alcalloway.jpgSo now the Republican Party wants to spend a paltry $30 million to woo black voters. Well, let’s see: If they focus on, say 30 states, that’ll be a million bucks for each state – if divided equally. Granted, that total sum is probably above what the Democratic Party intends to spend on black folks.

You know the drill: “the black vote” is a dependable base for Democratic Party victories and will always be there because blacks have nowhere else to go.

Just about everybody is tired of hearing black politicos lament that they are ignored by the Republicans and taken for granted by Democrats. It’s so old hat and lame. A bad habit, a vestige of slavery looms significantly problematic. Black so-called leaders, Democrats, Republicans, preachers, civil rights poverticians, et al., have got to stop accepting what white folks put on the table.

Blacks at the table employ no marketing skill, no salesmanship or real political acumen. They just sit there and complain; i.e., beg. Politics is business, it’s economics and it’s all about cutting a deal, formulating a quid pro quo: you give me this and I’ll give you that. You don’t talk about morality in a business deal.

You just make sure you and the other guy are moral in your dealing.

Serious transformation has to take place in black America; we’ve got to get the round objects out of the square holes. Black America must have no illusions about America’s political system, which is unequivocally about economics, first and foremost. A new paradigm necessitates dynamic 21st century leadership — bold, futuristic and savvy.

Black preachers cannot lead because they are caught in a time warp combined with a negation of Kemetic (Nile Valley) history, the history of great black civilizations during the period of the Old Testament and the period of Jesus and the New Testament. Black preachers are still teaching that ancient Egypt and the Pharaohs were evil. Ancient Egypt and its Pharaohs were black and the Nile Valley civilizations were great.

Black mis-educators with advanced degrees and no knowledge of self, who leave a trail of dysfunctional inner city schools, are no match for demands that the future warrants. And lawyers who know something about civil rights, but have no knowledge of business, cannot muster meaningful stamina for real political meandering.

Florida’s very conservative Republican Gov. Rick Scott and his former black Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll won the 2010 election by 1.2 percent of the vote. The actual figure they won by is 61,550 votes. According to Carolyn Kennedy, a black Republican official and Secretary of the Broward County Republican Executive Committee, there are “about 60,000 black Republican voters in Florida.”

With all of his money and white nationalist power, Rick Scott desperately needed Jennifer Carroll and the black Republican vote to become governor. Carroll clearly loomed as competition for 2014 and was quickly driven out of Tallahassee. Black Republicans meekly faded with Carroll’s dismissal.

It matters not whether current black so-called leaders are Republican or Democrat; the behavior is similar, if not the same. Omnipresence is the Four Horsemen of the Black Apocalypse: fear, ignorance, inertia and a psychology of dependency.

This illusion about America’s political system, and America, in general, has its antecedent not in slavery but from so-called emancipation onward. The alluring illusion of “freedom” excited Negroes to accelerate imitations of whites. Blackness began to be shed down to conking and straightening hair to bleaching of skin. Any non-white behavior became gauche.

To this day, the darkest black person whose behavior is whitest is allocated the most respect from blacks and whites alike. What lends heavily to holding black people back is not “white” behavior in terms of language and style but imitating white people culturally and religiously, which deadens the soul – the cosmic force from whence we come.

Therefore, we cannot think straight and come together as brothers and sisters. And, therefore, we cannot liberate ourselves. We cannot live an illusion and be whole.


Al Calloway is a longtime journalist who began his career with the Atlanta Inquirer during the early 1960s civil rights struggle. He is writing a book of essays. He may be reached at Al_Calloway@verizon.net