Marching in a Circle, Going Nowhere: Electing White Liberals Hasn’t Neutralized White Supremacy. Few Political Goals Achieved by Blacks including the Voting Rights Act were Accomplished by Voting
/HOW DID WE GET THE RIGHT TO VOTE? WAS IT BY BEGGING OUR MASTERS? [MORE] To much of the Black votary, whether President Brandon or Kamala Harris will ever deliver any tangible, material benefits or actually economically empower Black people or provide substantive justice to the Black community is beside the point. Claud Anderson explains, “Both White and Black candidates for public office, various political parties, and this nation, all get a free ride with Black voters.”
The rebel Dr. Amos Wilson Amos Wilson asks Black people,
‘Who has control of your food? Who has control of your electricity? Who has control of your water? Of your jobs? Who tells you what to wear when you go to work? Who tells you when to come to work...when to leave...when to go to lunch...how to speak...how to write...how to do this...how to do that...and how are these things taught, and how they are conditioned?"-- It is by reward and punishment. " You do this you get paid; you don't do this you don't get paid; you get a raise, you get docked. What do we have here?’
To live under the power of another people is to be created by that people. To be rewarded or punished by that people is to be created by that people. We are living under them as the result of the exercise of the power of another people over us. Therefore, if we wish to change this situation (i.e., the conditions under which we live), then we must change the power relationships. If we are to prevent ourselves from being created by another people and are to engage in the act of self creation, then we must change the power relations.’
Wilson also explained that the so-called Black bourgeoisie has no independent power on its own. Rather it maintains it status through its direct political and corporate ties to the Democratic party establishment. The “Niggerati” or Jack & Jill Blacks from the Moteasuh Tribe would rather in engage in fantasy discussions, such as talk about reparations and symbolic politics like the removal of statutes, than deal with the nuts and bolts work of economic development, the creation of sustainable independent communities and institutions and providing a real education to Black children that teaches them how to solve their communities problems and defend their group interests, not mere training to serve elite whites, dominate their own people and enhance the system of authority.
Wilson stated,
“This establishment strives strenuously to convince the Black electorate that every conceivable problem which confronts it can be resolved through voting heavily for Black and friendly White politicians. The Black media is ever quick to remind the Black electorate of the historical struggles necessary to achieve their right to vote. It indicts the community for its electoral apathy and seeks to evoke guilt feelings in those who do not participate in the electoral process — making such ritualistic participation emblematic of democracy and first-class citizenship. This is of special interest when it is realized that very few, if any, of the major political, economic and social goals achieved by Black America, including the Voting Rights Act, were accomplished through Black voting prowess. The ballot box has been a relatively impotent weapon in the achievement of major victories by the Black community. Suddenly vigorous protest and direct-action legal suits and extralegal processes such as boycotts, sit-ins, and the like, which were used so effectively by the community to achieve its sociopolitical ends and to fight injustice and oppression, have fallen far behind the election of Black politicians to achieve the same ends. The mystery of the Black media establishment's complicity with this type of political fraud — the electing of politicians to a bankrupt political system dominated by the ruling corporate elite whose values and aims are inimical to the cause of Black liberation; the election of Black politicians who are but pawns of the White Democratic Party machine and who seek to have the Black community identify its communal interest with the politicians' personal interests; the election of politicians who in no way are interested in developing a program for the economic emancipation and empowerment of the Black community, and who are not committed to the final overthrow of White supremacy, becomes clear when we recognize their bourgeois interests.” [MORE]