KWAME

Michael Norman, one of the most talented 400m sprinters in the world, has the potential to be one of the greats but struggles with patience. By patience, I mean disciplined inward focus, not. My Nigerian brothers and sisters would frame it as “facing your front.” Norman and his coach, Quincy Watts, have pointed to his lack of patience as a key blocker from Norman fully realizing his potential. In this training video, we see his coach Quincy Watts reminding Norman to cultivate that patience and how that will enable him to make it through the prelims of the Olympics and be ready to get after it in the final, rather than gassing himself chasing folks throughout. Norman’s struggle serves as a microcosm of a broader issue I aim to explore – the quest for racial parity. His journey to fully face his front reflects a broader call to action for Black folks.

Watts’ comments about patience came back to mind when I saw McKinsey’s recent report on the quality of the Black experience in varied types of communities across the United States. When I saw the report, I remembered Watts’ comments about patience. They found that Black folks could take between 110-320 years to reach parity with White folks at the current pace of change. They do highlight that we have made progress over the past decade but White folks have seen their outcomes improve as well at or above the level of Black folks, across all categories. The authors then float two approaches to accelerating progress. One approach was to make targeted investments in specific communities that bring a holistic strategy for elevating the lived experience in the community. The other was to make thematic investments in areas like nationwide public early childhood care.

The reason Michael Norman’s video comes to mind is that I believe a good amount of his struggle with patience comes from his operating in relation to others rather than himself. This causes him to press to catch them, which leads him to run out of gas in the big moments. If he masters running his race, the sky is the limit for what he could do. Just as Norman needs to find a way to consistently run his own race, the task is the same for the Black community to double down on cultivating our inherent strengths in efforts to build a beautiful future, rather than chasing parity. Parity feels like a low goal to have to wait centuries to realize.

Are we really chasing parity with White folks? I would argue that is the wrong race to be running. It leads us to a place of important but uninspired solutions to flip the situation – reliance on legacy philanthropic institutions, an ineffective Congress, and corporations that say one thing yet do the other. I don’t see how these institutions get us to accelerate the closing of that gap. I should also mention that we are assuming the gap can’t widen. The fallout of Reconstruction’s failure was a 100-year journey to reclaim rights rescinded on a handshake deal in exchange for a presidency. What’s to say we couldn’t find ourselves in a similar place trying to rely on institutions that contain echoes of that history in their DNA?

Maximizing what we have within us – our talents, insights, creativity, resources, and more – seems to be the more worthwhile path. In Let’s Trade Keys, I’ve written that the Black community on a global scale is operating with one hand tied behind our backs and have been doing so for centuries since the emergence of the Black American, Caribbean, British, and the list goes on. These barriers prevent us from fully renewing our minds by trading keys, sharing information, collaborating, building institutions, and more.

Some would say, “I am American.” Africans have nothing to do with me. My ancestors helped build this country and I am focused on reaping the benefits of that labor. To that, I’d say well and good. But, if McKinsey’s analysis is right, how exactly do we plan on reaping those benefits? I’m open to ideas, but the ones outlined by McKinsey don’t appear to get us there. What if we linked arms across borders in efforts to shift the game being played?

It seems worth a shot to run our own race, focused on maximizing our potential to build a future not yet conceived. I believe this will enable us to unlock outcomes we could not imagine and serve as a macro benefit to the world. That requires a patience that comes from confidence in what is within us as a community.