Accompanying
the 2008 presidential elections, and the campaign which made Barack Obama the
first Black President of the United States, the term ‘post-racial society’ soon
became an oft repeated mantra from both the liberal left and conservative right.
An idea seemingly embraced by both sides of the political aisle, think tanks,
policy-makers and corporate controlled media soon declared the end of America’s
race based Civil Rights Era and the beginning of a new day under the monikers ‘Hope’
and ‘Change,’ as heralded by the election of a Black man into the
Whitehouse.
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| Lee Atwater |
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| John Erlichman |
These,
like the many other socially engineered initiatives before them, sought to
graft in a top-down approach to America’s centuries long debate over what was euphemistically
known as the Negro problem. Spanning many decades, indeed centuries since the
arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the shores of North America, the
government and society of the United States, whose laws codified white
supremacy from its inception, later evolving into unspoken rules, code phrases
and dog whistles, as orchestrated by the likes of the late John Erlichman,
President Nixon’s former domestic policy advisor (who admitted the administration’s
war on drugs was actually a war on Blacks), and the late Lee Atwater, a
Republican proponent of the Southern Strategy and advisor to both Presidents
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (who refined the practice of marginalizing
the Black community as the quality of public education declined and jobs left
urban communities for foreign labor markets), sought to maintain white
supremacy through the guise of law and order.
Making
it abundantly clear that America’s national policy intends to maintain the
racial hierarchy, with whites at the top and in charge at all costs, politically
speaking, Black Americans are given the choice between the lesser of two evils
every four years. In a system that permits few in the Black community to advance,
in order to sell the “illusion of inclusion,” substantive and collective change
will come only when a critical mass begins to think outside the box of seeking
legitimacy through white recognition and approval.
However,
regardless of party affiliation, whether in the form of Democrat policies which
led to the mass incarceration of young Black men, after President Bill Clinton
signed the 1994 Crime Bill into law, or from the Republican policies of
privatization and deregulation, which placed state functions into the hands of
corporations that valued profit margins over people, the Black community’s
state of continued dependency continues to hamper our future as a free, justified
and equal community when compared to other ethnic groups and nationalities
living in the United States.
Appearing
no different than the fundamental differences between the early 20th
century aspirations of Booker T. Washington’s advocacy for a Black economic
infrastructure, and W.E.B. DuBois’ drive for social and political inclusion, the
fantasy of 21st century post-racialism, in the waning months of the
Obama administration, is essentially a repackaged form of non-economic
liberalism. To borrow from the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan: “they
integrate the bedroom, but not the boardroom.” Therefore, within American society, there is
little Black representation wielding real influence over the nodes of power
from editorial boards (that move public opinion), to the broadcast and
publishing industries (that propagate ideas), to STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Mathematics), the disciplines that build and maintain societies,
to domestic or foreign policy making (that governs free trade and wealth
creation), or in the many other institutions guiding the onward march of civilization
in a technological Information Age.
Control the narrative, control your
destiny
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| The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan |
While
it has almost become common knowledge among Black Americans that as consumers
we contribute more than $1.1 trillion dollars to the global economy every year,
this fact has been more than abundantly clear, well documented and well understood
by merchants, economists and the financial establishment itself as they have all
quietly benefited from our culture of consumption and spending. Our collective
failure to compete as the producer of our own goods and services has created in
its wake a mockery of our non-productivity by those profiting from our
ignorance of business and enterprise. In fact, the merchant class and financial
elite have understood the domestic and international implications of this
reality far better than the Black community has understood it, and as such,
they have done everything to control access to the golden goose that lays the
golden eggs, for the sake of maintaining their power and control.
An
awakened, disciplined, organized and producing Black community could, almost
overnight, harness hundreds of billions of dollars for recirculation into
itself, which would not only translate into a dignified community of movers and
shakers, but also into a community where the substance of economic power would
dictate the agendas of local and state government, subsequently changing the
balance of power not only nationally, but also internationally as trade and
commerce would redefine and realign global relationships.
According
to the demographers, within the next 25 to 30 years, today’s elementary school
student will be a man or woman of middle age, and as such, he or she will live
in an America with a white minority and Black and Brown majority. In light of
this fact, and to avoid the post-Apartheid model of South Africa, where an
aging white minority continues to control the technology, the military and the economy
of the so-called new South Africa, Black Americans must act quickly to avoid
this fate and immediately decide to change a culture and tradition rooted in
the legacy of slavery, fear and dependency.
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| www.economicblueprint.com |
Our
failure to overcome the many distractions, traps and pitfalls of today’s
society will deprive our children of a life of security and upward mobility by
adulthood. Furthermore, there should be no question that much of dysfunction we
see in contemporary American culture is designed to slow or prevent the
likelihood of Black and Brown people from inheriting the inevitable reins of
power. Therefore, we must recognize the intentional dismantling of public
education as an opportunity to design our own curriculum and to open our own
schools, even if it is at home or in the basement of a mosque or a church. We
must recognize inner city food deserts as opportunities to buy vacant lots and to
grow our own fruits and vegetables, and we must recognize the closing of factories
as opportunities to pool our resources and to open our own businesses in order to
provide goods and services for ourselves, our families and our people. Although
the choices are not hard to make, time will eventually force on us a critical
decision. It’s either nation or plantation and the choice is yours.
