 It is important that serious attention be focused on what those who ostensibly speak for us are doing. Without a finely honed accountability factor, political development of the people and control by the people is not possible.
We must be ever mindful of what
the great Martinique-born black psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz
Fanon wrote: “Some of the oppressed don’t want to destroy their enemies,
they want to be them.” Fanon wrote passionately on the psychopathology
of colonization most famously in his renowned book The Wretched of the
Earth. Fanon is known worldwide as “the leading anti-colonial thinker of
the 20th century.”
A
few years ago, David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies, a black think tank in Washington, D.C., published a
report that said there are some 10,000 black elected officials in the
U.S. Today we can say that those elected officials range from school
board members to a governor but does not include a member of the U. S.
Senate.
Real power
I
pound away consistently at the anomaly of that vast power’s uselessness
because, like the proliferation of black churches, particularly within
our inner cities, political and religious leaders have developed no
holistic game plan, no synergy by and through which real power of the
people can be realized.
Grandstanding
Unfortunately,
so many have gotten in positions of relative power and developed on it
by coalescing with the very interests that are anathema to black people.
As Fanon says, even though they are themselves oppressed, too many
black leaders do not align with their constituents in the struggle to be
liberated but, instead, covertly and overtly imitate the oppressor.
During
President Barack Obama’s long and arduous re-election campaign, the
relative silence of our nation’s black leadership was often astonishing.
Only when down to the wire, in crisis mode, did significant numbers of
leaders jump in front “to lead” a people’s response to voter-suppression
laws.
This tendency
to be single-issue-orientated and crisis-motivated does not bode well
for community development. It does, however, provide impetus for
grandstanding and other forms of individual political promotion. For
once the crisis is over, now that voter-suppression laws did not
significantly depress the black and Latino vote, high-profile black
leaders are jockeying to meet with President Obama on their assessment
of “the black agenda.”
But
have you heard tell of any black leader or group of black leaders ever
meeting with constituents about an agenda? Do you know what the
Congressional Black Caucus does? Do you think it is a good idea for all
the civil rights organizations to meet in one big convention and map out
a national political and economic community development strategy?
Oops!
No, civil rights groups can’t convene together because their individual
annual conventions are primarily fundraising events. A large part of
their annual budgets come from corporate and foundation interests whose
primary agenda with black people is the politics of containment.
So
the question is: How are black people going to get positive action from
black leaders? The people will have to flip the dynamics to do so.
Persons in positions where they negotiate on behalf of a constituency
must become trained to understand that they serve, not lead.
Accountability is to the people and the people are the leaders.
How does that happen? One of the smartest persons in the history of politics, President Barack H. Obama, told us how.
Organize
When
your block is organized and the blocks of your neighborhood are
organized, then your neighborhood has the power to induce positive
social change. Replication throughout a city and so forth increases
people power. It is not complex but it does take work.
The needed talent is within the people and their development potential has no ceiling.
The
people can open church doors and call for ecumenical gatherings for
strengthening individuals and communities. Do not be misled. We the
people are the leaders!
Al
Calloway is a longtime journalist who began his career with the Atlanta
Inquirer during the early 1960s civil rights struggle. He may be
reached at
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