Political Jujitsu

A politically conscious participant on BlackPlanet.com, TigressEyes wrote: We are apathetic, reactionary, disorganized and envious of one another. With the dissolution of segregation, greater divides were created among us where we`ve fed into the myth of "middle class" and the belief of community strife being "their problem".

Is the Civil Rights Movement dead? Hmmm...when did it begin? Yes, things happened. King was the head figure of demonstrations and sit-ins. Yes, Rosa rode that bus and things happened from there. Yes, Sharpton and others marched and protested during the past inauguration. But, where`s the movement? A movement would mean that the majority is on the same page and that ain`t the case. So many black folk look at themselves as different and being more affluent than before, but how has stuff changed much? Oh yeah, we can afford to spend and consume more, right?

In concurrence, I responded thus:

I agree with a lot of the things that you have said. It is sad that only a few people like you get to see the facts for what they are. Be that as it may, let me also add to what you have said regarding the movement. The movement had been thriving right from the first moment the slaves were put on the plantation. They constantly sought to be free. In the midst of the harshest conditions, they survived because they never wavered in their belief for eventual freedom. Children were taught good cultural values. Family structures were kept as intact as they could even though some family members could be sold at any time. Elders behaved like elders and never abdicated their roles as family luminaries.

When opportunity offered, blacks worked very hard and were very enterprising. Blacks realized that they had to work for their survival otherwise they would perish. When they established thriving economic centers, jealousy whites rode in town to raze everything to the ground. That never deterred the blacks. With even more vigor, they would rebuild everything right from the ashes. That was the civil rights movement of self-dependence, until Martin Luther King and his hordes of marchers stormed into town.

King never had a clearly articulated agenda. He preached the need for blacks to find acceptance by whites even if it meant abandoning values that had helped blacks endure the bitter cruelties of antebellum and post-bellum America. By preaching the gospel of integration at any cost, King and his supporters basically killed the civil rights movement. In an essay on my site, I try to prove that the civil rights movement predates Martin Luther King by hundreds of years.

What is needed to revive the movement is a total repudiation of King's poorly conceived integration ideas. Dr King had a message that did not make any political sense and yet we latched onto it like it was from Holy Writ. Instead of extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency, he preached the misguided gospel of being accepted by whites. Whites do not even accept other whites and what made him think that they would suddenly accept blacks after not doing so in the past 400 solid and torrid years?

Integration is based on a notion of fitting onto a nebulously defined American fabric. Such a fabric does not exits. America is a loose patchwork of an eclectic collection of ethnicities each with its own set of values and mores. Simply put, we were being asked to embrace a phantom. I repeat again: There is no such thing as an American fabric. Only blacks have abandoned their values and, without surprise, only blacks are wallowing at the bottom of humanity dreaming about being judged by the content of their character. Look at how other ethnic groups have stuck together and prospered; the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Phillipinos, you name it. They know they will never be looked upon as equal no matter how hard they try. To succeed, they have accepted that there is no such thing as ethnic equality in America. We blacks need to understand that America has its foundations deeply rooted in the inequality of men. If these tenets are undermined, this nation would collapse quicker than a castle of sand.

Blacks need to retrace their footsteps back to an era in which they had their own businesses, ran their own schools et cetera. With the hefty buying power blacks have, they could do better than some of the richest nations in the world. They could open black-owned banks and what-have-you. Instead of our best athletes going to white universities like Notre Dame, FSU were they bring in a lot of money to finance academic programs for which the inordinate majority of the beneficiaries are white students, blacks athletes should be made to understand the need to go to black universities. The NBA and NFL will come knocking at the doors of black universities. I stress the monetary benefits black athletes garner for white schools because I feel so passionate about it. By stressing the need to integrate schools like Mississippi University, the citadel of the unrepentant proponents of the confederacy, Dr King inadvertently helped create a modern-day plantation as well as a circus in which the gladiators grappling at each other throats are blacks while the cheering hordes are white.

Without black athletes, all the major universities that thrive on big contracts from NBC, ABC et cetera would crumble. Black athletes are being used like slaves to help these schools get multimillion-dollar television contracts. In the name of integration, black athletes have been herded into the pens of white academic institutes. They bring in money via broadcasting rights for media like CBS and ABC. The money is funneled to libraries and other academic projects that benefit a majority of white students. Black athletes are made to believe that they are untouchables; they are made to believe they are holy cows until they run out of eligibility without graduating or graduating with degrees in basket-weaving and render them unemployable. It is a fact and, as any college athlete knows it is the truth. Facts never lie.

The clever whites in academia have really milked King's integration ideas. While using black athletes to make money, universities are not as enthusiastic about black students. JEB Bush has been trying to roll back the integration of Florida universities. Instead of fighting him, I would say let him have his way. All the black athletes that have made Florida's whites universities football powerhouses would also lose the black athletes. Let us see how good a coach Steve Spurrier is, let the world see how much of a fatherly coach Bobby Bowden is and how the University of Miami will thrive without black athletes. It is called political jujitsu and this approach alone is enough to politically castrate Ward Connely, Rush Limbaugh, G. W. Bush, Trent Lott and all the confederate politicians. Jesse Jackson should not organize demonstrations against JEB Bush's ideas. He should simply tell blacks to support our own.

But Jesse comes from the Martin Luther King school of misguided social, political, economic and cultural policy. Like Martin Luther King, he is too naive to understand it and too beholden to the white economic establishment to want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for his political noise.



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