Quote:
Originally posted by 1 Woman of Virtue:
Of course we need new leadership. Every generation does. If we did not, we would constantly find ourselves relying on the dreams of our ancestors, and not pursuing our own. But I agree w/ a previous post, we have to lead in EVERY AREA OF LIFE. It's not enough to have a great national figure, it's not fair to them because they just can't do it all. And it 's not fair to us, because we put all of our eggs in one basket.
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First of all, I'd also like to give props to Manndingo Nupe for bringing up this topic. It's something that's on my mind pretty frequently.
Regarding Jesse, although some people may think of him as a leader, I don't. Not saying that he has done nothing for African-Americans. I have just never thought of him as a leader. His behavior, in my opinion, is not alignment with what
I feel a leader's behavior should be. I never felt as though he was a spokesperson for me, or for African-Americans in general.
Anyway...I'm not going to focus on Jesse.
1 Woman of Virtue:
I enjoyed what you had to say. I think that it's absurd to think that one person is going to represent such a diverse group of people. That puts a lot of pressure on that so-called spokesperson and there's no way s/he can do it all.
Also, having one person or a select group to represent a collective can sometimes cause people to shun personal responsibility. When something goes down, some people feel compelled to seek out that national spokesperson without even attempting to deal with it themselves.
Nupe4Life said it best: "Why can't we stand up as a race and deal with the problem?"
I think that we as a people face many, many issues and there's no way that one leader/spokesperson can address them all. Leadership, as a couple of people have already said, needs to be more of a grassroots effort and it also needs to be steeped in more action as opposed to rhetoric.
After all, there are those leaders (both greek and non-greek), like Manndingo Nupe said, whose names we don't know. And a lot of the time, those leaders are doing a heck of lot better job than some of our so-called recognized spokespeople are.
Just my .25 cents...
[This message has been edited by BrandNubian (edited April 12, 2001).]