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.