RHYTHM - A Way Forward: FORWARDNOMICS through Cultural Competence and Teams Brings YOU More Money, Power, Influence & HEALING

By John Anthony Pham, Sr. and Brittani Wingate

I am proud to be an American.

It is astonishing how seven words can carry so much weight yet leaves us wondering the validity of their claim. As Americans, we often feel the conflict of loving our country and noticing the ripe injustices that still plague our borders.

Turning on the news, we see violence, crime, disease, hatred, and fear. So, in this uncertain time, when our country is on the precipice of change, where do we turn? How do we seek to right the many wrongs? Where can true reconciliation and redemption come from?

With research and insightful wisdom, John Anthony Pham, Sr. creates a concrete plan for change that will realign America with our forefathers’ progressive ideals. Rhythm: A Way Forward looks at how understanding the truth of our past can ground us in our identity and how embracing our uniqueness through teams can restore what has been broken.

Rhythm is filled with brave truths to counteract the lies and omissions made by society norms, stunningly historical accounts that remind and refresh us of our true heritage, and tangible action steps every American can take to change our future.

There was never such a time as this to change the course of our history.

Pick up your copy of Rhythm: A Way Forward: Forwardnomics through Cultural Competence and Teams Brings You More Money, Power, Influence, and Healing today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716480683

Book preview

References

Introduction

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I

n this book I am going to reveal my model, meaning the way I think, my beliefs, my worldview formed from my life experiences and my heart, all to heal us. The democracy of America is in peril. The innocence of our children is being stolen. And the media and politicians are fermenting divisions among law abiding everyday Americans. More division, plus Covid, a Congress that does not work together and a chaotic Executive will lead to higher unemployment, more pain for not-rich Americans, a weaker America and probably a different country all together.

It is my desire that the forgoing pages are received as a perspective, as to how we, Americans, as a nation arrived at our today, and how the various entities (e.g., ethnicities, governments, households and individuals) can take action to accept our ancestral past, heal today’s false divisions and love ourselves and others more genuinely. If you already know the history of atrocities heaped upon Blacks, then it will be merely a review. The pain of the abused does not easily go away. It takes time, and so will our healing.

This ugliness permeates the world and unless we recognize the beauty and gifts given to each of us, we are poised to destroy ourselves. Empires do fall! I hope that through an understanding of the Philosophical Aspects of Cultural Difference, the citations of our common spiritual and religious beliefs, DNA science and the Diverse Teams research that we recognize that we need the gifts (model) of all of us to show, in order for America’s greatest achievements to spring forth. We get to create what this American Rebirth looks like, no one else.

The solutions that I present in this book are meant as a baseline to generate the healing. No overnight solution exists.

Read everything twice because of the way I write.

Vision

America in Rhythm.

Mission

Put forth a more accurate overview of the Lugubrious Pain (sins and iniquities) Indigenous Africans of America and Enslaved Africans (Blacks) and Indigenous Americans have endured, deepen readers’ understanding of others, coagulate our commonalities and present interrelated, viable and holistic solutions that will heal America and bring our functioning in rhythm with our constitution.

Rhythm: (for this book) is a person, thing, instrument or tool being utilized for or functioning as it was created. Rhythm is balance. Rhythm is harmony. Rhythm is truth.

Ultimately, Rhythm is LOVE in action.

Our Constitution (our tool) = The Covenant We Made With One Another

At this point in our history, The US Constitution has not changed, yet The Covenant has not been fulfilled for ALL Americans; hence, WE are out-of-rhythm.

How do you continue preaching this kind of momentum and trying to develop a shift in paradigm so that folks can begin to understand that this has nothing to do with color, this has everything to do with survival of our own society?

– Dr. Fabio Gonzalez

Walk with Me.

You [American European] are not responsible for your ancestors’ sins. Asking you to pay for what they did may not be reasonable either, but after reading the truth of the past, learning of how egregious and unwarranted the system was and is, it is reasonable to expect you to cease its continuance.

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Not Everything

That Is Faced Can Be Changed, But Nothing Can Be Changed Until It Is Faced.

– James Balwin

1

Identity

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Identity – (Dictionary.com) the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another:

He began to doubt his own identity.

condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is; the qualities, beliefs, etc., that distinguish or identify a person or thing:

(Merriam-Webster) the distinguishing character or personality of an individual : INDIVIDUALITY

the relation established by psychological identification

(Cambridge Dictionary) who a person is, or the qualities of a person or group that make them different from others:

My Analysis

Knowing your identity is as fundamental a need, as needing to be touched or skin-to-skin contact as a baby. Too many stories have demonstrated that without human touch countless children have failed to grow and thrive; and they died. Knowing who you are, where your ancestors come from is foundational to living with wholeness. Wholeness is a person existing with a strong sense of who they are, how they arrived at their understanding and an anticipatory awareness about what is next to come; as a result, they are in rhythm.

The difference is made early in a child’s life. They enter this world knowing to observe through all their senses, so they watch, listen and interpret everything. Their sense of who they are and eventually who they can become is continually shaped by their surroundings and experiences. A Pew Research Survey shows that a parent’s view of their outlook for their child is closely tied to their financial situation (Social & Demographic Trends, 2015). The research is clear that if a child sees poverty, hard work, smiling faces, plenty, lack, peasant living or queen living then they say those are my option.

Early childhood experiences can be very consequential for children’s long-term social, emotional and cognitive development, said Sean F. Reardon, professor of poverty and inequality in education at Stanford University. And because those influence educational success and later earnings, early childhood experiences cast a lifelong shadow (Miller, 2015).

Children grow up learning the skills to succeed in their socioeconomic stratum, but not necessarily others (Miller, 2015).

Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation, says Annette Lareau, a University of Pennsylvania sociologist whose groundbreaking research on the topic was published in her book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. They try to develop their skills through close supervision and organized activities, and teach children to question authority figures and navigate elite institutions (Miller, 2015).

We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families (Bailey & Dynarski, 2011).

That should not be in America! Sadly, too many Americans matriculate through school, marry, raise children and have a successful career, but they never reach wholeness. Everyone deserves to reach wholeness. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs teaches us that you cannot reach the next level until the elements on the previous levels are satisfied and maintained. You cannot just satisfy the elements one time or every now and again and reach wholeness. So, people end up settling for less than they were promised.

When something is not whole, it is out-of-rhythm. When something is not whole, it can be as frustrating as strumming a guitar with a loose string, trying to see through a finger smudged window, driving a smoking tailpipe car, having a red stuffy nose on picture day or internet with slow connectivity. Unintentionally, America has STRIPPED the right to wholeness away from the vast majority of Americans! Unintentionally, because my assessment of the founding fathers is that they understood the strength of team. So, on their team were people of varying backgrounds, professions, religions, genders, logic sets and skin colors who used their differences (their models) to create the greatest document [The US Constitution] and experiment ever embarked upon by mankind.

After America’s constitutional embarkation, a segment of individuals whose heads and hearts were not in alignment (passive aggressive personality) decided that self-enrichment and power were more valuable than the collective. Thus, the systematic division of groups based on skin color intensified and permeated every facet of our country. Then they promoted the skin color inferiority complex throughout the world. For survival, groups of Americans went along with this alternative world.

It [the lie of superiority] gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

My research shows that there are tens-of-thousands of proud American Scottish, Italians, German, French, Poles, Swedish, etc. who recognize that their culture and traditions have been sacrificed in lieu of being under the White umbrella. An umbrella that pits the rich against the poor and the poor against the poor. Many immigrants expressed concern about their children and grandchildren missing out on the depth and connection to their home country all because they chose to accept the coverage and privilege that the White designation offered them.

A teacher stated that I’m not really talking about British people here but more towards French, Italian, and Russians. I visited Europe a lot and know many different Europeans. But lately, what I have noticed is that they don't like to be called white. Many of them would get all offense about it. For example, I had a girl in my chemistry class. She was Italian. So during an exam, we had to put our ethnicity. She asked the teacher if she could put another. The teacher told her no, she had to put white. She got so angry over this; said that she wouldn't put white cause she wasn't. She only wanted to be known as Italian. Which is quite funny because many Europeans only like to be identified as their nationality? I mean, they act as if they're a race of their own (Anonymous, 2020).

White

By nature, Europeans are descent, independent thinking, spiritual and driven. Their patriotism is rooted in their axiology. They place a high value on individualism, the acquisition of property and things, so much so that sometimes other ethnicities wonder why the blinders, why the tunnel vision or why the focus on only their interest. These characteristics were illuminated in the past by how they faced, endured and surpassed many challenges.

But the ancestors of today’s American European accepted (drank the Kool-Aid) the constructs of being White, causing them to accept a fragile framework and a passive aggressive functioning. The distrust generated by their functioning and object focus makes them difficult to share the same space with. EVERYBODY sees the fragility in the superiority functioning; whether you are their co-worker, their friend, a passenger on the train and especially when you are their boss or owner of the business. Nobody wants to be that person, and the biblical beliefs say that you came from LOVE and were commanded to LOVE.

Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of 'whiteness' for economic, social, scientific, and political ends. Our story begins in Greek and Roman antiquity, where the concept of race did not exist, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Not until the eighteenth century did an obsession with whiteness flourish, with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. This theory made northern Europeans into 'Saxons,' 'Anglo-Saxons,' and 'Teutons,' envisioned as uniquely handsome natural rulers. Here was a worldview congenial to northern Europeans bent on empire. There followed an explosion of theories of race, now focusing on racial temperament as well as skin color. Spread by such intellectuals as Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle, white race theory soon reached North America with a vengeance. Its chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, did the most to label Anglo-Saxons -- icons of beauty and virtue -- as the only true Americans. It was an ideal that excluded not only blacks but also all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. The Irish and Native Americans were out and, later, so were the Chinese, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks -- all deemed racially alien. Did immigrations threaten the very existence of America? Americans were assumed to be white, but who among poor immigrants could become truly American? A tortured and convoluted series of scientific explorations developed -- theories intended to keep Anglo-Saxons at the top: the ever-popular measurement of skulls, the powerful eugenics movement, and highly biased intelligence tests -- all designed to keep working people out and down (Painter, 2011).

…just personal curiosity as an Irish-English white person. Essentially, my angle was how people designated white felt about having a perceived lack of culture within the US and erasure of specific aspects of their cultures