When I heard President Donald Trump’s simple words about returning to a colorblind and merit-based society, it struck me rather personally.
I had the privilege of attending President Donald Trump’s inauguration last week. The highlight for me was his speech when he said the following words: “I will end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into everyday life. We will forge a society that is colorblind & merit based.” These words were simple, direct and they are everything we need to be to return this lost nation to its rightful path.
My neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago has been on that lost path for far too long. It wasn’t always this way. In the 1940s and 1950s, working class Blacks as well as entrepreneurs lived on my street. There was entrenched segregation, but these Blacks did not let it affect them. In fact, they defied it. They practiced the American values, sometimes better than the whites on the other side of the racial divide.
One of the most famous examples was Samuel Fuller, who opened his cosmetic products business, Fuller Products, on 63rd Street. Fuller was born to Louisiana sharecroppers, dropped out of sixth grade due to poverty, and started selling products door-to-door. He moved to Chicago where he worked in a coal yard and then as an insurance representative before he decided to pursue his own business. He was so successful that he became the richest Black man in America.
But what impressed me the most about his story in light of Trump’s comments was that Fuller believed in America and in the principle of merit. He put thousands of salespeople to work, even those who were not Black. He only cared if they could sell. He once said, “It doesn’t make a difference about the color of an individual’s skin. No one cares if the cow is black, red, yellow or brown. They want the milk it can produce.”
Most of all, Fuller believed in the power of capitalism: “Wherever there is capitalism, there is freedom.”
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We lost these invaluable lessons when post-60s liberalism descended upon our community after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty speech. Our government told us that they — not us — would engineer our uplift out of four centuries of racial oppression. Sadly, we betrayed the Fullers of our time and sold our soul for pennies on the door.
Instead of uplift, what we got were policies of dependency, man-in-the-house rules that helped fracture our families, sub-standard schools, never-ending violence in our neighborhood, and on. Post-60s liberalism never spoke to our better selves; it only brought out the worst in ourselves.
That is why when I heard Trump’s simple words about returning to a colorblind and merit-based society, it struck me rather personally. It’s what I’ve been preaching to my people all along — it’s not the White man that is your problem, but your lack of development. We need to reinforce this message from every side, and we can no longer allow the excuse of race to undermine us and our efforts.
The road ahead of us will not be easy, but why should the generation of now pay for the failures of the previous generations? Our work starts now and our ambition must be nothing less than the creation of more Samuel Fullers to better our America.
