Do you really think Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA have a clue, or care, about black economic prosperity?
There are some hard facts.
Your greatest victory would be ridding your inner city neighborhoods of major gangs.
They are holding back your communities from any hope of gaining a secure economic foothold in society.
To accomplish this awesome task, you need help. Think about how the New York mafia stranglehold was broken. It took the passage of a federal RICO law; and then the use of that law to prosecute and convict significant numbers of mafia members and leaders, for running “continuing criminal enterprises.”
If you want to stage meaningful efforts, there you have it. You want RICO applied to major gangs in American cities. And you want it now.
Of course, you’ll have to give up the strategy of blaming the police as an overall strategy for explaining your troubles.
Every ethnic and religious group in the history of the world has two common denominators. A story about oppression, and a desire to gain a firm economic foothold in society.
Every oppression story contains truth, and it’s also embellished, in the sense that it’s sold long after its most violent period is past. The story can be useful at times, but it doesn’t carry the necessary freight to accomplish economic goals. Far from it. It can have negative blowback. It can turn into widespread “blame the oppressor”1 as a device to force economic progress. Which, at the root, is counter-productive. It doesn’t work.
You have more pressing problems. Gangs. Drugs. Black-on-black crime. Absent fathers. Too many people living on welfare—-which was designed as a palliative to pacify and hold down the population. It has worked far too well.
Forget about tapping government money as a main source for boot-strapping your communities into long-term economic prosperity. Ditto for charity doled out by the rich. These sources don’t make a black economy succeed, long-term. In the end, they drain money and resources away from that struggling economy.
Here’s a recent report you should be interested in. During the COVID lockdowns, 440,000 black-owned American businesses have shut their doors, and most of them won’t come back. That’s a missile attack aimed at the heart of progress. Consider the blood, sweat, and tears the business owners have poured into keeping their enterprises alive for years and years. And it’s all going up in smoke now.
On a related note, those black groups who are dead set on promoting socialism (or outright anarchy) as an economic solution are not your friends. Find out where their funding is coming from. Take a deep dive into the background and activity and agenda of George Soros.
Do you really think Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA have a clue, or care, about black economic prosperity? They’re running your future into the ground.
If you don’t want widespread black economic prosperity—-via free enterprise—-you’re going against the history of how every ethnic and religious group has achieved stability.
Once an ethnic group gains a strong and permanent economic foothold, other benefits follow. For example, relations with police automatically improve. And where they don’t, you could exert the kind of effective pressure that deals from a position of strength.
Teaching the young to “stand up for their values” turns into an empty suit in about five minutes, unless there is a pathway to some kind of economic prosperity. It becomes “blame the oppressor,” which is ultimately a dead end.
Where pro athletes are going with their protests will not be productive. They kept their mouths shut when NBA relations with China suddenly wobbled. They protected their shoe contracts, and turned a blind eye to what are euphemistically called “human rights abuses” in the People’s Republic. And now, they want…what? They know they collectively have the power to destroy their leagues, but is that an advantage?
If these athletes re-routed the money they give to “black community improvement,” and instead, with competent advice, and with major discipline, invested in black-business start-ups, and existing black businesses that have a chance of success, the whole framework of progress would be shifted.
Face it, the athletes are getting incompetent advice. And, in the pomp and circumstance of “social justice,” they’re being enabled by white liberals, who don’t really care about authentic black progress at all. Malcom X figured this out 60 years ago. The forgetting that then set in was no accident. The so-called liberal establishment is morally bankrupt. The men behind the curtain who control the establishment are intent on using the black community to sow chaos and destruction across the landscape, and lead the nation into a new normal that no one in his right mind wants. That is its own story for another time.
I will say this. The current defamation campaign and assault against capitalism and free enterprise will have no greater negative impact anywhere than in the black community. It will undermine every effort launched toward finding a better life. So why are black groups leading that campaign? Obviously, somebody wants destruction.
Meanwhile, if you have an open channel to LeBron James, ask him when he’s going to demand immediate RICO prosecution of inner-city gangs…
Once he recovers from the shock of the question, tell him a winning RICO case would earn him the championship ring of a lifetime.
- Instead of “blame the oppressor,” first engage in “find the most serious oppressions.” Then find the oppressors, expose them, and demand change. I’m talking, for starters, about environmental toxicity in black (and Latino) communities. See, for example: Center for American Progress, “5 Things to Know About Communities of Color and Environmental Justice,” April 25, 2016.
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