In 1963 at the Apollo Theater, 12-year-old Little Stevie Wonder amazed the audience as he entered the music world and has not stopped wowing audiences with his unique style. As we all know, an even greater intrigue of Stevie’s is that he is blind basically from birth. If only we were all blind! Check out the video of that performance:
I was reading about a man who was walking down the street by himself at night in a big city. It really does not matter which city, but it does matter which man as will be revealed later. The man heard footsteps behind him and immediately his heart raced and his mind told him to move quickly and away. He continued on for another block, yet the footsteps seemed to be getting closer. Now he was really scared and contemplated his options. He was relatively old, so he knew that he probably could not out run whoever was behind him. He shoved his hands into his pockets feeling for anything that could be used as a weapon. He only had his keys and his wallet. Ah, his wallet he thought, there go the $85 dollars and change; there go my credit cards, and hopefully, there wouldn’t go my life. As the followers got closer, he sneaked a peek at those behind him just as they passed one of the street lights that was actually working that dark night. He immediately relaxed; his heart rate began to return to normal. The men were WHITE!
Fingertips will not reveal black or white. Stevie Wonder does not know if his audience is black or white. What matters to him and to all entertainers for that matter is if they enjoy his music. I went to see Chris Rock at the Caesars Casino in Windsor, Canada a few years ago. Now Windsor is very close to Detroit, in fact just across the Detroit River. It takes about ten minutes to get there from Downtown Detroit depending on how busy the traffic and how slow the immigration officers are. To Chris Rock’s surprise, the audience was nearly all white. When he came on stage, he even commented that he thought being so close to Detroit that the audience would be primarily black. We didn’t care, and he didn’t care. He was great in his terribly irreverent manner.
I mentioned earlier that if only we were all blind. Would we immediately profile? Would we make assumptions? Would we be afraid? Being blind would make us get closer to use other senses to get to know other people. With our ears, we could hear the music, humor or ideas; with our taste, we could enjoy the wonderful ethnic foods of other races; with our fingertips, we could feel that others are made the same as we are; with our smell, we would realize that we all fart.
By the way, the man who was walking down the street was none other than the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Photo credit: Stevie Wonder. Photo by David Redfern / Redferns
