What Does Success Look Like?

When a "Black Lives Matter" group took over the pavilion in a park to broadcast a message by bullhorn last night, I was reminded of this question an interviewer asked a Black author on the "Book TV" program. I guess I would have answered her question by saying success in a Black neighborhood would look like a well-maintained school, no Pay-Day loan and liquor stores or abortion clinics. The kindly Black man on the "Today" show this morning, who had adopted a "family" of a dozen or so multiracial children would have answered differently. As would Rev. Derrick DeWitt, the director of the Maryland Baptist Aged Home whose residents have had no infections during the COVID-19 epidemic. Jasmine Guillory, an attorney who writes romance novels with Black female lead characters, might judge her success by publication of PARTY OF TWO, her fifth novel. Everywhere on the globe, no matter what your aim is: reforming a police department, feeding a hungry world or living a happy and fulfilling life, before beginning a task, ask yourself, "What will success look like?"

Must Someone Look Just Like You?

I heard a woman telling a friend she didn't know much about those running for school board positions in the coming election. In response, the friend said, "Just vote for the women." Such advice rings sort of hollow at a time when DNA research finds, unless DNA shows someone is an intergalactic alien with six arms, less than one percent of a person's DNA makes him or her different from everyone else. We might as well vote for anyone.

     Nkechi Okoro Carroll, a black female TV writer and showrunner at the CW network, reminded TV studios they cannot expect one African American to convey the perspective of all blacks. She herself grew up in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast and attended an English boarding school. She knows nothing about the hood.

     When I was growing up in Chicago, I asked my mother why there were no black sales clerks at Marshall Fields. She said the store didn't think white customers would buy anything from people who didn't look like them. For a long time, the same thinking, or lack thereof, prevented older, white managers from hiring young, professional women to sell the advertising, copiers, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and everything else they sell today.

     The point is, you can't tell a book by its cover and you can't tell those who have something valuable to share by the color of their skin. Stereotypes make it easy to assume we have nothing in common with teachers, characters in books, police officers, politicians, and anyone else who doesn't look like us and we have everything in common with those who look the same as us. Reality suggests more careful discernment pays off when it comes to human relationships.
 
   

Terrorism Alerts

New York City's Police Commissioner, James O'Neill, didn't just tell us, if we see something, say something, he told us what to look for. He said to put down our cell phones and look for something out of place. An automotive vehicle driving down a bike path certainly was something out of place in New York City on October 31, 2017. Years ago, an NYC vendor said something and successfully alerted the police to prevent a disaster, when he saw wires and smoke coming out of a van in Times Square.

     Looking back on other tragic events, we remember later seeing unattended backpacks at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, GA, and at the Boston Marathon in 2013. Also there was the unusual young white man attending a Bible service in an African-American church and the high school boys who wore long black coats. In department stores, security looks for potential shoplifters carrying large shopping bags and wearing big winter coats, especially in summer. When a security guard at the Watergate complex saw a piece of tape over a lock, he found the burglars who led to President Nixon's resignation. Then, there are unusual purchases of too much fertilizer and too many boxes of ammunition. And there is unusual behavior: a "Do Not Disturb" sign on a hotel door for three days, an unusual amount of activity on a web site, or pilots in training who don't seem to care about learning how to land a plane.

     When Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, was asked to investigate the cause of the Challenger space shuttle's explosion, he saw a photo of a small smoke puff coming out of one side of the craft. His advice that anything not supposed to happen according to a project's design should signal trouble is applicable in other circumstances, as well. A police officer shooting anyone holding up his or her hands should not happen. Neither should the sound of a gun being fired in a convenience store be heard. Current police practice requires going to anywhere a gun shot is heard, because any sound of a gun shot in a neighborhood is out of place, as is a woman's scream and screeching tires.

     Finally, keep the telephone number of your local police department handy. When you see or hear something, the next step is to say something to prevent more violence.