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MAR WASOW. BORN DECEMBER 22, 1970. Omar was born in Kenya, grew up in New York, lived in Puerto Rico, and has a white, Jewish father and a black mother -- so he has been exposed to many cultural models. ... Omar is the founder and president of New York Online, an electronic bohemia that stresses intimacy and diversity and is the largest black-owned online service in the country. ...
One of the most transformative periods of my life occurred when I was a student at Stanford. When I arrived, I felt totally alienated from the black community on campus. At the time I was pretty illiterate about race politics, as I had come from New York, where there was this one world vibe. For all of the power that idea has, it also shelters you from the harder realities.
For example, the black community on campus was really polarized at the time. It was hard as a freshman to figure out where I fit in. As a result I stayed on the periphery. But by the time I graduated I was a resident assistant in the Black Theme House, one of the minority-focused dormitories where those living in it are 50 percent or 60 percent of a particular racial group. I went from being marginal to being at the center. I was in a place where every time I left it I felt like the rest of the world was not as comfortable or as familiar. It’s surprising then that not only did I become savvier about race politics in this country but I also became more at peace with the world. It might be because the experience gave me real love and respect for black folks and our history.
I have no problem accepting it as my history, but I do have a problem with the notion that if you are not black and not white, then you are in the middle. In a lot of ways that ignores all of the history and politics that have existed for hundreds of years in this country. That there is no middle is not logical. But race is not about logic. It is a social construction that has no grounding in reality. It is about a caste system. ...
After graduating, it seemed to me that where the black agenda had succeeded over the last fifty years had been in legal fronts. ... So becoming a laywer, which a lot of people encouraged me to do, didn’t make a lot of sense to me because I didn’t believe that was where the action was. The issue was much more about economics than about law. There was something really powerful about business, and I knew that I could only learn what it was by being in it. ...
I think a lot of what I have learned I could have learned selling T-shirts. But the other thing that has been nice is that I went into New York Online with a love of computers, and it turned out to be the biggest craze of the decade. Much of what people do online is play with identity. By understanding identity, I have a much better understanding of what to offer people online and how to make online services work. ...
Being twenty-five is mainly about learning. So for me, the degree to which I succeed is the degree to which I am challenging myself, working as hard as I humanly can and gaining knowledge from that.
The photograph and text are from the book Face Forward: Young African American Men in a Critical Age, by Julian C.R. Okwu, a photographer. Copyright (c) 1997 by Julian C.R. Okwu, published by Chronicle Books.
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