By: Natiece Ford
“The training which they undergo gives a false conception of life when they believe that the business world owes them a position of leadership.” How is it possible that, 91 years later, Woodson’s words still ring true? Black America, how many of us have paid for degrees yet have not used them—or the information we studied? The pages haunted me. The degree I so cherish, hanging in the corner of my office, a symbol of academic prowess and empty pockets. I continued reading, and my own life unfolded before me, as well as the lives of my miseducated counterparts.
I thought of the brand Honey Pot and its demise after consumers discovered that the brand had been tarnished by selling the cherished recipe to a white company. I thought of the aging publishers of Black newspapers around the state, with no one to pass the knowledge on to—a generation likely never to know Black media again. Why didn’t we create businesses in the beauty industry like Asian Americans, or own gas stations like Middle Eastern Americans? Was it racism that caused us not to get funding, or did we shy away from trades and tell our young men and women to pick up a ball instead? Our youth equate manual labor with slavery while Latin Americans jump at the chance to do work we deem subservient.
Less and less of us know how to create with our hands something tangible, further isolating ourselves from the rest of America. We do not know how to grow our food, we do not know how to build our houses, fix the plumbing, or even change a tire on our cars. Yet, we scoff at jobs that require skills not likely learned in a book.
