CHAPTER 1

What We Forgot about the American Dream

What if I told you that there was a cancer in America more destructive than racism? A problem of intent more harmful than hate? What if I told you that the real issue in America today was increasingly not love or hate, but indifference. Or worse, radical indifference. People—a group of powerful and wealthy people even—who don’t care enough about you to even hate you.

The biggest problem in America today, the reason for all the destructive divisions among us, is that we have forgotten our storyline. We have forgotten how we got here, how we succeeded, and what it takes to sustain that same level of success. For the last two-hundred-plus years, America has been winning because of the spiritual wealth of her people, and because of our great belief in America as the Land of Opportunity.

Today we are facing the cancer of spiritual poverty. We have lost our belief in our ability to win. We have lost our storyline.

On an individual level, getting your mind right is the single most important thing you can do to get your life right. You’ve got to commit yourself, every day of your life, to removing the old, bad, negative, destructive tapes from your mind, and replacing them with new, positive ones. It is literally true that whether you believe that you can, or believe that you can’t, you’re right. (Thanks for that one, Henry Ford.)

Unfortunately, in America today it seems like half the country is suffering from some form of depression. And this is a problem, because belief is the most basic requirement of an aspirational mindset, of a thriving or winning state of mind, and it stands at the door of any positive action.

Our Own Worst Enemy

While it is no doubt true that social and economic mobility has become a real problem for the average worker, America is still one of very few places where you can literally start at the bottom of the ladder and then own the ladder twenty to thirty years later.

The untapped, unleveraged opportunity for America’s future is her next generation of GDP growers. Rebuilding the ladder for certain groups who have been historically disenfranchised is our shared potential opportunity.

Today, as an example, only 2 percent of all businesses in America with one employee or more are owned by African Americans.¹ Where would we be (we, as in America, the country), if the roadblocks hindering African Americans were removed?

Today, African Americans—this proud and deserving race of people—have just about 10 percent of the net worth of their white counterparts. This is not me throwing shade or starring in my own whining session; this is me saying we are all acting like idiots. We are idiots for holding any people back. We are idiots for focusing on how to cut up a smaller economic pie instead of growing and sharing a larger pie among us all.

For hundreds of years, America systematically stole black lives, black freedom, and black labor. It was a theft of labor and a reverse transfer of wealth enshrined in law and enforced by violence. Do you know when the word “millionaire” was coined? Circa 1850, to describe the (white) amassers of huge wealth in the wealthiest city per capita in the world, in Natchez, Mississippi, a center of trade (and slave trade) in the South. There were a whole lot of cotton fields along the Mississippi River back then . . . What kind of labor do you think was working them?

Black slavery is literally how we birthed our country’s first millionaires.

The impact of this theft over a period of centuries has meant an enormous loss of wealth for individuals and families across generations—a kind of compound interest in reverse.

It’s time to say enough—and to do something about it! It’s time to stop being idiots.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2020, billionaire Michael Bloomberg spoke to the people of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and lay down this bombshell: “We can decide to invest in black wealth creation. And just think about this: if we could eliminate the racial wealth gap in this generation, we would add $1.5 trillion to the economy.”²

He didn’t say anything here about charity or handouts. He was suggesting that, by creating future wealth for those previously left behind, we can bridge the economic wealth gap in our generation and generate an extra $1.5 trillion in GDP—creating a larger economic pie to pass around.

That’s a hand up, not a handout. And it pays a dividend too.

Here’s a story about what happens when people choose to play nice (spoiler: they win together).

Operation HOPE, Inc., is a nonprofit, for-purpose organization working to disrupt poverty. We do this primarily by providing financial literacy empowerment and economic education to low- and moderate-income youth and adults. When I founded Operation HOPE in Los Angeles back in 1992, no one really knew what I was talking about. Financial literacy was far from a common topic. Not many showed up for that first meeting, where I shared my vision for a city emerging from the ashes of the Rodney King riots—and of those who did, not many believed. But those who attended left believing that I believed, and that alone was enough to hold Operation HOPE together during those first five rocky years or so.

All of this tenacity, resiliency, and refusal to give up, along with my absolute obsession with winning and becoming the person in the room who could not be denied—on merit, substance, or delivering tangible results—all of this led directly to the founding of Operation HOPE.

Around the same time that I started Operation HOPE, Mayor Tom Bradley had asked businessman and noted civic leader Peter Ueberroth to launch what became known as Rebuild Los Angeles (RLA). It immediately raised tens of millions of committed dollars and recruited the city’s best leaders to come on board pro bono or in loaned executive capacities. Of course, it also had the mayor’s, and thus the city’s, imprimatur. It became the center of response and the official resource point for all things related to the rebuilding of the city.

I loved everything about it. I did not see RLA as any kind of competition to my efforts; I saw it as an enhancement. There were enough poverty and problems to solve to go around. I welcomed with open arms the credibility that RLA provided to all of our community efforts, even if it limited the resources flowing directly to my fledgling organization. I believe this is where I adopted the philosophy that 10 percent of something big was much better than 90 percent or even 100 percent of something small. I was not ego-tripping; I was trying to create scale and impact. I’m basically in the same exact business today.

But the vast majority of other nonprofit leaders in the community I spoke to resented RLA and what it represented: the centralization of substantial resources. Most other community-based nonprofits viewed RLA as competition; as a result, they did not go out of their way to help RLA or anyone associated with them. Not only did I want to help RLA, I lobbied anyone and everyone I knew to join their board! And I stepped up too, becoming the youngest member of the RLA board of directors.

I supported RLA because we shared the same mission. But it’s also true that I benefited hugely from the association. Actually, RLA was such a good idea that I borrowed several pages out of its book, including the partnership model of the private sector, government, and community all working together. This is a critical element of the HOPE business plan, and without question I got this from RLA. And while RLA never made a direct grant to Operation HOPE or sent any funding directly our way, Operation HOPE and I absolutely benefited from the association and the relationship capital. We both gave and received.

I ended up with a major pro bono law firm commitment through someone I met at RLA. I built relationships with several major corporate leaders, including Peter Ueberroth, who ended up staking me at many critical junctures. In fact, there is no doubt in my mind that Peter Ueberroth was continually a key “Now, who is this guy again?” credibility call when VIPs wanted to check me out. Like when I invited President George W. Bush to visit South-Central Los Angeles on the tenth anniversary of the riots. There is no doubt in my mind that the White House handlers called Peter, among others, to vouch for me. He vouched for my character, which he has done since I was twenty-six and continues to do to this day.

But, unfortunately, despite Peter’s brilliant vision for community revitalization and change, RLA was doomed from the beginning. That was because his nonprofit was a political creation, and so for every one who wanted it to succeed, there were two who actively conspired for it to fail. There were a number of cochairs of RLA representing different constituency groups throughout the city. Basically, it was an organizational mess, and that is part of why RLA never worked—because it was a house divided. In late 1992 or mid 1993, when I saw that RLA was starting to be blamed for even the faltering of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I knew their days were numbered. Of course, RLA had no power over the city’s school district. This was politics.

Infighting within RLA became so pervasive there was often little time to get any real business done. From this I learned to remove myself from the noise, and to focus like a laser beam on producing tangible results. I also began to learn how to get out of my own way. One of the cochairs, Bernard Kinsey—a retired Xerox executive and the only African American in leadership at RLA and in on the rebuilding effort back then—pulled me into an office one day and gave me some advice that I use to this day. He had heard me go on and on and on with my vision for rebuilding the city. He said, “John, don’t use twenty words when two will do!” I took it to heart. Busy people don’t have the time or interest in hearing me drone. I learned to cut to the chase.

It’s great that I learned all I did, because back then pretty much everyone counted out me and Operation HOPE. In 1994 I won a bank grant for $600,000—my entire annual operating budget. When I went to pick up the check I was told the grant request had been sent back to committee at the bank. Translation: Someone had convinced them to not give it to me. It hurt me to my core, but I got over it.

It didn’t kill me; it made me more resilient. It made me harder to kill. And I learned that I had to dial back my utter, absolute optimism to a level of passion and emotional engagement that my audience could handle. I had to learn how to funnel my passion into two words rather than twenty. They could only handle, say, 30 percent of me, and yet I was giving them 100 percent. I just overwhelmed whomever I was talking to. I spooked them, and they ran for the doors.

And soon after that, I got a call from a city official who was on my first founding board of directors. He instructed me to change my letterhead from “eradicating poverty in America,” to “eradicating poverty [exclusively in his local district].” I refused. He threatened to resign from my board. I still refused. He resigned. His resignation letter made its way to the funding office of yet another planned early donor, who also pulled back their commitment. This was a plan, consciously or unconsciously, to bury me. I was an irritant. I would not play ball. I could not be controlled. I was a problem. I had to go. Well, I just decided to ignore it all.

What it taught me was this important life lesson: learn to go through life consciously oblivious to most things around you. Be ruthless about how you and others use your time. Stay focused on things that matter—and ignore all the rest. I put my head down into my own optimistic rabbit hole of hope and just moved forward. By the time I lifted my head, Operation HOPE had emerged as the only post–Rodney King riots nonprofit organization to go national, yet alone to expand beyond the city and state.

The Dream Is Alive; the Ladder Is Broken

Pretend for a moment that it’s possible to take racism and racial issues out of the disgusting business of both the slave trade and slavery itself. What it actually was at its core was the largest reverse generational wealth transfer in modern history—not to mention bad capitalism.

When I say this, I am not trying to make an emotional statement, or an anger statement, or a reparations statement. Nor am I even remotely attempting a guilt trip. I have only one, nonemotional point to make: the thing that helped every honest, and even dishonest, entrant to the American experience was their own self-determination. They were individuals benefiting from their own industriousness, allowed to reap the returns of their own hard work and the sweat of their brows. And yet, this opportunity for self-determination was 100 percent denied to African American “immigrants” for more than 300 years.

Let’s put this into proper context. The complete American experiment is a little over 450 years in total, and slavery represented approximately 300 years of that history. African Americans spent 300 years enslaved, and 150 years free—but at least 100 of those post-slavery “free” years functioned within a system that we refer to as “Jim Crow,” which is basically just another name for economic and social repression.

So we’re talking about a group of people who for over 400 years in America had no meaningful chance of benefiting from what most proudly refer to as the “sweat of their brow,” their natural smarts, or their raw intellectual genius. None of what they were born with or developed was theirs to keep.

As part of Reconstruction, on March 3rd, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln founded Freedman’s Bank “to support the land grants and other elements of the Freedman’s Bureau Act,” and “help newly freed Americans navigate their financial lives.”³ By 1874, that venture had completely failed. That fact makes clear that there was never a broad-based effort to make sure that African Americans had even the most basic financial literacy. No one attempted to teach them how money, banking, entrepreneurship, small business creation, and big business growth work.

We live in a free enterprise democracy in America—indeed, the nation was founded on that basis—but no one has ever made it a priority to ensure that African Americans had even the most basic clue of what it meant to succeed in that environment.

And so, mainstream America directly benefited from the wealth created by the tireless efforts of industrious and hard-working blacks, who were 100 percent unpaid for three centuries. The agricultural economy rocketed growth in early America, rooted as it was in that wealth accumulation in land—lots of it—much of it fertile farmland worked with free slave labor.

White America smartly took their accumulated wealth creation and cashflow, now spilling forth from the agricultural age, and moved to protect their wealth (and way of life in the American South) by taking up positions in public service. They became high-ranking elected officials to protect what they and others had built. You could say the success of white America began and ended with wealth creation—except the wealth creation didn’t end; it just got larger. After they left office, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it was back to business for them. It became a well-known circular route for my mainstream friends that began and ended with wealth creation.

For black America, post the achievement of their physical freedom, the mainstream route to success was religion and church, general education and community good, civil rights, social justice, politics and political office, and then—for most—a good job. The prize for black America, ninety-nine times out of one hundred, was a good job. More times than not, we were the ones cashing checks, not writing them. Making money, yes; but building wealth—not so much.

The route to success for white America was specialized education, then business ownership, to wealth, to politics, back to wealth, and even more business creation.

The route to success for the main of black America was mostly civil society in nature. World War II created a level playing field for trained black professionals, and what emerged was a generation of black doctors and nurses, lawyers and accountants, and other skilled professions. The one and noteworthy exception to this rule, which has helped to create real wealth for some, was black America’s incredible and outsized achievement in professional sports and the arts. And even this success ties back to our slave journey. Our art emerged from our strong church tradition. Our athletic achievement emerged from the expression of the only asset we had partial control over: our own bodies.

And the math makes sense here as well, because if you look at African American achievement in these two master-class spaces, you can recognize immediately that (1) the rules were published, and (2) the playing field was level. And so we excelled. We were winners.

If you sang or danced or played an instrument well, you were a winner, and you won—period. If you ran fast, or jumped high, or swung the bat like no one else ever had, then you dominated the game, and you won. You were a winner. But the problem here is that these two master-class areas of professional achievement and wealth creation are narrow and extremely limited pathways to success. We’re talking about hundreds of jobs and positions of wealth creation, maybe a few thousand every year—when what we need are pathways for millions.

Despite black America’s brilliance, talent, and industriousness, we never got what I call “the memo” on real, broad-based, sustained business and wealth creation. White America owned that memo—and they owned it from the first inning of the first game.

Now, to be totally clear, what I’m laying out here is not an indictment of all (or most) white people of that era. There are many positive examples of these same mainstream white members of the wealthy class, the power structure, who used their wealth and power to free slaves, to grant safe passage for the unjustly persecuted, and to provide real opportunity to black Americans.

The founding backers of the Freedman’s Bank were enlightened white elites. The founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Urban League, were a thoughtful collection of enlightened blacks and whites who worked together and put their lives at risk in order to create institutions that America needed then and still needs now. These and other examples of powerful white men and women, in and out of business, in and out of the community, and in and out of politics, are legend, and they deserve to be recognized and acknowledged. But none of this is the point.

My nonemotional point here is about the system itself, and the accepted culture that produced that unequitable system. The system has never worked for African Americans—nor has it worked for many other groups. The business plan for America was all messed up. In some ways, it still is.

Again, I am not talking about the exceptions. I am talking here about the rule. The rule whipped black America’s aspirational rear end from sunup to sundown, every day, while rewarding even the most average of their mainstream counterparts. This is the math of the matter. This is my point.

When people think about affirmative action, people automatically think about black people. But actually, the first beneficiaries of affirmative action were my white brothers and sisters. Twice. See above for the first example: three-hundred-plus years of unequal access to the uniquely American aspirational dream, plus the rules to achieve it.

The second experience of affirmative action for white people immediately followed World War II. It was called the G.I. Bill. Now, let me make it clear that I think this was a brilliant move for America. Ensuring that every returning American military veteran from World War II got as much education as they could consume, a down payment for a home they could own, and an apprenticeship for a well-paying job was how we created what we now call the American middle class.

To this day, the agricultural business sector (read: 99 percent mainstream farmers in rural America) are the recipients of literally the largest financial and economic subsidy, year after year, in America’s history.⁴

Why do we do it? Our leaders will tell you that it is in America’s interest.

Well, this book is designed to convince the reader that imagining new strategies to support the unleveraged talents, hopes, and aspirations of the rest of left-behind America—which is not just American blacks by the way—is also in America’s interest, and always has been.

African Americans are absolutely not the only group that has been left behind in America, but let me use them as an example one more time. Bridging the wealth gap for black America alone would create trillions—that’s with a t—of additional GDP and American wealth. The color of those trillions isn’t black, though. It’s green, and it benefits us all.

Capitalism Still Wins

Even if you want to distribute money like a socialist, you first have to collect money, like a capitalist.

THE LATE SHIMON PERES, speaking to John Hope Bryant, encouraging him to “keep going” with Operation HOPE

Ownership is a big deal, and an ownership mentality might be an even bigger deal. When individuals do not see themselves as owners of something, they treat that thing differently.

No one washes rental cars. The nicest people in the world don’t wash rental cars. They rent the car, drive it—until the wheels come off, even—let the dirt accumulate until they could write WASH ME on the windows, and then at the end of the rental contract they return the car to the car owner, possibly with no gas in the tank.

Likewise, the worker, disconnected from their employer and employment-engagement experience, may take on the destructive productivity perspective of “in late, long lunch, leave early.” In other words: indifference. Treading water. Just barely showing up. Giving minimal effort. Basic compliance. The problem is that this attitude, approach, and perspective never made anything great, anywhere.

In the twentieth century, worker’s unions emerged as a means to level the playing field for the average American, to provide them with the first-ever worker’s rights. Leaders in free enterprise and capitalism also weighed in with their own creative solutions, such as Ford founder Henry Ford’s bold effort to pay his workers double their former pay, helping to create the new American middle class in the process.

But the twenty-first century saw an increasingly widening income, wealth, and opportunity gap in America. This new challenge has inspired highly intelligent, thoughtful, and otherwise very reasonable people to talk down capitalism and the free enterprise system in exchange for a socialist one.

This attraction to socialism is understandable. So many feel that the current system has failed them and believe it will fail their children as well. But socialism is not sustainable. An overwhelming majority—90 percent—of the world’s nations that switched to a socialist (or worse still, a communist) model over the past two hundred years has failed. In fact, the two most prominent examples of communist societies, China and Russia, have—oddity beyond oddity—chosen the Western capitalist model as their own.

As it happens, what most people laud as successful socialism is really free enterprise with a progressive tax scheme attached. Nordic countries like Sweden aren’t truly socialist. Anyone there can start a business, build it, make a lot of money, and create wealth. The deal there is just that the government requires you pay taxes of half or more of your income, which it then uses to take care of the state—health care, public education, providing a safety net for the poor, and everything else. The people in these countries obviously think this is a great deal for them, and I applaud them for that. But this also means that the government is the babysitter, the minder, and the “educator” of the poor. With the best of intentions, the government is both preventing those at the bottom from falling between the cracks (the good part), and preventing them from ever rising up and climbing onto their own roofs—let alone building a second or third story on their own (the bad part). It’s not because the government doesn’t want the poor to rise (they probably do), but because they can’t. How can the government possibly teach someone how to come up from nothing—as entrepreneurs and self-made builders of business—when they haven’t done that themselves? When there are no aspirational models in the culture? This is not a criticism, it’s just an is. Like I like to say, “It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know but that you think you know that’s killing you.”

I fully believe that if I had been born in France, a country I love for many reasons, I would not have become who I am in the world today. If I had been born in Japan, which I love also; or the UK, with all of its benefits; or Germany, where I have connections tied to my knighthood from the noble class there; or Norway, one of the happiest and healthiest places in the world; or the amazing African continent, or Latin America, or the Middle East—all great places I have visited—I would never have become who I am today, my own up-from-nothing story.

In fairness, most all of these places have done a better job than the United States has over the past fifty-plus years on the issue of basic social and economic mobility (moving from the poor class, to the working class, to the middle class),⁵ but not one of them could have catapulted me from the inner cities of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles to the world stage, working peer to peer with billionaires, captains of industry, and heads of state. Nowhere but the United States combines 100 percent free enterprise, with 100 percent freedom of opportunity (relatively speaking), with 100 percent freedom. No country produces winners from the whole cloth of absolutely nothing like America does.

I am passionate about the freedom part of our story. America—even with all of our drama and challenges and racism and inequality—was clearly the path for me. I saw that a free enterprise environment and a capitalist system hooked on freedom was the path of least resistance to the full expression of my God-given potential in this world. For me, America spelled “winning.”

Now, socialism, on the other hand, could never have garnered me my wins. People in a socialist society don’t own anything, and an ownership mentality is how we win.

God gave us two ears and one mouth so that we listen twice as much as we talk. So I love to listen and to learn everywhere that I go. I love listening to and speaking to waiters and taxi cab and Uber drivers whenever I find myself in their company. One day I had the pleasure of spending time with a highly educated Cuban gentleman at the restaurant where he worked in Chicago. I asked him about the Cuban socialist model, and at first he bragged extensively about a first-rate, free educational system that served all Cubans. Then I pressed him for additional information.

The gentleman shared with me that he was an engineer back in Cuba, but the nation was having a heck of a time finding any educated young people to take over his and similar skilled jobs there. Why? Because smart young people educated in the free Cuban system didn’t much care for the idea that, no matter how hard they worked, someone or a group of someones right next to them, working half or one-quarter as hard, would receive the exact same pay. Or worse, those others could be promoted, regardless of whether they were qualified or had worked hard and earned better treatment and considerations. And so, an entire generation of young Cubans, educated for free in the Cuban system, simply left.

Where did they go? America, of course, where one’s abilities and skilled effort could be and would be rewarded by the free enterprise system. This is the real story of the many waves of immigrants from all over the world that flooded into America for one reason: freedom of opportunity.

Today, fewer Americans are seeing the possibility of freedom of opportunity. An estimated 40 percent of current jobs will shrink or disappear over the next ten years.⁶ Those still working today feel like they are getting less consideration for more and more effort and hard work. They’ve lost their aspirations because the model of aspirational success in America is broken.

I am seeking to change all of that. With this book, with our national ground game efforts through Operation HOPE and my other philanthropic, public sector, and thought-leadership efforts, I plan to reset the field.

It’s time to remember some things about America and to reimagine some other things. The beauty is that America is not a country, she is an idea—and we can imagine and reimagine her to be anything we like.

It’s time to remember our storyline, the original dream for America: where you come from and what you look like doesn’t matter as much as where you’re going.

It’s time to reimagine capitalism in a way that makes free enterprise work for all of God’s children. It’s time for a collective mental upgrade to create the America that she was always intended to be: the place that winners everywhere in the world want to find their way to, so they can secure for themselves that elusive thing we call freedom.

Russia and China Get It

Everyone wants to be an American—except Americans, that is. Russia and China want to eat our lunch. Russia and China want to be America. Or worse still, they want to beat America.

Why, you ask? Because they want our way of life, that’s why. The very thing they attack, pretty much daily, is the very thing they don’t have and crave: our freedoms and our global success.

Even with all of our problems—and, my God, there are countless of them—and regardless of what anyone else has said or says today, America is a special place. That’s why it is still the sole superpower in the world today.

But here is the problem: others see America as special too, and they don’t like this fact. It stands in the way of their progress, of their success. And so, they have to find ways to deconstruct us, to destroy us from the inside out. And the easiest way to destroy us is not to actually attack us—it is to somehow convince us that we are each other’s enemy.

Make no mistake about it, China and Russia are at war with America. Right now. But smartly, they have chosen a better way to fight against us than bombs and bullets. After all, if they succeed in physically destroying us, it also destroys them too. America’s success is inextricably linked to the long-term success of both Russia and China. Our economics are helplessly intertwined.

Their war on America is a war of divide and control, and it is leveraged with money, perverted self-interest, economic selfishness, and economic short-termism. The efforts of Russia’s influence in our political system and our democracy is so obvious that I believe even my friend Stevie Wonder can see it (and yes, Stevie would find this joke amusing).

And China could not be more obvious of its intent. They have practically said it out loud. It is underscored every time they steal one of our countless legally protected intellectual property rights and make it their own—stealing it, effectively, in broad daylight. Or how they have used the power of their wallet to push around American democracy, to have us pawn our freedoms. Like when in October 2019 Daryl Morey, general manager of the NBA (National Basketball Association), stood up for basic freedoms and human dignity by tweeting support for Hong Kong protestors⁷ only to have China attempt to bully, push, prod, intimidate, and crush his voice—simply because they believed that they could. And we almost fell for it.

But make no bones about it, China and Russia are testing our limits. Our inner fortitude. Our resolve. Our resiliency. They are working to figure out what we are really willing to stand for and, conversely, what we are willing to possibly sell ourselves for. And they are convinced that there is a price.

China is convinced that there is a price for everyone because, unfortunately, depressed human beings without a spiritual grounding are shockingly simple creatures, and our disconnect from our collective concern is an easy button to push.

A house divided cannot stand. It was true in biblical times and it’s true now. The way we have been focusing on our differences has not only been messing with our business plan, it has been playing into the hands of China and Russia. And the one thing I know is that is not how we win. That is nobody’s American Dream.