Diatribes by Joah

Why Older Black “Leaders” Are a Glass Ceiling for Blacks in America

I was on the phone with someone who, like me, has a substantial amount of experience reading about and working with self-described Black leaders. I’m going to be very specific about who I’m talking about.

For starters, I’m not talking about our President and First Lady. They’re actually being attacked by, what I’m going to call, racially conservative Black leaders. Cornel West called Barack Obama a “black mascot” and Tavis Smiley bitched about the President being unable to attend his “State of the Black Union” event and offering Michelle’s speaking services instead. They are conservative in that they believe they own the definition of what it means to be “Black in America”. Silly.

But I digress…the older Black leaders I’m really talking about aren’t even people like Cornel West and Tavis Smiley. No, they’re both actually famous and, in West’s case, have contributed tremendously to the discourse (not always positive, but that’s another topic) of Blacks in America for years upon years.

The people I’m talking about are in their mid-to-late 40s, 50s and 60s and they’re not famous, they haven’t created Black wealth or been significant contributors to large discussions about Blacks in America. Actually, they’re the exact opposite. They’re not famous, because they have focused on agendas so narrow that no one should pay attention to them. They’re not creating Black wealth (though some of them are themselves rich) because they don’t seem to understand economic development policies that focus on generating sustainable wealth instead of generating temporary favoritism. And they’re not significant contributors to the discourse about Blacks in America because they are so off-base in what they believe is happening or should be happening and so narrow-minded in who they’re working with or what they’re working on, that they just go in circles.

As a result, much of Black discussion in America has gone in circles. And the efforts of far too many Black-centric organizations has followed suit. Round and round and round they go. Literally, for at least the last decade, maybe two.

Meanwhile, us young Black people watch and wonder: “will you ever move over and let us do our thing?”

Historical tidbit: Dr. King was 26 when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and just a few years later with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded. Malcolm X was in his late 20s and early 30s when he led the creation of several Nation of Islam posts in some of America’s major Northeast cities. Stokely Carmichael was 26 when he took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, taking over from John Lewis who led the organization when he was 23 years old. James Farmer, one of the less-heralded Civil Rights leaders, was just 21 when he was invited to meet with President Roosevelt. Ella Baker, a leading female voice in the Movement, was actually the old member of the leadership tree having started as NAACP’s director of branches at the ripe age of 39.

So why in the hell do some of today’s Black leaders in their late 40s, 50s and 60-somethings fancy themselves our generation’s Dr. Kings, Malcolm Xs and Ella Bakers? When in fact King and others were our age when they were leading the Movement! We haven’t had a young Black leader in three decades! Why? Because these older people won’t let one in! They think that since Jay-Z and Kanye West are famous, they’ve allowed the younger generation to have a voice when – as pointed out in Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save America – this hip-hop voice is not nearly what is needed.

And don’t give me that lip about “we were a part of the Movement” stuff as if to get some five-star general level of respect from us. How were you a part of the Movement? By being the first-generation of beneficiaries from it? By being the Blacks first-allowed to go to college and fully enter Corporate America only to have to be the first person to become the VP of something and graduate from a non-historically Black college or university for once?

If you’re 65 today that means you were 19 when Malcolm X died and 22 when King died. Very formative years indeed, but to continue harping on that time as if you didn’t end up taking some job in Corporate America (or pitching against it) in order to ascend to the upper middle class in some management role is truly malicious. Especially since many of you end up raising your children with the biggest silver spoons ever seen by Blacks in America, quite literally hurting the poor Black people you say you’re about helping by creating an “us” vs. “them” reality in Black neighborhoods and schools until – like other races – we created segregated schools for ourselves in cities like Atlanta.

If you’re 45 to 60 years old, I really don’t buy your need to continue harping back on things like institutional racism as if you didn’t live in a day and time when Blacks experienced less racism than ever before in America. I really hate hearing people in Austin talk about this like it’s some type of cross they’re bearing from the 1760s. I know things are still bad and police brutality still happens, hatred is still spewed and jobs are still hard to come by for Black men who are poorly educated as young boys and poorly treated in prisons as young men and poorly considered in society thereafter. I know far too well.

But for you to pretend that you are the new incarnation of Black leadership in America when so little has been done on your watch in the last decade or two is pathetic. Actually, tell me exactly what it is that you’ve done in the last decade other than sit back in your cushy “association of” and “commissioner/chairman” jobs and meet with the same damn people week after week, month after month doing the same damn things, hosting the same damn events and complaining about the same damn federal/state/local policies that only people in real leadership roles and power can address.

Going round and round and round. Harping on the same issues. Coming up with the same bland ideas and events. Doing the most mundane fundraisers. Sending the most uninspiring emails. And reaching out to young people with about as much innovation as the General Motors Truck division brings to an alternative energy conference.

Move out of the way. If you need us to kiss the ring, us being young Black people, in order for you to pass on by then fine. (Please don’t let these long-standing organizations die out with your generation.) We’ll kiss the ring if you don’t also require we anoint you all chairman/chairwoman emeritus status too because we need some other people to serve in that role. Like mid-to-late 30-somethings.

Yes, I’m being an ageist. I would apologize if I wasn’t so spot on based on far too many conversations with friends of mine in Austin, Houston, D.C., New York and other American cities. These are friends who work in business, entertainment, finance, law, politics, technology…they went to good schools thanks to the work of King and others and they are ascended to higher heights in their professions thanks to the roads your generation paved. Yes, I admit that. You fought the good fight for us. These are friends who’ve worked on Obama’s campaign and work in Congress, they lead young professionals groups across the country (only some of them solely focused on Blacks) and they have bright, albeit untested, ideas about what we should be doing right now.

The only problem with right now is that you’re in the way talking about back then. You have absolutely no clue about right now. This is wholesale and generalized and exceptions certainly exist. I know that Cory Booker is in his 40s now and he’s amazing. Google’s chief counsel David Drummond is in his 40s and is largely unknown, but significant. But those few are the exceptions. So stop acting like the energetic, educated, inspired, innovative young Black person attending your meetings is the exception and needs to “pay our dues”. People like Johnica Reed, Jam Donaldson and Coltrane Curtis know more about what’s going on in Black America than your average NAACP chapter president, that’s for sure.

The honest truth is that the older you all get, and the more stuck in your ways you continue to be, the fewer dues paying members you’re going to have if you keep this up. So, no, I won’t pay those dues. Not until you acknowledge what we’ve been trying to tell you for years. Keep this up and you’ll be the generation that negated much of the unseen but good work that King and others did because more than lead the Movement and serve as positive forces of change, they were icons.

Icons to Black leadership. Young Black leadership. Young Black leadership that didn’t wait around for dues to be paid. As for me, I’m not waiting around. You can believe that I am going to bum rush your door and tell you to hand over the keys or else.

Yeah, it may be the house you’ve lived in for years, but you definitely did not build it (King’s generation did) and you definitely aren’t in a position to renovate it (my generation is). Especially not with that attitude toward the most important Black constituency in America: young professionals.

We have money. We have white, Hispanic and Asian friends. We’re educated, well traveled, well dressed, well read and well versed on our Civil Rights history. We know how to use computers and we’re savvy with social media. We can command six-figure salaries and start businesses if we want to. We can talk Jay-Z and foreign policy in the same dialogue. We can do many things for Blacks in America because unlike many of you, we actually understand the positive impact Obamas have been in the White House. So much so that our votes are based on policies and not on race alone. Truth to power.

You need to come to terms with the fact that we can’t be the generation that pays the majority of the mortgage for Black people in America if we’re also going to be told that the title to the house will not be ours for another decade or two.

Let’s see how long you can make those payments without us.

Re-Blog: Lessons We’re Learning Riding Mass Transit by Leo Babauta

For almost a year now, my wife Eva, my six kids and I have been walking and riding mass transit almost exclusively.

We have bikes but we’re still new to them, and we also use City Carshare for longer trips out of the city. But for everything else, it’s walking and mass transit — for meeting with people, going to restaurants and movies and museums and parks, for grocery shopping (we only buy what we can carry), farmer’s markets, fairs, visiting relatives, and more.

It’s been one of the best things ever for us.

We’ve adjusted from being car users when we were on Guam. I love walking tremendously (I can walk anywhere in the city), but I also love the mass transit … for the lessons it has taught my family.

Some of the lessons we’ve learned so far:

1. How to wait. Mass transit isn’t always on time (surprise!). But rather than look at that as a reason why riding buses and trains suck, we learn how to see that as an opportunity. My boys climb trees while I do pullups and (admittedly rudimentary) gymnastics from a low branch. We tell jokes and I swing the little kids around. We share things with each other, make each other laugh. It’s a good time.

2. How to walk. Mass transit doesn’t take you everywhere, so we walk more than most families. That’s a great thing. Even my little ones are in pretty good shape and rarely complain about walking. We deal with the weather, which is something most people don’t do, as they’re cut off from the world in their glass and metal boxes. Truthfully, we don’t always walk — we love to race each other up hills and be out of breath. It’s wonderful.

3. How to deal with humanity. We’re often shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, which is something you never experience with a car. We deal with smells, with annoying people, with those who talk loudly, with the mentally challenged, with plain crazy people. In other words, with people. And this is a great thing. We learn that we come in all shapes and sizes, that life isn’t the perfect picket fences you see on TV, that the world is real … and that that’s OK. We’re learning to celebrate differences.

4. How to live sustainably. We haven’t cut our emissions to zero, but by the simple act of giving up a car, we’ve cut our use of resources and our emissions down more than most people will by recycling, buying less, using less heat, using less paper, etc. I’m not saying this to brag, or to judge others. I’m saying we’re learning, and while we have a lot to learn, I think we’re making progress.

5. That transit can be more convenient than cars. Sure, it’s nice to be able to hop in your car and go somewhere quickly, no matter the weather. That’s convenient. But there are inconveniences with cars that we forget about: the frustrations of parking (especially in San Francisco), traffic jams, rude drivers, car accidents, flat tires, car maintenance, having to stop for gas, having to actually drive instead of relaxing on the trip, sitting all the time instead of moving around, and more. Again, I’m not judging cars, but all of that, if you think about it, makes riding on a bus or train actually seem nice.

6. How to live frugally. My kids aren’t poor, but I want to teach them that there are good ways of living that don’t have to cost a lot. That spending money for conveniences isn’t necessarily a good thing. We shop at Goodwill, ride transit, cook in big batches, eat little meat (my wife and I eat none). We’re not the most thrifty ever, but we’re teaching the kids that it’s possible. (Read more.)

7. How to live with less control. When you have a car, you feel that things are under your control (forgetting about traffic, accidents and the like). But when you’re riding mass transit, things are not under your control. You’re at the mercy of the schedule, of drivers, of other people slowing the system down, of trains breaking down and backing the system up, and so on. You learn to let go of the illusion of control, and to deal with changes as they come. This is a miraculous lesson.

Who is Ella Baker

Justice advocate. Civil Rights leader. Societal change agent. Women's rights and student's voice giver. Real Role Model.

Ella Baker was instrumental at the NAACP, before helping to drive the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization MLK led, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Snick/SNCC to most).

Reaching Your Potential, Your Debt to the World

I was filling out some type of questionnaire the other day and one of the questions was about my biggest pet peeve. It took me awhile to answer it and that’s mostly because there’s no one thing I hate more than people who don’t reach their potential. And I wasn’t quite sure that’s what they were looking for.

It’s a big world out there and there are so many people, places, opportunities, lessons, experiences, challenges and goals for just about all of us to meet, see, make the most of, learn, live through, take on and set. Why waste time not doing any of it when you can do it all!

But what are the main reasons why some people can’t reach their potential? 

1. They’re afraid. Of regretting something. Of challenging themselves. Of risks. Of failure. Of success. Of what people think. Of what their parents will say. Of not fitting in. Of having to choose. Of making a bad decision. Of rejection. Of doing something about it. Whatever it may be.
2. It’s easier to be mediocre. Slide into the background. Push goals aside. Forget all those ambitions. Disregard all the education, preparation and training. Stop wanting more than what you already have. Welcome complacency. Surround yourself with lackluster people. It’s easier to do all these things.
3. People only have enough time for so much. There’s enough time to see what someone else is doing, but not enough to do it yourself. There’s enough time to read, but not enough time to write. There’s enough time to learn, but not enough time to teach. There aren’t enough jobs. There’s already someone doing that. There isn’t room for me here. There’s been enough struggle already. There doesn't seem to be something that fits.

Time is time for everyone. The same 24 hours. The same set of days. The same calendar year. But people who are afraid or people who get content with mediocrity seem to have less time than us all. So I can't stand how much they talk about how little time they have, yet have time to talk about why they're not fulfilling their potential or to talk about their perceptions of your attempts to fulfill your own. This isn't about mental health or socio-economic standing or lack of access to affordable [insert word here]. This is just about work ethic and having a sense of purpose.

Those that lack both of those important qualities feed back into the 80/20 rule. Instead of being a part of the 20 percent of the people doing all the work of the world, they're the 80 percent of the people the world really needs to make it a better place. All of the world's problems - AIDS, illiteracy, poverty, you name it - could be put on their deathbeds if the people living life like they're already dead woud just wake up and realize that Sister Mary Clarence was right!

 

People who don’t realize they’re living life in that 80 percent without a genuine desire and drive and tenacity and dedication and persistence and love for themselves to reach their potential are my biggest pet peeve. It’s selfish to take from this world without so much as giving back your best shot at reaching your life's potential when so many others’ lives are cut short, like Andrew Runciman's, an amazing Bazaarvoice employee I never got to call a colleague and friend because he died the day before my first day.

Wake up and pay attention! The world needs you.

Texas Don't Like Read Very Good

We're cutting schools and family planning. Now all we need is a bill to cut the birth rate. I pulled this from the NY Times (I can see some Tea Partiers skipping this post already).

The New Anti-Abortion Math

By GAIL COLLINS

One of my favorite stories about the Texas State Legislature involves the time Senator Wendy Davis was trying to ask a colleague, Troy Fraser, some questions about a pending bill. Fraser deflected by saying, “I have trouble hearing women’s voices.”

Really, she was standing right there on the floor. Holding a microphone.

These days in the budget-strapped, Tea-Party-besieged State Capitol, you can be grateful for any funny anecdote, no matter how badly it reflects on Texas politics in general. Like the time Gov. Rick Perry defended the state’s abstinence-only birth control program by saying that he knew abstinence worked “from my own personal life.”

Right now, the state is wrestling with a fiscal megacrisis that goes back to 2006, when the Legislature cut local property taxes and made up for the lost revenue with a new business tax. The new tax produced billions less than expected to the shock and horror of everyone except all the experts who had been predicting that all along.

Governor Perry blames the whole thing on President Obama.

Texas’ problems are of interest to us all because Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation’s future work force with a system that goes like this:

• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.

• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.

And naturally, when times got tough at the State Capitol, one of the first things the cash-strapped Legislature tried to cut was family planning.

“It’s in total danger,” said Fran Hagerty, who leads the Women’s Health and Family Planning Association of Texas.

One of the best family-planning efforts in Texas is the Women’s Health Program, which provides an annual health exam and a year’s worth of contraceptives to poor women. For every dollar the state puts into the plan, the federal government provides $9.

The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year. But when a budget expert told the Texas House Committee on Human Services that the program saved money, he was laced into by Representative Jodie Laubenberg for using “government math.”

“You speculate that,” she snorted.

Meanwhile, on the House floor, anti-abortion lawmakers were stripping financing for other family-planning programs. Representative Randy Weber successfully moved part of the money into anti-abortion crisis centers for pregnant women.

“There’s been research done. ... It actually shows the highest abortion rate is among women actively using contraceptives,” Weber insisted.

“These folks are anti-abortion, anti-contraception and anti-science,” said Representative Mike Villarreal, who tangled with Weber during the debate.

Villarreal has had a rather dark view of the rationality of some of his colleagues ever since he tried to improve the state’s abstinence-only sex education programs by requiring that the information imparted be medically accurate. It died in committee. “The pediatrician on the committee wouldn’t vote for it; he was the swing vote,” Villarreal recalled.

Welcome to the fact-free zone. This week, U.S. Senator John Cornyn gave an interview to Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he claimed that the battle in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood “was really part of a larger fight about spending money we don’t have on things that aren’t essential.”

There are a lot of fiscal conservatives in the anti-abortion movement, and it’s apparently hard for them to admit that destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser.

There’s also a resistance to government support for contraceptive services. “There are some people in the pro-life movement who think birth control pills of all kind are abortifacients,” said Senator Bob Deuell, a Republican. “But I don’t see any medical evidence.”

Deuell is one of those rare abortion opponents who is dedicated to the cause of helping women avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place. He says his allies in the anti-abortion movement haven’t objected to his approach, but he admitted that they haven’t been handing him any medals either.

We’re currently stuck with a politics of reproduction in which emotion is so strong that actual information becomes irrelevant. Senator Cornyn, in his interview, was reminded of the great dust-up his colleague Jon Kyl of Arizona created when he claimed that 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood did involved abortions. When challenged, Kyl’s staff said the figure “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

So did Cornyn agree that Kyl screwed up?

“I’m not so sure,” Cornyn said.

Is Fashion Art? The loud minority doesn't thing so.

It’s not a stretch for me to say that roughly 99 percent of the feedback from the inaugural Style X has been positive. I did, however, read a comment on the bottom of this Statesman article that said, “I really don't think Austinites care about fashion. I know I don't. It's not art.”

I normally don’t pay much attention to negative and ignorant things people say online, largely because I agree with something I heard Urban Outfitters’ Dmitri Siegel say at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit yesterday: the lingua franca of the Internet is snark. Every time I read comments on XXL’s site or Hypebeast.com or Statesman articles, the majority of them are harsh, uninformed and not at all insightful. I suppose it goes back to that whole silent majority, loud minority thing.

But I paid attention to this one comment because of something that is really important to me: supporting the creative community of Austin. One of my duties since joining the Austin Music Commission has been to reach out to some of the non-live music creative organizations. In recent weeks, I’ve had the privilege of having lunch with Austin Lyric Opera head Kevin Patterson and Ballet Austin executive director Cookie Ruiz, among others, to share thoughts on how the music community and the “classical” arts community can work together.

The main thing that comes out of each of these meetings is a shared vision for Austin as a city that continues to celebrate and embrace a culture of creativity. Live music may be the heart of this city’s creative class, but it also includes actors, artists, bloggers, dancers, filmmakers, graphic designers, opera singers, photographers, web developers and…fashion designers.

For some person to say fashion is not art is to say that the manufacturing of fashion – be it clothing or jewelry or other accessories – is not a creative process. In essence, this would mean that Style X’s goal of showcasing emerging designers from around the world is not of artistic merit.

Obviously I couldn’t disagree more. And I have a good feeling that the other 13,000 or so people who came to Style X and the millions of others in the world who participate in the fashion industry either as creators or consumers, would disagree as well.

I’ve chosen not to post a rebuttal comment on this Statesman article because it would come off as self-promoting if I, the co-founder and executive producer of Style X, got defensive about someone attacking fashion as art. But don’t let that stop you.

If you care about Austin’s continued status as a city that embraces creativity, a place where artists of all types can be celebrated and the home of tens of thousands of creators of everything from fashion and films to music and mixed-media art, then please educate this guy and the rest of the loud minority.

True, they are a minority, but as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to make clear in my favorite book of his Why We Can’t Wait, we cannot stand by as the silent majority and say that we are doing our part to make the city or country we live in a better place with more open-minded people. Speak up!

A handful of mega-phones can still drawn out a thousand whispers.