Although traditionally the month of February has celebrated famous African-Americans throughout history, maybe it’s time to augment how that history is told with our personal history stories, ones that define and shape who we are today. Here’s mine…
The neighborhood I grew up in conjures up images of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Hal Rauch’s “Our Gang” with scenes of Mayberry from the “Andy Griffin Show” added to the mix. The folks in my neighborhood were caring, creative and resourceful because we had to be. Our survival depended on it.
You have an idea, you have something that you want to do, a business that you want to start up. How do you go about doing it?’
Self-Confidence, Motivation, and Inspiration help you develop and grow as an Entrepreneur. It’s about recognizing opportunity, looking around you, and thinking of something that could be done differently. It might be a new product or a new service but it’s about spotting an opportunity in the marketplace. Something out of the box. Out of the ordinary. Often, it’s the most simplest of ideas that really take off.
Inspired by the response to my article,2018 Challenges for Women Entrepreneurs and How to Overcome Them, I initiated this series called How to grow as an entrepreneur. I am talking to leading and inspiring women entrepreneurs all over the world and welcome men who support Women Entrepreneurship as well. This is about raising awareness. Women need to take the entrepreneur baton in their hands.
I have moved quite a lot in my life, especially in the first part of it, clocking one to three schools per year on average and as many caravans, mobile homes, flats or apartments until the age of 16. The good thing with this nomadic lifestyle is that it has forced me to be quite ruthless over the years in terms of keeping or discarding belongings.
We are now in the process of converting our attic into an adult bedroom in our family home with a view to get me a small desk for my musings and a walking wardrobe for my other half. This not a move but it almost feels like one. To do that I have to get rid of quite a lot of bits and pieces that have been accumulated since our previous move 10 years ago or so.
In the mid-1990s, at the dawn of the Information Age, when many were concerned that the lack of awareness and participation in this new world by communities of color would create a Digital Divide, Ken Granderson had an idea. He was one of a handful of black entrepreneurs in the industry, and was committed to helping make this new reality more accessible to communities of color by creating computer technologies that featured people of color, created by people of color.
So for Black History Month 1997, following previous Black History Month technology projects that digitized the Boston Public Library’s book chronicling 350 years of Black Boston History, and launched web sites for Boston’s predominantly black communities, Ken collaborated with his friend and fellow black technology entrepreneur Dale Dowdie, and starting with a small public domain listing of about 3 thousand entries, launched BlackFacts.com as the Internet’s first data-driven Black History web site, which was powered by technology built by black engineers, and populated by teachers and history buffs throughout the US and several other countries.
Women Entrepreneurs around the world face major challenges but many are inspiring us to shape the future of global business. They show the value of extending a helping hand to others. They support fellow women to rise together rather than looking at them as rivals. They are instrumental in building positivity and in establishing the Golden Era of Women Entrepreneurship.
My Holocaust research started with SW Germany, where my relatives were rounded up. My great-aunt, Hedwig Schwarz, was the only Jew to escape deportation in Horb/Rexingen. She was handicapped before the Holocaust, fell off the transport car, and was rescued by a nameless person who took her to Marienhopital in Stuttgart, where the nuns cared for her. My sister, daughter and I visited the hospital to thank the current generation of sisters for taking care of Hedwig. They told us that Hedwig was the only Jew in the hospital, though there were some Resistance members; and they treated her with silence, because they thought that was the best medicine. Can you imagine!
Here’s a poem I wrote about echoes in Horb and a photo of Hedwig in her hospital bed, surrounded by photos of all the others who were taken. The poem was first published in Prism: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, and in Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press. 2009.
Mezuzah In Memory, Hedwig Schwarz
In the doorpost of her house, a hollow
where the mezuzah used to hang.
I press my hand against the indentation,
my way of speaking to the past.
Touch the hollow where the mezuzah
used to hang. In Horb, Nazis renamed her street
Hitlerstrasse. My way of speaking to the past
is to listen, press the old men for answers.
1941, Jews were packed into Hitlerstrasse.
Now it’s a winding picture postcard road,
Jew-free, pleasant as it seemed
before Nazis pressed my family into Judenhausen.
I press my hand against the indentation.
Over Horb, a hundred doorposts echo, hollow.
The “ho hum,” been there/done that remedies for stopping sexual harassment have been sitting in seldom-read policy manuals and preached about in awareness workshops for decades. And yet harassment still raises its ugly head in organizations large and small, public and private. There’s no better validation than the recent “me too” movement and outed perpetrators who have seen their personal lives and careers go up in smoke.
So, what effective personal strategies should potential targets of harassment consider? How do they ward it off in the first place, or respond to it in the moment?
Let’s face it men: more of us need to “man-up” by proactively helping to end the scourge of sexual harassment. We must collectively stop being the main cause of the problem and start being part of the solution.
This means standing up and speaking out to support women. This also means swiftly shaming and punishing male perpetrators for their despicable deeds.
I have doubted the Zombie Apocalypse meme for some time, lumping it in the same category as vampires, werewolves, and romance novels. But lately, I’ve started to doubt myself. I developed the idea of the Rule of Stupids and the Epidemic of Stupidity long before Trump was elected President. I could not, however, explain why the American people were becoming so stupid. For several years I have suffered being called all sorts of vile names on social media because I obsessively believe in logic, reason, evidence, and facts. Most recently those names include “sealioning,” I kid you not. Look it up.
We in the diversity world need a new pair of words. Or maybe the terms already exist and I just don’t know about them. Here’s my concern about diversity language.
In November I had a discussion with my cyberpal Neal Goodman, president of Global Dynamics. Neal had just read “Toward a 21st-Century Interculturalism: Reflections of a Cranky Old Historian,” my keynote address at the October, 2017, national conference of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research. In that talk I had contrasted the words ethnonym and ethnophaulism.
