At Negrophile, George linked to an op-ed in The Seattle Times, 'Be light to ourselves': Black America must look inward for solutions by Aaron Counts and Larry Evans which may influence me in the near future. I think the article worthy of a couple of posts

Over the course of the recent presidential campaign, we saw how each candidate tried to ingratiate himself with various voting groups. And while NASCAR dads and Latinos were a big focus this year, we continue to witness each major election year the efforts that the parties make to court the black vote. It's less a wooing than a predictable arrangement, as office-seekers vie for the endorsement of one African-American organization or another by snuggling up to the heads of these groups. A system of artificial leadership is thus perpetuated at the expense of the collective of black Americans, many of whom occupy the bottom rungs of America's socioeconomic ladder.

Black activist have been making this complaint for decades. They were disregarded for several reasons, primary of which is the civil rights leadership did come from the mainstream of the Black communities and do have broad acceptance. Those who noted the media's focus on specific folks tended to note it while complaining about the lack of attention they were getting. Yet that leadership is growing ever more distant from those who most need their attention. And given the nature of humans it was inevitable. First of all there's the truth first mentioned by Frederick Nietzsche, that any organization formed for any purpose eventually stops serving that purpose and becomes a vehicle to power. Both our major political parties have made that transition and several minor parties exist because they couldn't get into one or the other vehicle. The other major reason, rooted in the nature of power relationships not race but as manifested in race relations, is well expressed in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a New York Times Magazine article titled Black Power Defined:

We have many assets to facilitate organization. Negroes are almost instinctively cohesive. We band together readily, and against white hostility we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to each other. We are acutely conscious of the need, and sharply sensitive to the importance, of defending our own. Solidarity is a reality in Negro life, as it always has been among the oppressed. On the other hand, Negroes are capable of becoming competitive, carping and, in an expression of self-hate, suspicious and intolerant of each other. A glaring weakness in Negro life is lack of sufficient mutual confidence and trust. Negro leaders suffer from this interplay of solidarity and divisiveness, being either exalted excessively or grossly abused. Some of these leaders suffer from an aloofness and absence of faith in their people. The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man's contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man's representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.

I quote this article a lot. And I don't quote this particular section to demonize those that have made the transition because as I said it's a human thing. You don't blame people for that. But you can do better than the reflexive reaction if you're conscious of the problem and possibility, which (again for human reasons) most are not. So when I read

Underlying these stories about black leaders is the idea the black Americans are a people who need to be led, perpetuating the idea that we are less capable of thinking and acting for ourselves than members of other ethnic or racial groups, and that we can be placated simply by corporate heads and politicians cozying up to select individuals.

Messrs. Counts and Evans are wrong. As we speak the Religious Right is getting the same symbolic treatment. What is a speech at Bob Jones University but a placation by cozying up to select individuals? What is legislative pork but a placation by cozying up to select individuals? We need not just to acknowledge issues exist, but to correctly identify their nature.