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Mae Jemison
“If we can allow some people to be average, how come a minority or a woman
who
comes into a particular job has to be the absolute cream of the crop?” asked
Jemison, who candidly acknowledges that affirmative action helped secure her a
spot in Stanford’s Class of ’77.
But Jemison, in spite of or because of all the hurdles she has
scaled, retains a dreamy sense of confidence. It is the same unbridled
imagination that allowed her to envision herself in space at a time when Lt.
Uhura, for all her technological prowess, was still better known for performing
TV’s first interracial kiss. Without dismissing society’s obvious
inequities,
Jemison remains convinced that the only true limits are the ones we impose on
ourselves or permit others to impose on us. When cynics took aim at
another popular TV series, “The Cosby Show,” she was deeply pained by
the
implication that a happy middle-class African American family was somehow the
stuff of futuristic fancy.
As Jemison is quick to point out,
she is far from a one-dimensional,
NASA-molded, “black Barbie doll”
“Nothing hurts me more than when I run into a little girl or a little boy
who
asks me how they should keep from being limited because they’re black or
they
grew up poor,” she said. “I think a lot of that comes from the images
that we
provide to them, images that focus on one stereotypic way of life. When a 6- or
7- or 8-year-old child asks me, ‘How do you get over this?’ that’s
a question
they’ve been taught to ask.”
Sitting in a conference room at her Houston firm, The Jemison Group Inc., she
radiates poise: Her sentences are precise and methodical, but she also erupts
into bursts of self-deprecating
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