Generation B: Black America’S Reset to Success

Generation B:

Black America’s Reset to Success

A Blueprint

Suru Manek Smiley-manek.jpg

Copyright © 2015 by Suru Manek.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015905301

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5035-5669-0

                Softcover        978-1-5035-5670-6

                eBook             978-1-5035-5668-3

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Rev. date: 07/23/2015

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Part One

Is Racism Working for You?

1 Another Kind of Slavery

2 Exposing the Lie of The System

3 The Business of Race: How the American Media Uses Racism as Propaganda

Part Two

Gujarati Culture: The Blueprint

4 Gujarati Culture Part One: Family as the Central Unit

5 Gujarati Culture Part II: Clean Living

6 Economic Success: Prayers, Hard Work, and Frugality Win Every Time

Part Three

The Generation B Solution

7 Becoming Generation B

8 The Making of Generation B: The Steps to Economic Progress and Prosperity

About the Author

Acknowledgments

DEDICATION

To my mother, Diwaliben, for teaching me the value of compassion and caring.

To my father, Liladharbhai, who taught me how to be righteous and use my brainpower.

To my loving wife, Arti, for always pushing me to the next level.

To my dear sons, Shawn and Raju, for your absolute support and encouragement.

Above all, to my Hindu deities:

My family’s Supreme Goddess (Kuldevi Maa): Maa Bahucharaji

Goddess/Lord: Sita/Ram

Ethnic Lohana Saint: Sant Jalaram Bapa

Family spiritual guide: Pujya Morari Bapu

My in-laws’ spiritual guide: Sant Pramukh Swami Bapa

My purely humanitarian Sant (Saint): Mahant Devprashadji Bapu.

May your spiritual presence and blessings be ever present in my heart to inspire all good deeds.

MY PRAYER

By the spirits of my Pitruo (my immediate and extended family’s departed souls) I pray: may this book’s blueprint guide at least one soul on the path of comfort and joy so that he or she may find righteousness and a life filled with love, truth, and compassion.

PREFACE

I SELL AIRPLANE PARTS for a living; I’m actually quite successful at it. I only dabble in authorship. It is something I enjoy because it allows me a way to help others. In 1986, I published Scholarships for International Students that helped a lot of students in the late eighties and early nineties find ways to come to America to attend college. I wanted to help them just as I was helped in the late sixties by a Peace Corps volun teer.

I’m not really a writer, even though this is my second book. I am, however, a visionary. I see a future that is filled with possibility even in the midst of the despair I see manifest all around me. This is why I wrote Generation B: Black America’s Reset to Success—A Blueprint.

Generation B is my vision. I have a strong affinity for the African-American community because in a way, I am an African-American. Even though my ancestors are from the Gujarat state in India, I was born and raised in Kenya when Kenya was still a colony of the British Empire. I lived there when Kenya fought for its independence in the fifties and the sixties. I witnessed the amazing struggle of a country trying to redefine itself as a postcolonial entity.

Because of what I experienced growing up in Africa, I have long felt that part of my life’s calling is to help the African-American community in some way be more economically successful. I have read a ton of books on the subject of racism and the problems caused by discrimination; many of them had excellent things to say, but many of them also pounded African-Americans continually about the problems they face: the high crime, the lack of motivation. I decided that the best way I could help Black America was tell them about how my culture—the Gujaratis of India—has overcome adversity and racism continually for hundreds of years to be one of the most economically successful cultural groups on the planet. I decided that I could offer a viable cultural solution—mine—as a way to explore how we react to the adverse forces of prejudice both positively and negatively and the consequences of each. I wanted to call it Secrets to Success Revealed, but my editor thought that might sound too much like a how-to business book, and that is definitely something this book is not.

As a twenty-three-year old, I immigrated to the United States to attend college. You’ll read about that journey in the course of these pages, but when I arrived in America, wide-eyed and full of stereotyped ideas, I was struck by the upheavals surrounding race. It still causes me much sorrow to see the black community in America suffer so much: the high crime rates, the children without fathers, the rampant drug use, and the far-too-high illiteracy rates. This truly is the land of opportunity. I know because I came here with nothing, but with hard work and a lot of tenacity, I built a viable business. I have been successful based on my education to a certain extent, but when I stepped back and took a look at what I had accomplished in my life, I realized that it was how I was raised that made the difference.

When you are born a Gujarati, you learn from birth the importance of financial and social success, and indeed you quickly learn that one is not divorced from the other. From my birth onward, the idea of success, entrepreneurship, and education were instilled in me, so much so that I swear they are now part of my DNA. Actually, maybe it is; Gujaratis are referred as the Jews of India because we’ve been so successful economically, no matter what country we’ve found ourselves in because we were forced to.

I’m not a social scientist or any kind of academic for that matter. But as I’ve moved into my later years in life, I think about giving back, about helping others with the knowledge I have. I kept asking myself, what if African-Americans were raised in the same kind of environment as Gujaratis are raised? What if Black America could learn what Gujaratis know practically from birth about business and success—would that solve the crisis in Black America? Gujaratis have a similar background to Black America; we’ve both experienced extreme forms of racism because we weren’t the right color.

I wondered. How long would it take Black America to turn itself around if it applied some simple principles about life: a strong family unit, an expectation of education, a constant immersion in entrepreneurship? These are the basics of Gujarati life, but with one more element, something that Black America already has, but many have perhaps strayed from if the statistics on crime and babies born with no father in the house say anything—a deep sense of spirituality.

I asked a couple of African-Americans I knew about my idea. They were interested, but one gentleman said it best, It’s going to take a whole new generation to have that happen. That’s when it hit me. It is a new generation that I’m calling for—and what better name to give it than Generation B!

Generation B is not something that you have to be born into. Rather, it’s something that Black America can create together, one individual making a decision to change his or her life for the better and helping other individuals make that choice too.

But in order for any African-American to make the decision to be a part of the Generation B movement, I realized that I had to tackle one of the most difficult subjects in America: racism. Racism is ugly, and it has also become a word so charged with political overtones that it’s very difficult to talk about it. It almost seems that you are in danger of being called a racist if you approach the subject any other way than what has been deemed proper, i.e., Black America is more a victim of racism now than it has ever been in the past.

I refuse to fall into the trap of believing that one must always blame racism as the cause of all the ills in the African-American culture. Blame is never a recipe for success. I say that because I could have easily become a victim of racism. I grew up in a time when the British Empire was dying in Africa, which made it all the more nasty and entrenched. I have experienced my fair share of racial injustices because of the color of my skin. But I was taught as a child to never let that get in my way of finding success in life, and because I have worked very hard in my life, I have, thankfully, achieved a great deal of success.

There is a proverb: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. That is the foundation of all that I learned growing up, a fundamental truth that I want to pass on to my fellow African-Americans.

So my great wish for the black community is both simple and profound. I fervently hope that you will find the honor, the glory, and the success that comes when a person decides to let go of the chains of suppression—the horrible sinking feeling like you can’t fight back—and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps to be successful and happy. For it is true no matter what color you are, what country you’re from, what religion you practice, success comes because people consciously made decisions to better their lives, to take advantage of what was offered to them, to work hard to achieve whatever goal they’ve set for themselves.

Black America, I am offering a solution to the problems you face in these pages based on what I know—my own culture and upbringing. It has created spectacular success for my people, the Gujaratis, a people who have been forced to leave their homes, who have had their entire fortunes stripped from them, who historically travelled in the same slave ships that transported your ancestors and forced to work in the same deadly cane fields as your kin. Success can belong to you too. African-Americans, as a group, have a wealth of potential waiting to be tapped much like the vast riches of resource found in your ancestral homeland. It’s up to you to make the choice to listen to what I have to say and make the decision to go forth and prosper.

INTRODUCTION

B LACK AMERICA SUFFERS. It’s a chaotic world, and it often seems to treat some of us unfairly, especially if we happen to be of a different color or race than those who assert themselves in p ower.

I have seen and experienced the hate and hopelessness that discrimination and prejudice can create. As I noted in the preface, I was born in Kenya, and while I am not black, I am of the other undesirable color. I’m of Indian ancestry and am considered brown, a coolie. While I have never called India home, my people come from the Gujarat state in the northwest corner of India that borders Pakistan. We’re proudly known as the Gujarati people.

I have lived in the United States for over forty-five years, arriving here four short years after the landmark Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. I witnessed the end of the British Empire in Kenya and experienced firsthand the discrimination that always occurs when a suppressed native power takes over from the colonial master. So when I say sometimes those in power can treat others in unbelievably unfair ways, I know of what I speak.

What I learned in Kenya and then again when I moved to the United States was that prejudice, discrimination, and racism exist everywhere. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what religion you are, what foods you eat—someone, somewhere will find something offensive about you because they don’t know you and thus consider you less of a human being than they are. Racism is suppression at its worst, and as I noted in the preface, suppression means that you don’t feel like you can fight back against the entity that’s suppressing you.

The consequences of prejudice and racism are well-documented. Hitler decreed anyone not of the Aryan race to be inferior and slaughtered six million people because of his prejudice. The Shiites and Sunni Muslims commit horrendous atrocities against each other all the time, even though they are of the same religion, at least in name. The Serbians were slaughtered by the Bosnians in Eastern Europe a short twenty years ago. Whites in America still discriminate against blacks, but blacks also discriminate against whites or Koreans or even other blacks. Throughout history, and including the present moment, there is always one group who perceives themselves to be more powerful than another group, and they exert their power in detrimental and discriminatory ways. Power that acts with prejudice always alters human kind’s behavior, and prejudice always leads to conflict at best and at worst subjugation.

No one group is immune to this scourge, and I suspect because it’s so prevalent, it’s the reason why so many people feel they are victims of prejudice and racism and either have given up trying to fight back or haven’t ever been presented with a workable way to fight back. Thus, they continue to feel powerless.

Some people retaliate against racism, and others outsmart it. Some use it as a scapegoat to justify their shortcomings, while others smartly and meticulously plan out a forceful rebound to not only overcome it but to outlive it. I have seen and experienced racism and have seen so many others react in so many different ways to it that I have come to a startling and what I know will be a controversial conclusion: it is how one reacts, handles, tackles, and responds to racism and prejudice that is more important than the act of racism itself.

I know that for many, your feathers are ruffled by what I just said, but know this: racism and prejudice are never acceptable in any way, shape, or form. However, if we as human beings are going to effectively eliminate the effects of racism and prejudice, then it requires a change in how we not only think about racism and prejudice but how we act positively to combat it. I’m not just saying this. I know it to be true because I’ve actually lived both sides of it—the racism and the way out.

Have you ever noticed something? People love to tell you what the problem is. The problem with Black America—they proclaim in newspapers, on TV, in blogs on the Internet—is racism. But how many of those people ever actually offer a workable solution to the issues you face?

Generation B: Black America’s Reset to Success, I humbly submit to you, is a way the African-American community can approach racism and prejudice in such a way to effectively handle it proactively—meaning before it hurts you—as opposed to always be reacting to it after you’ve been victimized by it.

You as a people have suffered much at the hands of racism; that is one of the well-documented facts I alluded to above. But in order to overcome it, you must find a way to actively and positively deal with it so that you can overcome effectively, not with anger or violence but with the best kind of weapon there is—economic and social success. It is possible, no matter what people say otherwise.

As I noted in the preface, I have long wondered if the elements that have helped the Gujarati survive a long history of suppression and discrimination would work in the African-American community. The short answer is yes because the Gujarati have proven themselves over and over again to be able to break the chains of racism and suppression by using all that we know to build and rebuild ourselves into an economically powerful force in a number of countries, even when we started with nothing.

History of the Gujarati

When I say nothing, I mean nothing. At one point, many of my ancestors were slaves, just like your African ancestors. Our labor was bought and sold, often at a very high price, just as with the African slaves. But like slaves anywhere in the world, we as individuals were seen as somehow inferior to our masters and thus did not enjoy the profits made from our labor. Many times my ancestors were transported in the same ships that brought the Africans to America through the Golden Triangle (the famed geographic triangle created in the African slave trade when African men, women, and children were taken from the west coast of Africa through the Caribbean sugar plantations and eventually to the Southern United States). Like our African brothers and sisters, we too worked the deadly sugarcane fields in the Caribbean and have been beaten and whipped for daring to stand up to our oppressors.

That unholy trade also took my people, as it did many Africans, far away from our homeland, many never to return, in a forced migration that is often referred to as a diaspora. Our masters were the plantation and railway owners that were part of the infamous—and highly discriminatory—British Empire. In the early 1800s, they were scrambling to find cheap labor to substitute for the free labor provided by the black Africans when the slave trade was abolished in 1807. The East Indians, colonial subjects of the British at that time, were often kidnapped, and many were tricked into signing what are known as indentured contracts. Many of these indentured workers were sent to Kenya and Uganda by the British Government to help build the Kenya-Uganda railway. They worked under heinous masters and were beaten if they did not rise at 3:00 a.m., no matter what the weather or the condition of their bodies.

Unlike African slaves, my ancestors were not forced, but they couldn’t read or understand what they were signing because the contracts were written in English, not their native language. The Indians who signed did so because they were promised a better life than what they had in India: hunger and squalid living conditions. In today’s world, this promise is called human trafficking, the more politically correct word for slavery.

Many have called this infusion of Indian natives into the Eastern Caribbean the coolie slave trade. When we got to the Caribbean, we were more often than not referred to as monkeys, which, of course, means that we were lower on the evolutionary chain than our white masters.

The history of the coolie slave trade isn’t as well known as the African. Many were promised freedom but were never given it. Others served their five-year contract and were returned home, no more better off economically than they were when they left. But what is important here is, as in any slave-like situation, our labor was more valuable than our freedom, and the historical fallout from that is similar to what the African-Americans have experienced—racism, both extreme and subtle, and sometimes on a daily basis.

Some would argue that there is one key difference between a slave and an indentured slave: at the end of the contract, the indentured slave was given their freedom. That may well be true. But just as the newly freed black slaves in the South often experienced brutal forms of racism, the Indian people who found themselves freed of their indentured service were also on the blunt end of extreme racism, a long way from home and no relief in sight.

Like our African-American brothers and sisters, we Asians—as our British masters called us—have suffered the indignity of second-class citizenship. We have been beaten, spat upon, and forced to give up our homes, meager as they were sometimes, because we were no longer needed by our masters or, worse, because they saw us as a threat to their very existence. So I know what it is like to have ancestors who worked to build a country economically—for that’s what slave labor does—and then be kicked like a mongrel dog because that seems to be the only way a master can treat his former slave.

Choosing Progress and Prosperity

As I have watched what has happened in the African-American community since the passage of the Civil Rights bill, I have often thought about what happened to my own people and the choices we made after we were freed.

When an enslaved person is given his or her freedom, they have a choice to make. It doesn’t matter if that person is white, black, or brown, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu; this freed person can either fall into the trap of thinking that there is no way out, or they can find a way to survive, even in the face of all that adversity.

The Gujarati chose survival, relying on their own cultural resilience to see them through the very rough transition time from suppression to freedom. They were determined not to lose what made them Gujarati. They created a semblance of their lost homeland by finding ways to practice their religion, eat traditional foods, wear traditional clothes, adhere to their festivals and holy days, and revere the family structure and the Gujarati community culture. The Gujarati are also very proud of their heritage, the way they live their daily lives, so much so that we have also been accused of being too clannish, too protective of the culture that others would have liked to take from us. Be that as it may, the Gujarati refused to ever become a victim to their circumstances, no matter how dark and hopeless it may have seemed, and kept alive one of the most important aspects of the Gujarati culture—their ability to not only survive but thrive economically.

My Own Personal Experience with Extreme Racism

By the time I was born, the British Empire was in its death throes. Mahatma Gandhi (of whom I will speak about in great length in this book because he was a Gujarati) was close to securing Indian independence from the British. Once Great Britain lost India, it was a matter of time before its other colonial holdings, including Kenya, would declare their own independence.

In other words, I was born at the crossroads of history. I was first a subject of the British Empire and thus suffered Jim-Crow type segregation that all Indians and Africans endured at the hands of the British. I remember when blacks and browns had to use a different door than whites in my store and certain other places. I remember being slapped, very hard, by a white man when I was just a boy because my scarf crossed over onto the whites only part of the place my friend and I were sitting. In my guts, I can still feel the pain that egregious unfairness caused.

After Kenya regained its independence, I felt no relief. Rather, I experienced the effects of reverse discrimination by the African Government, and it was like going from the frying pan and into the fire in terms of racism and how I was treated because of my color and my heritage. In other words, it went from bad to worse. My people were considered blood suckers by the Kenyan Government that took over from the British, a hindrance to the economic success of the native Kenyans.

In 1963, my father, like many Gujarati in Kenya, was a trader. Unlike many of the indentured contract labors, he, along with his brother, was given a grant of land (a very small parcel in a remote African jungle) by the British Government to set up a trading post by the Kenyan-Ugandan railroad. My father and uncles built their businesses from literally nothing. They left India with the clothes on their backs, a handkerchief, and an umbrella. They also took with them a whole lot of initiative and know-how in business.

My father was illiterate. He could sign his name after he was taught over and over how to do it, but he learned the ways of business from his grandfather who learned it from his—for that’s the way we live our lives in Gujarat. The British knew this about the Gujarati Asians, and that’s why they gave my father and uncles the grant. My family started their small grocery-type store in OL’Kalou, as one location, that also sold other dry goods, sort of like my village’s Target but a lot smaller and far less fancy. When they first got to OL’Kalou, they slept on gunny sacks in a corrugated tin shack—that was about all that fit on the parcel they had been given. But they persisted and were eventually able to provide homes for their families.

Just to give you an idea of how primitive my village was, we didn’t have running water, electricity, or natural gas. We cooked, heated water for baths—everything—on a stove (a hand-constructed cast-iron grill called a sagadi that burned charcoal and wood). Lions roamed everywhere because we really were in the middle of an African jungle.

The newly independent Kenyan Government didn’t take long after the British left to begin to exert pressure on all the Indian traders to leave. Our village was no exception. The Kenyan Government wanted the Gujarati out because we dominated the retail trade and were much more prosperous in relation to the Kenyan natives who lived in our same village.

My family and my fellow Gujarati had a dilemma. We were all born in Kenya and knew that country. We had no powers over the British when they ruled Kenya, but we had found a way to be prosperous. When the British left, our Kenyan neighbors turned on us. We were accused of exploiting our Kenyan customers. We were considered thieves and called other far more horrible and discriminatory names.

The Indian traders, including my father, were put on notice by the government. They had to engage a native partner the government called shareholders. If they didn’t, their trade license could go under review. It was a thinly veiled threat. We either changed our very successful business model, or we would no longer have a business. Worse, there were certain trades, like transportation, which we Indians could not apply a license in which to trade. The Indians had to decide to become Kenya citizens or be out of the trade. The Kenyan Government knew of our Gujarati pride and knew that we would refuse to sell out our cultural heritage like that.

The new Kenyan Government knew what they were doing. By placing such restrictive measures on the Asians (the name referring to Indians who were predominantly Gujarati), the government was setting up the natives to replace the Indians. However, the government failed to take into account one very important element. The Indians, including my father, never gave up their businesses, not altogether. They played along with the Kenyan Government rules but sat back and watched what they knew would inevitably happen.

It quickly became apparent that the new regulations were not working. To the Indians, it was very simple to understand. The natives had no training in retail trade. Worse, they had little inclination to be traders, and as the government quickly found out, it could not force a completely new culture upon any group of people. The government had failed to take into account that the Gujarati were successful traders because we had been raised, practically from the cradle, to be economically successful by being good business men and women.

Kenya’s economy, without the Asian influence, suffered. The mandated regulations designed to kick us out of the country backfired big time. We didn’t leave, but the Kenyan Government, instead of admitting their mistake, blamed the Indians even more, and the discrimination against us grew worse. The government said that the Gujarati reluctance to mingle with the natives was a way to sabotage the progress of the natives. They didn’t take the time to find out that the very reluctance they claimed harmed them was the very backbone on which we had built successful businesses—businesses that kept the Kenyan economy afloat.

The Gujaratis, my family included, didn’t despair. We didn’t run away or insist that the government treat us different or special because of all the havoc they caused in our lives. When the government mandated all those regulations, my father and other Gujarati tradesmen in my village didn’t lie down and become victims. Instead, they decided that the new regulations translated into a simple cost of doing a business. They took on their native partners, even though they were partners in name only, and paid them. Some of the Indians in Kenya even went so far as to obtain the prohibited licenses in the name of their native friend or their domestic servant. Again, this partner was paid a small sum, and my fellow Gujaratis started to reenter the trades. These partnerships also came with something besides a small stipend: education. Since the 1960s, the natives, through their Gujarati teachers, have learned the intricacies involved in running a business, so much so that more and more native Kenyans are setting up their own businesses.

The moral of this story? I know the kind of work it takes to turn an entire community around. More importantly, I know it can be done successfully.

Most of the Indian traders in the village of OL’Kalou, including my parents, had not completed elementary school. I’ve already noted how my dad could not write except his signature. However, I lovingly recall how hard my parents worked raising eight of us in that little village. They knew the value of a good education and demanded that we get what they never had. Of the eight siblings, the four youngest of us completed high school and beyond in spite of not much of a school facility in our little village of OL’Kalou. I managed to get an MBA in America. Three of my other brothers studied in Britain. The only thing we started with was a loving family who insisted that we learn the ways of businesses so that we could do, as they did, the best with our lives.

Coming from Kenya to the United States of America in 1969, I hope you can understand the affinity I automatically held with the African-Americans. But as I became more and more steeped in American ways of life, I became confused. The government took care of the poor. That never happened in the place where I grew up. While it originally seemed like a noble idea, I learned by observing the effects of government