black America by paying people of color less and passing over them for jobs are qualified to hold not only hurt African Americans, it hurts the potential profitability of companies themselves.

Until Corporate America learns that lesson, it will continue to pay. It will literally pay to settle discrimination lawsuits. And it will also pay in the marketplace.