Clearly, Franklin and Anthony Williams and countless other Black urban executives over the past four decades were not interested in establishing or maintaining Black political power, or else they wouldn't have methodically undermined the population base for Black power. The best that can be said of them, is that they are loyal to their own tiny but crafty class of Black hustlers, for whom the masses of African Americans are simply pawns, marks and suckers, eminently unworthy of self-determination or even simple protection.
"Black urban executives were not interested in Black political power, or else they wouldn't have methodically undermined the population base for Black power."
The Black mayor's primary job was to convince white capital and white people to return to the city, to save Black people from each other. As I wrote in Black Commentator on August 14, 2003:
"Big city mayors have been reduced to a bizarre class of beggars, lining up at corporate doorsteps with gifts of public resources. Urban executives extend permanent invitations to private capital managers to do whatever they want with constituents' property and futures, but please do something! Rarely do they have anything resembling a plan of their own, beyond a firm determination to accept whatever capital offers, and a willingness to out-grovel the next mayor in line." " "Wanted: A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves, Part I"
Capital, for its own reasons and on its own schedule, decided to take back the cities " and boost the value of urban assets by importing white people and expelling Blacks. In a real sense, Black urban mis-leadership has for decades been attempting to dis-empower their own constituents.
The Left Lives in Detroit
This process bodes very ill for progressive politics in the U.S. The whitening of Chocolate Cities will disperse the most reliable progressive constituent group in America, depriving left politics of its only tightly concentrated voting blocs. Back in 2005, the leftish Bay Area Center for Voting Research surprised itself by discovering that the populations of the 25 most "liberal"-voting cities averaged a little over 40 percent Black:
"The list of America's most liberal cities reads like a who's who of prominent African American communities. Gary, Washington D.C., Newark, Flint, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Birmingham have long had prominent black populations. While most black voters have consistently supported Democrats since the 1960s, it is the white liberals that have slowly withered."
Therefore, the answer to the question, Where does the Left live? is: in the Black cities. When those places are diluted, where will the Left live, then?
No Black person should be smug about the curtain being drawn on Black urban power. We are forced to ask, Is there really any prospect of any other kind of Black power? And, in the absence of concentrated populations of African Americans who possess the capacity to, at the least, be disruptive en mass, what is the true political weight of the Black America?
In his new book, The Black History of the White House (p. 308) author Clarence Lusane reminds us that "radical theorist James Boggs argued that the city had become the black man's land, a reconfigured zone where blackness could contend effectively and forcefully with white power." Boggs wrote his influential article The City is the Black Man's Land in 1966, when population experts were predicting Black majorities would emerge in 50 of the nation's largest cities by 1970. "We must struggle to control, to govern the cities," Boggs wrote, "as workers struggled to control and govern the factories in the 1930s."
Of course, American workers never achieved any significant level of control over the U.S. means of production, ceding that to capital. A corrupt and venal Black misleaderhip class enthusiastically ceded the great cities to capital, which will now reconfigure them in ways that are hostile to the presence of Black people in numbers that can make any difference.
At least, that's the plan.
http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/whitening-chocolate-city
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