February 22, 2023 • 47 mins
In celebration of Black History Month, Carol brings back her captivating conversation with the former CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Merck, Kenneth Frazier, in which he shares his powerful story of being raised by his fiercely determined single dad. Ken’s dad Otis Frazier, a widower raising three children on his own, firmly believed in the power of tough love. He looked beyond the limits of being a janitor raising a family in an impoverished neighborhood to see his children as capable of achieving anything. He consistently set the bar high and expected his children to clear it. Ken tells Carol how tough love worked to shape him and his siblings, and Carol and Ken explore the limits of and alternatives to this approach. Ken shares plenty of his father's words of wisdom, along with some gems of his own, in this compelling and inspiring episode. Follow us on IG @groundcontrolparenting and at groundcontrolparenting.com
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Ground Control Parenting, a blog and
now a podcast creative for parents raising black and brown children.
I'm the creator and your host, Carol Sutton Lewis. For
our last podcast episode during Black History Month, I want
to bring you one of my favorites from the archives,
a conversation with a great business and civic leader who
has a powerful and inspirational parenting story. So let's get
(00:28):
started today. I happily welcome my friend Kenneth C. Frasier,
CEO of the multinational pharmaceutical company Murk N an attorney
who joined Mark twenty nine years ago, is retiring as
CEO this year after ten years in the role. He
has been widely recognized for his many contributions to Murk
and to society at large. In twenty nineteen, he became
(00:50):
the first recipient of the Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award for Healthcare,
and earlier this year, he was named CEO of the
Year by Chief Executive magazine for his longtime leadership at
the pharmaceutical giant and for his devotion to social justice
and economic inclusion. He demonstrated this devotion earlier this year
when he at former American Express CEO Kenschanal co sponsored
(01:14):
a statement in defense of voting rights, which included signatures
from over a hundred black executives and hundreds of other
business leaders, including Laarren Buffett and executives at Amazon and Google.
Ken is also the co founder and co chair of
one ten, a coalition of leading organizations committed to upskilling, hiring,
and promoting one million Black Americans into family sustaining jobs.
(01:37):
Ken and his wife Andrea have two children, a son James,
and a daughter Lauren. Ken is with me here today
to talk about parenting and his parenting influences, and I
can't wait to dive into this conversation. So welcome to
Ground Control Parenting. Ken. Thank you, Caron, pleased to be here,
very happy to have you here. So I'll just say
at the outset, you have to know that you are
(01:59):
one of the reasons I started this podcast. We sat
together at a dinner years ago and had a really
fascinating conversation about parenting and you and your siblings being
raised by your dad, and I left the conversation thinking
we all need to hear stories like this and have
more conversations about parenting. And as I think about the
conversation we had. I remember you telling me about not
(02:20):
only your father raising a CEO, but raising a concert
pianist who you unfortunately just recently lost. Can you tell
me about about your sister and about how your father
raised a concert pianist. My younger sister, Cal, as you say,
passed away about a week ago, and need was a
world class concert pianist, a virtue also, as her obituary
(02:42):
in the Philadelphia Inquired described her. She was from the
time she was three or four, recognized by my mother,
who was a music teacher in a church organist, as
being a prodigy. And she would sit her on phone
books so that she could read the keys, and my
mother play from sheet music, and my sister would imitator
(03:03):
could play flawlessly what her mother had just done. Wow.
So that was the perfect setup, being the daughter of
a music teacher to go on to be a concert pianist.
Except as God chose to do things, He called my
mother home when my sister was a little girl. As
my father often reminded us, my mother, who was some
twenty four years younger than him, told him at one
(03:26):
point confided in him almost that she believed that my
sister Carol had an extraordinary gift, and with that one comment,
she gave him the lifetime responsibility for nurturing that gift.
And so my dad, although he couldn't read music, couldn't
read a musical note if you put her on the
side of a barn. As his obligation that he was
(03:49):
going to bring out whatever talent the Lord gave his
youngest child. And I could talk about it in more details,
but one of the stories that I'll never forget is
we were raised in a very small rowhouse, and at
one point in my sister's development, the professor told him
that my sister couldn't make progress without a better instrument.
(04:11):
So lo and behold. I come home one day and
they're brickmaces there because they've taken off part of the
front of the house in order to get a baby
grand piano into this narrow rowhouse. And at the same time,
after that, we lost our living room because it was
the living room. After that, there was no more television downstairs.
(04:34):
We had to live in a house with a baby
grand piano. But she went off to play on the
great stages of the world orchestras as a concert soloist
and as a member of Ensembles, and she produced a
lot of great people, including if you liked the most
recent example of a student of hers who just recently
won the voice competition on NBC. Oh my goodness. Oh oh,
(04:57):
but well, I'm so sorry for you lost your sister.
Sounds amazing. And I have to also say, your father
sounds amazing because, as you said, you lost your mom
at a really early age. I mean, you guys were
pretty small. You were what twelve, how old were you?
And I was twelve twelve, yeah, and she was younger.
And so your father, who up until that point had
(05:19):
been sort of the traditional stereotypical man of a house
who left to go to his job every day and
came home to his wife and children, was suddenly the
parent and the parent who had a prodigy so school again,
he was the driver in the disciplinarian that's where he was,
(05:41):
and made a good life for you guys in Philadelphia,
but it was relatively humble in that he was a janitor,
as I recall, and had not had the opportunity to
have any advanced education. And so he's got this prodigy daughter,
he's got this son who is making the good grades
(06:01):
that he's supposed to be and suddenly it is all
of his responsibility. I'll tell about that, by the way,
please do so. My father, if he were alive today,
would be one hundred and twenty one years old. He
was born in nineteen hundred. My paternal grandfather, Richard Fraser,
was born in eighteen fifty seven and therefore was born
in Slavery. My father was from that generation of hardy
(06:26):
colored people who believed that their children could achieve anything
and had tremendous belief in the future in this country.
You know, my dad would say many times he knew
America was different when he paid his admission and was
then called Shy Park in Philadelphia, walked out and saw
it the resplendent Jackie Robinson on the field. Wow. So
(06:48):
in nineteen forty seven he decided that anything was possible
because Jackie was on the field. That's simple. The other
thing you need to know about my father's that if
I told you that he had only three years of
what passed for a formal education for a black child
in South Carolina between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine,
you wouldn't know who he was. Because he had such
(07:09):
a thirst for knowledge, He read two newspapers a day,
He spoke impeccable English, he dressed impeccably, he was a gentleman,
all the things that White America told him Black people
could not be determined to be. And so I tell
people that I was born in the inner city of Philadelphia,
(07:31):
but that's actually not the full truth. I was actually
born in my father's house. My father's house happened to
be located geographically in the inner city of Philadelphia, but
it was a different place. The standards of behavior, of speech,
of going to church and going to the library, and
being a gentleman were forced upon me by a man
(07:55):
who was determined not to be what the white man
told him were the limits his capabilities. So where do
you think he was sent north by his father or
more opportunities sent north from South Carolina, got to Philadelphia
and created this life for himself and then his family.
(08:16):
Where do you think that he learned how to be?
He said it was what he wanted to defy expectations.
But he clearly had a very strong sense of self
and a strong sense of style. I mean, he was
a quick adopter, apparently because he didn't come to town
knowing all these things, do you have any sense of
how he educated himself socially and in life. So let
(08:37):
me give you a couple of answers. So, first of all,
there's a great book called The Measure of a Man.
It's about city. Partier was born on an island in
the Bahamas where the language was Ghala all right for
those who that dialect as ad African dialect. He moved
to Nassau, where he listened to the BBC every night.
(08:59):
And if you know what he's about, Sidney Partier, he
was known for his impeccable fiction, and he learned that
from listening to He was a dishwasher in Nassau, and
he would come back to his room because he was
determined to be more than people thought he could be.
My father had exactly the same thing. The only other
thing I would say about my father, because I had
(09:20):
to hear this all the time, is my father would
ask of me and my oldest brother and my sister
how we thought his father, who was born into slavery
on a plantation, became an involuntary servant because of the
laws of around sharecropping, never lived off that plantation. He
would ask us, how did my father, Richard Fraser, get
(09:41):
the idea to send me north so that I wouldn't
become indebted to the land. Father was a man of faith,
and he believed that only the Lord gave his father
that idea. Okay, and my father needed to live up
to what his father started. And when I was a
little boy growing and what was then called the ghetto
of North Philadelphia, and he would go to work after
(10:03):
my mother died and he would say, you can't go
out in the street act like these other boys. You
know why, because this is not even your life. He
would tell me, this is his story me, right, question
is can you write your chapter in his narrative? Right?
This isn't even about you? And you know, unfortunately for
James and Lauren, they had the insane story. He would
(10:27):
say to me, if my father hadn't set me north, Okay,
maybe I don't own a lot, but I own this
modest house that I live in. I'm not indebted to
the land. I'm not a sharecropper, right, And you get
to go to school every day and you don't have
to work in the fields like I did. So how
hard is it for you to get all eyes? But
(10:50):
you're not dotting and pulling up in the yams and
after school come on. So so that works until it doesn't.
It would not work in today's Yes, I agree. I
appreciate what you said about his core came from his
father and sort of looking back and realizing how far
(11:10):
he'd come. So there are. Your father was a man
who clearly had a lot of self awareness, which he
passed on to his children. But he also had ideas
of success. Let me ask you, when you started doing
well in school, you were meeting his expectations. Is that right?
I mean, did he have specific continuing expectations for you?
Did he have career expectations for you? Not specific career expectations.
(11:34):
But my father was the first lawyer I ever knew,
because he was a union shop steward in a segregated
union at United Parcel Service because blacks couldn't belong to
the teamsters. He was the shop steward for the black
union at UPS. And what that meant was that he
had to grieve for people's jobs if they were suspended
or fired. And so the first lawyer, he was a
(11:57):
poor man's lawyer, is what he really was. And so
his expectations because this was His frame of reference was,
I'm scrubbing floys, but one day you're going to be
a supervisor like the white guys in the office. He
imagined Harvard Law school and partner a law firm or
CEO of Mark. But he knew there was something better
(12:19):
than what he had experienced, and he expected that I
would get a college education and I would go off
and become somebody like a supervisor r United Parts. So
let's talk a little bit about how this impacted all
of you. Now, your sister was a concert pianist, and
clearly his expectation for her was that she continue in music.
(12:42):
Did she continue in music school? I mean, what was
her path to performing? Were there it's music school she
attended or was she able to just start performing? No? No, no,
My sister was born with God given talent. But as
I said at her funeral last week, but people don't
see is the artist in full that she became. It
was all about acquiring technique. It was all about mastering
(13:05):
increasingly difficult, intricate piano techniques. So she had in some
ways a very narrow childhood because she couldn't play. After
she got her a's, she had to go right to
that piano, and if the professor told my dad, by
the time she comes back in three days for her
next lesson, she must practice this piece fifty times. She
(13:27):
could practice at fifty one, but she could never practice
forty nine ever, And that was what he made sure
happened when she went through the stages of her life
as an adolescents, when she rebelled, she still had to practice.
And so, you know, for us, you know, the rest
of us, it was going to school, but for her
it was she needed to actually practice, practice, practice, And
(13:47):
that's how she got to the point where she went off.
Someone gave a scholarship to her because they heard her play,
and they realized that as she became sort of an
adolescent teenager, it was really hard to my father to
keep this up in the inner city. So person gave
a scholarship for her to go to a private school
(14:08):
where it would be easier for her to get the
music lessons there. And then she went off and graduated
from the Opening Conservatory College Conservatory where she got her
BA in piano performance. And then she took off to
the stage and played around the world for many years
as a concert pianist, a soloist, and accompanying orchestras and
the like. But then something else happened to her, which
(14:31):
is that she found the Lord. And she went back
to school at SMU Southern Methodist and got two master's degree,
one in sacred music and one in music education, and
she eventually became like my mother and music teacher. Her
focus became on sacred and gospel music. Later on in
her life, she decided that her instrument, that her talent,
(14:52):
was here to teach people about the love of Jesus Christ,
and that became her life after that. Wow, I marveled
still at your father. I have this image of in
my mind of him sort of going off to work
and coming back home every day and sitting down for
dinner and then suddenly becoming the man that has to
do everything. I mean, he had to hold you guys
together having lost their mom, I mean, which is yeah,
(15:15):
you know. I have to say one of the couple
things that I remember about my mother's death. My mother
was the youngest of her siblings, the youngest girl. She
was my father's child bride. She went into the hospital
to have a hysterectomy, which was typical in those days,
and she had a pulmonary embolism, so she wasn't supposed
to die. She just died because the way the surgery
was done. So when they buried my mother, my father
(15:39):
called us into the living room and we remember we
didn't really know this man. Everyone. He called us into
the living room that night and he said, kid, today
was a good day. And we couldn't get that through.
I had mommy death died. How could be it today?
And she said, because she's with the Lord and she
will never suffer again. And to me, that's faith. He did.
(16:00):
Then was one of my mother's older sisters showed up
with a bunch of suitcases in a car. Actually she
was the first person you have ever drew and Mercedes.
He was well off, and she said, okay, I'm going
to collect carrol because obviously you janitor cannot raise this girl. Okay,
And my father said, no one is taking my children.
(16:22):
And he arranged for a neighbor who actually was a
hairdresser to come down and do the thing that he
couldn't do. A child there. Every night before she went
to bed, this is dours and rang the bell and
they had the little platts in her hair. She could
wear the school the next morning. So he was a
(16:44):
man of tremendous faith. And the other thing that he
learned out of this he didn't really know us. He
certainly did not a cook. I remember that I went
to school right off to my mother's death, and I
opened my lunch box and he had made me a
ham in jelly sandwich. Well, and that's that. My mother's
death was a real tragedy and we were all going
(17:06):
to starve to death, okay, But he taught himself, Carol,
be a parent, and long after we grew up, I
remember him saying to me, you know, if your mother
hadn't died, I would have never had your children the
way I had. You, not exposure to his children. Now,
(17:28):
he wasn't a sentimental man. You aren't that earlier hard
and he had really tough principles, but he learned. He
learned to know his children, and he wouldn't have hit.
He allowed her to play the traditional sexualal of mommy
and he had to play the dad evil. Yes, that
is truly truly amazing. The messages were that you you
(17:50):
had to do what he needed you to do. I mean,
you had roles, you had to do what you were
supposed to do but his confidence in your ability to
do that was astounding, I mean was contagious. Similar to
how your father said his father had worked so hard
to put him in Philadelphia. Did you feel this sense
of I've got this confidence because my father has works
(18:11):
so hard to give it to me. Yes. The other
thing my father did is he gave all of us
psychological arnor to go out in the world in two
different ways. Right, So my sister and I were bused
to all white school and we're not well accepted, and yeah,
it didn't bother me. So I often mentor young black
people who are worried about racism in the workplace, and
(18:33):
what I try to do for them is to deconstruct
what they're worried about. Because my father would always say,
it's not what white people that think about you that
bothers you. It's what you think white people think about
you that bothers you. So at the end of the day,
if you learn to believe in yourself and you remember
Jackie Robinson, do you know what Jackie Robinson was really
(18:53):
good at. He was known for stealing home which is
the hardest thing to do in baseball. And it's hard
because the picture is looking at you on third base.
It requires a strong mind your home. So my father's
whole thing was we're not just as good as that,
we could be better than them. That was the first
(19:14):
lesson that I learned from him, which is that I
didn't have to believe what racist white people thought about
my capabilities. Now here's the second lesson. I grew up
in toghether I said, there was incredible peer pressure. The
other thing my father taught me was that I wasn't
allowed to fit in with my friends in the neighborhood.
(19:34):
In fact, the single most important piece of advice I
ever got in my life was when I was a
junior high school and at that point in time, sneakers
shifted from canvas high tops to leather shoes, and my
neighborhood people didn't have nice houses or cars or anything.
But if you have the good sneakers, you had status exactly. Okay.
(19:56):
So I came home one day from the basketball court
and I said to my dad, I'm not going to
play basketball anymore because I'm tired of people making fun
of me. I'm the only one who has these old
fashioned sneakers. And my father pretended to be empathetic, and
he set me upstairs to get his wallet, and I'm
walking up the backsteps and I'm thinking, what Martian has
taken control of otistration. But I've never seen empathy before.
(20:19):
So I come down and he starts counting out the
money to me at the kitchen table, and he's staring
at me intently and making sure he understands that I
need these sneakers so that people won't make fun of me,
all right, And after he clarifies that rationale, he slides
the money across the table. I go to reach it,
he grabs me. He administered discipline in the form of
(20:41):
a slap to the side of my head, and when
I got up, he said the single most important sentence
that any human beings ever said to me, and I'm
about to say it now. He said, Kenny, what other
people think about you is none of your damn business.
And the sooner you learn that, the better off you're
(21:02):
going to be. So if you're here to tell me
that you need these sneakers to be cool in this neighborhood,
you cannot have them, because I'm going to teach you
that you need to stand on your own feet. It's
so true. If you can get to the point where
you are not concerned about what other people think, you
(21:23):
are free to pursue. There's no stopping you. You can
pursue anything. And so I hear that it is wonderful advice.
But the reality is that for some people, so maybe
some more than others, that's a hard thing to do.
It's hard for me. It's hard for me. It's just
that I was prepared to do it. So it's not
(21:44):
that I don't really care what people think. Let me
give you a little thing that my father taught me
when as a child, my father, if you complimented him,
he would never say thank you. He would say, that's
kind of you to say And he said he would
say that is he said, I'm reminding myself that I
feel good because you said it. And if I allow
(22:07):
myself to feel good when you compliment me, i'll feel
bad when you criticize me. Okay. So his whole point
was you need to be your own person now as
CEO of Murk, when analysts and investors and the press
when I first shot the job said I didn't deserve
the job and I was an incompetent lawyer, didn't hurt
(22:27):
it hurt a little bit, but you know, I could
hear my father in my ear saying, boy, that's none
of your damn business what they said. Do you understand? Yeah?
So what I say is we can give our children
psychological armor. Okay. So for me, the thoughts that were
put in the tape recorder in the back of my
(22:49):
head were empowering. And by the way, they were what
colored people believed. Do you know what I mean to
say by that the institutions we have, the HBCUs were
built by colored people. They couldn't have imagined the amount
of wealth we have today, but they believed. My father believed,
(23:14):
as de Boys would say in his Talented tenth, that
the race was going to be advanced by the excellence
of individuals. That's what Jackie Robinson was. Okay, you know
one more Jackie Robins story. Most people, Jackie Robinson is
famous for what being a baseball player, I mean, being
the first black baseball player in the professional league. Yes,
(23:36):
but that doesn't give him credit because in nineteen forty seven,
his first year, he was Rookie of the Year. In
nineteen forty eight, his second year, he was most valuable
player in all of baseball. Okay, So to say he
integrated baseball is not to do him justice. And the
thing about stealing home plate was Jackie demonstrated a superiority.
(24:02):
And so my father's whole thing was you're not trying
to be as good as them, because you would have
to be twice as good as them to get to
the same place. We'll be right back after these messages,
welcome back to the show man. We allud this a
little earlier. So having this very powerful, very confident, disciplinarian,
(24:26):
particularly sentimental man be both mother and father, be the
person's raising you. It works when it works. But clearly,
if you said this wouldn't work today, could you see
back then that there were aspects of it didn't work?
Or did it feel? Was it? It was? He larger
than life. He was larger than life. He was tall.
But now that I'm a father and I look back
(24:47):
at this and I think about my own parenting, I
think about it differently. So, first of all, this unsentimental
man gave me psychological armor. But one of the problems
with psychological armor is it's hard to express one's feelings right.
So we were taught to be dignified. We were taught
(25:08):
to be stoic, to be strong. It was only later
in life that I realized that there's more to life
than just being stoic and strong and dignified. There is
this aspect of feeling, and for me that's much harder
because he didn't want my feelings to hurt me. Okay,
that made it harder actually for me to be expressive.
(25:31):
And so there's a flip side to everything. We have
to raise our children and give them the opportunity and
the impetus to be successful, but they also need to
know that their love no matter what they do. In
my life, I knew my father approved of me. I'll
tell you one funny story. I remember when I got
(25:53):
to Harvard Law School. I came back to my family
church to preach on some Sunday. Maybe it was Father's Day,
I don't know, but they wanted and proud of this
kid who left North Celia because you come back and
do the sermon. So I come back and I do
this sermon, and I overheard someone talked to my father
later on about was he proud of me? And all
(26:13):
this kind of stuff, and how the conversation turned around
to him being such a strict disciplinarian. And this woman
says to him, well, the only problem with that is
your children don't feel like you're their friend. And my
father said friend, he said friend, he said, I want
(26:34):
to be respected and feared, he said, but not necessarily
in that order. Well, you know, it's interesting because we,
many of us in our generation, grew up with that
if we were fortunate enough to have our fathers and
around and at home, the fathers were the disciplinarians. Once
you were you were a little scared to tell daddy.
(26:54):
But as we had children, and as we watched younger
people have children, now that's shifting. And to your point,
it's it's it's a very good thing for people to
give importance to how people feel. And all the talk
about mental wellness now and part involved getting in touch
with your own feelings. But it's hard for we're sort
(27:16):
of in the bridge generation because we got that. I mean, similarly,
my father was the sports guy, the guy's guy, the
one who you daddy was the last resort. And I
knew that wasn't always the best thing. It wasn't the
best thing for some of my siblings. But you can't
really turn one hundred and eighty degrees away from that,
(27:36):
I mean, because that's sort of the core of what
you know. No, that's right, and I think the gold
is for balance, right right. On the one hand, you know,
you don't I would never want to be like my
father in the same way. It wouldn't work. By the way,
let's be really clear. My kids were raised in low
density housing in the suburbs I was raised, and what
(27:59):
was all the ghetto with gangs around. A lot of
what my father was doing was counteracting what was happening
in those streets. So his style of parenting I think
was totally appropriate for the time and place in which
I grew up. My children grow up in a different world,
(28:19):
and how do we then inspire in them that same
desire that I had to prove that I was up
to my father's standards. I couldn't be like my father.
My father in some ways was overly simplistic. Right. Everything
to him was it's either vice or virtue, okay, and
there was no in between. It was either strength or weakness.
(28:43):
And now that I'm older, I understand that the world's
a lot more nuanced than my father was. But boy,
was he the right father to have in the mid
nineteen sixties was willing. Yeah, No, I know that's right.
And the ability to envision in your family in a
circumstance that's better than the one that they're in, and
(29:04):
more importantly convey that to them. So even if you
never leave that place, you know of the expectation. I mean,
that is still as valid to day as it was
when we were growing up now. And so the challenge
is to be able to do that and not sort
of beat out and I don't mean necessarily physically, but
sort of squash the feelings part. Some children particularly need
(29:24):
to feel that they are loved and not to just
intuit it by the circumstances. What I'm going to ask you,
You know, you in your career, in your life, and
you've talked about this, in many instances, you have been
focused on doing the right thing. You know, when you have,
as you have in many circumstances, stepped out on a limb,
stepped away from the expectations of you. Even when you
(29:45):
were practicing law, you stopped the fancy corporate law practice
to represent a man on death row and you got
him off of death row. And then when you were
in as CEO, you the President Trump's counsel when you
disagree vehemently with his perspective, and just recently you and
Ken and other executives went up against Georgia and then
(30:06):
ultimately the people who want to suppress voted. My question
is that I'm trying to get in terms of your
father's influence, what's the core of knowing what's right? Is
it faith based? I mean, you said it's not always easy,
But where does the core of that come from? Where
did it come from from your father? And it is
the same place that it comes from for you. Well,
(30:27):
part of it is faith based, but I think the
part that you're talking about is not as much faith
based as it is. My father was what used to
be called a race man. We don't use that expression then.
But with that, it's not a racist. It's a person
(30:49):
who's anti white. It's a person who very much supported
the advancement of his people. And so if you grow
up in a house where the dinner table conversation is
about civil rights, and this dinner time conversation is about
why when you grew up in the South, lynching was
(31:12):
so terrible. It was terrible because it wasn't just that
someone in your community was lynched. It was that people
were made to get out of their bands and watch
somebody be lynched. Okay, and you have somebody who brings
that to their parenting and then also on top of
it again, because it's not just the issue around how
(31:32):
the race issue affects you in terms of how White
America views you, it's also how you're viewed by your
colleagues in a neighborhood. And so, you know, somebody woke
me up at four o'clock at Christmas morning and say
what are you most proud of? I would say that
I was able to go to school, get good grades,
speak perfect English, and I could fight okay, Okay, because
(31:54):
in my father's house, you didn't run from anybody. Okay.
So if you go up in my neighborhood and you
go to the white schools and you learn to speak
well and all that kind of stuff, and you're my
father's son, you're forced to be a pariah. Okay, you
can be a pariah when you're thirteen. You can definitely
(32:16):
be a prior when you and you're a CEO. You
think about it, you know, all of the block. If
people didn't like it in my old neighborhood. You might
get your ass whipped over it. None of that here,
I mean, what's gonna do but tweet at me? People say, oh,
that was so brave. You know, it was brave. Crossing
(32:38):
the Edmund Pettis Bridge was brave, you know. And and
to your point, how do we instill that in the
next generation, because we don't want to put our children
in harm's ways can make their way out of it.
I mean, you know, we don't want to send them
into a place to fight so that they can learn
to fight. But that a bill to not walk away
(33:01):
from an uncomfortable circumstance is a learned behavior. I mean
you can mean or an experienced behavior. I mean, you
have to be in a circumstance to know that you
can rise to it. And I wonder so many of
our children are not ever put in that circumstance. I mean,
not physically. But the same issue occurs with respect to
(33:23):
you know, it's interesting if you go around the world,
there are tribes where people die because they're shunned by
their tribe. They actually physically die. They're not deprived of
anything necessary for life other than the respect and the
acceptance of their they're tribe. It actually makes the point
that I was talking about earlier, which is often we
(33:46):
don't have physical fear. We have the fear of being ostracized.
We have the fear of not being light. We have
the fear of people saying things about us behind our backs,
and that generates the same kind of fight or flight
instant in us that growing up in my neighborhood when
(34:08):
somebody wanted your lunch money, you have that same fight
of f life. Nobody's taking your lunch money anymore, but
they might take your title away from me, right, they
could fire me a CEO murk And and if you
allow that to actually make you a frame, then you
hold onto your position in life at the expense of
(34:31):
your values. So I think that's what I'm trying to start,
probably not very articulate. Oh no, no, that was perfectly
a little bit like the guy that wanted to take
your lunch money on your way to school. No, that
is that is perfect because you're right. Even if they're
not facing down bullies, that happens less these days. Bullying
(34:52):
is bullying. Yes, yes, yes there is fiber bullying. But
but we can we can help them be mentally strong
I mean you can. There's a mental battle that you
fight against the perception that you're not light, that you're
not good enough. And what we can give our children
is the core of confidence. And you know, part of
that core of confidence comes from what your father did
(35:13):
for you, and that is talk about the history. I mean,
you can proudly talk about your grandfather, yes, and we
need to make sure our children can proudly talk about
their ancestors, because you there have been many times when
I have thought, Okay, I'm having it bad, but I
didn't have it nearly as bad as two generations ago.
(35:34):
Context is everything. Oh, and that's why what hurts our
kids is the messages that are being said to them
and a post racial so to speak. I'm making air
quotes in a post racial society and are constantly hearing
that little nagging voice where people say you're not quite okay,
(35:55):
just not quite smart enough, You're just not quite pretty enough.
They're just not quite good enough. And if you don't
give your children that psychological armor, then they hear that.
And I, you know, I have to say, I've mentored
so many young African Americans and I can hear them.
(36:20):
They're saying that they're wounded by the subtle messages that
are given to them through society, and we have to
we just have to equip them to deal with it absolutely,
and they're they're wounded by that. They're also they're they're
wounded by the knowledge that there have been programs that
(36:41):
have advantaged them as there should be. And the combination
of knowing that there are these programs and then believing
because other people want them to believe that they don't
deserve to be there helps them feel like they're imposters.
They don't belong, we don't. We need to embrace as
many of these programs as possible and then just teach
(37:01):
our children that they are fully equipped to be as
successful as anyone else in whatever they're going. I mean,
and I've seen that in so many instances, if kids
can get past their own concern about sort of whether
they fit in or I mean, if that's what I
said at the very beginning of this interview, I say
(37:24):
what my father used to say to me, it's not
what white people are thinking about it. You think they're
thinking about you. That's bothering you. So you need to
understand the distinction between those two things. Exactly exactly. If
you can stop thinking about what you think they think
and only deal with whatever is coming at you, you
(37:45):
can get the armor for that much more easily. Reality is,
they're worried about themselves. You know what. That is the
ultimate truth. Most people are just so self absorbed and
assume they're really not. They're your yearly. So if you
start looking at it that way, if you start realizing
(38:09):
that what's going to hold you back is this voice
in the back of your head, I think you can
go a lot farther. I mean, people are afraid to fail.
I see it all around in this company. One of
the reasons I became CEO of this company is because
I was willing to fail multiple times, and other people
(38:29):
were so insecure that they wanted to succeed, but they
wanted a very narrow conception of success. You know, I'm
probably the biggest failure, at least in the public sense,
in recent history of this company in what way, sir? Okay? Well,
so you know it's interesting because I used to be
the general counsel of the company and we had to
define defend sixty thousand lawsuits but were withdrawn pain killer
(38:52):
name bios and it was like a huge scandal because
we were accused of selling a drug that we supposedly
knew called tart attacks, which, of course it is ludicrous.
But there's sixty thousand cases and a lot of varacious
planets lawyers suing us all over the country. Well, anyway,
we try. I decided that we were not going to settle,
and we're going to fight each case one by one. Okay,
(39:13):
So we get our first verdict out of sixty thousand cases,
and it's terrible, and the verdict is two hundred and
fifty three million dollars. At New York Times, very helpfully
on a Sunday front page said two things. They said, Merk,
according to Wall Street, is likely to go bankrupt. That's
not a good thing. And then they said, and then
(39:35):
they can blame it on the ineptitude of their lawyer
who insists on fighting each cases. Oh my god, I
told people who tell me about them what they're fearing.
I said, most people will never be referred to on
the front page of the New York Times, enacted on
the front page of the New York Times. But you
know what they were really saying. I lost. I lost
(39:57):
trying to do something that no general counsel had ever done,
which is to try fifty thousand lawsuits. And so what
I say to people is, you know a lot of
people think that life is a test, and we grew
up as good students. View me, Carol, you supposed to
get good grades on the test because that was a
reflection of your character. Did you study hard enough? Exactly?
In fact, life is a contest. It isn't a test,
(40:21):
all right. So if you get to the super Bowl,
by definition one team must lose, there is no shame it.
If you get to the starting line at the Olympics
for the one hundred meter dash and you're in last place,
you're still the fastest person anyone around you ever knew it,
all right. So if you start seeing the world through
(40:44):
that frame and not think that if you fail it's
a failing grade, it's about you, then you can try
to do things that are hard. You can reach for
things that you might fail at, but you know what
you might succeed. No true words, man, that is so true. Look,
this is supposed to be about parenting, but I'm writing
I'm taking notes myself. Well, because we're all kids. You
(41:08):
realize that we're still kids. We just look grown up.
Absolutely that that is why I do a parenting podcast,
because we're all still processing how we were when we
were little, and here we have responsibility for raising little
ones up, so we gotta we have to deal with
it all at the same time. Well, there's a funny
(41:30):
vaudeville joke. Can I tell you that. I think it
pains a lot. I love the jokes. So the joke
says that father knocks on the door earlier in the
morning and sons and his son's room and he says, son,
time to get up and go to school. And the
son says, I don't want to go to school, and
the father says why, and the son says, three reasons.
I'm tired. Schools boring, any other kids are me? And
(41:54):
the father says, will let me give you three reasons
to go to school. It's time, it's the right thing,
and you are the headmaster. So much about life is
we need the headmaster, but we don't know it. That
took me a second, but that's hilarious. That as hilarious.
(42:18):
I'm gonna use that is. But I think it's funny,
but I think it's illustrative of what we're all going
through in life, which is that deep down inside, we're
the scared little child. And if we know that. Once
we know we're scared, then it loses its power over you.
It's only when you're not aware that you're scared, all right,
(42:43):
that you actually it takes control of you, once you
recognize that you have to do something even when you're scared.
Let me give you the greatest example. Look at young
men who are sent into battle. There is no stronger
instinct than self preservation. And yeah, when they go into
battle and Afghanistan, Iraq or whatever, it would be harder
(43:04):
for them to run than to stand and fight. Okay,
And yet we actually give ourselves reasons from running from
our responsibilities, and no one's shooting at us because we've
allowed the fear to be the thing that determines our
course of action, and it doesn't have to be. At
(43:24):
my point, that's absolutely true. The fact that you've been
able to get to that point is yet another tribute
to your father, because that doesn't sound like something that
he would necessarily have thought about in terms of the
fear and conquering the fear. It sounds like he might
not have wanted to even talk about the fear that
there was fear and the next generation you've managed to see.
(43:49):
I said we were the bridge, but you're definitely you
are the bridge. You're moving into the next generation because
that kind of insight is going to be helpful to
parents everywhere they as they try to give their kids.
It's that important psychological armor. Well, but I've learned from
my kids to cattle. The difference between my father and
me is I care what my children think of me.
(44:10):
I wouldn't say I want to be respected in fear,
but not necessarily in that order. I would never say
that I want to be loved by my children. I
don't want to be loved at all costs by my children.
But I listen to them and so they give me
candid feedback about what kind of person they think I am.
Some of it's not fun, and so I think I've
(44:34):
learned as much from my children as I have from
my father. So I told you we all should be
seeking balance. My children are the ones who are helping
me try to find this balance before I depart this world.
That is great, and so that means that we have
to tweak your father's saying just a little sort of
what other people think of you who are not your
(44:56):
family and your children is none of your business, but
you ought to care about what they think, and you
ought to care very much about what they think. Yeah, yeah, Ken,
this is as wonderful as I knew it would be.
But I'm going to wrap it up here and I'm
just going to ask you to do me the favor
of one quick little GCP bonus round two. Quick questions one,
(45:19):
and I'm sure you have great answer to this. First,
what is your favorite poem or saying or psalm some
words that mean a lot to you. Well, there's many
of them that mean a lot to me. But the
one that just pumped into my head is a scripture
that my grandmother made me learn. It's Ecclesiastics twelve, which
(45:40):
says remember the Lord, thy Creator in the days of
thy youth, because it's really a poem about aging, and
it's really a reminders that all of what we have
in life passes. And now the final question, children's books.
Were there any that you love growing up or that
you love reading to your kids? Well, of course Harry
(46:02):
Potter comes to mind, but but no, I mean, I
don't remember any from my childhood in particular. But I
do remember books like Goodnight Moon, and I like remembering
when my children were little and they were fascinated by
that book. You know, one of the things that I
(46:23):
try to do is I always try to put my
youngest and my oldest and my youngest to bed. And
that was really precious time at bedtime. Thank you so
so much. I so appreciate it. All right, Carol, All
the best to you, Bill and your family too. I
hope everyone listening enjoyed this conversation and that you'll come
back for more. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you
(46:46):
listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more parenting
info and advice, please check out the Ground Control Parenting
blog at ground Control Parenting dot com. You can also
find us on Instagram and Facebook at ground Control Parents,
and on LinkedIn under Carol Sutton Lewis. The Ground Control
Parenting with Carol Sutton Lewis podcast is a part of
(47:06):
the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartMedia. Until
the next time, take care and thanks for listening.
Hello, and welcome to Ground Control Parenting, a blog and
now a podcast creative for parents raising black and brown children.
I'm the creator and your host, Carol Sutton Lewis. For
our last podcast episode during Black History Month, I want
to bring you one of my favorites from the archives,
a conversation with a great business and civic leader who
has a powerful and inspirational parenting story. So let's get
(00:28):
started today. I happily welcome my friend Kenneth C. Frasier,
CEO of the multinational pharmaceutical company Murk N an attorney
who joined Mark twenty nine years ago, is retiring as
CEO this year after ten years in the role. He
has been widely recognized for his many contributions to Murk
and to society at large. In twenty nineteen, he became
(00:50):
the first recipient of the Forbes Lifetime Achievement Award for Healthcare,
and earlier this year, he was named CEO of the
Year by Chief Executive magazine for his longtime leadership at
the pharmaceutical giant and for his devotion to social justice
and economic inclusion. He demonstrated this devotion earlier this year
when he at former American Express CEO Kenschanal co sponsored
(01:14):
a statement in defense of voting rights, which included signatures
from over a hundred black executives and hundreds of other
business leaders, including Laarren Buffett and executives at Amazon and Google.
Ken is also the co founder and co chair of
one ten, a coalition of leading organizations committed to upskilling, hiring,
and promoting one million Black Americans into family sustaining jobs.
(01:37):
Ken and his wife Andrea have two children, a son James,
and a daughter Lauren. Ken is with me here today
to talk about parenting and his parenting influences, and I
can't wait to dive into this conversation. So welcome to
Ground Control Parenting. Ken. Thank you, Caron, pleased to be here,
very happy to have you here. So I'll just say
at the outset, you have to know that you are
(01:59):
one of the reasons I started this podcast. We sat
together at a dinner years ago and had a really
fascinating conversation about parenting and you and your siblings being
raised by your dad, and I left the conversation thinking
we all need to hear stories like this and have
more conversations about parenting. And as I think about the
conversation we had. I remember you telling me about not
(02:20):
only your father raising a CEO, but raising a concert
pianist who you unfortunately just recently lost. Can you tell
me about about your sister and about how your father
raised a concert pianist. My younger sister, Cal, as you say,
passed away about a week ago, and need was a
world class concert pianist, a virtue also, as her obituary
(02:42):
in the Philadelphia Inquired described her. She was from the
time she was three or four, recognized by my mother,
who was a music teacher in a church organist, as
being a prodigy. And she would sit her on phone
books so that she could read the keys, and my
mother play from sheet music, and my sister would imitator
(03:03):
could play flawlessly what her mother had just done. Wow.
So that was the perfect setup, being the daughter of
a music teacher to go on to be a concert pianist.
Except as God chose to do things, He called my
mother home when my sister was a little girl. As
my father often reminded us, my mother, who was some
twenty four years younger than him, told him at one
(03:26):
point confided in him almost that she believed that my
sister Carol had an extraordinary gift, and with that one comment,
she gave him the lifetime responsibility for nurturing that gift.
And so my dad, although he couldn't read music, couldn't
read a musical note if you put her on the
side of a barn. As his obligation that he was
(03:49):
going to bring out whatever talent the Lord gave his
youngest child. And I could talk about it in more details,
but one of the stories that I'll never forget is
we were raised in a very small rowhouse, and at
one point in my sister's development, the professor told him
that my sister couldn't make progress without a better instrument.
(04:11):
So lo and behold. I come home one day and
they're brickmaces there because they've taken off part of the
front of the house in order to get a baby
grand piano into this narrow rowhouse. And at the same time,
after that, we lost our living room because it was
the living room. After that, there was no more television downstairs.
(04:34):
We had to live in a house with a baby
grand piano. But she went off to play on the
great stages of the world orchestras as a concert soloist
and as a member of Ensembles, and she produced a
lot of great people, including if you liked the most
recent example of a student of hers who just recently
won the voice competition on NBC. Oh my goodness. Oh oh,
(04:57):
but well, I'm so sorry for you lost your sister.
Sounds amazing. And I have to also say, your father
sounds amazing because, as you said, you lost your mom
at a really early age. I mean, you guys were
pretty small. You were what twelve, how old were you?
And I was twelve twelve, yeah, and she was younger.
And so your father, who up until that point had
(05:19):
been sort of the traditional stereotypical man of a house
who left to go to his job every day and
came home to his wife and children, was suddenly the
parent and the parent who had a prodigy so school again,
he was the driver in the disciplinarian that's where he was,
(05:41):
and made a good life for you guys in Philadelphia,
but it was relatively humble in that he was a janitor,
as I recall, and had not had the opportunity to
have any advanced education. And so he's got this prodigy daughter,
he's got this son who is making the good grades
(06:01):
that he's supposed to be and suddenly it is all
of his responsibility. I'll tell about that, by the way,
please do so. My father, if he were alive today,
would be one hundred and twenty one years old. He
was born in nineteen hundred. My paternal grandfather, Richard Fraser,
was born in eighteen fifty seven and therefore was born
in Slavery. My father was from that generation of hardy
(06:26):
colored people who believed that their children could achieve anything
and had tremendous belief in the future in this country.
You know, my dad would say many times he knew
America was different when he paid his admission and was
then called Shy Park in Philadelphia, walked out and saw
it the resplendent Jackie Robinson on the field. Wow. So
(06:48):
in nineteen forty seven he decided that anything was possible
because Jackie was on the field. That's simple. The other
thing you need to know about my father's that if
I told you that he had only three years of
what passed for a formal education for a black child
in South Carolina between nineteen o six and nineteen o nine,
you wouldn't know who he was. Because he had such
(07:09):
a thirst for knowledge, He read two newspapers a day,
He spoke impeccable English, he dressed impeccably, he was a gentleman,
all the things that White America told him Black people
could not be determined to be. And so I tell
people that I was born in the inner city of Philadelphia,
(07:31):
but that's actually not the full truth. I was actually
born in my father's house. My father's house happened to
be located geographically in the inner city of Philadelphia, but
it was a different place. The standards of behavior, of speech,
of going to church and going to the library, and
being a gentleman were forced upon me by a man
(07:55):
who was determined not to be what the white man
told him were the limits his capabilities. So where do
you think he was sent north by his father or
more opportunities sent north from South Carolina, got to Philadelphia
and created this life for himself and then his family.
(08:16):
Where do you think that he learned how to be?
He said it was what he wanted to defy expectations.
But he clearly had a very strong sense of self
and a strong sense of style. I mean, he was
a quick adopter, apparently because he didn't come to town
knowing all these things, do you have any sense of
how he educated himself socially and in life. So let
(08:37):
me give you a couple of answers. So, first of all,
there's a great book called The Measure of a Man.
It's about city. Partier was born on an island in
the Bahamas where the language was Ghala all right for
those who that dialect as ad African dialect. He moved
to Nassau, where he listened to the BBC every night.
(08:59):
And if you know what he's about, Sidney Partier, he
was known for his impeccable fiction, and he learned that
from listening to He was a dishwasher in Nassau, and
he would come back to his room because he was
determined to be more than people thought he could be.
My father had exactly the same thing. The only other
thing I would say about my father, because I had
(09:20):
to hear this all the time, is my father would
ask of me and my oldest brother and my sister
how we thought his father, who was born into slavery
on a plantation, became an involuntary servant because of the
laws of around sharecropping, never lived off that plantation. He
would ask us, how did my father, Richard Fraser, get
(09:41):
the idea to send me north so that I wouldn't
become indebted to the land. Father was a man of faith,
and he believed that only the Lord gave his father
that idea. Okay, and my father needed to live up
to what his father started. And when I was a
little boy growing and what was then called the ghetto
of North Philadelphia, and he would go to work after
(10:03):
my mother died and he would say, you can't go
out in the street act like these other boys. You
know why, because this is not even your life. He
would tell me, this is his story me, right, question
is can you write your chapter in his narrative? Right?
This isn't even about you? And you know, unfortunately for
James and Lauren, they had the insane story. He would
(10:27):
say to me, if my father hadn't set me north, Okay,
maybe I don't own a lot, but I own this
modest house that I live in. I'm not indebted to
the land. I'm not a sharecropper, right, And you get
to go to school every day and you don't have
to work in the fields like I did. So how
hard is it for you to get all eyes? But
(10:50):
you're not dotting and pulling up in the yams and
after school come on. So so that works until it doesn't.
It would not work in today's Yes, I agree. I
appreciate what you said about his core came from his
father and sort of looking back and realizing how far
(11:10):
he'd come. So there are. Your father was a man
who clearly had a lot of self awareness, which he
passed on to his children. But he also had ideas
of success. Let me ask you, when you started doing
well in school, you were meeting his expectations. Is that right?
I mean, did he have specific continuing expectations for you?
Did he have career expectations for you? Not specific career expectations.
(11:34):
But my father was the first lawyer I ever knew,
because he was a union shop steward in a segregated
union at United Parcel Service because blacks couldn't belong to
the teamsters. He was the shop steward for the black
union at UPS. And what that meant was that he
had to grieve for people's jobs if they were suspended
or fired. And so the first lawyer, he was a
(11:57):
poor man's lawyer, is what he really was. And so
his expectations because this was His frame of reference was,
I'm scrubbing floys, but one day you're going to be
a supervisor like the white guys in the office. He
imagined Harvard Law school and partner a law firm or
CEO of Mark. But he knew there was something better
(12:19):
than what he had experienced, and he expected that I
would get a college education and I would go off
and become somebody like a supervisor r United Parts. So
let's talk a little bit about how this impacted all
of you. Now, your sister was a concert pianist, and
clearly his expectation for her was that she continue in music.
(12:42):
Did she continue in music school? I mean, what was
her path to performing? Were there it's music school she
attended or was she able to just start performing? No? No, no,
My sister was born with God given talent. But as
I said at her funeral last week, but people don't
see is the artist in full that she became. It
was all about acquiring technique. It was all about mastering
(13:05):
increasingly difficult, intricate piano techniques. So she had in some
ways a very narrow childhood because she couldn't play. After
she got her a's, she had to go right to
that piano, and if the professor told my dad, by
the time she comes back in three days for her
next lesson, she must practice this piece fifty times. She
(13:27):
could practice at fifty one, but she could never practice
forty nine ever, And that was what he made sure
happened when she went through the stages of her life
as an adolescents, when she rebelled, she still had to practice.
And so, you know, for us, you know, the rest
of us, it was going to school, but for her
it was she needed to actually practice, practice, practice, And
(13:47):
that's how she got to the point where she went off.
Someone gave a scholarship to her because they heard her play,
and they realized that as she became sort of an
adolescent teenager, it was really hard to my father to
keep this up in the inner city. So person gave
a scholarship for her to go to a private school
(14:08):
where it would be easier for her to get the
music lessons there. And then she went off and graduated
from the Opening Conservatory College Conservatory where she got her
BA in piano performance. And then she took off to
the stage and played around the world for many years
as a concert pianist, a soloist, and accompanying orchestras and
the like. But then something else happened to her, which
(14:31):
is that she found the Lord. And she went back
to school at SMU Southern Methodist and got two master's degree,
one in sacred music and one in music education, and
she eventually became like my mother and music teacher. Her
focus became on sacred and gospel music. Later on in
her life, she decided that her instrument, that her talent,
(14:52):
was here to teach people about the love of Jesus Christ,
and that became her life after that. Wow, I marveled
still at your father. I have this image of in
my mind of him sort of going off to work
and coming back home every day and sitting down for
dinner and then suddenly becoming the man that has to
do everything. I mean, he had to hold you guys
together having lost their mom, I mean, which is yeah,
(15:15):
you know. I have to say one of the couple
things that I remember about my mother's death. My mother
was the youngest of her siblings, the youngest girl. She
was my father's child bride. She went into the hospital
to have a hysterectomy, which was typical in those days,
and she had a pulmonary embolism, so she wasn't supposed
to die. She just died because the way the surgery
was done. So when they buried my mother, my father
(15:39):
called us into the living room and we remember we
didn't really know this man. Everyone. He called us into
the living room that night and he said, kid, today
was a good day. And we couldn't get that through.
I had mommy death died. How could be it today?
And she said, because she's with the Lord and she
will never suffer again. And to me, that's faith. He did.
(16:00):
Then was one of my mother's older sisters showed up
with a bunch of suitcases in a car. Actually she
was the first person you have ever drew and Mercedes.
He was well off, and she said, okay, I'm going
to collect carrol because obviously you janitor cannot raise this girl. Okay,
And my father said, no one is taking my children.
(16:22):
And he arranged for a neighbor who actually was a
hairdresser to come down and do the thing that he
couldn't do. A child there. Every night before she went
to bed, this is dours and rang the bell and
they had the little platts in her hair. She could
wear the school the next morning. So he was a
(16:44):
man of tremendous faith. And the other thing that he
learned out of this he didn't really know us. He
certainly did not a cook. I remember that I went
to school right off to my mother's death, and I
opened my lunch box and he had made me a
ham in jelly sandwich. Well, and that's that. My mother's
death was a real tragedy and we were all going
(17:06):
to starve to death, okay, But he taught himself, Carol,
be a parent, and long after we grew up, I
remember him saying to me, you know, if your mother
hadn't died, I would have never had your children the
way I had. You, not exposure to his children. Now,
(17:28):
he wasn't a sentimental man. You aren't that earlier hard
and he had really tough principles, but he learned. He
learned to know his children, and he wouldn't have hit.
He allowed her to play the traditional sexualal of mommy
and he had to play the dad evil. Yes, that
is truly truly amazing. The messages were that you you
(17:50):
had to do what he needed you to do. I mean,
you had roles, you had to do what you were
supposed to do but his confidence in your ability to
do that was astounding, I mean was contagious. Similar to
how your father said his father had worked so hard
to put him in Philadelphia. Did you feel this sense
of I've got this confidence because my father has works
(18:11):
so hard to give it to me. Yes. The other
thing my father did is he gave all of us
psychological arnor to go out in the world in two
different ways. Right, So my sister and I were bused
to all white school and we're not well accepted, and yeah,
it didn't bother me. So I often mentor young black
people who are worried about racism in the workplace, and
(18:33):
what I try to do for them is to deconstruct
what they're worried about. Because my father would always say,
it's not what white people that think about you that
bothers you. It's what you think white people think about
you that bothers you. So at the end of the day,
if you learn to believe in yourself and you remember
Jackie Robinson, do you know what Jackie Robinson was really
(18:53):
good at. He was known for stealing home which is
the hardest thing to do in baseball. And it's hard
because the picture is looking at you on third base.
It requires a strong mind your home. So my father's
whole thing was we're not just as good as that,
we could be better than them. That was the first
(19:14):
lesson that I learned from him, which is that I
didn't have to believe what racist white people thought about
my capabilities. Now here's the second lesson. I grew up
in toghether I said, there was incredible peer pressure. The
other thing my father taught me was that I wasn't
allowed to fit in with my friends in the neighborhood.
(19:34):
In fact, the single most important piece of advice I
ever got in my life was when I was a
junior high school and at that point in time, sneakers
shifted from canvas high tops to leather shoes, and my
neighborhood people didn't have nice houses or cars or anything.
But if you have the good sneakers, you had status exactly. Okay.
(19:56):
So I came home one day from the basketball court
and I said to my dad, I'm not going to
play basketball anymore because I'm tired of people making fun
of me. I'm the only one who has these old
fashioned sneakers. And my father pretended to be empathetic, and
he set me upstairs to get his wallet, and I'm
walking up the backsteps and I'm thinking, what Martian has
taken control of otistration. But I've never seen empathy before.
(20:19):
So I come down and he starts counting out the
money to me at the kitchen table, and he's staring
at me intently and making sure he understands that I
need these sneakers so that people won't make fun of me,
all right, And after he clarifies that rationale, he slides
the money across the table. I go to reach it,
he grabs me. He administered discipline in the form of
(20:41):
a slap to the side of my head, and when
I got up, he said the single most important sentence
that any human beings ever said to me, and I'm
about to say it now. He said, Kenny, what other
people think about you is none of your damn business.
And the sooner you learn that, the better off you're
(21:02):
going to be. So if you're here to tell me
that you need these sneakers to be cool in this neighborhood,
you cannot have them, because I'm going to teach you
that you need to stand on your own feet. It's
so true. If you can get to the point where
you are not concerned about what other people think, you
(21:23):
are free to pursue. There's no stopping you. You can
pursue anything. And so I hear that it is wonderful advice.
But the reality is that for some people, so maybe
some more than others, that's a hard thing to do.
It's hard for me. It's hard for me. It's just
that I was prepared to do it. So it's not
(21:44):
that I don't really care what people think. Let me
give you a little thing that my father taught me
when as a child, my father, if you complimented him,
he would never say thank you. He would say, that's
kind of you to say And he said he would
say that is he said, I'm reminding myself that I
feel good because you said it. And if I allow
(22:07):
myself to feel good when you compliment me, i'll feel
bad when you criticize me. Okay. So his whole point
was you need to be your own person now as
CEO of Murk, when analysts and investors and the press
when I first shot the job said I didn't deserve
the job and I was an incompetent lawyer, didn't hurt
(22:27):
it hurt a little bit, but you know, I could
hear my father in my ear saying, boy, that's none
of your damn business what they said. Do you understand? Yeah?
So what I say is we can give our children
psychological armor. Okay. So for me, the thoughts that were
put in the tape recorder in the back of my
(22:49):
head were empowering. And by the way, they were what
colored people believed. Do you know what I mean to
say by that the institutions we have, the HBCUs were
built by colored people. They couldn't have imagined the amount
of wealth we have today, but they believed. My father believed,
(23:14):
as de Boys would say in his Talented tenth, that
the race was going to be advanced by the excellence
of individuals. That's what Jackie Robinson was. Okay, you know
one more Jackie Robins story. Most people, Jackie Robinson is
famous for what being a baseball player, I mean, being
the first black baseball player in the professional league. Yes,
(23:36):
but that doesn't give him credit because in nineteen forty seven,
his first year, he was Rookie of the Year. In
nineteen forty eight, his second year, he was most valuable
player in all of baseball. Okay, So to say he
integrated baseball is not to do him justice. And the
thing about stealing home plate was Jackie demonstrated a superiority.
(24:02):
And so my father's whole thing was you're not trying
to be as good as them, because you would have
to be twice as good as them to get to
the same place. We'll be right back after these messages,
welcome back to the show man. We allud this a
little earlier. So having this very powerful, very confident, disciplinarian,
(24:26):
particularly sentimental man be both mother and father, be the
person's raising you. It works when it works. But clearly,
if you said this wouldn't work today, could you see
back then that there were aspects of it didn't work?
Or did it feel? Was it? It was? He larger
than life. He was larger than life. He was tall.
But now that I'm a father and I look back
(24:47):
at this and I think about my own parenting, I
think about it differently. So, first of all, this unsentimental
man gave me psychological armor. But one of the problems
with psychological armor is it's hard to express one's feelings right.
So we were taught to be dignified. We were taught
(25:08):
to be stoic, to be strong. It was only later
in life that I realized that there's more to life
than just being stoic and strong and dignified. There is
this aspect of feeling, and for me that's much harder
because he didn't want my feelings to hurt me. Okay,
that made it harder actually for me to be expressive.
(25:31):
And so there's a flip side to everything. We have
to raise our children and give them the opportunity and
the impetus to be successful, but they also need to
know that their love no matter what they do. In
my life, I knew my father approved of me. I'll
tell you one funny story. I remember when I got
(25:53):
to Harvard Law School. I came back to my family
church to preach on some Sunday. Maybe it was Father's Day,
I don't know, but they wanted and proud of this
kid who left North Celia because you come back and
do the sermon. So I come back and I do
this sermon, and I overheard someone talked to my father
later on about was he proud of me? And all
(26:13):
this kind of stuff, and how the conversation turned around
to him being such a strict disciplinarian. And this woman
says to him, well, the only problem with that is
your children don't feel like you're their friend. And my
father said friend, he said friend, he said, I want
(26:34):
to be respected and feared, he said, but not necessarily
in that order. Well, you know, it's interesting because we,
many of us in our generation, grew up with that
if we were fortunate enough to have our fathers and
around and at home, the fathers were the disciplinarians. Once
you were you were a little scared to tell daddy.
(26:54):
But as we had children, and as we watched younger
people have children, now that's shifting. And to your point,
it's it's it's a very good thing for people to
give importance to how people feel. And all the talk
about mental wellness now and part involved getting in touch
with your own feelings. But it's hard for we're sort
(27:16):
of in the bridge generation because we got that. I mean, similarly,
my father was the sports guy, the guy's guy, the
one who you daddy was the last resort. And I
knew that wasn't always the best thing. It wasn't the
best thing for some of my siblings. But you can't
really turn one hundred and eighty degrees away from that,
(27:36):
I mean, because that's sort of the core of what
you know. No, that's right, and I think the gold
is for balance, right right. On the one hand, you know,
you don't I would never want to be like my
father in the same way. It wouldn't work. By the way,
let's be really clear. My kids were raised in low
density housing in the suburbs I was raised, and what
(27:59):
was all the ghetto with gangs around. A lot of
what my father was doing was counteracting what was happening
in those streets. So his style of parenting I think
was totally appropriate for the time and place in which
I grew up. My children grow up in a different world,
(28:19):
and how do we then inspire in them that same
desire that I had to prove that I was up
to my father's standards. I couldn't be like my father.
My father in some ways was overly simplistic. Right. Everything
to him was it's either vice or virtue, okay, and
there was no in between. It was either strength or weakness.
(28:43):
And now that I'm older, I understand that the world's
a lot more nuanced than my father was. But boy,
was he the right father to have in the mid
nineteen sixties was willing. Yeah, No, I know that's right.
And the ability to envision in your family in a
circumstance that's better than the one that they're in, and
(29:04):
more importantly convey that to them. So even if you
never leave that place, you know of the expectation. I mean,
that is still as valid to day as it was
when we were growing up now. And so the challenge
is to be able to do that and not sort
of beat out and I don't mean necessarily physically, but
sort of squash the feelings part. Some children particularly need
(29:24):
to feel that they are loved and not to just
intuit it by the circumstances. What I'm going to ask you,
You know, you in your career, in your life, and
you've talked about this, in many instances, you have been
focused on doing the right thing. You know, when you have,
as you have in many circumstances, stepped out on a limb,
stepped away from the expectations of you. Even when you
(29:45):
were practicing law, you stopped the fancy corporate law practice
to represent a man on death row and you got
him off of death row. And then when you were
in as CEO, you the President Trump's counsel when you
disagree vehemently with his perspective, and just recently you and
Ken and other executives went up against Georgia and then
(30:06):
ultimately the people who want to suppress voted. My question
is that I'm trying to get in terms of your
father's influence, what's the core of knowing what's right? Is
it faith based? I mean, you said it's not always easy,
But where does the core of that come from? Where
did it come from from your father? And it is
the same place that it comes from for you. Well,
(30:27):
part of it is faith based, but I think the
part that you're talking about is not as much faith
based as it is. My father was what used to
be called a race man. We don't use that expression then.
But with that, it's not a racist. It's a person
(30:49):
who's anti white. It's a person who very much supported
the advancement of his people. And so if you grow
up in a house where the dinner table conversation is
about civil rights, and this dinner time conversation is about
why when you grew up in the South, lynching was
(31:12):
so terrible. It was terrible because it wasn't just that
someone in your community was lynched. It was that people
were made to get out of their bands and watch
somebody be lynched. Okay, and you have somebody who brings
that to their parenting and then also on top of
it again, because it's not just the issue around how
(31:32):
the race issue affects you in terms of how White
America views you, it's also how you're viewed by your
colleagues in a neighborhood. And so, you know, somebody woke
me up at four o'clock at Christmas morning and say
what are you most proud of? I would say that
I was able to go to school, get good grades,
speak perfect English, and I could fight okay, Okay, because
(31:54):
in my father's house, you didn't run from anybody. Okay.
So if you go up in my neighborhood and you
go to the white schools and you learn to speak
well and all that kind of stuff, and you're my
father's son, you're forced to be a pariah. Okay, you
can be a pariah when you're thirteen. You can definitely
(32:16):
be a prior when you and you're a CEO. You
think about it, you know, all of the block. If
people didn't like it in my old neighborhood. You might
get your ass whipped over it. None of that here,
I mean, what's gonna do but tweet at me? People say, oh,
that was so brave. You know, it was brave. Crossing
(32:38):
the Edmund Pettis Bridge was brave, you know. And and
to your point, how do we instill that in the
next generation, because we don't want to put our children
in harm's ways can make their way out of it.
I mean, you know, we don't want to send them
into a place to fight so that they can learn
to fight. But that a bill to not walk away
(33:01):
from an uncomfortable circumstance is a learned behavior. I mean
you can mean or an experienced behavior. I mean, you
have to be in a circumstance to know that you
can rise to it. And I wonder so many of
our children are not ever put in that circumstance. I mean,
not physically. But the same issue occurs with respect to
(33:23):
you know, it's interesting if you go around the world,
there are tribes where people die because they're shunned by
their tribe. They actually physically die. They're not deprived of
anything necessary for life other than the respect and the
acceptance of their they're tribe. It actually makes the point
that I was talking about earlier, which is often we
(33:46):
don't have physical fear. We have the fear of being ostracized.
We have the fear of not being light. We have
the fear of people saying things about us behind our backs,
and that generates the same kind of fight or flight
instant in us that growing up in my neighborhood when
(34:08):
somebody wanted your lunch money, you have that same fight
of f life. Nobody's taking your lunch money anymore, but
they might take your title away from me, right, they
could fire me a CEO murk And and if you
allow that to actually make you a frame, then you
hold onto your position in life at the expense of
(34:31):
your values. So I think that's what I'm trying to start,
probably not very articulate. Oh no, no, that was perfectly
a little bit like the guy that wanted to take
your lunch money on your way to school. No, that
is that is perfect because you're right. Even if they're
not facing down bullies, that happens less these days. Bullying
(34:52):
is bullying. Yes, yes, yes there is fiber bullying. But
but we can we can help them be mentally strong
I mean you can. There's a mental battle that you
fight against the perception that you're not light, that you're
not good enough. And what we can give our children
is the core of confidence. And you know, part of
that core of confidence comes from what your father did
(35:13):
for you, and that is talk about the history. I mean,
you can proudly talk about your grandfather, yes, and we
need to make sure our children can proudly talk about
their ancestors, because you there have been many times when
I have thought, Okay, I'm having it bad, but I
didn't have it nearly as bad as two generations ago.
(35:34):
Context is everything. Oh, and that's why what hurts our
kids is the messages that are being said to them
and a post racial so to speak. I'm making air
quotes in a post racial society and are constantly hearing
that little nagging voice where people say you're not quite okay,
(35:55):
just not quite smart enough, You're just not quite pretty enough.
They're just not quite good enough. And if you don't
give your children that psychological armor, then they hear that.
And I, you know, I have to say, I've mentored
so many young African Americans and I can hear them.
(36:20):
They're saying that they're wounded by the subtle messages that
are given to them through society, and we have to
we just have to equip them to deal with it absolutely,
and they're they're wounded by that. They're also they're they're
wounded by the knowledge that there have been programs that
(36:41):
have advantaged them as there should be. And the combination
of knowing that there are these programs and then believing
because other people want them to believe that they don't
deserve to be there helps them feel like they're imposters.
They don't belong, we don't. We need to embrace as
many of these programs as possible and then just teach
(37:01):
our children that they are fully equipped to be as
successful as anyone else in whatever they're going. I mean,
and I've seen that in so many instances, if kids
can get past their own concern about sort of whether
they fit in or I mean, if that's what I
said at the very beginning of this interview, I say
(37:24):
what my father used to say to me, it's not
what white people are thinking about it. You think they're
thinking about you. That's bothering you. So you need to
understand the distinction between those two things. Exactly exactly. If
you can stop thinking about what you think they think
and only deal with whatever is coming at you, you
(37:45):
can get the armor for that much more easily. Reality is,
they're worried about themselves. You know what. That is the
ultimate truth. Most people are just so self absorbed and
assume they're really not. They're your yearly. So if you
start looking at it that way, if you start realizing
(38:09):
that what's going to hold you back is this voice
in the back of your head, I think you can
go a lot farther. I mean, people are afraid to fail.
I see it all around in this company. One of
the reasons I became CEO of this company is because
I was willing to fail multiple times, and other people
(38:29):
were so insecure that they wanted to succeed, but they
wanted a very narrow conception of success. You know, I'm
probably the biggest failure, at least in the public sense,
in recent history of this company in what way, sir? Okay? Well,
so you know it's interesting because I used to be
the general counsel of the company and we had to
define defend sixty thousand lawsuits but were withdrawn pain killer
(38:52):
name bios and it was like a huge scandal because
we were accused of selling a drug that we supposedly
knew called tart attacks, which, of course it is ludicrous.
But there's sixty thousand cases and a lot of varacious
planets lawyers suing us all over the country. Well, anyway,
we try. I decided that we were not going to settle,
and we're going to fight each case one by one. Okay,
(39:13):
So we get our first verdict out of sixty thousand cases,
and it's terrible, and the verdict is two hundred and
fifty three million dollars. At New York Times, very helpfully
on a Sunday front page said two things. They said, Merk,
according to Wall Street, is likely to go bankrupt. That's
not a good thing. And then they said, and then
(39:35):
they can blame it on the ineptitude of their lawyer
who insists on fighting each cases. Oh my god, I
told people who tell me about them what they're fearing.
I said, most people will never be referred to on
the front page of the New York Times, enacted on
the front page of the New York Times. But you
know what they were really saying. I lost. I lost
(39:57):
trying to do something that no general counsel had ever done,
which is to try fifty thousand lawsuits. And so what
I say to people is, you know a lot of
people think that life is a test, and we grew
up as good students. View me, Carol, you supposed to
get good grades on the test because that was a
reflection of your character. Did you study hard enough? Exactly?
In fact, life is a contest. It isn't a test,
(40:21):
all right. So if you get to the super Bowl,
by definition one team must lose, there is no shame it.
If you get to the starting line at the Olympics
for the one hundred meter dash and you're in last place,
you're still the fastest person anyone around you ever knew it,
all right. So if you start seeing the world through
(40:44):
that frame and not think that if you fail it's
a failing grade, it's about you, then you can try
to do things that are hard. You can reach for
things that you might fail at, but you know what
you might succeed. No true words, man, that is so true. Look,
this is supposed to be about parenting, but I'm writing
I'm taking notes myself. Well, because we're all kids. You
(41:08):
realize that we're still kids. We just look grown up.
Absolutely that that is why I do a parenting podcast,
because we're all still processing how we were when we
were little, and here we have responsibility for raising little
ones up, so we gotta we have to deal with
it all at the same time. Well, there's a funny
(41:30):
vaudeville joke. Can I tell you that. I think it
pains a lot. I love the jokes. So the joke
says that father knocks on the door earlier in the
morning and sons and his son's room and he says, son,
time to get up and go to school. And the
son says, I don't want to go to school, and
the father says why, and the son says, three reasons.
I'm tired. Schools boring, any other kids are me? And
(41:54):
the father says, will let me give you three reasons
to go to school. It's time, it's the right thing,
and you are the headmaster. So much about life is
we need the headmaster, but we don't know it. That
took me a second, but that's hilarious. That as hilarious.
(42:18):
I'm gonna use that is. But I think it's funny,
but I think it's illustrative of what we're all going
through in life, which is that deep down inside, we're
the scared little child. And if we know that. Once
we know we're scared, then it loses its power over you.
It's only when you're not aware that you're scared, all right,
(42:43):
that you actually it takes control of you, once you
recognize that you have to do something even when you're scared.
Let me give you the greatest example. Look at young
men who are sent into battle. There is no stronger
instinct than self preservation. And yeah, when they go into
battle and Afghanistan, Iraq or whatever, it would be harder
(43:04):
for them to run than to stand and fight. Okay,
And yet we actually give ourselves reasons from running from
our responsibilities, and no one's shooting at us because we've
allowed the fear to be the thing that determines our
course of action, and it doesn't have to be. At
(43:24):
my point, that's absolutely true. The fact that you've been
able to get to that point is yet another tribute
to your father, because that doesn't sound like something that
he would necessarily have thought about in terms of the
fear and conquering the fear. It sounds like he might
not have wanted to even talk about the fear that
there was fear and the next generation you've managed to see.
(43:49):
I said we were the bridge, but you're definitely you
are the bridge. You're moving into the next generation because
that kind of insight is going to be helpful to
parents everywhere they as they try to give their kids.
It's that important psychological armor. Well, but I've learned from
my kids to cattle. The difference between my father and
me is I care what my children think of me.
(44:10):
I wouldn't say I want to be respected in fear,
but not necessarily in that order. I would never say
that I want to be loved by my children. I
don't want to be loved at all costs by my children.
But I listen to them and so they give me
candid feedback about what kind of person they think I am.
Some of it's not fun, and so I think I've
(44:34):
learned as much from my children as I have from
my father. So I told you we all should be
seeking balance. My children are the ones who are helping
me try to find this balance before I depart this world.
That is great, and so that means that we have
to tweak your father's saying just a little sort of
what other people think of you who are not your
(44:56):
family and your children is none of your business, but
you ought to care about what they think, and you
ought to care very much about what they think. Yeah, yeah, Ken,
this is as wonderful as I knew it would be.
But I'm going to wrap it up here and I'm
just going to ask you to do me the favor
of one quick little GCP bonus round two. Quick questions one,
(45:19):
and I'm sure you have great answer to this. First,
what is your favorite poem or saying or psalm some
words that mean a lot to you. Well, there's many
of them that mean a lot to me. But the
one that just pumped into my head is a scripture
that my grandmother made me learn. It's Ecclesiastics twelve, which
(45:40):
says remember the Lord, thy Creator in the days of
thy youth, because it's really a poem about aging, and
it's really a reminders that all of what we have
in life passes. And now the final question, children's books.
Were there any that you love growing up or that
you love reading to your kids? Well, of course Harry
(46:02):
Potter comes to mind, but but no, I mean, I
don't remember any from my childhood in particular. But I
do remember books like Goodnight Moon, and I like remembering
when my children were little and they were fascinated by
that book. You know, one of the things that I
(46:23):
try to do is I always try to put my
youngest and my oldest and my youngest to bed. And
that was really precious time at bedtime. Thank you so
so much. I so appreciate it. All right, Carol, All
the best to you, Bill and your family too. I
hope everyone listening enjoyed this conversation and that you'll come
back for more. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you
(46:46):
listen to podcasts, and tell your friends. For more parenting
info and advice, please check out the Ground Control Parenting
blog at ground Control Parenting dot com. You can also
find us on Instagram and Facebook at ground Control Parents,
and on LinkedIn under Carol Sutton Lewis. The Ground Control
Parenting with Carol Sutton Lewis podcast is a part of
(47:06):
the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartMedia. Until
the next time, take care and thanks for listening.
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