As I continue meeting YBPs on and offline I consistently receive the feeling they have not found what they’re looking for. No matter the heights of glory, depths of knowledge, nor the leverage of friendship it comes a day when we just look in the mirror with no words. We stand there in silence. We sit in our meetings with that peculiar glare. We drive up to a stoplight and succumb to the glare. What is the unspeakable truth that we seek, but cannot find? Matters of the heart and mind never have to be verbalized to make sense to their possessor. But when these matters are not resolved, the eyes produce the glare that is all too familiar to many of us.

I believe spiritual concepts teach business truths so let us shift to Ecclesiastes 8. In verse 16 the writer says he decided to load up on wisdom and observe the business of the earth. In the first verse he says nothing is better than being wise; knowing how to interpret the meaning of life. Wisdom puts light in the eyes and changes a man’s face from stern to shine. Now my question is this: What makes so many of us walk around in a daze? No matter how far we go, what we’re doing, who we’re around, the movement of our organizations – where is the light in our eyes? Where is the shine on our faces? What is the wisdom we seem to be lacking?

The hard truth is we as a people were never taught the science of business. For our purposes business is activity that puts a return into the heart and mind – not the pocket. When we navigate this world our heart is bothered by not being fully accepted, and the mind is troubled with what to do about it. The evidence of this is ever since the release from physical slavery there has always been an informal concept of YBP. The existence of our many organizations attests to the fact that we never feel fully accepted and we are trying to find out what to do about it. Historically and presently there seems to always lurk two choices: stay and integrate, or unite and leave. I think there is a third that will bring light to the eyes and peace to the heart. Unite and stay. No matter how nice we’d like to be, the simple truth is that statistically Whites do not prefer to have too many Blacks in the heights of their economic empires. How many historians and modern news reports do we need to hear this from before we unite and build for self?

Fifty years from now will our grandchildren still be humming “and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”?