Harvard Told A Black Girl She Couldn’t List Jay-Z As A Role Model
Back in 2005, a Harvard freshman filling out a profile for an on-campus recruiting program listed Jay-Z as her business role-model.
Chanequa Campbell was promptly called into the Office of Career Services and told to name someone else.
“It’s not appropriate. I don’t think people will respond well to this,” the career counselor told her.
Campbell, who grew up seven blocks from Jay-Z in Brooklyn and idolized the drug-dealer turned rapper turned entrepreneur, refused to name someone else. She argued with the career counselor awhile longer, finally offering as a small concession to use her role model’s given name, Sean Carter.
Seven years later Campbell, who ended up getting kicked out of Harvard, still gets upset telling how Harvard didn’t respect the businessman from her community.
If it wasn’t clear back then, it’s clear now that Jay-Z is a damn good business role model.
“I know his resume,” Campbell told me. “He made most of his major respect—Wall Street respect—since ’04.”
But he was a businessman from the start.
“Hov [another nickname for Carter] started as an independent artist with Reasonable Doubt in 1996. Even though he wasn’t going platinum, at the beginning he was making money because he owned his own label, he was his own business,” Campbell said.
Then he got big. Fourteen Grammy’s and over 50 million album sales were just the start. Jay-Z invested in all kinds of ventures—including the Brooklyn Nets, ad firm Translation, cosmetics company Carol’s Daughter, Rocawear, and the newly revamped 40/40 Club—earning a networth around half a billion dollars.
Read more: [businessinsider]
