I haven't looked in on my conservative brethren and sistren in a while. so I looked about a bit. Got a pointer to an editorial in Newsday...and to this line in particular:
Black America has no future-oriented vision of itself within the context of American reality.
And this is true.
But what is that context?
Within the context of American reality it seems one has power to the degree that one has a constituency. That's the nature of a confederacy
Confederacy
A governmental system in which sovereignty is vested entirely in subnational (state) governments.
and that's what America was intended to be at its origin. The way the Constitution was written makes it a Federation:
fed·er·al·ism n 1. political system: a political system in which several states or regions defer certain powers, for example, in foreign affairs, to a central government while retaining a limited measure of self-government
2. political principle: the principle of a federal system of government, or support for such a system
Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
...which was acceptable to those who really wanted a Confederacy only because the set up the government to run by the rules they would have implemented locally. The thirteen colonies...fourteen if you count the internally dispersed African colony...set about its business. Which was business. Property. Wealth.
All was fine
Then it wasn't. Things changed to the point where the ground no longer supported the ground rules. And the Civil War announced the end of the initial federation.
Eventually a new federation was born, built on the reversal of the promises of citizenship made to the children of Africa. And so it stood until the middle of the 20th century.
As the editorial says
Except for Brown v. the Board of Education and the two landmark pieces of civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, almost every policy - affirmative action, welfare, minority set-asides, etc. - that has come into existence via the federal government to assist blacks has been attacked, chipped away and de-legitimized by the conservative movement.
Every program was resisted. I have my own understanding of why they were implemented so clumsily, and all are being ended. The views of those who opposed change hold sway.
Remember, though, that's not the vision of ourselves. Individually or collectively. That's the context. in which we must develop an enabling understanding.
