- Kimberley Guillemet
- Adapted from a quote by Brené Brown
My generation has been calibrated to look at ourselves through one lens, at least as it pertains to our professional lives. As children, we were encouraged to go to good schools, become professionals, excel in our careers and ride off into the sunset. Indeed, I feel very blessed to have procured the academic training, professional achievements and life experience that I have.
However, when we achieve goals that we have set for ourselves, we must be careful not to allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency. After achieving set goals, we should never feel as if our contributions to the world must cease or are limited to a certain form or genre moving forward.
I felt moved to write a book a few years ago that would equip young people with the tools they needed to succeed in elite academic and competitive social spaces, and would help their parents and educators effectively support them. Despite my abilities and accomplishments, I kept talking myself out of it. The excuse parade pummeled me relentlessly. It wasn’t the right time. I didn’t know enough about the book writing and publishing process to execute the project. No one would be interested in the subject matter. And perhaps the mental impediment that resonated the most with me: what gave me the audacity to believe that I could make a meaningful contribution to a field outside of my professional expertise? The list of deterrents kept me paralyzed and stuck in inaction. For a while, I allowed my fear of failure and public vulnerability to convince me to abandon the idea.
Then 2020 happened. Specifically, the summer of 2020 happened and young people across the country started vocalizing their experiences with oppression, trauma and dejection during their tenure at elite independent schools throughout the U.S. Their long-suppressed emotions were bubbling up. I knew that I had to take action.
I started writing. I wrote furiously and purposefully calling back into the forefront of my consciousness stories that I had long since buried. I wrote and wrote and wrote until my book Black Prep: Life Lessons of A Perpetual Outsider, was fully formed. The book officially launches on December 7.
My hope is that the book will help young people, parents and educators alike. My prayer is that it will help people, who like me, had to navigate the unfamiliar terrain of elite educational spaces with no roadmap. People, who like me, felt as if they were constantly being told they were inferior, not good enough, and not worthy of having a seat at the table. People, who like me, needed the support of my village and reiteration of my worth in order to remain resilient and whole in the face of adversity.
It is important that I deliver one key message loud and clear: you are good enough. You are more than enough. You are the asset. You do not have to change who you are in order to be successful in elite spaces. If anything, you may simply need to change the way you see yourself. See yourself as the asset.
I hope that the book will not only support and encourage young people, but that the book will inspire others to step outside of their comfort zones. I took a step outside of a well-trodden professional path to do something in new and uncharted territory.
We all must remember that no matter where we come from, our background, our educational level, and even our achievements, we write our own story. We decide how we will move forward in our journey. While we might not always select the terrain over which we must traverse on the road to achieving our goals, we can be intentional about deciding where we are headed.
Be brave and courageous. Seize each moment and do not take one day of your life for granted. It is imperative that we share who we are with the world. In this season of giving, please be brave enough to share your gifts.
- Kimberley Guillemet
Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Chloe Anthony (“Toni”) Wofford Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She was the second of four children of working-class parents, George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and his wife, the former Ella Ramah Wofford, née Willis. When Morrison was two years old her family’s home was set on fire by their landlord while she and her family were in it. “People set our house on fire to evict us,” Morrison later told an interviewer. Morrison went on to state that her father refused to be intimidated by racially motivated hostility.
Morrison’s parents encouraged her early interest in literature, which encompassed Austen, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Her father instilled in her a sense of heritage and language by sharing with her traditional African-American folktales, ghost stories, and anecdotes he had heard growing up in the south. This nurtured Morrison’s interest in narrative and the African-American folklore tradition.
Morrison graduated with honors from high school and studied humanities at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1955, she earned an MA in English at Cornell University. Thereafter, she taught at Texas Southern University in Houston, and then Howard University. In 1964, after a divorce, Morrison left her position as a professor and moved to New York with her two young sons to join Random House as an editor in the fiction department. She would go on to become the first Black woman senior editor at Random House, a position she held for 20 years. One of her achievements there was, in her own words, developing “a canon of black work” in the fiction genre. In that capacity, Morrison played a vital role in bringing Black literature into the mainstream.
Eventually, Morrison began writing and publishing fiction pieces of her own. She authored 11 novels, as well as children’s books and essay collections. Her best-known works are the novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), and Beloved (1987) and the nonfiction volumes Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) and Remember (2004).
In 1989, following the success of Beloved, Morrison was appointed professor of humanities at Princeton University. She also served as a visiting professor at Yale University and Bard College.
In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for this distinction, and the first Black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category.
A quotation from Morrison’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech provides an appropriate epitaph: “We die,” she said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
To read more about Ms. Morrison’s tremendous life and legacy, please visit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/06/toni-morrison-obituary, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison. Footage of Ms. Morrison can be viewed at: https://nyti.ms/2lwJZ5a.
- Kimberley Guillemet
- Elizabeth Scott
I’ve had a lot of experience with apologies, both giving them and receiving them. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an authentic apology and I also know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a disingenuous apology. Because I understand the impact of insincerity in the context of an apology, I strive to make sure that my apologies are sincere.
When we initially make a mistake or cause harm to another person, we might not be fully cognizant of the depth of the harm we’ve caused. I can acknowledge that I’ve certainly had situations where I inadvertently hurt someone’s feelings or did something carelessly where I wasn’t aware how the other person felt. I can remember times when someone whose feelings I had hurt shared their experience with me, and where I initially felt as though they were overreacting or that what I had done was not that big of a deal.
I am grateful that I have come to learn and appreciate over time that when I have harmed someone, the apology is not about me. It doesn’t matter if I agreed that the person had the right to have hurt feelings. Nor does it matter whether I intended to hurt their feelings. What matters is acknowledging the harm that I caused and validating the aggrieved party’s experience. Moving forward, I can demonstrate my sincerity by taking action to not engage in the harmful conduct again.
This month’s World Changer of the Month is Willa Bruce. In 1912, Mrs. Bruce along with her husband established Bruce’s Beach, a safe haven for Black beachgoers in Manhattan Beach, California. Racial discrimination ultimately drove the city’s seizure of the land through the use of eminent domain in 1924.
Publicly, the local government stated that the land was needed to build a park, however, the city had just recently built a park near the location of Bruce’s Beach. Moreover, the park was not built until approximately 1960, over 30 years after the eminent domain proceedings had concluded.
It was not until this year, nearly 100 years after the Bruce family was divested of their property, that local and state officials took action to rectify the past injustice done to the Bruce family and returned the land to the Bruce family descendants. This action reflects contrition and a sincere desire to do better moving forward.
It takes integrity and courage to acknowledge the truth and take steps to rectify the past, especially when it is embarrassing, bureaucratically difficult and inconvenient to do so. Not only does acknowledgement of past harm create a path forward for healing, reconciliation and progress, but in outwardly recognizing the errors of the past, we guard against repeating them in the future.
