It was not so long ago that former Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone said "America's intellectual level is lower than Japan's because American society has too many blacks, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans"...
I WAS thinking about this while wandering the Harvard University campus last week. A number of seemingly unconnected thought processes were painting what appeared to be a larger picture. The picture is still incomplete.
In my strolls around Harvard, I noticed, on four separate occasions, black men accompanied by east Asian women. Physiognomically, I had at least three of those women mentally tagged as Japanese. Does that mean anything?
I had also been considering the cost of health care in US society, having seen a nurse at the Harvard University hospital for 15 minutes for insect bites and been charged $75. This led to my thinking about Charles Richard Drew.
Charles Drew was born on June 3, 1904, in Washington, DC. He excelled in sports at school and seemed destined for a career in athletics. He received an athletic scholarship to attend Amherst College in Massachusetts where he was recognised for both his outstanding athletic and intellectual ability.
After graduation, Charles Drew attended McGill University Medical School in Montreal, Canada, and graduated second in his class of 137. In 1938, he received a Rockefeller scholarship to work with Dr John Scudder, an assistant professor of clinical surgery at Columbia University.
While looking for ways to stockpile blood reserves, they realised the solution was to remove the red blood cells from the blood fluid. The remaining fluid, the plasma, could be stored for months, unrefrigerated. It required no blood typing and was useful for treating shock cases common on the war-front.
Drew presented his 200-page dissertation on banked blood early in 1940. The work was hailed a "masterpiece" by Scudder. As a result, 35 blood donation centres across the country were in operation during World War II, and by the war's end, more than a million units of blood had been collected.
Those centres have evolved into the blood banks that we have today, saving millions of lives.
Ironically, Drew bled to death in 1950 after a car accident.
He was a black American.
Today, there are more black American men of college age in prison than in university. Whose fault is that?
Stripped of their own language and culture, churches became black America's source of stability. Some 37 black churches have been burnt down by arsonists since January 1995. Whose fault is that?
Scott Snook, a lieutenant-colonel in the US Army and professor at Westpoint Military Academy, told me this tale about the late Konosuke Matsushita, founder of the business which bears his name. Japan's Matsushita Electric is better known to most of us as National Panasonic, arguably the largest and most successful corporation in the world. On the wall behind his desk, the following words were etched in stone:
"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.
"Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
"Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the centre of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.
"When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80."
These words, said Snook, were written by Samuel Ullman, who campaigned for educational rights for black American sharecroppers. Does this mean anything?