(ThyBlackMan.com) In 1963, speaking to the noted psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark, James Baldwin describes the experience of meeting a 16-year-old black boy who declared: “I’ve got no country. I’ve got no flag.” Baldwin continues: “I couldn’t say, ‘you do.’ I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does.”
Today, some fifty years after that conversation, we must wonder aloud if things have really changed or remained the same – in spite of realizing our first black president, Barack Obama ascend to office in 2008. It’s even more conflated when the current president mounts a podium and openly refers to black N.F.L. players as “sons of bitches”.
Never has the political atmosphere in America become more sinister
than the present array of Trumpism, racial antagonism and feudal anti-government sentiments. With the national political agenda being controlled by the Republican Party and the concomitant slogan ‘Make America Great (read: white) Again’, blacks are caught in a racial vortex intent on de-browning these yet to be United States of America.
How do we stay alive? How do we resist?
It’s important to state here emphatically: we will survive, as our ancestors did for many years upon these heralded shores. Black folk in America must do many things to stay alive. Here are three.
Become Political Opportunists
I do not have the percentages or numbers, but there is a palpable movement now in progress to undermine African American involvement in the political process. Across social media, many are expressing the nihilistic urge to withdraw and become political ‘do-nothings’.
Most of this sentiment comes in the aftermath of the failed ‘post-racial’ reality of the Barack Obama administration, as many blacks put their faith in a man who could only do limited things within a certain political construct.
Now is not the time to recede into the backdrop of America, as most would implore us. Instead, we must become active at the polls more now than ever in our history in America.
Nowhere is this truth more obvious than in the recent electoral results in Alabama. Due to record-numbers of African American men and women going to the polls, Roy Moore was prevented from filling a Senate seat in a traditional Republican stronghold.
Maintain Coalitions
One thing we learned from the success of the Civil Rights Movement was the importance of building coalitions. The movement was not successful because it was black-only based, but because the leadership reached out to other disaffected groups.
This commonality reached across America and galvanized the goals the leaders sought. We cannot go it alone. External politics has its rewards; we must maintain its advantages. We have built bridges with younger groups such as Black Lives Matter, although generational differences still strain us.
The networks we build must move beyond class, age and gender divisions and must remain vigilant in the era of Trumpism.
Reinvent Segregation
We must build a bridge back to one another. We must return to ‘black-a-nomics’, the segregation-era practice in which blacks relentlessly bought and traded black dollars (made famous by the film Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored).
It’s a return to a version of ‘grassroots politics’ or communal spirit that I am suggesting here.
This recurrent spirit is not too far removed from our ancestral past.
Segregation had its peculiar moments for our people. It’s no secret that our communal spirit – how we treated one another – fared better in separate or segregated conditions then what we are currently seeing.
We had a collective interest, a common destiny that bound us together in ways we have largely become divorced from.
Now, unfortunately, we’ve become strangers in a strange land. We don’t speak, we don’t greet and we are afraid to support one another.
The honorable Thurgood Marshall, perhaps expressing the anti-sentiment to what Baldwin shared, wrote, Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.
Black people in America must – and shall – stay alive!
Staff Writer; W. Eric Croomes
This talented brother is a holistic lifestyle exercise expert and founder and executive coach of Infinite Strategies LLC, a multi-level coaching firm that develops and executes strategies for fitness training, youth achievement and lifestyle management. Eric is an author, fitness professional, holistic life coach and motivational speaker.
In October 2015, Eric released Life’s A Gym: Seven Fitness Principles to Get the Best of Both, which shows readers how to use exercise to attract a feeling of wellness, success and freedom (Infinite Strategies Coaching LLC, 2015) – http://www.infinitestrategiescoaching.com.