It's Hard To Watch Black Unity Die..

I admit that the world is extremely complicated...and yes it may be extremely challenging to the un-savvy brother or sister...but I am honestly worried about black folk.  Recently, I've been watching a group of peers struggle to make sense of institutional racism that is ultimately being perpetrated by black hands.  While it is clear that the major players stand to benefit, the peers only seem to feel ultimately connected to and reverent for the very folk who are seeking to thwart their opportunities at best.

It is a sad sight but I hear Thurgood Marshall's musing in my head as he offered a considerable thought about the unfathomable Clarence Thomas, the then nominee for the Supreme Court.  Brother Marshall offered, "A black snake and a white snake will bite you just the same."  This shining insight is very true in this age where black people seem to be pitted against each other.

Conservatives seem to have more and more "tokens" to pull out of their coin purse...and so do liberals...and everyone else in between.  Everyone except Black people who believe collective causes and collective identities seem to have a bunch of "change" shaking in their pockets.  What it means is that there are quite a few smoke and mirrors keeping all of us from seeing what I might aptly call the "light."

In this day and age, so called black opinions are so diverse that we all become very careful about expounding about what "all black folk" should galvanize around.  But, the reality is that there are a plethora of challenges for our viewing pleasure.  There are issues that we must address particularly as a community of folk who typically collectively end up with the raw deal.

I know, I know...your family is totally fine.  Your friends are totally doing well.  But, I don't know when our exceptional personal experience ever became the collective experience of Black folk.  I think if some of us took a different route to work than we would find that all of us don't live in suburbia or uptownia or loftia...and don't commute into work with Green Tea or Latte in hand.

In fact, I believe that its this kind of exceptionalism that is killing black unity one shot at a time.  I don't know if it's the black quasi-bourgeois who are stabbing it in the back with this "I got mine, you get yours mentality", or the preachers who are shooting it with this anti-black Christian rhetoric, or  black organizational leadership strangling it with this kleptocratic mentality, or maybe its media and black intellectuals poisoning it with poor thoughts of what blackness could be.

If there is ever a need to be black, and to be mobilize around cultural values...I believe the time is now.  Because, we live in a critical time where the stakes are high and the expectations for leadership are too low.  I'm hoping we can take black unity's wounded body to a hospital, apply salve, bandage it up, and then nurse it back to health.