The best way to look at multi-racial organizations is usually to start off with a given: the mass of white folks is going to be hostile to Black people acting in concert. Since whites are both in charge and tend to share a common worldview, they do not need to organize as whites in order to move in the same direction - they are already there, so to speak. African Americans share a common general worldview but are not in charge. Therefore, we have to meet and plan as a group in order to move towards empowerment.
In assessing the Democratic Party, we must take general white hostility as a given, and then ask, how well have Blacks in the party organized themselves in those areas in which they are minorities, and how have they leveraged those local party machineries in which Blacks are the party, numerically and as officers. Essentially, we must run the test on ourselves, not on whites, whose general hostility to Black action-as-Blacks is a given.
Since Blacks have not done a good job of organizing within the party, and have not treated local bastions of Black numerical dominance as engines of party-wide Black power, the verdict on the utility of the Democratic Party is still out. That's our fault, since we have failed to press our potential impact on the party to the limits. Simply pointing out white hostility begs the question of intra-Black political cohesion.
Ideally, every Black caucus within the party should act as a Black-Party unit.
's publishers have long maintained that we already have the makings of a Black political party within the Democratic Party, if we just acted like it. We have failed to organize where we already exist in great and strategically placed numbers. There is no reason to believe that we will do a better job outside of the party than we have done inside the structure.
However, it is also necessary to create separate structures outside of the Democratic machinery, to which Black Democrats would also belong. This organization would be committed to a broad set of progressive goals that are well understood as the Black Agenda. (The Black Agenda is a progressive political agenda that takes into consideration the particular history and legitimate group aspirations of African Americans.) One could call this a political party, but the word has too narrow a meaning in the United States, so let's just call it a Black National Caucus.
We have been trained like everyone else in the U.S. to think that parties exist only for the purpose of fielding candidates for elections. This is a huge, uniquely American weakness, and a large part of the reason businessmen so easily control society - they meet and discuss common interests and put forward programs and devise strategies all of the time, as an essential part of shaping the environment in which they do business. They then manipulate parties to carry out their agenda. Both parties.
Blacks must learn how to see parties as structures that have a certain utility, and use them to advance our agenda. Although the agenda exists, we have not organized to push it forward by treating the Democratic Party as one, very useful vehicle. Thus, Blacks inside the Democratic structure do not act in concert. Therefore, white corporate agents (or Black ones!) win battles that they should, based on raw Black numbers, lose.
Thus, we find ourselves in a situation in which there is a question of whether Al Sharpton will be invited to the January debates, or not!
It was in this spirit that we wrote,
What a Black Presidential Candidate Must Do.
