She is Lowe Siu Na. Her brother Elrick is Lowe Min Zhi and her brother Howard is Lowe Min Jian. “That makes me feel more Chinese than I felt in the past,” she says, “but I don’t say that to mean I am less African American or Jamaican. It’s part of the soup,” she says, adding: “I wanted to find my people, but I knew who I was.” Identity, she tells questioners, “is layered and complicated.” She has no plans to check off the box on official documents that offers the option of “other” instead of “black” or “African American” because for her, “It’s a political statement.”
These days more than talk about diversity in the news industry, her primary focus for a great part of a three-decade journalism career, Madison uses the documentary to jumpstart “a different kind of conversation” about race, about family solidarity, about economic independence. She regales her audiences with talk about her descent from Maroons in Jamaica, runaway slaves who fought the Spanish, then the British in the 17th and 18th centuries, and from the Hakka people of China, who are known as the migrating tribe, the adventurers.
Her story is especially appealing to black Americans whose history has been disrupted by slavery and its aftermath. Many people count themselves lucky to know three generations of their American saga. “I am not defined by slavery. We are not,” Madison says. “It was a moment in time of a very, very, very long legacy of Africanness.”
Madison has been “teaching” since she was one of the few black students at the elite Cardinal Spellman High School in New York City in the 1960s. During a spirited discussion one day, in which classmates suggested that the answer to the city’s latest financial crisis was to cut off payments to all those lazy people on welfare, she quietly pointed out that her family had been on welfare and explained to them the indignities they had endured at the hands of officious social workers. Classmates reacted with shock, embarrassment and tears, leading the teacher to ask her to come back and repeat her story for an afternoon class. Madison declined, telling the teacher, “God didn’t put me on this planet to teach white people what it’s like to be poor and black.”
Long before Paula Madison became NBCUniversal’s go-to person on matters of workplace diversity, she had a way of widening narrow minds. As a relatively new reporter at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, for
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“You need to go out and see the rest of the world,” she says, insisting that when black Americans view themselves in a global context, they can break
free from “the despicable institution of slavery… that continues to limit us economically, spiritually, emotionally and all sorts of
other ways.”