> I wasn't aware of Dr. Cole's trajectory when I
> wrote my post, but I chose Coca Cola for a
> reason: during the 1980's when I was still
> compelled (being young) to listen to 'self-esteem
> boosting' speeches from an array of do-gooders
> -- mostly from local churches and 'Black
> enterprise' orgs -- Coca Cola was often
> mentioned as an object lesson of success.
That's pretty ridiculous, even coming from the "black bourgeoisie," since Coca-Cola rather notoriously refused to divest from South Africa.
In my own high school (in lily-white rural Pennsylvania), the school board once brought in one of those "motivational speakers" to talk to the "gifted" students or "leaders" -- a bunch of us basically got a day off of school to attend this weird-ass seminar where he "color-coded" our personalities. I forget the exact methodology, but it was crank stuff. Anyway, this guy was African-American, and here he was talking to this exclusively white group (except, of course, for the one Indian student who was pretty much my best friend in high school), and he was very charismatic and a lot of people liked him. Then he talked about how he had grown up in the "ghetto," in a dirt-poor public housing situation, but had studied math and eventually gotten a job working for the Pentagon . . . designing the MX missile. And he said (I'm paraphraising only slightly):
"I went from nothing, to designing a weapon that could kill 600 million people in an hour!"
I would wager that the hearts of even the not-so-progressive among us skipped a beat or two at that moment. It was my first up-close-and-personal encounter with what you might call the Colin Powell syndrome.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!