We cannot innovate when we exclude

Either they don’t know, don’t show, or don’t care about what’s going on in the hood.
Dough Boy

By Academy Fellow, Anthony Johnson.

This famous quote from Boyz N the Hood personifies America’s reality as it relates to the Coronavirus. The “Hood” is unfortunately feeling the brunt of the Coronavirus deadliness where in state after city after community the small number of people of color are making up the large number of cases and deaths. This is not the news though. This is simply the next logical step regarding the reality for people of color in America.

It is time to act. The traditional and sophomoric response has been to engage in some sort of race where these gaps are closed because of the greatness of black and brown people or some moralistic vicissitude of dominate culture. These efforts have not yielded much return on investment – yes there have been gains, yes there have been victories and yes there have been [fill in the blank]. We were thrust into “integrating” into a society with an arm tied to the opposite leg. Kicking and screaming, the losses are as great or greater than the wins. And, while we kicked and screamed, both the internal and external chasm grew – the “integrated” reality has become the “plantation” view, again.

For most black and brown people, reality is the proverbial “us” against “them” – where the “them” also includes a number of organizations who “say” they work on the best interest of the people who suffer the most. In reality, those organizations are parasites who prey on the poor and use poor people, poverty and the cascading effects from their disenfranchisement as a stepping stool to a slightly elevated reality and existence. They become the voices of the poor and essentially nothing more than middle men on the take. More harmfully, they perpetuate outdated social norms that continue to imprison the poor and disenfranchised – at a maximum; and indict and promote a culture rooted in selfishness and individualism at a minimum.

Either extreme means more of the same. More of what we cannot – should not allow. At some point, we have to create better systems and processes – ones that are people centered. Ones that allow for strength development versus weakness dehumanizing. Ones that allow us to fully support and serve people in their time of need. At the end of the day, the Coronavirus should have all of us thinking about – how did we get here? Are we using our talents wisely/effectively? What’s my role in all of this? How do we prevent this from happening yet again?

We cannot innovate without evolving. And, more importantly, we cannot keep excluding ourselves from either side of the equation. Go ahead, I’ll wait. And, that is exactly the problem. Poor, depressed and disenfranchised communities have been waiting. They have waited on their best and brightest, they have waited on politicians, they have waited on educators and academicians, they have waited on scholars, lawyers and engineers. They have waited on climate change (for the record, all efforts regarding climate change have to acknowledge environmental racism, include people of color as part of the solution and address the enormous burden that they have disproportionately carried), learning organizations, and systems change. They have waited on gurus, yoga and Jesus. They have waited. And, while they have waited, their lot has worsened – every significant data point regarding quality of life, health, achievement gap, etc., black and brown people lag behind their peers. Reality is a strange bedfellow and an amazing teacher. When are we going to ACT on what we have learned and are learning? More importantly, when are we going to design solutions that allow all of us to heal from our chaos?