Role models

Last week, I ran across this article about blacks needing to pick the right role models. One section seemed tojump out at me:

Historians have noted that before Rosa Parks became the mother of the civil rights movement, at least two other women had been arrested for challenging segregation laws. But boycott organizer E.D. Nixon had feared that 15-year-old Claudette Colvin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and rumors that Mary Louise Smith’s father was an alcoholic would undercut their images. This seems harsh, but leaders such as Nixon understood that no cause succeeds without the right role model.

And then Sunday morning, I see this photo in the newspaper. It is the board of directors of a bank that is about to be launched here. What’s wrong with this picture?

Reading through the comments posted on Yahoo about this article remind just how far blacks have to go in our society. (Warning: Yahoo does not police its message boards. If you go over there to read the comments, be prepared. It’s pretty nasty.) And in this day and age, how can a new business be launched without any minorities on the board and only one female? Do they even realize how this looks?

The issue of role models is a tough one, one that was much easier when I was growing up. In those days, our neighbors were our role models and we didn’t have all the hype of the media to contend with. I worry when the pictures in the Pilot of the criminals are all black and the pictures on the business pages are all white. I worry, not because black professionals or white criminals don’t exist – they do – but because the media continues to portray blacks in a bad light. Getting a foot in the door may be a little easier today than it was in my father’s time, but the barriers still exist, as that board of directors picture shows.