Cobb

Something else I must say is that in the overwhelming majority of my academic and professional life, I have been one of the very few or the single black man in proximity. This has never been a significant problem for me despite the obvious frustrations. What I want to stress however is how few of my non-black associates have connected all the way to some great powerbase. I have always been the kind of person who asks somebody named Campbell how the soup business is going. Needless to say I am always disappointed to find they have no clue and look at me funny for asking. I am constantly looking for the hookup - I'm a strategic thinker. So if I know a friend of a friend who knows Condoleeza Rice, I'm sure to drop the name. Most of the time, however, I don't have the hookup and nobody around me does either. Nevertheless, I'm continually on the lookout, and this blog is a specie of the fact that I am cogitating on items which perhaps I 'have no business' considering. That is part and parcel of emergence. I bogard.

So being a black Republican (the noun being black, the adjective being Republican, as it should be for anybody who wasn't born yesterday) I understand and recognize the 'difficulty' one faces for bogarding. On the other hand, that's how the hookup gets created, or not at all. If you don't know any blackfolks who have escaped from the ghetto, whose fault is that? Yours, for not looking. If you feel lonely for being the only black Rhodes Scholar, whose fault is that? Yours for being lonely. If you find that you are the only black Buddhist you know, whose fault is that? Yours for not hooking yourself up. If your little black book is full of knuckleheads don't blame the world for producing knuckleheads, blame yourself for attracting them. But most importantly, if all the blackfolks you know are lame... well you get the picture.

Sooner or later, people will network themselves into something of interest, and if they have any skills to express, then it will be self-evident that they are a rarity anyway. It's awfully hard to find anyone who has 17 years experience in multidimensional database design. Why should I be mad because none of them, that I know, are black? Probably because I haven't made enough effort to find the kind of blackfolks I want to be around.

This finally is the heart of the matter. I continue to say that there are at least 30 million blackfolks here in America and another 600 million, at the very least, AIDS notwithstanding, in Africa. Who am I to lament their 'sorry state' when I don't know 10,000? This is the kind of whining I cannot tolerate, neither from blackfolks nor anyone else. What I hear is blackfolks immediately convinced by whitefolks that their prejudices are legitimate. But is that done by whitefolks with the hookup? No.

I recall (and here I go namedropping) some time ago on Martha's Vineyard when I was writing poetry near the East Chop Lighthouse in the early morning hours. I met a strikingly beautiful woman who was tall and lean. I was feeling rather lonely myself, having gotten my absolute fill of the sorry ass comedians on the Circuit the night before, and being sick to death of being elbowed aside by the groupie chicks stalking John Singleton. We struck up a casual convo and I found myself quite attracted. I tried to set up a date, but I struck out. Essentially, she wasn't allowed male company at her cottage. Her family was descended from the original servants of Commodore Vanderbilt, and she had her rules.

It just so happened that summer, Jill Nelson had finished penning 'Volunteer Slavery' and was doing the book tour thing. I missed her signing that evening; I found another date. So it wasn't until now that I realized:

her social life was nonexistent. Taking to drink, Nelson had a nervous breakdown and finally quit her job, telling the managing editor that she was ``more like the average African-American on the street than most people in the newsroom.'' Told with passion and honesty: a story as much about the African-American experience as about the corporate conformity of most big-city papers.

Here she was, at the top of her career in Corporate America and willing to chuck it all for her own peace of mind. It was all the talk at the time. I understood, and I admired her willingness to tell her story just the way she saw it and be true to herself and her principles. The bottom line is that she knew where she was most at home and decided to move there.

One of the most extraordinary people I know is a cat named Phil S. Right now I wish I could find him but it's not worth the ten bucks - he's one of the only folks I know who escaped the dot com bubble ahead of the curve. He used to work in the intelligence business. He told me that the first thing one should do is investigate ones own family. It took him about two years, but he was able to prove that he was at least 1/32nd Native American. That and some more research got him another small pile of money.

These three folks remind me, each in their own way, that you have to find your family, and that until you are comfortable and settled with them you are not likely to work out issues in the larger world. Out here in the world we don't care much about you, except for me of course - that's why I write. Most importantly that when you are settled with your own world, the big world can't hurt you. So finally you must find out how your world works with the big world.

I'm still working that, and still putting Friendster links and LinkedIn connections and all the other things I'm trying. This is from the bottom up. I have cynical reasons to believe this is the only way. More on that later.