A white man in a black world

This week I visited another world.

On Thursday, I attended my first Bob Wright Symposium on Business Empowerment.

The event is now in its second year, and as a regular attendee of the James Blanchard Leadership Forum, I figured this would be a similar event: A wealthy community leader using his extensive connections to bring the nation’s best leaders to Columbus to sharpen the rest of us.

(In the spirit of disclosure, the Ledger-Enquirer is a sponsor of both events, providing me with a ticket and the time to attend.)

In a sense, I was right. Like Blanchard’s forum, Wright’s symposium was a source of inspiration and life lessons I can apply right away.

But I learned something else.

Going in, I knew the speakers and most of the audience would be black, but I thought the color of the people wouldn’t matter.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

The moderator was ABC News Chief Correspondent Byron Pitts, who occupied an easy chair on a stage furnished like a living room. Participants took turns sitting on the sofa.

Pitts, who had clearly done his homework, used questions to draw out each person’s success story.

Everyone had this in common: They were descendents of slaves, they’d experienced discrimination early in life, and nothing about their history or environment indicated that their dreams could possibly come true.

No way. But as one participant said, they “made a way out of no way.” They told themselves, “I can’t be broken because I didn’t come from a broken people.”

Most of them grew up “po’.”

My favorite speaker of the day, Reginald Parker, lived on a dirt road in Savannah. In the late 1980s, his family had a household income of $4,000.

“I was ‘po’,’” he said. “People who are poor have the ‘-or.’”

As a high school student, Parker was gifted in math and science but had no full scholarship offer from a Georgia university.

One day he told his adviser he was getting brochures from some school with three letters: M.I.T.

“Is it as good as Georgia Tech?” he asked.

M.I.T. was the only school to offer him a free ride, so he went to Massachusetts. “God forced me to go there by making it available,” he said.

He earned his chemical engineering degree and then a Ph.D from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Florida State.

At 50, he’s the founder, president and CEO of 510nano, Inc., and the president of Silicon Valley Solar. He wants to make $500 million, he says, so he can give to others and solve big problems.

“Are you doing this for yourself or something bigger than yourself?” he asks.

Another participant, Mellody Hobson, is president of a Chicago Investment firm, chair of the board of DreamWorks, and on the boards of Estee Lauder and Starbucks. She’s married to George Lucas and they have a 3-year-old daughter who’s fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

She acknowledges she has a “magical life” but remembers as if it were yesterday being evicted from her childhood home. Not a day goes by, she says, when black people, however successful, aren’t watching white people closely.

“We observe,” she says, “because we live in their world.”

Hobson said she hears white people talking about being “color blind,” when she wishes they would be “color brave.”

That made me think.

As a white person, I don’t fully understand people of color when I invite them into my world and interact with them on my terms. I’ve got to go into their world, where they’re talking to each other and saying what’s on their mind, and listen.

For me, Thursday was a step in the right direction.

This story was originally published August 19, 2016 at 8:51 PM with the headline "A white man in a black world."