This year, I’m spotlighting a man who didn’t come from as harsh a background. W. Arthur Lewis started his journey from a different rung on the social ladder than Prof. Lee did. But he used that to climb to a height that (so far) no other Blackman or Blackwoman has climbed to. I’ll give a brief biographical sketch of one of my personal heroes, and some links for further exploration. And then I’ll rant on a few issues.
W. Arthur Lewis was born in St. Lucia when St. Lucia was still a territory of the British Commonwealth. He was well-educated and genius-level bright, from all accounts. He attended university in Britain and eventually became an economist. But he didn’t JUST get some degree and resign himself to the backburner of academia. He researched intensely, and became one of the more influential economists of the 20th Century. Prof. Lewis’ work was so important and influential that he eventually won a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work.
To this day, Prof. Lewis is the only person of African heritage to win a Nobel Prize in a category outside of Literature or Peace. And yet, we almost never hear his name in conversations during Black History Month. We hear about the more ubiquitous names like MLK, Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, Obama, etc. every year, but when was the last time we heard about W. Arthur Lewis? We use this month to talk about people who broke barriers in various social spheres, but we never seem to talk about this man during this time of the year. I find it somewhat depressing when I meditate on that.
W. Arthur Lewis passed away in 1991 in Barbados, but his legacy in the economics community lives on, both via his name and via the policies and ideas his research gave birth to. For more on this trailblazers’ life and legacy, click on the following links (or just google search).
LINKS:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1979/lewis/biographical/
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/04/19/legacy-nobel-laureate-sir-w-arthur-lewis-commemorated-robertson-hall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuOVzRNaK24
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arthur-Lewis
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/17/obituaries/sir-w-arthur-lewis-76-is-dead-winner-of-nobel-economics-prize.html
I told you the biographical sketch would be brief, yeah? Now it’s time for the rant….
I purposefully chose to highlight Benneth Lee last year and W. Arthur Lewis this year to show the positive effect academia can have on the lives of people who come from all types of backgrounds. Like I stated earlier, these two men did NOT come from the same situations. It can take a someone like Benneth Lee, who could have been a victim of a racist, classist, and segregated society, and get him to a spot where he can help others combat the cycle of racism and classism and pull them from the seemingly bottomless pit of recidivism that that society disproportionately imposes on the black community. It can take him to a spot where he can also influence the next generation of all races by both his words and actions.
On the other side, academia can take someone like W. Arthur Lewis (who had at least in terms of access to education, a more privileged life) and catapult that person to the most rarified air of their profession; a place where they win the greatest awards and rub shoulders with the other leading minds of their field. I don’t know much about his childhood, but my guess is any “privilege” Prof. Lewis had while growing up as a black child in St. Lucia was still, by large orders of magnitude, living a life of far less privilege than any white person living in the Western world at that time. I’m not a historian specializing in the history of racism and segregation in St. Lucia. My guess is that it wasn’t nay kind of cake walk growing up black there (in any time period), even if you were a rung or two above the average black citizen. But he had the privilege of a good (and later, great) education as well as the privilege of having things like parents who were able to help with school work and more advanced study.
I think what I’m trying to say is that, given an equal shot (or even a “less-unequal” shot) in the academic world, you will almost always find that black people make more than the most of the opportunity. For all of the Western world’s self-back-patting on being integrated (legally, though not always in practice) for less than 100 years, we’re still a long way off from being truly integrated, especially in academia and especially in partitions of the academic world like the STEM fields. Integration, and I mean TRUE integration and not just “integration on paper”, is the only way to build a better world. To find, educate, and employ the best minds (regardless of race, sexual orientation, social class, etc.) is the only way to achieve the best possible world we can live in at any given time. Without the best builders, you can’t build the best structure, so to speak.
I’ll probably be adding to this post more throughout the month (and probably further into the future than that), but I want to put this up a bit earlier in the month (and before the “final exam study blitz” starts up in the next week or two). I also wanted to get something up since apparently Black History month is being ignored by the population at large (e.g.; Google normally has “doodles” linking Black/African-American figures throughout the month, but not so much this year. As of today [2/8/19], only Sojourner Truth has been highlighted as a Google doodle figure this month. The highlighted figure on 2/8/19 is…. the white German guy who “discovered” caffeine? Happy Black History month?)
So, for now, this one will be just short of 1,000 words.
But before I get back to the books, I do want to clarify one recurring theme from throughout this blog. In general, I tend to write/talk posts on racism in a way that, I worry, may sound like I’m implying all black people are poor and living in impoverished neighbourhoods in broken homes and go to under-funded schools with poor graduation rates. I don’t mean to give the impression that I believe that. But I DO believe (and statistics back this belief) that these issues affect black people disproportionally more than most, if not all, races in America (and probably/possibly the world). I believe that is the result of a racism that society as a whole has yet to fully shake off. It’s also true that, in general, I grew up around a lot of poverty and I saw the differences between being poor and white VS being poor and a person of colour (especially black). Experience informs our opinions and observations. In my youth, in what’s now known as the Edison neighbourhood of Kalamazoo (when I was growing up, it was more specifically the Washington Square neighbourhood), I mostly hung out with kids form my neighbourhood or North Side or East Side, all of which (socio-economically speaking) topped off at “lower working class”. At best. Even Milwood, a nicer neighbourhood I lived in for 3-ish years, topped off at maybe middle-middle class. Aside from my few years in the suburbs from halfway through 7th grade until 12th grade and my years out here in Oregon, I’ve mostly lived around poor people of colour. It’s my experience. It’s who I’ve broke bread with. It’s who my neighbours were and all that. Prodigy from Mobb Deep (RIP, G.O.D.) asked “Where ya heart at?”, and I guess that’s just where mine's at at the end of the day. I don’t’ mean to imply that I believe all black people are living like it’s East New York pre-NYC-all-borough-gentrification or whatever, but that’s who my people were, that’s who/where I was, and that’s what I stand up for. I have wild love for black people of all backgrounds. Growing up black in, say, a rich white neighbourhood is, I’m sure, no joke. But I don’t really know that world. When I moved to the suburbs, I can’t say I was as accepted by the suburban African-American community as I was by the “round the way” African-American community. That’s just what it was. I was just kind of “that angry ghetto trash kid” after we left the old neighbourhood(s). But anyway, that was all meant to be a small aside (not like 500 extra words…) to explain why I tend to focus on a certain segment of the black community. But I do love the whole diaspora, though.
I just felt I should clarify that. I kind of have in the past, but stuff like that gets buried in the backpages of this blog and can go unread by readers who (understandably, I guess) don’t like sifting through the longwinded posts I put up.
Also: I want to clarify that I'm not specifically talking about OSU when I'm talking about the need for real integration in the educational system., I'm talking about the entire country (and world). I figure most people will know I mean "everywhere, not just here", but...just to clarify.