Unicorns, and Plain, Ordinary, Everyday Cows

Shaylyn Romney Garrett, a founding contributor to Weave: The Social Fabric Project, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, are the authors of “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.” They have a remarkable essay in this morning’s New York Times. 

It’s a rewriting of the standard, white lip service given to racial history in the United States. “In the popular narrative of American history, Black Americans made essentially no measurable progress toward equality with white Americans until the lightning-bolt changes of the civil rights revolution. If that narrative were charted along the course of the 20th century, it would be a flat line for decades, followed by a sharp, dramatic upturn toward equality beginning in the 1960s: the shape of a hockey stick.” 

Any one of us who attended public school in the United States would tell this exact same story in this exact same way. But Ms. Garrett and Dr. Putnam, through their research, have discovered a much different, somewhat startling, much differently-shaped narrative that deserves attention. 

They write, “It was Black Americans’ undaunted faith in the promise of the American ‘we,’ and their willingness to claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s.” 

The most significant detail is that the end of the civil rights movement instituted and encouraged a significant loss of that faith and a concomitant loss of the rights that had been gained in the previous century. (You might want to read that counterintuitive sentence again, Beloved.) 

Wait, what? 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 caused gains to be lost? What?! How? Naw, that can’t be! 

Yep, LBJ fostered “deliberate acceleration” and immediate, “deliberate deceleration.” 

They write, “These interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have come to call the ‘I-we-I’ curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century.” 

“A central feature of America’s ‘I’ decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.” Those ‘I’ decades have no greater symbol than what have come, in the business world, to be called Unicorns. It is an epithet most often used to describe mammoth, unusual tech companies that start, take off, and deliver on rare, wondrous, fast, and obscenely profitable trajectories.

And, well, let’s be honest, everyone aspires to having a unicorn. Who wouldn’t? 

Back to Garrett and Putnam. “The moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely coincides with the moment America’s ‘we’ decades gave way to the era of ‘I.’ At the mid-’60s peak of the I-we-I curve, long-delayed moves toward racial inclusion had raised hopes for further improvements, but those hopes went unrealized as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal.” 

Let’s take a little trip, shall we? 

“KYOTO, Japan—Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief—in the year 1000.” 

The headline read: “This Japanese Shop Is 1,020 Years Old. It Knows a Bit About Surviving Crises.” Ya think? “Ichiwa has been selling grilled rice flour cakes to travelers in Kyoto, Japan, for a thousand years.” 

Companies like Ichiwa are studied by Japanese economists in the same way business historians in the United States study unicorns. “By putting tradition and stability over profit and growth, Ichiwa has weathered wars, plagues, natural disasters, and the rise and fall of empires. Through it all, its rice flour cakes have remained the same.”

“Their No. 1 priority is carrying on. Each generation is like a runner in a relay race. What’s important is passing the baton.” 

When the No. 1 priority is making a big splash, making the big gesture, taking the big bow, Beloved, we miss the point of those reliable, plain, ordinary, everyday cows like Ichiwa. In fact, I would submit to you that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was just such a gesture—a unicorn for racial parity, if you will.  

Ta-DA!, we said. We’ve done something about racial parity. Then we white folk ran a victory lap. Do you hear the subtext? It’s We’re done. Uh, no, Beloved, we’re not. We’re not even close to done. We’re barely at the beginning of a path to racial parity despite the unicorns—usually athletes and actors—who disprove the rule.  

The always trenchant Rebecca Solnit writes of American women finally earning seventy-seven cents on the white male dollar after starting at sixty-six cents, “[E]ither seventy-seven cents is a victory, and victories are points where you shut up and stop fighting; or seventy-seven cents is ugly, so activism accomplishes nothing and what’s the point of fighting? Both versions are defeatist because they are static.” 

Growth is never static. Healing is never static. Victory, itself, is never really static. Neither are unicorns or cows. It’s all part of the process of change, Beloved. 

“A selfish, fragmented ‘I’ society is not a fertile soil for racial equality.” 

Ichiwa has the right of it. “‘To survive for a millennium,’ Ms. Hasegawa said, ‘a business cannot just chase profits. It has to have a higher purpose. In the case of Ichiwa, that was a religious calling: serving the shrine’s pilgrims.’” 

Garret and Putnam close with Teddy, not Franklin, Roosevelt. “As Theodore Roosevelt put it, ‘the fundamental rule in our national life—the rule which underlies all others—is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.’” 

Covid-19 has proven this, if nothing else. 

Mythologically, unicorns are associated with virginity. Virginity in the original sense of the word: wholeness unto itself. Cows, on the other hand, represent daily nourishment.  

What if we were to broaden our use of unicorn to make our entire civilization a unicorn rather than just a few companies within it?  

If our civilization were a unicorn, it would automatically have a higher purpose—to serve its own growth, to make opportunity for each one of us, and to make a difference to one another. There would even be a hallowed place for the cows that nourish us. 

Victory laps and dramatic gestures are lovely. Who doesn’t love a parade? But when the parades and the fireworks are done, we are left with lives in which we need motivation, a greater purpose to inspire us to carry on. This is where real purpose is served, Beloved, in the everyday, the ordinary, the magical wonder of quotidian life. As Our Lady of Whimsy, Mary Engelbreit says, “Life is just so … daily.” 

When we commit to daily life with a higher purpose, Beloved, then we’ll stand a chance of inching back up that inverted U from an ‘I” world into a “we” world where everybody wins, and won’t that be grand? 

Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her website is susancorso.com.