It’s Four More Years, So Dry Your Tears

By James ClingmanBlackonomics This may be difficult for some of you to take, but it needs to be said and, more importantly, it needs to be heard and acted upon. I cannot count all of the articles I written over the past 10 years that deal with Black folks’ emotional investment in politics. Just as I thought, on Wednesday after the “most crucial election of our lifetime” Black folks were, once again, shocked and amazed at what took place. They were calling talk shows, whining about the outcome and asking “What are we going to do now?” Well, we should have had a plan for that long before now. Black participation in this game called politics always results in one of two things: Lamenting the fact that our guy lost, or celebrating the fact that our guy won. Beyond the crying, complaining, whining, lamenting and, in some cases tears, our “loss” means absolutely nothing. Beyond the celebrations, glad-handing, ataboys, euphoria, and happy-days-are-here-again rejoicing, our “winning” means nothing. Both scenarios result in either a depressing, almost fatalistic, blue funk kind of despair, or in a temporary state of exhilaration, excitement, and victory -at last! Neither outcome really benefits Black people; we have experienced both and have remained in the same relative position for the past 50 years. When will we learn to apply what our elders taught us? When will we move away from thinking that politics will solve our problems? When will we invest in something that will give us a reasonable return on that investment? Yes, Black people have been “played” yet again. Now many of us will crawl back into our cocoons and hibernate until the next “most crucial election of our time” comes along. We won’t do anything; we won’t change; we won’t even attempt to participate in an economic strategy for empowerment; we will simply say, “Wake me when I can vote again.” The campaign for the Hip-Hop generation was “Vote or Die!” Sounded real good. Got some folks fired up. It even made some young folks go to he polls and vote. Maybe some of them are now thinking, “Man! I voted, and I am still dying.” Maybe P-Diddy, et al, should start a new campaign now. How about “Start you own business (like he did) or die!” Maybe it could be, “Pool your money or die!” Or, maybe even, “Economic empowerment or die!” I wonder what message the hand-wringing, alarmist Black politicians will give us now. Will they finally capitulate to the message of gaining economic empowerment first, and then move on to political empowerment? Will Jesse Jackson and the rest of those who cried so loudly for us to vote and put Bush out of the White House be coming up with a campaign to vote with our dollars? Will Bob Johnson now write another letter to the Black folks in Bush’s cabinet asking them to ask Massa Bush if he would talk to us now on BET? Is he even willing to preempt Comic View to bring George W. on in prime time? We gots to get our party on, you know. Let me be as plain as I can be. We ain’t got no juice in this political game! And we will never have juice until we get our economic act together and until we start leveraging our vote against the benefits we want to receive from either, that’s right, I said “either” party that is willing to reciprocate. Of course, we could also form our own independent party to demonstrate how serious we are. But didn’t they try that in 1972 in Gary, Indiana. Again, we did not listen. Many of the folks we depend upon for information, preachers, radio talk show hosts, and politicians and their operatives, are ignorant and willingly complicit when it comes to misleading Black people on politics. They make the weak and ignorant among us actually believe that the single act of voting will take us to new heights of freedom. Newsflash! It will not! For most of us it will be back to the drawing board, back to the political strategy sessions, and back to whining about what Bush and his cronies are not doing for us. Many of us will return to our pattern of begging our politicians to do the right thing by us. All of this is futile without leverage, without the ability, and the willingness, to reward our friends and punish our enemies. The leverage we must have to accomplish that is found in economic empowerment. My advice is what it has always been: Stop putting all of your hope in politicians and the political process. It’s a huge gamble, and Black folks have no chips in the game. Let’s work together to build up our chips and then get into the game. I direct you to Claud Anderson’s quote in the Harvest Institute Newsletter (Fall 2004). Anderson notes that Black folks are outnumbered 8 to1 by non-Blacks in this country and writes, “When one rabbit is fenced-in with eight hungry hound dogs, how important is the rabbit’s vote on what the hound dogs want for dinner? In a racial context, the only way Blacks can expect to receive benefits from their vote is to first build and control their own economic structure. Then they can use their economic power to back, rent, or buy politicians who will support the interest of Black Americans.” I say, since we are going against hound dogs, we had better at least have enough money to buy them dinner. James E. Clingman, an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati’s African American Studies department, is former editor of the Cincinnati Herald Newspaper and founder of the Greater Cincinnati African American Chamber of Commerce.