Hey everybody!
We’re back. Mr. E is beside himself. He looked at his phone and yelled Pamplona. I asked him why he was yakking about running with the bulls. He looked at his phone again and yelled bull run. I’m like this Substack isn’t about the civil war.
Oh, bitcoin. Mr. Ross get him!
Mr. E was a crypto virgin this time last year. Now he’s a crypto maniac.
Did ya’ll know the deer in Fayette County look both ways before they cross the street. Yep, 314 used to look like a trail of tears with the dead Bambis strewn all over the side of the road. We noticed a couple of years ago no more deer carcasses. Couldn’t figure it out. Then one evening we saw a deer stop, look both ways, before dashing across the highway.
We were coming home from Starbucks this morning before Mr. E headed out to class. A fawn stood on the side of the street. It looked at us. When it saw us stop, it wobbled across the street. One thing for sure if there’s one there’s more. Sure enough, there was Momma and a twin standing there waiting. Mr. E and I looked at each other.
We were both thinking if the deer can figure out how to cross the street safely maybe Black people can figure out a new approach. We both shook our head and said nah. Did you know forty percent of the white tail deer on the east coast and in the Midwest have Covid antibodies. Dat Rona is real. I bet Bambi would get the vaccine.
Hey let me go! Help! Not back down the rabbit hole. Ya’ll please help me.
The little one is quite frisky here lately. A trip down the rabbit hole is just what the doctor ordered. Isn’t that right Dee?
Anyway, gentle reader, here we go.
When I was a child, I fell in love with college football. I used to watch the ABC game of the week. I enjoyed the games but couldn’t understand why Bud Wilkinson did the color commentary. Genial described him to a tee. He knew a lot of football. I just wondered why him.
Later I would learn he was one of the great coaches in the history of the sport. His Oklahoma football teams won forty-seven straight games from 1953-1957 in one of the most dominant stretches in college football history. Coach Wilkinson was known as a great offensive innovator, a peerless recruiter, and an exceptional organizer. He took the split T offense and turned it into a machine that produced three national championships. His Oklahoma teams did not lose a conference game for twelve seasons.
I got it.
The fifties were a time when the Civil Rights Movement would produce victory after victory as it dismantled Jim Crow. Innovation in approach (nonviolent protest), peerless use of technology (television), and exceptional leadership (Martin King, Thurgood Marshall, and countless others) would lead a successful charge to the legality of Blackness in America. If only that were enough. Laws were merely the first domino we needed to topple in the Black struggle for equality. Attitudes had to change too.
As great as Bud Wilkinson was as a football coach, I doubt he would win at such a high level in today’s game using the same strategies he deployed in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. I don’t doubt Coach Wilkinson would adjust were he still alive and able to coach Oklahoma football today. The greats know how to adjust to changing times and circumstances.
Alabama football is lucky to have had two coaches capable of changing with the times. Bear Bryant and Nick Saban both assembled dynasties at Alabama by recruiting well (it takes talent), working hard, and organizing their teams to a degree that would have made Julius Caesar nod his head with approval. These coaches are all three exceptional leaders with a keen understanding of how to succeed. And they met their times.
And of course, Oklahoma in its modern era hired Barry Switzer and Bob Stoops to carry on the legacy of winning football. None of these coaches specialized in the split T post 1960s. They may have admired this great offensive innovation, but they know times changed to a point the version Oklahoma ran in its first dominant era would not work against modern defenses.
Yet Black America insists on running a 1950s style political activism, social protest driven offense against 21st century defenses and wonder why we don’t win. It’s simple folks. This ain’t the 1950s. We can be nostalgic for past greatness, or we can come up with innovative approaches that provide a better chance to succeed. The deer in Fayette County ended their trail of tears by abandoning tradition and concluding it is better to look both ways before you cross. Perhaps Black people should use Bambi as an example. Drop tradition and seek a strategy that will win in the modern era.
There was a writeup in The Wall Street Journal recently observing the growing wealth divide between Black and mainstream American college graduates. It pointed out even as the number of Black college graduates has surged Black grads have not been able to reduce the wealth gap. The usual suspects were rolled out. Black people start out with less. They don’t have the networks to advance themselves.
People stop.
My maternal grandmother took me and my brother in a cotton field when I was fourteen years old. She wanted us to have that experience. While we were picking, she told us you don’t have to do this. There was a time when we didn’t have a choice. Don’t you ever forget being Black isn’t an excuse for failure. It’s a reason to try harder. She was right.
My grandmother was a college educated, retired schoolteacher and real estate investor when she took us in that field. A field owned by two Black sisters who grew cotton for a living. I saw all kinds of businesses owned by Black people when I was a child. And I get we needed to put the idea of asset ownership to the side to fight the good fight to defeat Jim Crow. I won’t ever not acknowledge that. But I believe Bob Dylan once sang the times they be a changing.
Young Black people sneer at trying harder. If trying harder is working for Microsoft I get it. Working for someone else is a losing proposition when you are a community that started out with so little. You can’t get even by working for mainstream America. And why do Black people want even. After four hundred years of this why don’t we want to have more.
Maybe we do. I admit to a generational divide.
Because it’s not enough to try harder. We must work smarter. The first day of class I always challenge my students to take a dollar home and put it under the bed. Leave it there until our next class, look under the bed and see what you have. Nobody ever says they found two dollars. My point to them is school teaches us to work for our money. It doesn’t teach us to make our money work for us.
I tell them you are better off if you learn to make your money work for you while you work for your money. You and your money will live better, more prosperous lives. We as a people are too caught up in the idea I deserve to work for corporate America. We need to form our own corporations.
Ownership of income producing assets in abundance is the road to a shrinking wealth gap. Not going to Harvard. Ask Oprah or Jay Hova, or P Diddy, or so many other lesser-known Blacks who have overcome the wealth gap. You working for your money and your money working for you is how its done.
Don’t believe me. Consider what I am saying the next time you sit down to eat Pho. Or go to the nail shop. I have watched my Mexican yard man grow his business and invest in a large truck and more equipment. And he has hired several employees. He does good work. And I promise you he tries harder. As does my Vietnamese acquaintance in the restaurant business.
Just like my paternal grandparents who raised eight children off the proceeds of a grocery store and a dry cleaner in a place affectionately nicknamed Bombingham. A Birmingham man named A. G. Gadsden, Black Enterprise’s Black Businessman of the twentieth century, wrote an article in 1963 for Ebony Magazine entitled how to be a millionaire. What I took away from it was become an investor. Make your money work for you as you work for your money.
I make it sound easy don’t I. It isn’t. But would you rather scream about the evil of intersectionality or indulge yourself bleating about white privilege than strike out on the investment path. To paraphrase Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker, do you want to work for Amazon and kiss ass like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman or work for yourself and kick ass like Rambo.
Work harder. And smarter. Screw equity. After four hundred years I want a monetary advantage.
Bud Wilkinson and Bear Bryant would tell you Black America needs to change with the times. That our offense is antiquated. Nick Saban has shown us that with the dominant Alabama program he has maintained by changing from top notch defenses to top shelf offense.
Black America needs its Saban.
Marea del rodillo.
Next up Diversity