[The Cushite]

The plight of the Black Man, what a topic. I think that ultimately we have to recognize the complexity of our circumatance to begin to understand the plight.

To be a man in a eurocentric, patriarchal society requires you to assume a certain role in the social stratum that calls for an overwhelming degree of alienation (i.e. being something you, by nature, are not). Masculinity in this society requires a desire to dominate the people, space, and resources around you (hence the notions of Manifest destiny and imperialism of the 19th and 20th Centuries). When these values are injected into a capitalist economy, power equates with capital ownership. So a real man has to own capital, under this definition. A "real man" also has to dominate women physically, economically, and sexually (hence the double standard about sexual promiscuity among the sexes). Couple these assertions with the assumptions of a white supremacist society (a de facto caste society in which blackness equates to perpetual social disfranchisement and political exclusion), and the black man finds himself chasing a masculinity that he can never obtain. This results in black men being at the brunt of social demonization and exploitation, and ultimately personal alienation and the exhibition of what are deemed "self-destructive" risky behaviors (i.e. drug abuse, hyper sexuality, greed and criminality). We must instead impress upon our young men that masculinity is not predicated on power (read money in our society check the notion of "Get Rich or Die Tryin' ", we'd rather be dead than poor). Instead, we should champion a masculinity that develops within young men a sense of purpose grounded in the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, peace, discipline, and most importanlty love (traits that more accurately describe Jesus). This would in turn create in us a more critical mind that would reject the spiritual, mental, and ultimately physical death that is White, European Masculinity.

There have been some interesting proposals in this thread to deal with this issue, from simply bootstrapping ourselves to military discipline ( I have reservations with this notion, but I'll deal with those in another post). But, no one has mentioned a critical movement grounded in the consciousness of love. In order to begin to address the plight of black men, we must first affirm our love for black men (and boys). We must stop the perceptual demonization of our black men. In the book The Covenant compiled by Tavis Smiley's foundation, there is a chapter dealing with how black men were characterised as super-criminal by the Bush Administration in 1999. This was but one instance in the long history of the demonization of the image of the black man by the American power elite. It is out of this history that we come to have policy directives that serve to disproportionately incarcerate, disfranchise, and physically destroy black men. We have to begin to assert that the recent hype over the disproportinate social disengagement of black men since the late 80's (Check the article in this thread) has to culminate in an affirmation of the black man as fully human and his condition is the result of systemic evil, not moral, intellectual, or spiritual defect (or at least not any more than any other people have). Once we assert that the black man is worthy of the resources needed to elevate his condition, then we will be at ease with rendering the resources necessary to deal with said condition.

Next, we as a nation must see that inequality and poverty, especially in light of such a prosperous nation, is indeed immoral. We must maintain a critical consciousness of such bedrock institutions such as our educational, penal, medical, and governmantal entities. This critical consciousness must be guided by our love of justice, peace, and righteousness. We cannot let, as Dr. Cornell West describes as "Market Fundamentalism" be the overarching value of our people. "It sells" cannot justify criminal, exlpoitive , and dehumanizing behavior by us nor by the power elite. Where is our poor people's campaign? Our socialist consciousness? Before the notion gets dismissed, like it generally does in these forums, please someone tell me how we can have a collective struggle for freedom, justice, and equality within a system (political, social, and economic) that sees these things as "idealistic" at best and "impossible" at worst. How can we "overcome" if we don't have as a normative value the essential equality of all people, regardless of socio-economic status? Simply becomming better capitalists splinters us more as a people, because the very system of capitalism is predicated upon inequality, exploitation, and competition. These values are counter-intutitive to collective struggle.

Our black men have disproportionate plight because we are disproportionately deprived of a democratic right to life, liberty, and self-determination. On the surface, it may seem that oppressed people are simply making bad choices, but with further examination of the contexts under which many live, we can see that limited capital constrains choice in a capitalistic society. We cherish our moral tradition, and we should always champion discipline, righteousness, personal responsibility and wisdom for everyone, regardless of social condition. But what about the moral correctness of the "Heaven on Earth" (read as social equality) championed by Jesus Christ himself. In doing this, we must consider the just-ness of, as Stokley Carmichael explained in Black Power, the "internal colonies" not only of the so called Ghetto, but of a population of black people whose only resourse is labor which gets exploited by power elites.


Blackwatch!!!!!!