The Atlantic Ocean, 1919, World War IMen in my family have fought and died in every American conflict since the Civil War. In this era of Group Identity Politics, blacks have fallen behind Jews, Gays and "Trans-Gendered Americans", left to wrestle with Mexicans and Native-Americans for the left-over crumbs of entitlement. The tax-dollars given to Israel in a week, is more than what is spent to develop African-American communities in a year.
Was the Civil Rights Movement a political head-fake that broke down barriers and opened doors that ultimately empowered everyone except African-Americans?
Was the Civil Rights Movement a political head-fake that broke down barriers and opened doors that ultimately empowered everyone except African-Americans?
3 comments:
This is why Malcolm X dismissed the basic tenets of the Civil Rights cause; not out of his basic opposition to assimilation or on pure race politics, but on the fact that black folk bargained with the U.S. to begin with. Malcolm saw that other countries (those that were going through anti-colonial civil wars) sought interference from the U.N. therefore elevating their liberation movement to the world stage. He said that a dog or cat can have civil rights, but we needed human rights to protect us. Therefore, yes anyone can benefit what we were "given" as long as that benefit had particular points of life-sustaining means. It was a lost opportunity as Malcolm saw it, we sold out the real componsation for our ancestral ordeal here for a quick band-aid solution like sitting in resuraunts and getting jobs that we could not get before the 60s. Farrakhan (as always) is just repeating what Malcolm said before.
The thing his though, that we cannot just point at what a few members of other marginalized groups (mostly from the middle-class layer) as benefiting more from the civil rights movement than us. Why? Why are there gangs poverty in Mexican communities? Just because we see a CEO who may be Mexican-American doesn't mean that somehow that is trickling down in her/his neighborhood. It's the same dynamic we (African-Americans) are dealing with today.
"It was a lost opportunity as Malcolm saw it, we sold out the real componsation for our ancestral ordeal here for a quick band-aid solution like sitting in resuraunts and getting jobs that we could not get before the 60s."
Whew ...
Brotherkomrade - That is one hell of a point.
Band-aid solutions still plague our people (Jena 6).
You introduce another interesting point - seeking "civil rights" as opposed to "human" rights changed the destiny of African-Americans.
I plan to continue to review the relative merits of the "CR Movement" despite it's sacrosanct status within the African-American community.
Well if the Civil Rights Industrial Complex has failed to actually lift the bulk of this Black population up who's fault is that? Let's not forget a few men wanted to position themselves as the movement itself instead of being part of a greater cause. They marginalized the contribution of women (Ella Baker) and continued this afterwards (Shirley Chisholm) and continue to this day. They wanted to be respectable and make business deals for themselves and their friends. We cannot discount the class differences amongst the Black community. The elite do not want to have anything to do with the poor.
Post a Comment