Key for black America: Hold the line!
December 6, 2009 by Staff
Filed under News, Weekly Columns
(Akiit.com) Do not back up; do not back down, black America. Do not give in another inch, not one iota.
Hold the line! To do this, there have to be some necessary changes. Some would say there must be sacrifices. Call it what you will, but most blacks in so-called leadership positions have got to go.
Politicians, poverticians (including civil rights leaders) and some clergymen have long been out front, supposedly negotiating for you and me – representing us. They live very well, what we black folks call “high on the hog.â€
Meanwhile, rank-and-file black people who do “make it†do so through sheer will and other survival skills, despite the calculated odds. Every aspect of “the system†is arrayed against the black poor and near-poor, especially – and generally – against all people of African descent.
White police beat, shoot, and kill black men indiscriminately, and except for an occasional murmur here or there from black leadership, the beat down goes on. There is virtually no one out there shouting and organizing black people to hold the line against police brutality.
For a long time, white nationalist militias have been training in the woods on weekends. Recently their numbers have escalated, due to what they consider to be the last straw: The election of Barack H. Obama as president, and his policies.
These people are National Rifle Association (NRA) members, and a few have begun to stand armed with loaded hand guns and assault rifles, claiming their constitutional right to bear arms, at venues where Obama comes to speak.
Only one black leader, Roy Innis, head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), has been trying, with some success, to get black people to join the NRA and participate in their many gun ownership programs, including gun safety, target practice, home and neighborhood security, and various kinds of hunting.
Unfortunately, black inner cities are bereft of reason regarding guns, mainly because of the synergetic nature of drug and gang cultures.
The drug culture is inexorably about money, and is controlled externally, obviously, by very heavy hitters. What has never been strange, yet abominable nevertheless, is the fact that while law enforcement agencies contain black people, drugs proliferate in black communities. Years ago, Dick Gregory said that a nine-year-old can find the drug pusher, but the police, sheriff, DEA and the FBI cannot. There is no other realistic way of looking at it, black folks: The key for survival is to determine the line and hold it.
Moses is not coming, people, he’s dead. They killed him twice: He was Malcolm and Martin. We need a bunch of Davids, anyway! The mis-education giant must be slain, and the two-headed drugs and gangs dragon beheaded.
That will help pave the way for some future community development. And for God’s sake, don’t forget to get rid of political and economic pimps and other miscreants.
Remember the cruel and startling facts: There are over 10,000 black elected officials in the U. S. who are municipal, county, state and congressional politicians, and there isn’t a four-square-block area anywhere in black America where there isn’t at least one black church. Why, then, are black people powerless? What have these leaders been doing? Why are black community residents so passive, so permissive, so Christian yet amoral — is it not amoral, at best, to sit idly while your neighborhood deteriorates and its children fail? It’s probably immoral, but I won’t be presumptuous.
Remember, too, that during the presidential campaign, many black elected officials across the country supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Many of these politicians stayed with Hillary even after Obama won the primary.
Their mostly black constituents voted 80 to 90 percent for Obama. Florida’s three black congresspersons, Corrine Brown of Jacksonville, Kendrick Meek of Miami-Dade and Alcee Hastings of Miramar supported Hillary until she finally conceded defeat, irrespective of the will of their constituencies.
Black people have got to make elected officials accountable to them. Hold the line!
And, make black church leaders accountable for human development projects in church neighborhoods. In order to make progress in the 21st Century, black America must first hold the line!
Written By AL CALLOWAY