The Black Godot*

Ending Black Dependency. Well, I think my job is done. The candidacy of Barack Obama has done that for me/us. Which is a good thing. A reason to support this honorary White Man.

Now comes the job of organizing those that get it, and believe that we can be competitive .

There are a lot of Black folks that simply don't believe we can compete. They are angry and going to get angrier as the true impact of "Obama" sets in on Black America. "He's making history and Nigga's gonna be history," as one of my colleagues so pithily puts it.

Our benefactor is in trouble and he has a plan to let our unit go just like so many other under performing business units. And it's not personal. It's just business. After all, even good White folks are getting caught up in the forced downsizing of American hegemony, which is quite evident as my travel and work in the former industrial heartland puts me in direct proximity to all the scattered bodies and rust-belt melancholy, like that of the firefighter with six blond boys and no clue as to what the two graduating seniors are going to do; college isn't on the horizon, not because he hasn't suggested it but because they aren't hopeful about the trade-off between debt and their future prospects in an economy un-buoyed by the generous dispensation generated first by the surplus value from slavery, then global dominance.

And as the sound and vibrations from all those falling bodies reverberates throughout America, a lot of 'good' Negroes are going to tremble right out of their token circumstances like so many grains of salt slowly, steadily, rumbling off the table from the loud, ominous sounds of globalization.

It's hard to say what it'll take to flip the script. You don't just overnight become a genetic mastermind. It takes generations working purposely toward a defined something to achieve anything. Black folks are not independently purposeful, and we haven't defined the "what". Our whole tribe is just floating along hoping that our rudderless ship ends up somewhere, anywhere, and as the saying goes, "if you don't stand for something you'll go for anything."

That anything, right now, is Obama.

*From "Waiting for Godot" a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for someone named Godot, who never arrives.

Our Man in the Middle: Obama and Race

Boy! That was good! This guy is hitting on all cylinders. Barack Obama is a master mediator: he observes and listens to Party A; he observes and listens to Party B; he then eloquently and passionately sums up the contention in ways that gives credence to stories A and B, and in those crucial moments, while each party savors their own recognition in the recap, the good mediator closes on the goodwill that comes from simple recognition, and shifts the burden of reconciliation to each of the parties, neither of whom want to be held responsible for failure. The problem with mediation, however, is that it is incapable of addressing the inequities of power unless the powerful gives it's full consent. In the zero-sum game, the powerful close like a hungry tiger in the woods hunting antelope on a quiet sunny day.

So it was, the "Perfect Union" speech by Obama. The historical and contemporary Black struggle in this country was superbly recounted and acknowledged in personal terms that even the layperson, Black and White, could understand and appreciate. But in the end, it was the Black community with the burden of just getting over its "bitterness" and "anger", because those sentiments are "distortions" that "denigrate" the "greatness and the goodness of our nation", and are counter productive in American public life, causing division and resentment. If we Black folks hold our truths to be self-evident, well, that's just part of the story that has to be whispered in the barbershops and on the street corners out of range of "polite company".

And so goes Black in America with the ascendancy of Barack Obama. The country listened, acknowledged, and is moving on to its post-Black story: land of the deserving with opportunity for all that are willing to forget, forgive and forsake.

Barack Obama, as the Grand Mediator, is proposing a racial settlement agreement, Black folks get acknowledgment of our historical struggles, and recognition of that legacy's impact on our condition; White society, for its willingness to listen, gets a cease and desist of the criticism of America's racial past, and full allegiance to a White ethnocentric version of the future. That's the best deal Black folks can get, which isn't much different than the deal that A. Phillip Randolph and other pioneers in the struggle against White oppression were able to wrest from America during similarly challenging times of war. Here we are 60 or so years later having the same discussion, coming up with the same compromises: Black acquiescence to a relationship of terminal dependency in exchange for White society's sympathetic ear and enlightened largess.

The problem isn't what we think about each other, or the reference point from which we draw our personal conclusions. The problem is Black dependency in a game that most people acknowledge is designed as zero-sum. Barack Obama's candidacy and this speech, should represent to us an opportunity to get serious about breaking the psyche of dependency that is at the heart of the Black community's non-competitiveness, and the struggle to overcome the economic and social vulnerability that makes it impossible for us to ascribe value to our story.

We cannot allow the Black American Narrative to be criminalize or dismissed. We have absolutely earned the right to tell our story in terms and language that expresses the intensity of the ancestral pain, and the urgency with which we need to move beyond dependency. We will not be bullied into changing the substance, tone or tenor of that story.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright's critique of White America is not new, or shocking in the community of Black people that I have been a part of for 40+ years. His "views", even expressed as wolf-tickets (referred to by Barack as "incendiary"), are a part of our story that would've been considered mild and barely worth commenting on back in the day. The ruling elite, however, sees this as an opportunity. America has exhausted its patience with Black dissatisfaction, ingratitude, and Barack Obama represents a rhetorical and moral truce that allows them to keep all the land, all the water, and rights to the air. They are anxious to say that its over with; Barack Obama, his candidacy and his story, has become the symbolic end of the discussion.

You cannot dismiss Rev. Wright's comments as a "profoundly distorted view of this country," without discounting the entire Black narrative in these United States. Barack is trying to discount our narrative but not repudiate our community. Unfortunately, a "community" without a narrative, isn't a community at all. It is simply a collection of "individuals" from which the powers that be can choose a few through which to manage the aspirations of the many. Not a bad business plan; not new, but it works.

There is nothing insane, or distorted or offensive about a Black man in America being suspicious about the sudden appearance of a deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic that is devastating Black communities disproportionately, given the history of the Tuskegee Experiment, and the pervasive availability of mind-altering drugs to a restive population in near total social revolt during the 1960's of J.Edgar Hoover. Certainly the questioning of America's "special" relationship with Israel and the oppressive legacy of America's relationship with authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, should not be considered distorted but profoundly democratic, and honest.

America is asking the Black community for another pound of flesh for the candidacy of Barack Obama. In order to get along with White America, we must suppress the supremacy of our own narrative and adopt the supremacy of a White narrative that understandably wants to "elevate what is right with America" over what is wrong. The "views" and opinion of the Black street aren't what "denigrates" the "greatness and goodness" of America. It has been the consistent and concerted actions of an American ruling elite that devised and executed a devastatingly effective plan for racial hierarchy that rested on the inferiority and total subjugation of the Black race. Now, if you're Black, where should that story be anchored in the historical narrative of your community? And how does it inform a rational response that will allows us as a people to move forward?

Are the only things that get considered racially "divisive" the things that speak to the essentials of the Black story? Why isn't it considered to be racially divisive to be in a city where 45% of the population is African American but only five percent of the men that get paid to fight fires are Black. Why isn't it considered racially divisive for the Black community to have an unemployment rate that is almost triple that of White America's? Or racially divisive that a super majority of the good, high paying jobs always seem to be over populated with White folks (with over four million Black people with college degrees, there are only 600,000 or so Black people making $92,000+ per year, and that includes the uneducated sports and entertainment money)?

Well, the truth is that these things are racially divisive. The Black community is being asked to be quiet about those things, and keep a stiff upper lip. Keep a stiff upper lip while solid Black families get downsized out of opportunity, and chased out of the Harlem's of the nation by yuppies financed with White dispensation money (came out of our asses directly). Keep a stiff upper lip and waive goodbye not just to those nostalgic manufacturing jobs, but to the Next jobs of the 21st Century as they get outsourced to a smarter, faster and cheaper version of yourself, while the largely White "market makers" get paid-in-full from schemes against public money too big for any one person to go to jail.

Barack is right, it isn't something you talk about in mixed company; it isn't something you would bring up on your job, in front of people that have your livelihood in the palm of their hands. What divides the races is that Black people are in a state of total dependency, but have to conduct ourselves as if we were somehow engaged in a fair game with equal chances at opportunity. Our views are not "distorted"; the source of the distortion is in the images and realities being transmitted into our psyche, our soul, by a superior competitor that keeps trying to hide behind the sheepish clothing of conciliation, while simultaneously continuing to beat us down in every indice of social mobility and community prosperity. We see the distortion quite clearly.

So there we have it. Right back where we started. A stirring, soul searching and frank discussion about the distortions in all of our lives caused by a system of dominance and devaluation. We are suppose to feel better about one another. We should feel good about the possibilities. We do. Despite all the evidence, Black people do feel optimistic about our ability to survive. And like gladiators thrown into a zero-sum arena not of our own choosing, we see and embrace our story not as the end all and be all, but, as prologue to the future story we are preparing ourselves to tell. In the lion's den, there is no mediator.

Thinking About Resistance

I couldn't help cringing when, in this last debate with Hillary, I listened to Obama genuflecting before the altar of White priorities in his denunciation of Louis Farrahkan. Now we all know that Farrahkan dug his own hole with his comments about Judaism that have widely been perceived by Jews and Gentiles as anti-Semitic. I've heard his explanations about what he was trying to say, but bottom line, he remains a symbol of anti-Jewish sentiment in the minds of America's White political elite.

Black leaders are simply too dependant to resurrect Brotha Farrahkan and his analysis of White supremacy and its impact on the needs of Black people, even though his analysis continues to attract interest from lots of Black folks. Despite the reservations that we too have regarding Farrahkan's admitted role in the assassination of Malcolm X, given the saliency of his analysis, and the actions of the Nation of Islam in recovering brothers that have been economically hounded out of their families and communities (one out of every nine 20-34 year old Brothas - our warrior class -- are locked down in their desparate efforts to make a decent wage committing largely economic crimes, see the new Pew research center report), the Black grassroots does not see Farrahkan as a pariah that must be denounced, rejected and banished from the political discourse. The Million Man March. Need I say more.

As I always tell people, the "system" (of White supremacy) requires from those that want to participate, a pound of flesh in order to demonstrate your complete and utter loyalty to its survival and prosperity. These people are not stupid. The idea that you will get in by acting committed to their system of supremacy and then do some good deeds on behalf of your own people, is simply laughable. White folks aren't stupid. If they didn't invent it, they have surely mastered the art and science of psychological warfare. They know us better than we know ourselves. They know how to use the pressure of the purse to alter behavior. And they know how to use violence in the event that economic isolation doesn't get the results they want.

So there is Obama sitting on stage giving his pound of flesh: 'I denounce and reject and repudiate and spit on Farrakhan, his family, his thoughts, his actions, his statements, and his support.' And then he went further by swearing allegiance to the 20th century's biggest ironies: the Jews going from victims of Western racism and Colonial supremacy, to perpetrators of violence and oppression against the Palestinians. Obama could in fact end up winning the presidency. He certainly is no threat to injustice in the Middle East. This doesn't bode well for those of us hoping that his campaign of Hope really would allow America an opportunity to not only remake it's worldwide image, but to make the case for a more progressive politics that is bold enough to put everything on the table, including old relationships and ways of doing business that have been handed down from wars past.

Obama blew an opportunity to say what is on a lot of American minds when it comes to our unequivocal support for the actions of the state of Israel: Why? You hear it from C-Span callers, you hear in hushed tones from Democratic party activists. People are questioning this so-called "special" relationship with Israel, particularly in light of what most objective observers understand to be a war of unequals: the pitiful Palestinians throwing rocks at armored Humvees, and firing rockets into the deserts of Israel, while the Israeli army, among the top 2 most deadly armed forces in the world, uses sophisticated precision weaponry to assassinate and destroy Palestinian people and infrastructure at will. The only thing that makes this relationship special, is the fact that America, which used to pride itself on standing against oppression, is unwilling to take Israel to task, and to use its relationship to force a more equitable end to the lopsided war that has turned Palestine into an open-air concentration camp.

So why continue to resist? Like the Native Americans before us (and the Palestinians currently), the White man and his woman have conquered, and with conquest comes the power to ascribe value, determine priorities, and set standards for discourse and acceptable action. Obama has been cleared for take off. He has proven himself a loyal servant, he has offered his pound of flesh in exchange for the opportunity to be the first Black face in a decidedly white place. Unfortunately for the masses of Black folks in America, and the world, this doesn't bode well for our prospects for freedom; freedom from the endless lists evidencing underdevelopment, poverty, destitution, downward mobility and dependency. Since we are not moving forward, then we are moving backward because evolution is certainly not standing still. In fact, in the book, Radical Evolution, Joel Garreau writes about the advances in genetic, robotic, information, and nanotechnologies (GRIN) that are pushing the envelope on evolution, accelerating human mental and physical capacity in ways that envision a new Neanderthal: 2oth Century humans.

Now consider this capacity to alter what we understand it means to be human, combined with a ruling class, Whites in the Western World (is that what "www" means?), use to having their way with the world's resources, and you can quickly envision the evolution of a real master race. The futurists talk about the "singularity", in essence, the point in time that man-made computers exceed the organic intelligence of humans. At that point, some 50 or so years away by some estimates, the world's population will begin to slide into regression. The population will not continue to grow but will be in a free fall down to a more manageable and useful 2 or 3 billion people.

Guess who is not going to make the cut. Niggas and flies! Although, if a choice has to be made, my money is on the flies.

The very serious point being made is that elite White folks have turned their attention to a more perfect future, or: The Next Iteration of Human Existence. They will be, and already are making choices about what lives have value ("cheap labor" is another way of saying the lives of the people in low-end jobs are of little value) , and who deserves the opportunity to join their club. This is where the terminal dependency of Black folks is going to take it's toll. We simply don't have the social capital to ensure our own survival. The "exceptional" amongst us will undoubtedly be the beneficiaries of some White largess, but that doesn't bode well for the survival of the Black Man as we know him today. The "exceptional" amongst us can smell the scent of death that hovers around all the rest of us. They can see clearly that there is no Black power, and it's now every man, woman and child for their Black selves. Their kids will be half-breeds, their grandchildren will pass, their great-grandchildren won't know their names. (Go to a college mixer at an NYU or Columbia, and watch how those Black folks are running from each other.)

No, there is not going to be some great cataclysm that wipes out the Black race. As we are starting to see now with the disappearance of middle-class mobility work, technology will continue to increase productivity and convenience, reduce jobs, and take the human touch out of the social economic equation. The most vulnerable amongst us, those dependent on "others" for their survival, are simply going to perish, disappear, like so many homeless people sliding into the underground, unseen, unheard from, gone. The "others" we were depending on will simply not be able in most cases, willing in some, to extend the gift of life -- a livelihood -- because they too will be struggling and hoping to find ways of cashing their White dispensation check. Many of those checks will be returned for "insufficient usefulness". Many of those checks, however, are being cashed right now: The Savings and Loan Giveaway, The rescue of the Longterm Capital folks from their own genius, The Chrysler Handup, The Dotcom Pyramid Scheme, and most recently, The Subprimate Mortgage Fleecing. Every one of these financial schemes are chock full of losers, and a handful of winners, some we know about, most we'll never know.

Given the reality of this Next Iteration of Human Existence, why should the Black Cultural Grassroots continue to resist White supremacy? Well, because we, by and large, don't know what else to do. Standing still while an accelerated evolution rapidly surpasses us simply doesn't feel right. It betrays the legacy of the many RunAwaySlaves that paved the way for our legal freedom. Maybe, as the Grim Reaper continues to descend on the 4 or 5 billion "cheap lives" out here in the world, the ambition of Black folks will exceed a place in the White house and start to focus on our own house.

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Managed Mobility

I've been looking at some census bureau numbers lately, and the picture they paint regarding Black capacity for economic mobility is pretty dismal. Yes, even in the age of Obama, there are some challenging issues that will determine the real "hope" quotient for Black folks.


Here are some stats that best sum up the Black self-sufficiency challenge: 75% of all Black businesses in America gross less than $25,000 per year (yes, total income before expenses); Black folks making grown-up money, $92,000 and up, number a mere 600,000+, roughly 17% of all Black folks with at least a four year college degree (compared to about 12.5 million Whites, or 27% of Whites with a degree). Black owned businesses with at least $1m in income number only about one-percent of all Black owned business in the country. Approximately 49% of all Black people with income make less than $25,000 per year.


What these numbers mean is that 0ur upward mobility is being managed. The number of Black folks making decent money is small and the threat of economic regression so large that it scares the shit out of anyone too-black-and-too-strong enough to even think about challenging the control that White folks have over our lives and priorities. And without the confidence and impetus from this investment class, the grassroots Black entrepreneurial class will continue to fight a withering and debilitating battle to build a business infrastructure that would help Black people worldwide compete in the global economy.

Black people in America are terminally dependent on White people for their jobs, incomes, livelihoods, and opportunities. Very few Black people in this country are secure, and fewer enjoy any real personal sovereignty. Personal sovereignty is what frees one up to define one's own future, plant one's own seeds, cultivate values that reinforce rather than obscure one's existence, and allow one to harvest the power to ascribe value to the economy of our existence: the goods, services and ideas emanating from our collective experience, our tribal connections.

In a world where the White elite, who have benefited mightily from the social contract with American society, its law, military prowess, and economic power, are allowed to take the booty and run offshore along with the middle-class mobility work that was the trade-off for the American public, there is no sense of allegiance to any one thing or entity. There is no "American Business" there is just Business. And that business is being controlled not by nations but people; people connected more by corporate tribal affinities than by national ones.

In a world composed of tribal competitors, our erstwhile benefactor is releasing himself from the obligations that come with great "nations". Simply put, White folks are moving on. In the words of Snoop Dogg, "if ya can't swim ya bound to drizzown."

It is apparent that the Black Tribe is going to have to compete with these other global corporate tribes for our own piece of the rock. Taking control of the "economy of our existence" is our only option.