Reality Check

A few weeks ago, I had an appointment with a very good friend of mine, who happens to be a business development strategist. He came to my humble home – keep in mind he is a very, very busy man with a hectic schedule, but he made time for me.

After reviewing all of the materials for a new project I’m undertaking called ​“Changing the Face of Medicine,” he posed some traditional questions: Did I bring it to any of the black millionaires in Connecticut? What was their response? Did I bring it to the NAACP or the Urban League? What were their responses?

Then he offered me some pointed insight. ​“You know, black people have not figured out the power of philanthropy, the reaching back,” he said. ​“It’s been my observation that they’ll help what DuBois call the ​‘Talented Ten,’ but they won’t reach any farther back; as if it would somehow contaminate them.”

He went on to tell me that Jews, Italians, and Chinese have all grasped the concept of ​‘reaching back,’ and have collective strategies to empower themselves. Then he said, ​“You know, Crystal, there are many problems with what you’re doing. The first is that it’s black people that you want to empower, black children, and women.”

He said, ​“Black women – oh, and doctors.”

He said, ​“Nobody cares about empowering black people to become doctors. They don’t even think about that. It’s not on most people’s radar. You’re meeting these billionaires and thinking they would get it; they’re gonna be the last person to get it.”

He said, ​“And then, more importantly, your biggest problem is you.” It felt as if he had punched me in my heart. I gasped for air, and there was none.

I watched him as he said this and could tell he was serious. I asked him what he meant.

“You’re the biggest problem,” he said. ​“Even if you don’t speak, you are already intimidating to anyone you are sitting in front of. If they aren’t aware that you’re in a wheelchair, then they show up to a meeting and you’re in a wheelchair, they’re thrown off their guard. They have a preconceived notion of who you should be, and you just do not meet it. When they do know that you’re in a wheelchair, they have a preconceived notion that you’re gonna be less-than, and that you’re gonna be begging in a way. Then you do that ​‘Crystal thing’ and you throw them off guard again.”

He told me I make them feel less-than. ​“They think about all the things that you are doing despite the physical obstacles and all the things that you’ve accomplished: you’ve written books, you made movies, and you travel in a wheelchair. Yet when they think about what the most important thing in their day was, compared to what you do everyday, it’s frivolous.”

He went on to say, ​“It is because of this that they do not want to see you. They do not want to have to deal with the reality that here is this black woman, in a wheelchair, that is committing her life energies to uplifting the images of people of color and getting down in the trenches in the schools. They don’t want to know about you. They don’t want to know that you exist. Because your existence says that they are not doing enough. And so you become invisible. They never hear your requests, or see the power of the work that you laid out in front of them.”

If I wasn’t already depressed, this really depressed me. Where do you go with that? How do you respond to that?

​“Look, I’m a white Jewish male and I’m being honest with you,” my friend said. ​“What you need to do is reinvent yourself. You need to be the project. You need to get a lot of press around this poor black woman in a wheelchair with big dreams.

“You have friends that work in the media. Start getting them to do a campaign around Crystal Emery … Because people like to be involved with a celebrity, and you’re not a celebrity. You’re a force of nature, who has not become a celebrity.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

He said, ​“Use that handicap for something! You know, cry the poor handicapped black lady, you know, get a banner!”

“I can’t do that.”

“Drop all those names of people you know: You need to make people feel like you’re somebody they need to know. You need to change the power dynamic, and you need to start by getting a lot of media on who you are.”

I ended the conversation: ​“I can’t do that.”

I have worked hard not to be a narcissist. Yet my good friend sat here and told me the key to my dilemma is to flaunt myself before the project. I have always believed it is about the work and not me, that the work will go on whether I’m here or not.

Is this really reality? And if so — whose reality is it? You know me. And you know that I can only be who I am. I make no excuse, good, bad or otherwise. There’s an old Patti LaBelle song in which she says, ​‘I’m not afraid of who I am, and who I am not.’ The real question I am left with is, ​“Who am I?” I cannot be defined by being black woman, or by my handicap. And yet society cannot deal with the truth: I am energy in motion and spirit first.