This topic arose in a recent conversation with a colleague. Compared to more critical career fields, sports and entertainment is highly glamorized, especially within Afro American and people of color communities..
According to Dr. Gates, "The short answer: There aren’t!" many when compare to the total Afro American workforce, the percentage that are athletes is minimal. I would argue lots of waterfalls are being chased within the communities of interest among many who see the physical as the idea route to success as opposed to mind over body.
The following quotes clearly echoes the importance of family in planting the seeds of success and a need for a united effort to ensure the knowledge required to harvest the crops is decimated across the valley and above the mountain tops. .
...although my brother became an oral surgeon and I chose to become a
professor, it was our parents’ dreams and ambitions that took him to
dental school and me to Yale, and then to Cambridge, where I was
empowered to choose to become a different kind of doctor. - Henry Louis Gates Jr.
As “the father of black nationalism,”
Martin Robison Delany, said all the way back in 1852, just over a
decade before emancipation: “Our elevation must be the result of
self-efforts, and work of our own hands. No other human power can
accomplish it.” - The Root
