No matter who is finally declared the victor of Tuesday’s presidential race, African Americans will still be in a losing position. The election results will not erase the damage done to a people that have been historically denied education, health, housing, and economic opportunities for centuries. No matter who wins, Blacks will still be among those who disproportionately die from treatable illnesses, violence, and poverty. Our collective worth will still be far below that of white people.
If the coronavirus and the presidential election has taught us anything, it’s this: We’re on our own. The future of our children, our communities, our livelihoods, and our very lives are in our hands, not those of the Republican or Democratic parties. This is not a call to opt out of the democratic process; it’s a reminder that we must finally develop, promote and enact our own agenda, our own systems within the system.
Political pundits and pollsters were stunned that their predictions of Trump’s whopping defeat and a mighty blue wave in Congress and the Senate did not materialize. Sadly, these experts are victims of American propaganda. They naively believe, as Joe Biden preached, that all Americans are fundamentally good, decent people with a deep-seated desire to be decent, just, and fair. The pollsters always underestimate the sheer power of racism and ignorance in this country.
This is why Trump wins “bigly” in America. His dog whistles to nativism, racism and fear resonate with a large majority of white voters, be they doctors, bankers, teachers, policemen, judges or other. Although Trump has been largely derided for stereotyping Mexicans as rapists and murderers, Black protestors as domestic terrorists, and Black people as threats to the lily-white suburbs; the election results prove his strategy really, really works with a large segment of American whites.
Yes, elections are important, and we must participate. Elections provide the opportunity for change. But what they don’t do, what they can’t do, is immediately change the systems that were not designed for our collective wellbeing. Therefore, we settle for the party or candidate that we think will do us less harm. It is imperative that we move past this methodological madness of political dependency. We must go back to move forward.
Jamaican activist, publisher and entrepreneur extraordinaire Marcus Garvey once said: “A race that is solely dependent upon another for its economic existence sooner or later dies.”
Now is the time to resurrect the philosophies of self-dependence preached by the likes of Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcom X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We must revisit and revive King’s 1965, $50 billion employment proposal aimed at helping some “20,000,000 Negroes” at the time do-for-self by rebuilding their own neighborhoods.
Neither Trump’s “Platinum Plan” for Black America nor Biden’s “Lift Every Voice” plan for Black people devotes resources to Black independence. Both plans suggest a trickledown approach through established broken, ineffective, and biased government systems. If you dissect the plans closely, they are designed to help minority groups, which have historically benefitted white women and other ethnicities, not necessarily Black people.
Be it educational or economic reform, whites are loathed to put money in the hands of ordinary, everyday Black people to create their own systems. Yet, it is within this realm where real, sustainable change has the potential to flourish. Right now, in St. Louis and across the country, there are underfunded, struggling black nonprofits in the streets working to give young blacks opportunities to deter them from lives of crime. Instead of investing in these endeavors, we lavish money on police to target, detain and incarcerate them. Corporate feel-good money is doled out to established Black organizations without any significant commitment to employ the poor kids they represent.
If Blacks are serious about changing the trajectory of our collective destinies, we must develop our own do-for-self agenda. That means we must first coalesce around a plan of our making and then demand that politicians adopt and support the plan. I am not angry with rapper Ice Cube for discussing his “Contract with Black America” with Donald Trump. I agree with Cube that this work must go above and beyond partisan politics.
I am disappointed, however, that Cube didn’t collaborate with other Black rappers, entertainers and sports figures before allowing his plan to be cherry-picked and diluted to fit into Trump’s dubious narrative. Already celebrities like T.I., Queen Latifa, Jay-Z, Akon and others, like Dr. Kinf, are extolling the merits of buying land and rebuilding neighborhoods. Imagine if these entertainers had put up their own money and created their own do-for-self promotions complete with slogans, lyrics and social media-savvy images. They already have the power to energize an impoverished people.
Overcoming 400 years of oppression and mental conditioning is a yeoman’s task. Yet our current, health, economic and political conditions demand we chart a new self-reliant course that was outlined by our ancestors.
The truth of the matter is no matter who is declared victor in this election, until we decide to do for self, Blacks will still be losers.
Sylvester Brown Jr. is The St. Louis American’s inaugural Deaconess Fellow.