Monday September 14 was Guatemalan Independence Day. Yennifer entertained me with videos of past celebrations. One video featured her high school band and there she stood playing a horn. The song the band played was Tequila and I hummed along with it. We laughed.
Her English is improving. I wish I could say the same for my Spanish but we’ll get there. I’ve seen a picture of her at a desk back home doing her homework. She obviously loves Guatemala and seven of her brothers and sisters and her parents still live there.
I wonder what would drive someone so young to leave home and start a new life in a foreign country where you can’t speak the language. I believe in her. You can see determination in her eyes.
It is fashionable among certain Americans to argue immigration is okay, but it should be restricted to migrants who have certain skills. The usual suspects. Computer programmers, mathematicians, scientists, and a few other indentured servant classes who can be plugged into Silicon Valley firms like modern pack mules to provide cheap hard working labor.
They call this pimping where I come from. Iceberg Slim has nothing on Mark Zuckerburg. I read recently about tech sweatshops in California where the programmers all speak Mandarin. Though they make good money they are not compensated like American programmers would be. These Chinese workers are allowed to set up at base camp on Everest. There is no expectation they will summit.
I don’t believe Yennifer will ever set up on Everest. Not her mountain. But I can believe she will one day do what so many Mexicans and Central Americans I have seen before her do- summit her own mountain. And take a few others with her to the top. We play God when we pick and choose amongst skill sets rather than let people’s grit and determination deliver their American Dream.
And don’t we all have dreams.
I have a dream. A dream where my kind attempt to summit K-2 rather than Everest. They call the Himalayas the rooftop of the world. K-2 is the second tallest mountain in the Himalayas. It is considered to be the more difficult climb. But it is the summit we should seek.
Which brings us to Coach Prime.
Deon Sanders has always been a man who marched to the beat of a different drummer. He was a pioneer of the use of Black sports agents. Though this is common now it was not something done much before Prime Time in the NFL. Long before LeBron James and the decision Deon Sanders established player agency and moved from team to team as he saw fit seizing opportunity and championships along the way.
Though he played college ball at Florida State he chose to receive his degree from Talladega making Coach Prime an HBCU alum. He now coaches at Jackson State and is asking Black talent to come home. He wants to establish an HBCU super conference. He believes he can recruit against the top power five programs. Coach Prime has a dream. And you can see the determination in his eyes.
Already many are saying he should leave Jackson State for the greener pastures on Everest, I mean at Florida State. That Jackson State is a steppingstone to Florida State. Perhaps…
I have a dream that like my diecisiete años friend, Coach Prime will continue his trip to the summit of K-2. That he will do for HBCU football what he did for Black sports agents and player agency. Change the game.
A common complaint in the Post-Civil Rights Movement era is that the wealth gap between Blacks and mainstream Americans has shown no significant decline since the early nineteen sixties. Academics and activists demand policies that promote equity and inclusion. In other words let’s summit the crowded north face of Everest.
Always an argument.
When you are subtracting enough discrimination from a society to move yourself from the area of exclusion you should expect to have to do battle. It was the only effective approach Blacks found palatable during the movement. We didn’t want to opt out of American society, we chose to fight our way in. We made the shift from the area of exclusion to the area of inclusion.
We must realize calculus not subtraction is the math required to shrink the wealth gap. We focus on the gap at points in time rather than concentrating on the rate of change over a time frame. Our rate of change is slow when it comes to mainstreaming. The question becomes is policy the most efficient way to affect an accelerated rate of change. By studying other community’s rate of change functions in the area of inclusion we can make informed choices as to how to shrink the many gaps we see between Black and mainstream America.
Policy changes have not created an efficient rate of change over the past fifty plus years. It may feel good to argue for policy changes and there are changes needed. I repeat they are an inefficient way to decrease the gaps. Rate of change functions driven by business formation will allow Black families to compound their returns on investment and shrink the wealth gap.
There is a very small window of time each year when it is feasible to summit Everest. I have seen pictures of the queue as people attempt to summit before the window closes. Policy prescriptions leave so many in that queue. And a life time contains a very small window for any of us to summit.
Being caught in that queue can cost people their lives. Being caught in the queue on Diversity can cost people their career peak. Rate of change must be our focus. Lives and careers are short.
Advocates of policy changes mean well. I think they lack imagination. They concentrate on innovation in policy. The focus should be on the creation of a more efficient approach.
The Coach Prime approach. You know where you climb that other mountain. The summit less sought. Perhaps we can find a better path.
After all if racism is systemic, shouldn’t we develop systems to combat it. We can modify systems of power, but it can’t hurt for us to create our own. If racism is structural as it was once argued, shouldn’t we combat it with our own structures? Just a thought.
Guatemala, which in English means the land of many trees, has a mountainous terrain. My young friend is a climber. She has already climbed out of a low rate of return to a higher one by simply walking and riding five thousand miles. It was a difficult journey fraught with danger, where food was scarce and sleep came under cold and terrible conditions. She works a job that few Americans want at a wage most of us cannot see as livable. Yet if she is like many from her neck of the woods she will remit money back to her old country to support those she left behind.
It will require effort and sacrifice on her part. Yet every time I see her she is smiling. Even after cleaning the baños. She is pursuing her dream.
Every time I see Coach Prime he is smiling. Happy to attempt a new approach. One where he uses black structures to promote Black people. And I’m sure he will accept mainstream athletes into his program too if they can make the cut.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his last speech called for a shift in direction from social justice to economic empowerment. He sermonized that we need a bank in, an insurance in. He said he’d ben to the mountaintop and he’d seen the Promised Land. He said he might not be there to join us, but he knew we as a people would get to the Promised Land.
That mountaintop he stood upon was K-2. Dr. King understood it that is the mountaintop we need to summit if we are to quickly see the Promised Land. Coach Prime is attempting that summit.