Shiyazh Pete is an undrafted rookie offensive lineman for the Dallas Cowboys and the first NFL player from the Navajo Nation. Last week in Arizona, a full section of the stadium showed up for him.
His head coach gave Pete the floor in the locker room after the win. Pete spoke for about twenty seconds. Reminded us what’s great about sports. There’s something we can learn from his speech about culture we can bring to our organizations.
From many to one. A culture that works must integrate people of many different backgrounds to become devoted to one mission. It is how humanity gets through every difficult chapter and overcomes insurmountable obstacles.
And there is real poetry in this example. A Navajo man playing for the Cowboys, with his community filling a section of the stadium to cheer him on. We are not looking backwards and dwelling on the past. We are proud of this moment and where we go from here. One team, one dream. Fulfilling a truly American dream.
E pluribus unum
Thomas Sowell spent fifteen years on a three-volume study of why some peoples advance and others stall, and his conclusion was that culture is not heritage to be admired from a distance. “Cultures are not museum pieces,” he wrote. “They are the working machinery of everyday life.”
His conclusion was that winning cultures absorb. The British spent centuries taking what the Romans, the Normans, and the Huguenots brought them before they led the industrial revolution. Japan had sealed itself off from the world for two hundred and fifty years when Commodore Perry’s warships arrived in 1853, and the Japanese found themselves so far behind that Perry’s gift of a model train astonished them. They did not decide the West was decadent and shut the door again. They sent students abroad, hired foreign engineers, and put Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin in their children’s schoolbooks as men to imitate. Sowell’s point is that no one was there to reassure them that what they already had was just as good in its own way — so they closed the gap instead of defining it away. A century later the Japanese bullet train was beyond anything America could build. The cultures that stalled were the isolated ones, cut off by mountains or oceans or by their own choice. We would be foolish to pretend all cultures are equally good at this, and we would be fools twice over to grow so pleased with ourselves that we stop absorbing the best from outside.
And his verdict on the past is the line I keep returning to: history, geography, and culture “are influences but they are not predestination.”
Reagan understood this, and he said it on his way out the door.
His point was that you can move to France and never be French, move to Japan and never be Japanese, but anyone from anywhere can come to America and become an American. That is true, and it is rarer than we treat it.
Pete’s story is the other half of that same sentence. His people did not come here. They were already here. And the motto holds for both — for the ones who arrived and the ones who were always here, playing on one team, for one another, under one star.
What we can learn from twenty seconds
Pete brought his whole self. His culture was audible in it, and that’s precisely why it traveled beyond the room and why I wanted to write about it.
His speech was short. Four sentences. No agenda, no pretense, no angst. Most of us would have taken four minutes to say less.
He led with gratitude, not aspiration. He didn’t tell anyone what to become. He said he was fortunate to be there and proud of how far they had come.
He named the thing that was already true. Strangers becoming brothers. He didn’t invent a story, he described the reality everyone in that room was experiencing and feeling at that moment.
E pluribus unum. A house divided cannot stand.