“If you choose innovative thinking, you will transform your perception of the past, so it no longer endangers your future.” – Olympia LePoint
Science is a method of observing, hypothesizing and finding answers. Science looks at facts and can be helpful to transform anger into innovation. The main roles of science are to observe, find relationships and determine underlying factors contributing to positive change. If you use its tools wisely, you can predict the future. You can apply science to major issues and find answers. This scientific thinking can be applied to any pressing issue. Institutionalized racism is one such issue. In fact, institutionalized racism can be rooted out the fabric of the United States by changing the future. You may be unable to change the past, but you can 100% change the future. If you choose the thinking of innovation, you will transform your perception of the past, so it no longer endangers your future.
If you think this idea is far-fetched, consider when you have made a mistake. Every time you think about your mistake, you feel shame. That shame stops you from moving forward. Then one day, you commit to yourself to make a change in your life. Your actions change. Then every time you take new actions, you feel positive about yourself and about your future. Scientists have used this type of thinking to introduce innovation, and it has positively changed people’s lives. Your thinking leads to new actions, and your actions transform lives.
Famous Scientists Broke Racist Stereotypes

Three scientists who changed people’s thinking around the topic of racism were Franz Boas, Katherine Johnson and Albert Einstein. Franz Boas was a German-born American anthropologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the founder of the culture-centered school of American anthropology that became dominant in the 20th century. He was instrumental in helping Americans turn away from forming the same Nazi Germany concentration camps in the United States, because he introduced anthropology to suggest that Jewish people were human beings too. He explained that different races within humans showed equal ability to achieve cultural development. He saved thousands of lives.
Consider Katherine Johnson. In 1961, Katherine Johnson was one of the first African-American NASA mathematicians whose calculations of orbital mechanics led to the success of the first manned U.S. spaceflights. She was cited as a pioneering example of African-American women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). At the time of her employment, she experienced racism at NASA that nearly led her to quit her job. But she remained and proved that women and minority scientists were capable of solving international issues. Katherine Johnson helped the United States win the Space Race, and she helped launch rockets with satellites technology that is being used today by your cell phones. The blockbuster movie “Hidden Figures” shares her triumphant life.

The world knows Albert Einstein for creating the Theory of Relativity in 1916 within Physics. In 1946, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks. Many people may be unaware that Albert Einstein taught African-American scientists the Theory of Relativity in 1946 at Lincoln University long before any U.S. Civil Rights movements were to begin in the United States nearly 20 years later. Again, Einstein was ahead of the times. There is a scientific thinking involved in changing systemic problems into situations that provide hope and innovation. Even in the toughest situations, you always have a choice to use this type of thinking.
The Racism Pandemic Witnessed in 2020

George Perry Floyd Jr. was an African-American man who was killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Protests in response to both Floyd’s death, and more broadly to police violence against other black people, quickly spread across the United States and internationally. The death of George Floyd was witnessed across America, and it traumatized most Americans as a human life was taken on clear video. Children watched these death images replay on videos. As California Governor Gavin Newsom stated in his press conference, parents were faced with explaining racism and killing to their children. Floyd’s death resurrected an ongoing movement called “Black Lives Matters” during a deadly COVID-19 Pandemic. As “Black Lives Matters” peaceful protest began, there were also looting with riots witnessed blocks away.
Shortly after the protest and riots began, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) found that peaceful protesters and rioters where not necessarily a part of the same group. Rather, the FBI learned that some white supremacist hate-group groups attempted to frame minorities as initiating the riots. The FBI also began investigating the potential systematic issues of police brutality toward minorities. When this information was revealed in the news, many African American peaceful protesters were joined by Whites, Jewish, Middle Eastern, Asian and Latino groups. Citizens in the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Korea joined in peaceful protests to end systemic racism while chanting “Black Lives Matter.” Emotions across the world simultaneously caused pride, confusion and rage. These emotions serve as a type of energy that can be transformed into innovative change.
Eliminate the Root Cause of Racism and Transform a Problem into A Solution.

In science, when you eliminate the problem’s root cause, you change the future.
I was a rocket scientist for nearly a decade. To launch NASA’s Space Shuttle successfully, you had to backtrack your assembly steps. Any erroneous steps in the engine’s construction had to be corrected, so you could eliminate the root causes of unplanned, deadly explosions. If no one checked the value for the leak, pressures would force the value to rip open and explode during flight. The same analogy falls within the construction of the United States. If Americans do not check where racism was introduced into the fabric of the American public, America will explode from the pressure. You can eliminate the root cause of racism by removing the false thinking that was introduced into your ancestors’ minds in 1619. By changing your thinking today, you heal your ancestors from the past.
The root cause of American racism is due to economic gain.
In 1619, British settlers introduced racism into the United States as a method to control people in performing labor. This institution became slavery of African Americans and Indigenous Americans. In today’s terms, it is called human trafficking and brainwashing. The land was being taken from the indigenous people, and plantations were built by slaves. The land offered an agricultural income source for international trade. Since the slaves outnumbered their slave owners, racism was introduced as a psychological tactic to keep the slaves from running way or overthrowing their small, local governments. Consequently, a law was made that said that non-white individuals were not considered fully human, so anyone who was not white was forced to perform free labor. And this labor built the American economy.
Thankfully, Northern U.S. states had abolished slavery in some way by 1805 and abolition was a gradual process. Hundreds of people were still enslaved in the Northern states as late as the 1840 Census. Although slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, many African-Americans were unaware they were free. Even after slavery ended, the roots of racism became embedded in every aspect of American operation. And it is now called implicit bias.
YOUR INNOVATION OPPORTUNITY = Remove Your Hidden Thoughts and Create New Action Plans

Implicit Bias, also known as implicit social cognition, refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect your understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. It is how your brain may be brainwashed from racism. These biases are often activated without your awareness or intentional control. It lies deep inside your subconscious brain. To end this type of brainwashing, you can end the beliefs that feeds it. By doing so, you can change the way in which your brain responds to diversity.
THE KEY TO ENDING RACISM:
You always have a choice. You can break old forms of thinking and create innovative change.
Racism still exists. You can learn to identify it within society. For example, there is “Redlining.” In the United States, redlining is the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments as well as the private sector, to residents of specific neighborhoods or communities, through the selective raising of prices. Redlining in housing districts separates white students from black students in public school funding. In hospitals, there are different medical approaches given to minorities as they are called “people with underlying health conditions.” You see many minority residents left out of emergency disaster funding seen in Puerto Rico and New Orleans. The list go on… and on…and on…. until now.
People of all backgrounds are waking up to understand that the old way of thinking is not working for America. It is not working for many places outside of America either. We do not have crops to build. We now have technology innovation to build. Doing things in the old way feeds into implicit bias thinking. Innovation and success are dependent upon becoming aware of faulting assumptions. Innovation is built upon chaos that is transformed into unity for complete success. Americans can work together to build the innovation that is waiting for us as a country. You can learn how to identify actions that unify and standardize opportunities.
Here are some tangible ways to remove implicit bias and institutionalized racism across the United States, so we together can move out of implicit bias and into innovation:
- Government Officials: Remove housing redlining in the city planning, so residents have the same legal opportunities.
- School Districts: Start expecting minority students to attend top colleges and start investing in university preparation coursework beginning in junior high school with field trips to universities.
- Employers: Start training minorities for management roles and provide medical insurance for them while offering diversity education for your employees.
- Church Pastors: Realize that some leaders incorrectly use religious texts to promote hate, so start teaching your church attendees to listen without fear; so they love like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- Educational institutions: Tenure minority professors, show your enrollment numbers and create new retention policies for undeserved communities.
- Banking institutions: Stop assigning higher interest rates for minority owned business and borrowers with excellent credit. Provide underfunded communities with free economic training programs in schools.
- Governors: Stop the mass incarceration of minority foster children, and start funding mandatory youth-based psychological counseling programs to prevent future jail overcrowding.
- Executives: Stop primarily hiring men who look like you, and start considering hard-working and qualified women and non-white leaders for the open executive positions.
- Court Judges: Stop assuming guilt before the trials begin, and start sentencing minorities for the same crime as their white peers.
- Voting Officials: Fix the failing voting machines in minority communities, so the minority votes are correctly counted.
- News Media: Stop highlighting minorities only when it a cultural diversity month and start recruiting diverse TV experts for news tips.
- Hospitals: Stop sending minority patients home, because they have “pre-existing health conditions” and/or making them wait long hours after all other patients have been seen.
- Police Agencies: Start protecting minorities from the “bad apples” in police departments with new policing protocols.
- Retail Stores: Stop overcharging for the same products.
- Military: Ensure the same GI benefits are provided for all the men and women who gave their lives for the country.
- America: Stop thinking COVID-19 only kills minorities and start wearing masks.
- Technology Companies: Start selecting women and minorities on executive boards.
- You: Stop choosing only to socialize with people who look like you, and start inviting diverse people into your home who have demonstrated actions of inclusion and integrity.
Remember, YOU are the change that you wish to see in this world. You are the leader designed to change situations in your world. Black lives matter. Human lives matter. Always remember that your decisions heal everyone, even you. And your actions transforms lives. Until next time, find me on these websites and links:
- OlympiaLePoint.com
- Instagram.com/OlympiaLePoint
- facebook.com/OlympiaLePoint
- Twitter.com/OlympiaLePoint
- LinkedIn.com/in/olympialepoint
Sincerely,
Olympia LePoint