We’ve always used successful individuals as a barometer of possibility for everyone. “If I made it, then so can you.”
This is the siren call of almost every motivational speaker. And it makes perfect sense. It’s encouraging to see someone that’s like you from similar circumstances achieve greatness. As a guy that grew up in not so privileged neighborhood, I’m often used as an example of what hard work can achieve. But sometimes people use success stories as an excuse to not care about others. The fact is, when the system is failing people, one or two outliers is often used as an excuse to deflect social responsibility.
“If Oprah made it, why don’t people in the ghetto just get it together?”
To people that say things like this, I ask you one question, “Bill Gates was just a middle class White kid, why aren’t you a billionaire?” Do you see how absurd that sounds?
I think it’s important that we remember that while success stories can be motivational, they’re no representation of overall opportunity. I’d like to publicly declare, that no matter how my success is viewed, “Do not use me as an excuse.” Do not pretend that because I’ve achieved something, that other people are just lazy. Do not use my identity as a weapon against my peers. Do not use the things I’ve achieved as a weapon against people who look like me. And please for the love of God, do not use the work I’ve done as a shield for your apathy.
Systemic disenfranchisement is broader than work ethic and social mobility is impacted by much more than ‘pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.’ In fact, social mobility is greatly impacted by the means of one’s parents, as seen in reports by David Grusky and Pablo Mitnik from the Center on Poverty and Inequality. High-income families tend to retain a much larger amount of wealth from generation to generation — obviously. Furthermore, men often retain a lot more of their parent’s earnings than women do across the board. Though women from upper-class families face less of an income dip due to the types of men they marry on average. Wealth is rarely about an individual’s drive. More often than not, it’s about the structure of our society. And in America, upward mobility is a lot more complicated than it’s made out to be in typical heroes tales of underdogs striking it rich.
No matter how many times we have to wipe tears away while watching them.
Beyond wealth disparities, there are also racial and environmental barriers. Put bluntly, black and brown people are facing an uphill battle. The inmate population in America is 37.8% black, despite black people being only 13% of the overall population. The majority of those crimes, nearly 50% of all prisoners offenses, are drug offenses. The kicker? The incarceration rates are drastically incongruent to the racial breakdown of actual drug users. Spoiler alert: White people actually use drugs not only more, but at a greater rate than others. After adding in how those felonies make it harder to get jobs and mounting legal fees making it near impossible to stay out of the system it creates a feedback loop that impacts communities of color at a higher rate than the rest of America.
“I had a woman boss once, what are women complaining about?”
If you add gender discrimination and sexuality into the mix and we’ve got a full nelson of systemic oppression. For instance, the number of Fortune 500 CEO’s that are women? Twenty-one. Even though women are more than half the population they’re only 4.2% of the CEOs of these high ranked companies. This can’t simply be a reflection of how there are no qualified women to run these organizations. Certainly out of 157 million, we can find more than 21. Just for fun, only nine are Hispanic and five are Black. Studies have shown that women are not only effective leaders, but businesses with more women on the board outperform their counterparts. The inconsistency here can’t be explained away by a lack of “hard work” and “perseverance.”
“My dad grew up on a farm and now he’s a business owner, what’s your excuse?”
What we are experiencing is an example of systemic failure (or success if you’re a conspiracy theorist). But what’s truly important is that understanding systems are important. Communities, intergenerational wealth, and social mobility are major factors in success. This isn’t to say that financial and personal achievement aren’t possible, but a few of us overcome hardships is not an indictment of others that haven’t.
The successful aren’t always the harder working, sometimes they’re products of a system that functions in their favor. So it’s certainly time we stop using outliers as weapons against the disenfranchised and begin to look for ways to make those outliers more common. One of my favorite quotes of all time goes like this:
“When one fish dies, you question the fish. When all the fish die, you question the water.”
I think it’s time to start checking the water.
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Eric Thomas, Senior Partner and Brand Specialist at Saga MKTG speaking at TEDXDetroit
Eric Thomas is a Branding Specialist and Senior Partner at Saga MKTG based in Detroit MI. He’s also an entrepreneur who never believes “the way it has been done” is the “way it must be done.” Follow or connect with Eric for more articles on Branding, Marketing, and Diversity.
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