There she is -- no, not Miss America, but the Angela-Davis-Afro-wearing, machine-gun-toting, angry, unpatriotic Michelle Obama, greeting her husband with a fist bump instead of a kiss on the cheek.
It was supposed to be satire, but the caricature of Barack Obama and his wife that appeared on the cover of the New Yorker last week rightly caused a major flap. And among black professional women like me and many of my sisters in the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, who happened to be gathered last week in Washington for our 100th anniversary celebration, the mischaracterization of Michelle hit the rawest of nerves. Welcome to our world. We've watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails -- being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: "angry black woman." And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated "makeover" to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America. Sad to say, but what Obama has undergone, though it's on a national stage and on a much more prominent scale, is nothing new to professional African American women. We endure this type of labeling all the time. We're endlessly familiar with the problem Michelle Obama is confronting -- being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do. So many of us are hoping that Michelle -- as an elegant and elusive combination of successful career woman, supportive wife and loving mother -- can change that. "Ain't I a woman?" Sojourner Truth famously asked 157 years ago. Her ringing question, demanding why black women weren't accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African American woman's dilemma today: How are we viewed as women, and where do we fit into American life? "Thanks to the hip-hop industry," one prominent black female journalist recently said to me, all black women are "deemed 'sexually promiscuous video vixens' not worthy of consideration. If other black women speak up, we're considered angry black women who complain. This society can't even see a woman like Michelle Obama. All it sees is a black woman and attaches stereotypes." Black women have been mischaracterized and stereotyped since the days of slavery and minstrel shows. In more recent times, they've been portrayed onscreen and in popular culture as either sexually available bed wenches in such shows as the 2000 docudrama "Sally Hemings: An American Scandal," ignorant and foolish servants such as Prissy from "Gone With the Wind" or ever-smiling housekeepers, workhorses who never complain and never tire, like the popular figure of Aunt Jemima. Even in the 21st century, black women are still bombarded with media and Internet images that portray us as loud, aggressive, violent and often grossly obese and unattractive. Think of the movies "Norbit" or "Big Momma's House," or of the only two black female characters in "Enchanted," an overweight, aggressive traffic cop and an angry divorcée amid all the white princesses. On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a smart, accomplished black professional woman portrayed on mainstream television or in the movies? If Claire Huxtable on "The Cosby Show" comes to mind, remember that she left the scene 16 years ago.
The reality is that in just a generation, many black women -- who were mostly domestics, schoolteachers or nurses in the post-slavery Jim Crow era -- have become astronauts, corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers and PhDs. You name it, and black women have achieved it. The most popular woman on daytime television is Oprah Winfrey. Condoleezza Rice is secretary of state.
And yet my generation of African American women -- we're called, in fact, the Claire Huxtable generation -- hasn't managed to become successfully integrated into American popular culture. We're still looking for respect in the workplace, where, more than anything else, black women feel invisible. It's a term that comes up again and again. "In my profession, white men mentor young whites on how to succeed," a financial executive told me, but "they're either indifferent to or dogmatically document the mistakes black women make. Their indifference is the worst, because it means we're invisible."
As someone who recently left a large law firm to work in the corporate sector, I have to agree. I liked my firm, but I always felt that I had to sink or swim on my own. I didn't get the kind of mentoring that I saw white colleagues, male and female, getting all around me. The firm was actually one of the better ones when it came to diversity, and yet of 600 partners, only five were black women.
A 2007 American Bar Association report titled "Visible Invisibility" describes how black women in the legal profession face the "double burden" of being both black and female, meaning that they enjoy none of the advantages that black men gain from being male, or that white women gain from being white.
Invisibility isn't the only problem. I run an organization dedicated to supporting African American professional women and often run empowerment workshops at various conferences. At a recent such workshop, I asked the participants to list some words that would describe how they believe they're viewed in the workplace and the culture at large. These are the kinds of words that came back: "loud," "angry," "intimidating," "mean," "opinionated," "aggressive," "hard." All painful words. Yet asked to describe themselves, the same women offered gentler terms: "strong," "loving," "dependable," "compassionate."
Where does the disconnect come from? Possibly from the way black women have been forced into roles of strength for decades. "Black women are the original multitaskers of necessity," says one nonprofit executive. "We've perfected it because we've been doing it for so long. But people don't appreciate the skill it requires, and they don't recognize the toll it takes on us as human beings."
For all our success in the professional world, we have paid a significant price in our private and emotional lives. A life of preordained singleness (by chance, not by choice) is fast becoming the plight of alarming numbers of professional black women in America. The fact is that the more money and education a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have a family.
Consider these stunning statistics: As of 2007, according to the New York Times, 70 percent of professional black women were unmarried. Black women are five times more likely than white women to be single at age 40. In 2003, Newsweek reported that there are more black women than black men (24 percent to 17 percent) in the professional-managerial class. According to Department of Education statistics cited by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black women earn 67 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded to blacks, as well as 71 percent of all master's degrees and 65 percent of all doctoral degrees.
With all the challenges facing professional black women today, we hope that Michelle Obama will defy the negative stereotypes about us. And that, now that a strong professional black woman is center stage, she'll bring to light what we already know: that an accomplished black woman can be a loyal and supportive wife and a good mother and still fulfill her own dreams. The fact that her husband clearly adores Michelle is both refreshing and reassuring to many of us who long to find a good man who will love and appreciate us.
Recently, a friend who's a married professional mother of three girls wrote to me: "I think one of the most interesting things about Michelle Obama is that what she and her husband are doing is pretty revolutionary these days -- and I don't mean running for president. For a black man and woman in the U.S. to be happily married, with children, and working as partners to build a life -- let alone a life of service to others -- all while rearing their children together is downright revolutionary."
It's how so many black professional women feel. And our hope is that if Michelle Obama becomes first lady, the revolution will come to us at last.
Sophia A. Nelson is a corporate attorney and president of iask, Inc., an organization for African American professional women. Please feel free to e-mail comments about this article to snelson@iaskinc.org.]]>
Led by Howard university's Chair of Physics department Dr. Gregory Jenkins; a group of 20 of Howard's brightest spent their 2007 Spring Break in New Orleans, to not only help with revitalizing the city, but also research in hopes of realizing the problems of the city. The group studied in depth the effects of government, capitalism, and global warming on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, but as Doc. J says "you can't know anything about the result without knowing the origin of the problem."
On June 15, 2008 Dr. Jenkins took a group of four Howard University students, including myself, and one University of Michigan student to the origin of everything- Africa. Across the "pond" where the mighty Atlantic ocean crashes into the iron laden red rocks of the Senegalese coast; an environment eerily similar to New Orleans exists. Dakar, a low lying peninsula city which, just like the city of New Orleans has a geographical shape reminiscent of a boot, is the capitol of Senegal; and with respect to Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana, is the capitol of Western Africa. Dakar has been growing at warp speed since gaining the title of Senegal's capitol city; a title which was once held by a city just up the coast by the name of Saint Loius, just as St. Louis is North of Louisiana. Unlike both of the Catholic cities of New Orleans and St. Louis, Dakar is a city with a strong Islamic basis. This influence is attributed to the East as Senegal has a strong Arab population. Known as a "Black" African country- but just like any Black community in America- many merchants are from the Middle East, as a large number of store owners are Lebanese. Much to the dismay of many residents, in March 2008 Senegal's current President Abdoulaye Wade and the city of Dakar played host to the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) summit where a large number of high ranking representatives from Arab countries came to the capitol city in order to discuss pollution issues, food scarcity, and the development of the infrastructure of African countries such as Senegal.
Dakar is a city under construction; high rise business buildings, casinos, and hotel resorts are being constructed along the coast line; one day very soon the Cornish strip will be just as famous as Bourbon Street. But just as its big easy cousin across the water, the flourishing tourist industry comes in the face of thousands of displaced individuals- many homeless, impoverished, and mentally ill people have come from the surrounding villages, forced from their residencies due to famine and lack of resources, only to come to the big city to find more of the same. Teenage men duck in and out the organized chaos of the big city traffic in order to sale passers by phone cards, peanuts, or anything else that can be held by hand. The streets these "jaikats" hustle in are hectic enough during the day, but only grow more treacherous at night as the city has constant rolling blackouts. Many street hustlers and students alike only come to the city to make a living, and then return to their villages at the end of the day. Much like New Orleans, options of evacuation are scarce- in order to get out the city, all roads converge into one main two lane high way highway which is usually decorated with an aerial ribbon of carbon and Diesel fumes.
The connection between capitalism and carbon congestion only brings the cities of Dakar and New Orleans closer together. There are two major events that have origins in this region of West Africa that directly effect the Gulf Coast of the United States: slavery and hurricane formations. The origins of both can be found on the Island of Goree; once a French slave dungeon where people from the Wolof, Fulani, and Serer Nations were held captive until being shipped to the new world. The French ships would leave the southern port and use the trade winds to guide them to one of their colonies- most likely Haiti or New Orleans. It is these same trade winds that guided these ships that are now becoming fiercer due to climate change and are more readily turning common tropical storms into high categorical hurricanes.
The Island of Goree, once epitome of disregard for human life, has been revitalized to an aesthetically pleasing tourist attraction complete with colorful buildings, fine dining, and French men riding sea Jet Ski's while throwing loose change into the beautiful blue water so starving Senegalese children can risk their lives diving for the coins.
The 9th ward, once the epitome of the collective soul of African Americans; has been ravished to a point that shows total disregard for human life with dilapidated buildings, starving families, and wealthy Americans riding in luxury cars past homeless individuals on the way to the Essence Festival, Mardi Gras, or the 2008 NBA All Star game in order to be entertained by African Americans talent, athletics, and culture.
It is obvious these two cities have a lot in common, or as they say on French, beaucoup en commun; it is my greatest fear is that the growing metropolitan area of Dakar is setting itself up for a disaster with the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina- and that the money hungry city of New Orleans is setting itself up for a disaster with the magnitude of the Island of Goree- capitalism can cloud vision just as carbon dioxide does.]]>
If you were to turn on a popular video music channel, you'd probably see a video portraying a Black man either pressed up against some half naked chicks, throwing money in the air, or a combination of both. What you won’t see are healthy images of Black masculinity or fatherhood. In a society where Black masculinity is revered as a commodity, a product that is marketed, sold, and mass consumed, Be A Father to Your Child: Real Talk From Black Men On Family, Love, And Fatherhood is a God-send.
An anthology comprised of essays, interviews, poems, and lyrics, BAF presents personal accounts of fatherhood and manhood from 24 Black men who came of age during the emergence of hip hop culture. Featuring published author Kevin Powell, filmmaker Byron Hurt, Professor Jelani Cobb and a host of other writers, artists, and community activists, BAF presents a rather holistic view of fatherhood. Editor, April R. Silver says: "Editing this project was like a counseling session. There is a sensitivity that you have to have because you're dealing with men with realy sensitive issues."
Opening with an insightful discussion of Black masculinity, BAF gives a comprehensive summary of the social ills that negatively affected Black families such as unusually high unemployment and incarceration rates, drug epidemics, and "rolling stone" absent fathers. What comes next are candid interviews and earnest essays that interweave hip hop into an emotionally driven and in-depth dialogue into the meaning of fatherhood. From a narrative of a man coming out to his father to a man who was raised by a sampling of fathers, BAF touches on the challenges and successes of fatherhood.
Aimed at repatching the father/children disconnect that affects many within the hip hop generation, BAF helps to provide insight and understanding to men committed to creating healthy families. The compelling stories that make up this book calls the reader to take an introspective look at their own relationship, or lack thereof with their own father or men who stand in as a father figure.
"this is an ongoing movement," said Mo Beasly, one of the contributing writers to the book. "There is healing that has to be done and its decades in the making. We need to keep writing and keep telling these stories."]]>
Anyhow, in the interim I spent a great deal of time, more time than I've spent in my entire New York life, in Queens, mainly in Jamaica, Queens, getting to know Sean Bell's family. I was particularly struck by Sean Bell's mother, Valerie Bell, and his father, William Bell. Two very decent and well-intentioned working-class New Yorkers, who had raised their children the best they could, who were now, suddenly, activists thrust into a spotlight they had never sought. The parents are what we the Black community calls "God-fearing, church-going folk." Indeed, what was so incredible was how much Mr. and Mrs. Bell believed in and referenced God. But that is our sojourn in America: when everything else fails us, we still have the Lord. And there they were, holding a 50-day vigil directly across from the 103rd precinct, on 168th Street, right off Jamaica Avenue and 91st Avenuein Jamaica, Queens, in the dead-cold winter air. They and their family members and close friends taking turns monitoring the makeshift altar of candles, cards, and photos. And I remember how we had to shame local leaders a few times into supporting Mr. and Mrs. Bell with donations of money, food, or other material needs. While much of the media and support flocked to Nicole Paultre Bell, Sean Bell's fiance, and the sexiness of her being represented by the Reverend Al Sharpton and his lawyer pals Sanford Rubenstein and Michael Hardy, the media did not pay much attention to Sean Bell's parents and their kinfolk at all.
What was especially striking was the fact that Mrs. Bell got up every single morning, made her way to the vigil area, then to work in a local hospital all day, then to her church every single evening. She reminded me so much of my own mother, of any Black mother in America who has had to be the backbone of the family, often sacrificing her own health, her own wants and needs, her own hurt and pain, to be there for others in their time of need.
Mrs. Bell always told me that she truly believed justice would be done in this case. She really did. I never had the heart to tell her that it is rare for a police officer to be found guilty of murdering a civilian, no matter how glaring the evidence. Nor did I have the heart to tell Mrs. Bell that the media and the defense would seek to destroy her son's image and reputation, that Sean Bell would be reduced to a thug, as an unsavory character, to somehow justify the police shooting. Nor did I have the heart to tell Mrs. Bell that this pain of losing her son would be with her the remainder of her life. I did not share my suspicion that the parade of Black leaders, Black protests, media hype- all of it- was all part of someone’s carefully concocted script, brushed off and brought to the parade every single time a case like this occurred. I have seen it before, and as long as we live in a city, a nation, that does not value all people as human, there will be more Sean Bell's.
"I am Sean Bell," many of us chanted in the days and weeks immediately following his death. Yet very few of us showed up to the hearings after, and even fewer had the courage to question the vision, or lack thereof, of our own Black leadership who accomplished, ultimately, little to nothing at all. And very few of us realized that the powers-that-be in New York City have come to anticipate our reactions to matters like the Sean Bell tragedy: we get upset and become very emotional; we scream "No Justice! No Peace!"; we march, rally, and protest; we call the police and mayor all kinds of names and demand their resignations; we vow that this killing will be the last; and we will wait until the next tragedy hits, then this whole horrible cycle begins anew.
Plain and simple, racism creates abusive relationships. It does not matter if the perpetrator is a White sister or brother, or a person of color, because the most vulnerable in our society feel the heat of it. Real talk: this tragedy would have never gone down on the Upper Eastside of Manhattan or in Brooklyn Heights. I am not just speaking about the judge's decision, but the police officer's actions. Those shots would have never been fired at unarmed White people sitting in a car. Until we understand that racism is not just about who pulled the trigger in a police misconduct case, but is also about the geography of racism, and the psychology of racism, we are forever stuck having the same endless dialogue with no solution in sight.
And until America recognizes the civil and human rights of all its citizens, systemic racism and police misconduct, joined at the hip, will never end. That is, until White sisters and brothers realize they, too, are Sean Bell, this will never end. Save for a few committed souls, most White folks sit on the sidelines (as many did when we marched down Fifth Avenue in protest of Sean Bell's murder in December 2006), feel empathy, but fail to grasp that our struggle for justice is their struggle for justice. They, alas, are Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo, and all those anonymous Black and Brown heads and bodies who've been victimized, whether they want to accept that reality or not. And the reality is that until police officers are forced to live in the communities they police, forced to learn the language, the culture, the mores of the communities they police, forced to change how they handle undercover assignments, this systemic racism, this police misconduct, will never end. And until Black and Latino people, the two communities most likely to suffer at the hands of police brutality and misconduct, refuse to accept the half-baked leadership we've been given for nearly forty years now, and start to question what is really going on behind the scenes with the handshakes, the eyewinks, the head nods, and the backroom deals at the expense of our lives, this systemic racism, this police misconduct, these kinds of miscarriages of justice, will never end.
Our current leadership needs us to believe all we can ever be are victims, doomed to one recurring tragedy or another. It keeps these leaders gainfully employed, and it keeps us feeling completely helpless and powerless. Well, I am not helpless nor powerless, and neither are you. To prevent Sean Bell's memory from fading like dust into the air, the question is put to you, now: What are you going to do to change this picture once and for all? Mayor Bloomberg said this in a statement:
"There are no winners in a trial like this. An innocent man lost his life, a bride lost her groom, two daughters lost their father, and a mother and a father lost their son. No verdict could ever end the grief that those who knew and loved Sean Bell suffer."
No, the grief will never end, not for Sean Bell's parents and family, for his fiance and children. But Mayor Bloomberg, you, me, we the people, can step up our games, make a commitment to real social justice in our city, in our nation, and, for once, penalize people, including police officers, who just randomly blow away lives. Sean Bell is never coming back, but we are here, and the biggest tragedy will be if we keep going about our lives, as if this never happened in the first place.
And a long as we have leadership, White leadership and Black leadership, mainstream leadership and grassroots leadership, that can do nothing more than exacerbate folks' very natural emotions in a tragedy like this, we will never progress as a human race. Instead a true leader needs to harness those emotions and turn them into action, as Dr. King did, as Gandhi did. In the absence of such action, so many of us, especially us Black and Latino males, will continue to have a very nervous relationship with the police, even the police of color, for fear that any of one of us could be the next Sean Bell.
Kevin Powell is a Brooklyn, New York-based writer, community activist, and author of 8 books. He can be reached at kevin@kevinpowell.net. ]]>
As I considered the response of my friends and family, I also reflected on the decision of the editor of Vogue to put this provocative image on the cover of its April 2008 issue. My current status as a graduate student in an M.S. in Publishing program has trained me to do this type of evaluation of media, and I found myself drawing the same conclusion that had been drawn by many when I was on staff at Time magazine in the 1990s and a darkened O.J. Simpson image appeared on newsstands prior to his acquittal on charges of murder of his white wife and her friend. Someone must have sneaked this in after everyone went home. Right?
A brief conversation with one of my female professors on the subject reflected the dominant concern of activist Caucasian women, whose fight for women’s rights overlapped the civil rights battles, who bypassed the discussion of race and went straight to the feminist issue of gender discrimination, an issue about which I am also deeply concerned, and yet I did not feel the need to overlook one issue for the other, as she did. Upon greater consideration of my professor's point of view, I realized that the way the image is composed is suggestive of both the gender stereotypes to which she reacts and the racial biases that generated my reaction, yet I chose my racial concerns over those of gender bias because this is a fashion magazine after all.
I have become disheartened by the notion that our conversations about race and gender must compete for time in the same manner that they did in previous decades when the barriers to access were intrinsic in our laws and minds. The redefinition of the media as leftist or right-wing reflects the assertion by the general public that news no longer attempts to be an unbiased eye on the world, but merely disseminates information with the stamp of approval of the corporate entities that own it.
Yet, magazines by definition have always had a point of view. They are not meant to be neutral on the issues and ideas they put forth. They are not like newspapers or broadcast television or radio programs intended for the masses. Each magazine title has an intended, limited audience and a distinctive point of view. Each one goes in-depth with its telling of stories in words and images that only a small percentage of the country would be interested in reading. They are sought out by their readers who pay good money to escape to the world of ideas that a particular magazine creates for them on a monthly basis.
This is why I believe the Vogue cover is so damaging. Vogue is a well-known national fashion brand, but it is a magazine that is read by only a small percentage of the entire population. The readers of Vogue are more likely to be the wannabe Paris Hilton’s of the world than those who identify with india.arie. So when a cover image like the one of the April issue shows up on newsstands or in the mail, the first question has to be: What is the message Vogue is trying to convey? The cover image of every magazine is its most important sales tool, and Vogue had to believe that such an image would be well-received in retail stores around the country.
Historically, the shock factor really doesn't sell fashion, and pairings of black men and white women have not been fashionable in magazines or in life. Perhaps this is exactly the message the so-called fashion bible wanted to send as clearly and as loudly as possible. I suspect the message reached the heiress wannabes, but what about the young men who identify with LeBron?
Obama first denounced the statements made by Wright in an insightful and powerful speech on race politics saying, "...[his] comments were not only wrong but divisive at a time when we need unity." Now Obama has completely distanced himself from the pastor, calling Wright's words destructive and appalling in a public divorce between a man with sights set on becoming the first Black president, and a man who has made a haphazard attempt at restoring his reputation.
Although I agreed with some of the points Wright made, his sarcasm and condescending tone played right into a game of divide and conquer, splitting two forces that may ultimately lead to the defeat of both parties. Why is Wright coming out now at a critical moment in the Obama campaign? He couldn't have come out immediately after the sound bites aired or after the democratic nomination? Why now?
Perhaps Wright's selfish display is an effort to help promote his upcoming book. However, within days before democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina, Wright's iron grip on the media has made Obama an easy target to criticism.
According to mainstream media, uncommitted super delegates and working class whites may by swayed against Obama or influenced to renege on their vote behind Wright's hoarding of the spotlisht. Let's just hope that Wright's chickens don't come home to roost in Obama's coop.
This is what matters in the world of advertising. In recent weeks I have noticed an upsurge in niche social networking websites. Although these sites maybe small in membership advertisers are taking notice. Don't you think that the advertiser in charge of the Jonas Brothers event would be much more satisfied if they put that same ad on a website dedicated to there genre of music. Although the ad may not reach the millions of people it will reach on a Myspace or Facebook they would be able to rest easily knowing that a higher percentage of
people would come out and support the event.
Niche websites like Conscious Africans connected (http://consciousafricans.ning.com/), Linkedin (www.linkedin.com) and YSN.com are all connecting advertisers and audiences in a much more focused way than Myspace and Facebook are capable of. However do not think that the two networking behemoths are to be outdone. Facebook has tried to combat this with its decision to show users when their friends patronize a certain business or ad however this strategy has proven to be more of an annoyance to the average user like myself.
Ultimately I feel that the social networking site is here to stay as are its two flagships. However the days of there whole sale market dominance are numbered. What we are seeing now is that the floodgates have been opened. The concept of social networking is backfiring on the creators of these two sites but in reality they are not going anywhere anytime soon. What I foresee happening is that they both will eventually fall into the background as more niche sites begin to appear. In any case nobody can argue that Myspace and Facebook have
connected out generation like never before.]]>
I think the issue the series creator has tapped into is the fact that we in the Black community are in fact not in control of many of the things that are supposed to represent us. The sad thing about the Boondocks episodes that have drawn the most scrutiny is not that they are lies created by white corporate executives but that they are truths told by a young Black American artist through the eyes of a more politically aware young Black America.
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My cousin Josephine* on the other hand, a 65 year old woman who grew up in the South and witnessed racism first hand, voted for Hillary Clinton.
"What's up with that?," I wondered.
"I voted for her strictly based on her experience," said Josephine. "I feel that the country has a lot of problems and she is better equipped to tackle some of the problems that the country has. And her husband was a good president in the past, especially what he did for Blacks."
"Is she her husband?" I thouhght to myself.
"Is her husband running for President? No. Hmmm."
My cousin and I represent a generational divide between the two democratic frontrunners; the split among younger voters who support Obama, and older voters who back Clinton. According to primary exit polls, Obama is leading among voters under 30, whereas Clinton is gaining more support from voters over 50.
As my cousin pointed out, many older people are voting for Clinton because they want to see the Clintons back in the White House. It is this mentality of settling and comfort that annoys me as a young voter. My main point here is simple: "Why go backwards?"
I don't want Bill back. It's time to move forward. Despite Obama's "inexperience," I believe he can change the direction of America. In fact, I believe his inexperience will allow him to question current policies and go against the status quo.
Obama's appeal to youth is couched in his charisma, intelligence, cool factor, and promise to bring a difference to the nation. Often compared to Kennedy and King, Obama brings a message of hope that inspires.
At the end of the day, I believe its not about race. It's about CHANGE. Are you ready for change?