Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Why Are We As Black Men Not Responding To Our Current Economic Plight?

Due to economic globalization, mass Mexican immigration to the US, Black males are being increasingly marginalized to the point where our unskilled labor is no longer needed; we've become expendable!

There is an economic embargo imposed on us; we are being starved out economically! Do we understand the highest level of racism is economic elimination! What are our survival economic contingency plans?

1 comment:

Jamal Hodari said...

I feel that we are caught in this web of inertia for the following reasons:

#1. The false ideaology that Black Suffering is just; accordingly, we have literally "spiritualized" our suffering under colonialism/white supremacy even though white suffering is disproportionate to ours. Either God is racist or their is a significant imbalance of power.

Our suffering from "God" is maldistributed. Churches across the country and indeed across the globe have misinformed black peoples with regard to their suffering at the hands of our oppressors.

Moreover, many black leaders and heads of state act under this same premise and use it to justify their own oppression of black peoples.

Secondly, many of the Black clergy and national leadership also postulate the need for the elimination of oppression, yet, they preach these retarding and nullifying precepts in their pulpits and at functions.

Third, we are historically conditioned to simply be worker/wage/slaves. We see ownership and control as symbols of power;as other folks' business. Ours is to merely consume.

As a result of our being taught that Power should be in the hands of others, whether initially the raw white colonizer, or other ethnics who have infiltrated and exploited our econimic turf, we have thusfar not responded to the clarion call of our ancestors to be captains of industry or men of high regard.

Lastly, and I think equally important, is not only have we been woeful in protecting and exploiting our own local and "national"* collective economic power which is formidable; but have not kept pace with the ever-changing global ecomic and political marketplace up to and including the cyberspace.

The founding, development and expansion of industry abroad has further weakened our ability to even be recognized any longer as a viable entity save the prison industrial complex and a few other asundried uses.

In short, we have become, as Sidney Wilhelm pointed out nearly 40 years ago in his book, "Who Needs the Negro?" obsolete even for factory work.

The challenge facing us in the 21st Century and beyond, is not howm much gorrila theatre we can entertain people with; for our threats of revolution, our picket signs, slogans, rhymes and fanciful songs have at best become merely wistful posterity; "throwbacks" to a more courageous time and place for us.

Our self appointed "national"* leadership are throwbacks in and of themselves, pimping as it were, the heratstrings of posterity for the old.

They have become mere jokes and unknowns to the young who now suffer global oppression and literal physical extinction at the hands of an oppressor who has become immuned to the weak cries for humanity from us.

It appears to this writer, Dear bretheren, that the time has come for us to either pick up the plow and do the dirty work that leads to liberation, up to and including community/capacity building.

We must take the microphone away from the shadow sides of King and Malcolm and Marcus; like Sharpton, Jackson and Cosby, as well as Smiley and other talking heads.

We must assume the grass root mantle of leadership that spawned all of our sincerest liberation struggles and movements, up to and inluding self defense/armed struggle.

*I use the word "national" to describe the United States geographical containment of blacks; not that the United States is "our" nation.

Jamal Ohames Hodari