This paradigm must begin at the grassroots level and must reject the tame accommodation of present day Black leadership that will only act as a fetter to meaningful struggle and activism. Today’s Black leadership, too caught up in the trappings of privilege, consumerism, hedonism and tainted by the “achievement syndrome” cannot provide the kind of leadership that the Black community requires and needs today.
Also, as controversial as this sounds Blacks must align and form alliances with progressive whites aqnd other races who are “in the same boat.” One major weakness of today’s Black leadsership and its interpretation of the struggle is to reject and lump ALL white people in the same racist, prejudiced and supremacist pot. That’s easy and the act of a coward and progressive Blacks must expose and reject it from the standpoint that not all white people are racists.
Just as there are poor Blacks, Latinosm Hispanics and others there are very poor whites since poverty is color-blind. And whithin the intelligencia there are many whites who not only sympathize with the oppression of Black people who who, throughout American history, has been a strong and reliable ally. Today’s Black leadership needs to revisit this construct if genuine equality for all of America’s people is to be achieved in this century.
Lastly, I believe that his leadership at the block, church, civic, business, project housing and youth association levels is, I respectfully submit, a new hybrid that is born out of unique 21st century needs. The old Black Middle class leadership* that has for its own selfish reasons sold out the Black struggle is the failed example that a new breed of Black leadership must draw on to avoid the mistakes of the past.
[* I am referring to the Black Middle class and Black leadership that developed at the end of the 1960s into the 1970s right up to the present moment - MDR.]
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