The Responsibility of Professionals
I officially started today as a Senior Product Manager focused on Data and Analytics at Publicis Sapient.
The significance of the start falling on the week of Martin Luther King Jr. day is not lost on me. As a first-generation immigrant and person of color, starting such a role would be impossible without the multi-generational struggle for dignity and equality led by black Americans. The struggle began during the era of slavery, when slaves constituted the single most valuable financial asset in America, greater than all railroads and manufacturing combined according to distinguished Yale historian David W. Blight.2 At the time, to upend such an institution seemed an utterly hopeless, sisyphean task. Yet, a committed minority of abolitionists took on the task and waged a multi-decade struggle to agitate, educate, and implement policies that culminated in abolition. But their struggle fell short of equality. A struggle that continues today, one incumbent on every person to see to its completion.
Despite being heaped every indignity, every injury, every calamity for hundreds of years; rightfully, black America could have hated and sought revenge. Yet the best of the black tradition evoked a poetics of love, one that asked “…if you’re going to love, why not have the broadest, deepest, self-emptying kind of love that embraces everybody?” the words of eminent philosopher Cornel West.3 Love which sought to give dignity to black lives, and to the lives of other minorities who also found themselves abused and on the margins of American society. At the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr’s mission driven on this poetics of love, expanded the struggle of black equality to include ending poverty and ending war. In a digital society with no historical memory and limited attention, memory explains why we are here, and specifically what responsibility it entails. When such sacrifice and vision makes possible so many professionals holding their current roles, along with the power that comes with them, with such privilege the question is what responsibility does it carry? What debts are owed?
As professionals, with some range of power and influence, serious reflection is due on the types of institutions, products, and services we build and how we build them. The central question must be: what kind of society ought we have? One that perpetuates discrimination, inequality, war, and accelerates environmental catastrophe? Or one that actively tackles these serious challenges?
The questions of modern society are far too complex to be tackled by individuals alone, collectively professionals must work with wider society to realize the social change that Martin Luther King Jr. and others called for, rather than empty celebration once a year. To carry forward this social change, a change of attitude must be developed. When a friend of abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison implored him to “moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire.”4 Garrison responded, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.”4
Let us commit to being “on fire,” we too have icy mountains of apathy to melt.
Footnotes:
Homage to Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” and Dwight Macdonald’s “The Responsibility of Peoples.”
David W. Blight interviewed by Terry Gross, “Historian Says ‘12 Years’ Is A Story The Nation Must Remember,” October 24, 2013.
Cornel West interviewed by George Yancy, “Power Is Everywhere, but Love Is Supreme,” New York Times, May 29, 2019.
Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 119-120.
Beautiful reflection Mustafa!
This was refreshing to read, well written. Thank you.