By: Barry H. Browning

Barry H. Browning — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 10:48:18 +0000

Barry Browning ’73 says “Kudos to Eric ’73!”.
Stumbled across the Morehouse visits to Bowdoin as our son now working on the “Dynasty” set in Atlanta. And my wife Ann’s & my K-12 Educators set include any number of Afro professionals who have here in the South, done twice to three times what others may have done, in order to progress at the same rate, in their careers. And we network with them to get kids moved upwards through the system. Our own “underground railroad”, so to speak. And one of Bowdoin’s biggest weaknesses in this respect is, that the greater Bowdoin community DOES NOT NETWORK EFFECTIVELY. No excuse, now that we have a “Harvard Business Case Study” guy at the top. We should look seriously at the top of the heap in this, and copy Stanford’s model for doing this. Not much of a point, matriculating races & ethnicities previously under-represented, if we all don’t help ALL of us NETWORK and be MENTORED into such places of success as thrive on both. Bowdoin taught me to care, and to support in any way I can, “the Common Good”. Imagine what we might have accomplished, had I known what Bowdoin Brother Eric has just told us all, about himself. And imagine what we can accomplish now, if Eric & I, and many others, can get in touch, and stay in touch.

“Just-sayin””

Barry

Post Scriptum:
Dr Reed and others might be interested to know that my late father, who was FBI trained as a D.C. Patrolman, walked three beats before the war, in the Howard Theater District, “and learned so much from being there”. And Barry grew up in our South County Rhode Island potato fields, working with our brothers,the descendants of Rhode Island’s slave trade, and members of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Native Peoples. There’s a lot of collective knowledge for us to share among ourselves, which we were not able to share in four short years at Bowdoin. High-time to start doing it now???

By: Eric Weis ‘73

Eric Weis ‘73 — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 15:05:43 +0000

Congrats to Dr Reed.

10 years before my time at Bowdoin, I was one of the little brothers described by John Edgar Wideman in his book Brothers and Keepers. It was at Liberty Elementary school near the Homewood/East Liberty hood in Pittsburrgh. We lived diverstiy and racism in that pressure cooker. We experienced the Pirates victory in 1960 just a couple miles away. We watched the Kennedy assassination on a black and white classroom TV. We were brothers and sisters.

So, I think Dr Reed may appreciate this.

HERE WE GO STEELERS HERE WE GO!

Comments on: Reed Named Senior Vice President for Inclusion and Diversity at Bowdoin College

By: Barry H. Browning

By: Eric Weis ‘73