I love engaging in the various circles of discussion UI is creating among our people.
However, I am a bit mystified when I hear people misconstruing our words of being a self-sustaining and self-sufficient community of people for being segregationist.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Please stop allowing outside interest and people who don’t give a damn about you an opportunity to get your ear, sway your thinking and negatively influencing you into thinking talk about black unity, black consolidation of economic and political power means segregation. They are merely trying to distract you and many of us are falling for it.
The Black Community Doesn’t Need To Be Segregated, but Self-Sufficient
Therefore, in an interest to be clear, let’s talk about why being self-sufficient is critical for our future and why it doesn’t mean we hate white people, Asian people or any other people on the planet. This isn’t about NOT engaging others, but ENGAGING OURSELVES first.
1. Dignity
How can a people have pride in themselves, their future and their people if you cannot take care of yourselves? You must be in a position to take care of your weak, meager, ill informed, poor and elderly. If you don’t, then you are subject to the whims of any one and anything that has an offering remotely close to a better situation.
Dignity comes from doing just those things and they are not going to happen if we don’t come together first. This isn’t about coming together to hurt other people, but to help ourselves. Have some pride in your community and let’s come together to rebuild the pride and dignity we have had before we were torn apart.
2. Economic Advancement
There is no doubt in the age of capitalism, money matters. Therefore, any plan for that black community that doesn’t include economic advancement is shortsighted to say the very least. With just about a Trillion Dollars in spending power, the black community has more than enough money to take care of and advance ourselves. The only question is what is it going to take for us to start spending money where we lay our heads with people that live in the community with us?
Just know this will provide the jobs, opportunity, tax money, and help we need to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Just doing this will put us in a position to start properly, from a firm base, start to engage others outside of the community, but it is all a pipe dream if we don’t understand why it is critical we circulate our money among our own people. The Jewish dollar circulates 18 times among their community before it leaves. The black community’s dollar don’t circulate once. If it wasn’t critical, why are the Jews insistent on this being the process in their community?
We need leadership on every block where some unity is required to improve the community.