When Barrington Irving set out to become the youngest and first black person to fly a single-engine plane solo around the world, he wasn’t in a Charles Barkley state-of-mind.
And that’s a good thing.
Nearly a decade ago, Barkley said that he didn’t believe that professional athletes should be role models; that just because he could dunk a basketball didn’t mean people should expect for him to raise their kids.
Sir Charles was partly right. Parents are the ultimate role models. But it’s too bad that in his arrogance, he didn’t even try to get that the issue isn’t about him rearing other people’s kids. The issue is about people like him giving the parents a little help simply by understanding that the kids are watching.
Irving, however, actually wants the kids to watch. He wants the role model job.
It’s a job that the kids ought to take him up on. They should watch him. Not Barkley. Not Michael Vick. Not any of the professional athletes who either use their fame as a means of distancing themselves from poor black kids, or as a license for giving free reign to their worse, rather than their best behaviors.
Think about it.
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This 23-year-old brother, who interestingly enough, told the Miami Herald that he initially thought football was going to be his only ticket out of the ghetto, didn’t despair when he realized that wasn’t going to happen; that he, like most other brothers, have a better chance of becoming a nuclear physicist than a professional athlete. Instead, Irving challenged himself to look beyond muddled notions of black success and decided that he could use his brain and his body -- and get fame all in one big dose.
He decided to go to Florida Memorial College and major in aeronautical science. When he was 19, he began piecing together his dream, first by getting his pilot’s license and then by persuading sponsors to help him get his Columbia 400 plane -- which he dubbed Inspiration -- off the ground.
He told The New York Times that he named the plane thusly because he wants to be an inspiration to younger people.
So Irving took off from Opa Locka, Florida on March 23 and returned there 26,800 miles later on June 27.
While he still has bills to pay from trip, which cost around $1 million, he doesn’t appear to be as worried about that debt as he is about the debt he wants to pay towards helping black youths understand that their possibilities don’t have to be limited. That’s good, because too many believe that their path to a better life often is one that runs through the worlds of sports or entertainment. Others simply acquiesce to the life that they’re in by dealing drugs and succumbing to other forms of criminality that mean quick money, but early death.
I hope that Irving, though his efforts to expose inner-city youths to the world of aviation, can counteract those notions. But doing that will be tough. The fact that so many black people live near airports, as he pointed out to BlackAmericaWeb, and never think about flying as being anything other than something that white people do, speaks to how deeply dangerous such notions run.
I guess that won’t change until there’s a television series on black pilots.
“It’s humbling, especially in this day and age, when a lot of young black men are getting caught up in the wrong things,” Barrington told the Times about his role in history. “I feel blessed that I had the chance to maybe inspire kids out there, black or white, to become pilots or engineers, or to make a positive impact in any other area of life.”
I like it that Irving wants the role model job. But most of all, I like the fact that unlike black athletes like Barkley and others, people who apparently have bought into the notion that individual fame absolves them of any collective responsibility to the race and to the plight of those who look like them, Irving has chosen not to be one of them. He is driven by the need to give youths who grow up in poverty and isolation new possibilities on how to escape it by turning off the television and exploring what’s around them.
Starting with the airport.
