In the fall of 2016, the Walter Stafford Project, at New York University, had a symposium on Race and Inequality in New York City. The panel that I participated in discussed social capital in our community. As I sat there listening to the other panelists many thoughts went through my head, but it came down to one basic idea: The idea that we all need each other, we can’t do it alone, and that when we raise each other up we raise ourselves.
The following is taken from my remarks at the symposium and some additional ideas from a few decades ago.
Hillary Clinton coined the phrase, “It takes a village,” and put it in the American lexicon. But for the Black community “it takes a village” has been well-known for a really, really long time. When we look back at Harlem, in particular, or the Harlems of this country, or the small towns, if little Billy did something on 116th Street, his mama on 135th Street knew what he had done before he got to 120th Street. And he had been disciplined five times before he had gotten home, because the whole community was watching. And the whole community was invested in what he was doing and who he was going to become. That social capital was extremely strong. It did not matter if you were the doctor, or the dentist, or the lawyer or the maid, or the super or the stock boy, you all helped out and looked out for each other in your communities.
Let’s go back in time a little bit. Let’s go to Oklahoma. Let’s go to Black Wall Street when we had a community where the white folks were coming across the bridge to borrow money from the Black folks, because on Black Wall Street that’s where all of the money was. That’s where all not only the social capital was but the real capital was. And what happened there? It got bombed. It got destroyed because there was too much power in the hands of the people of color.
Now, we’ll jump forward again to Harlem and the Harlems of this country. Again, to a time when we had that social capital and we had that strength and we were raising our kids, our Black boys, our Black girls, to succeed, to get educated, to pull themselves out of situations that may not have been the best. And I’m not even going to call it poverty, because when I talked to my father about when he was growing up, he says he didn’t know he was poor. He was the son of a sharecropper but they were “rich” because they had a strong family. They had a strong community. My grandfather had a newspaper. He was a sharecropper but he had a newspaper, and it was a small farming newspaper that printed when they had enough ads. But as my dad said, he was a “bidness” man. He had a business and he had an office. It wasn’t anything fancy but it was his. And because everyone was poor, no one was really poor, because everyone was on an even playing field, and everyone used their social capital and their bridging and linking to lift everybody up. The opportunities that one person found, they showed to everybody else. With that, we had a very different reality than we have today.
So, somewhere along the line, it got to the point where somebody told somebody that there could only be one Black person in the C suite. Only one Black person or woman in a boardroom, and that if we let somebody else into that boardroom then our job might be in jeopardy. That if we helped somebody else then there may no longer be any room for us.
About three years ago, a young woman who was in politics called me and asked me to have coffee with her and I said, “Sure, no problem.” We sat down for an hour and a half, and we were just talking about her career. At the end she said, “Thank you.” I said, “No problem, I just did what anyone else would do.” And she said, “No.” And I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “No, other people won’t do this.” That just didn’t register with me because in my world if you have the time and the ability to share what you know, you do, because that’s the thing we’re supposed to do. Because we’re supposed to be uplifting our community. But there are people who have tried to instill in us that we don’t want to do that because they do not want our communities to be strong and they want to rip apart that fabric, that social capital that was created.
So when we look at our social capital and the creation of social capital we really have to look at the external forces that have torn it apart and try to figure out how we get some Kevlar thread to string it back together and not let those external forces come and continue to tear it apart.
We must also figure out how to mend it. It’s not that our communities can’t do it because we have done it, and we’ve done it extremely successfully as history has shown us, but what has happened is that we’ve allowed little tears to become giant rips that have created rags. Now it’s time to put it back together. And it may be a quilt of patches now, but those quilts can keep us warm.
What I’m talking about, in essence, are the ties that bind, those individual threads of strength that make us whole and united again. As the late Dr. John Henrik Clarke often reminded us about successes and achievements in the past, “We’ve done it before, and we can do it again!”