Norman Kelley: BLACK POLITICS ARE IN A BLACK HOLE

At this point in time and history, on the 38th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, African Americans have no viable political agenda and economic program or platform to withstand the resurgent phenomenon of white nationalism, an aspect of the conservative movement that has been developing in the country in plain sight for the past four decades. This is due to the decline of effective black political leadership. Since the 1960s, black America has banked its well-being and advancement on being in alliance with what Bayard Rustin called the "coalition which staged the March on Washington." That alliance, however, has netted very little in the past 25 years, since the rise of the New Right to power and influence. The last four decades of American politics have witnessed the rise of conservative politics and the decline of the alliance that staged the March on Washington: "Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups.". . Black America has no future-oriented vision of itself within the context of American reality. Its politics of the past 40 years has come to a halt, and the leaders of those years have offered nothing of programmatic substance. And in the face of the New Right, for the past 25 years, nothing but symbolic posturing has been offered as leadership. If professional and working middle-class African-Americans yearn for solutions to problems and a reasonable level of economic well-being, they are going to have to cast down their own buckets in the clear waters of organizational efficiency, political accountability and self-generated economic mobilization. As of this moment, there seems to be no other way. [MORE] (re-posted)