It was not long before Carson’s grades improved and he rose to the top of the class. Apropos of the time, a white teacher took note of Carson’s remarkable turnaround and criticized the rest of the class for letting Carson—a black kid—outperform them. Carson would have had every right to feel angry or dejected by the racist shaming, but instead, he used the teacher’s words to power his ambitions. On that day, he made the conscious decision that he would always excel in whatever he endeavored.
And excel he did.
Carson graduated third in his class before earning an undergraduate degree from Yale and attending medical school at the University of Michigan. He would go on to become a world-renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, and he earned so many accolades and awards that as a twelve-year-old, I was made in school to read his book, Gifted Hands—Carson’s autobiography, which would go on to be made into a movie.
But it was a speech that he would give in 2013 at the National Prayer Breakfast meeting that thrust Carson into the political spotlight.
Standing in front of a few thousand attendees, Carson told the extraordinary story of his youth, of the tragedy and triumphs that created the man he is today. He credited his countless successes to his mother’s persistence. For despite the tremendous adversity she had endured in her own life—despite having been born into extreme poverty as one of twenty-four children, marrying at thirteen, and battling severe depression while raising two sons as a single mother, with nothing more than a third-grade education level—Carson’s mother impressed upon her children that they could be limited only by their own beliefs.
“[She] never made excuses, and she never accepted an excuse from us,” Carson said. “And if we ever came up with an excuse, she always said, ‘Do you have a brain?’ And if the answer was yes, then she said you could have thought your way out of [any problem]. It doesn’t matter what John or Susan or Mary or anybody else did or said.”
In his life’s retrospect, Carson remarked that it was his mother’s constant encouragement to ignore the words and actions of others by taking full responsibility for themselves that was “the most important thing she did for my brother and myself.” “Because if you don’t accept excuses,” he added, “pretty soon people stop giving them, and they start looking for solutions. And that is a critical issue when it comes to success.”
Carson’s mother continued to push her sons even as friends criticized her for keeping two young boys locked up in the house and reading books. “They’re going to hate you,” they warned. Initially, Carson did hate those extra assignments. He didn’t want to spend his afternoons and evenings curled up with a book—that is, until he did:
After a while, I actually began to enjoy reading those books because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment, and as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you and what happens to you in life is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny.
In considering Carson’s story, I can’t help but wonder, what if? What if the black community as a whole made the decision to let go of every excuse that we perceive to be holding us back? What if we taught ourselves to see only opportunity, rather than opposition? What would happen if we harnessed the power within us, to work harder and do better? What would America look like if we became the embodiment of our ancestors’ dreams?
SHAME: A FORCE FOR CHANGE
Every black tale of success—whether it be the life of Thurgood Marshall, Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, or LeBron James—carries the same critical wisdom: there is no substitute for hard work. Tyler Perry is a black man with no formal education beyond a GED, who earns hundreds of millions of dollars per a year. He both owns and operates a movie studio, which sits on a staggering 330 acres outside of Atlanta, a property that spans nearly three times the area of the famed Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California. Perry accomplished all of this without any outside investment. Rather, his business achievements can be attributed to perseverance, a quality that is not dictated by race. Perry’s acceptance speech at the 2019 BET Awards spoke directly to our community’s need to stop making excuses and to, instead, take our futures into our own hands.
“While everybody was fighting for a seat at the table and talking about #OscarsSoWhite, #OscarsSoWhite… I said, ‘Y’all go ahead and do that. But while you’re fighting for a seat at the table, I’ll be down in Atlanta building my own.’ ”
Lamenting the actions and behaviors of others does little to aid our success. Neither does removing ourselves from any personal responsibility. Today, it has become quite fashionable to dismiss ourselves from any shameful behaviors. We are taught to assume that any bad actions we take are the fault of larger, oppressive systems. When I speak to groups of young people across the country, this is the single behavior that I tell them to reject. Because shame, I believe, is a necessary emotion, one that helps us edit our future behaviors.
I often share the example of a college experience I had where, after drinking past the point of reason, I made the terrible decision to sleep with someone whom I would have never engaged in my sobriety. This took place before the era of #MeToo, before the media and education blurred the lines between regret and rape. I regretted my decision, and felt shame. Rather than portraying myself as a victim who was taken advantage of by a man who—just like me—had drunk past his point of rational decision-making, I allowed myself to sit with those feelings of shame and regret. I was twenty years old and fully aware that alcohol is a drug that takes us outside our usual character, and it would have been foolish for me to expect someone else to take better care of me than me. I was right to feel embarrassed. And because I fully accepted responsibility for my own actions, I was able to fully edit myself in the future. Most people today know that I rarely, if ever, drink alcohol (a decision I made years later, after I began hating the morning angst), and people who know me personally are likely to describe me as a straight-edge. My character today is thanks in large part to not just the mistakes I made, but the mistakes I owned, which allowed me to grow into a woman who I am proud to be.
But had I been born just a few years later, things may have been drastically different. I may have awoken nights after binge drinking and poor decision-making and headed into a police precinct. I may have told detectives that yes, despite the fact that I poisoned myself with a liquid that functions to lower our inhibitions, I was appalled that people didn’t take me for the person I am in sobriety. And I would have become another victim of my own decisionmaking. Another oppressed woman in a patriarchal society, unwilling to accept any fault of her own.
It is unfortunate that with the all-too-fashionable claims of racism and sexism, people miss out on opportunities for growth. It is unfortunate that black America in particular is encouraged to deny that we play any role in our own misfortune, thereby forfeiting realistic means to transform.
DEPTH IN DATA: THE HIDDEN STORY
My many detractors love to skew data points to present proof that systemic racism really does still exist in this country. While every person knows that, despite media portrayals, America is far from being a tyrannical country, leftists harp on statistics that, without proper context, lead some to believe that the odds are stacked against them.
Take the poverty line, for example. It is true that blacks are twice as likely to fall below the poverty line as whites (20.8 percent versus 10.1 percent, respectively, according to the United States Census Bureau’s 2018 Income and Poverty in the United States report). But people fail to account for the fact that, across all races, single women (24.9 percent) and single men (12.7 percent) are far more likely to live in poverty than married couples (4.7 percent). Marriage rates have dropped dramatically in recent years, and (as we covered more extensively in chapter 2),
the crisis of unwed mothers has had a dramatic effect on blacks. It’s worth noting that only 6.9 percent of black married couples lived in poverty in 2006, while the poverty rate for nonmarried black families was a staggering 35.3 percent—a fivefold increase.
Similarly, we can lay waste to the concept of our oppression through incarceration, by simply correlating rates. It’s an uncomfortable truth that black Americans commit a disproportionate number of crimes in this country. Of the 6,570 homicides committed in 2018, blacks were responsible for 2,600. We represent just 13 percent of the American population, yet we commit nearly 40 percent of murders. When I consider these numbers, I cannot feign surprise regarding our disproportionate presence within the criminal justice system. Surely, no one would make the argument that we should stop locking up murderers and drug dealers simply because they are black.
NO PROBLEMS WITHOUT SOLUTIONS
Something that George W. Bush is well known for saying in his White House is the phrase “No problems without solutions,” and this expression couldn’t highlight a need in modern society better. Modern society has not only abandoned this mantra wholeheartedly but also added further caveats. Instead of “No problems without solutions,” we have “problems with no solutions,” and then “excuses for problems that have no solutions and no end”; finally, we have “excuses for problems that have no solutions and no end, but being given money by another group in society might make it better.” The list of ways we can change this slogan gets ever longer and more specialized depending on which rabbit hole of leftist thought you fall into. My point here, and throughout this chapter, has really been to say that if we want to succeed in life, we must take the attitude of that original slogan—for every problem, we must tackle it with a solution. If that solution doesn’t yet exist, then it is our job to create one; excuses will not fix the problem.
When we take that theme of victimhood versus victorhood, do we think the victors of this world returned home, glum and dejected, with excuses to their problems? Every great hero, ancient or modern, has fought against odds and overcome them; to their problems, they have found solutions. Of course, we do not need to define ourselves in such charismatic fashion; not all of us need be heroes or villains, but we are all challenged in our unique ways every day in life. It is in these small challenges that we are defined, because each of those small challenges builds to ultimately overcoming an even bigger challenge. And that is the harder path. No politician ever won an election with the slogan “be more responsible” or “don’t make excuses for your failures.”
My personal journey to success features no heroic feat: I got up every day and went to work. Boring, monotonous work. Work, however, that paid the bills, bit by bit, step by step, and helped me save and pay off my student loan. Dr. Carson was born with no superpowers—he just read books. Now he’s the secretary of housing and urban development, a qualified surgeon, and a former presidential candidate. Tyler Perry’s story? He skipped #OscarsSoWhite to focus on his own business. Excuses for failing to make tough decisions, failing to be honest with ourselves, failing to have responsibility will ultimately be the killer of dreams.
Black America has been fed excuses for generations. Every day excuses pollute the narrative surrounding our communities: police racism, generational slavery, wage gaps, etc. The list goes ever on and on, built around skewed data that helps support those narratives. Yet here I am—a girl who worked hard to pay off her loans, who had a few good ideas, started a YouTube channel, and is now being asked to speak around the country. Here I am, a girl from a small apartment and no financial means—who now knows the president of the United States. Why? Because I am the granddaughter of a man who got up at five o’clock in the morning to lay out tobacco to dry upon a sharecropping farm in the North Carolina, a man who worked so hard throughout his life that in his retirement, he purchased that sharecropping farm—a man who, despite growing up in the time of segregation, and despite surviving attacks from the Ku Klux Klan, never made any excuse. If my grandfather never made excuses, how could I? If our ancestors never complained, how can black Americans complain today?
9 ON FAITH
I am always a bit amused to come across conservatives who claim they have no faith. I find myself wondering just what exactly it is they believe they are conserving. You need not be religious to know that Western civilization was built upon Judeo-Christian values. The principles of Western society are deeply aligned with the principles of the Bible. Quite naturally, any meaningful attempt to comprehend exactly what the Left is attempting to undo will bring you to the topic of faith.
Our humanity is defined by two basic desires: that of the material and that of the eternal spiritual. On the material side, we are obsessed with provisions of everyday life: money, charity, power, service, ambition, sacrifice. All these elements relate to our place in this world—and our desire to be perceived as influential, perhaps as selfless by giving away wealth and provision or heralded as a great leader by accumulating power.
Yet there is the other, deeper desire—that humanity has long grappled with: that of the eternal spirit. This is the power that has driven men and women to forgo all things secular by taking vows of chastity or silence, or to exile themselves to distant lands in the pursuit of evangelism. In its quest, others have even committed themselves to the belief of martyrdom through suicide. That is the intangible power of the spiritual. It is how the most basic of childhood questions—“Where did we come from?” “What is our purpose here?” “What happens when we die?”—can morph into transformative life decisions that stem from the soul.
All of these questions and their answers can be boiled down to a single word: faith.
Because whether you believe in everything or you believe in nothing, you believe in something.
Everybody has faith. Whether it is faith in a traditional religious belief system or faith in nothing, people commit themselves to an intangible idea. Every minute of our every day is determined by little acts of faith: faith in politicians to lead us, faith in doctors to prescribe medicines for us, faith in the media to report to us. In each circumstance, we deposit a little belief in someone or something. If our faith is honored, it transforms into trust. But if that trust starts to corrode, we necessarily place our faith in some other person or thing—new leadership or new ideology, which we hope will restore our faith.
Faith, then, has been at the heart of the black American story.
AMAZING GRACE
The hymn “Amazing Grace” is well known to most as a staple favorite at Sunday church services. The harmonious melody carries words that reflect, in many ways, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Yet few know the story of John Newton, the man who wrote the hymn. Newton was a slave trader from Great Britain without any religious convictions. In 1748, just off the coast of Ireland, his ship became caught in a storm that he was certain would end his life. Desperate, he called out to God for mercy. Having survived, Newton believed that God had delivered him from his circumstances and he committed himself to Christianity. Six years later, he gave up slave trading altogether to pursue theological studies. Soon after being ordained into the Anglican priesthood, he began writing hymns, among them “Amazing Grace.” What is remarkable is that the hymn found no immediate popularity in Britain. Rather, it gained steam decades later in the American South, during a Protestant religion revival. Soon the song became a Negro spiritual, sung on plantations by black slaves.
In the story of John Newton we find a deep irony: a former slaver writes what will become a song that gives the enslaved what is perhaps the only thing that gives them the strength to keep going. Faith.
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears released.
How precious did that grace appear,
the hour I first believed
In these lyrics one can imagine how the everyday fear in the hearts and minds of slaves may have been silenced, even if just for a moment, by the thought of something bigger
than themselves. At the thought of something beyond themselves. It was a faith and a trust that they somehow belonged. In a word, providence.
Consider this. On August 20, 1619, the first ship arrived at the colony of Virginia, carrying slaves who would be bought by English colonists. Almost four hundred years later to the day, in mid-August 2019, a young black woman would be readying herself for a big day in Virginia. Dressed in white lace, that woman would walk down an aisle toward her soon-to-be English husband, to the sound of a congregation singing:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind but now I see
The irony of my wedding day was not lost on me. The meaning of the lyrics, the electrical current carried through the tangled web of both black and white history, was not lost on me. Our guests, of all different races, joined in a chorus and delivered us all, even if just for a moment, to something bigger than ourselves. I realized that I was the living embodiment of all that my ancestors had sung for, all that my ancestors had perhaps hung on for. In a word, providence.
There are not many positive considerations on the topic of American slavery, but the unshakable faith that was instilled in the black community is certainly one of them. It became something that even slaves could leave behind for their children, something that has given black America perhaps a richer faith narrative than any other group.
THE PROMISED LAND
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