If a person or a group of people can be misdirected, invariably they can be controlled. I’d wager you could sell anyone who is so affected the Brooklyn Bridge or even the hole in a donut.
Look at how drugs proliferate in inner-city communities, which are mostly inhabited by black and Latino working-class citizens and non-citizens, many of whom are poor and near-poor.
Cigarette smoking and other tobacco uses along with cheap alcoholic beverages, including volumes of beer, are too often more important to many inner-city residents than three wholesome meals a day.
Somewhere along the way, people are sold a bill of goods telling them that what is bad for you is good: “This’ll make you feel good,” or “This is the bomb.” There are shills everywhere, gaming people for however they can profit from it.
According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a shill is “a person employed to decoy or entice others into buying, gambling, etc.”
Some of the best-known and well-liked shills working inner-city communities are the politicos. In black communities, they are local Democratic Party enthusiasts who are deeply involved in church affairs, neighborhood associations, black sororities and fraternities and other social activities.
Many are public school educators and public service workers for state and local government agencies or retirees of same.
Because there is no ongoing political awareness activity, or any activity dared to be envisioned and implemented by black elected officials and aspiring politicians, churches and other black organizations, black politicos – like trained seals – accede to the dictates of white (nationalist) Democratic Party leadership authority. This is extremely harmful because white nationalists only want to maintain the status quo, to retain the current percentage of black votes for Democratic Party candidates.
Blacks are effortlessly misdirected through dependency on those other than themselves. These others have a modus operandi, or an effective way they want to play Democratic Party politics, and it has absolutely nothing to do with black people. That black people in general do not, indeed cannot, see the universality of this evident reality should be mind boggling. But it is not, due to the historical precedent: slavery and its residual slave mentality.
The key to transformation from containment to the politics of access lies initially in retraining those who are now shills for the Democratic Party as community organizers.
President Barack H. Obama is the great exemplar. In his first book, Dreams from My Father, Obama takes us on a 14-chapter trip through his years as an organizer in Chicago. You get it in the first paragraph: “Change won’t come from the top. . . . Change will come from a mobilized grass roots,” Obama wrote. That was back in 1995.
Such extensive training cannot come from lawyers, politicians or others inextricably wedged in political and corporate mire. Recent history again proves that more often than not, those souls suffer indictments, fines, imprisonment and disgrace. Where this unfortunate waste of talent is involved in a community organizing effort, tragically those initiatives are destined to reflect the desires of political and corporate bosses (white nationalists). Black communities that continue to utilize these worn, unworkable models are destined to remain stymied by gentrification, gerrymandering and powerlessness.
Take a look at the Obama example again. The man focused on community organizing while majoring in political science at Columbia University.
Upon graduation, he went to Chicago and got started.
By and large, preachers, teachers, social workers and activists make great students of political and community organizing. They do not make good organizers or teachers of the same without being trained themselves. Unfortunately, black communities have a horrible history of shunning black social scientists and business professionals as strategists and leaders.
Once these former political shills see their real power and respect within the community through training and organizing, the negative status quo will begin to dissolve. People will work together for comprehensive positive social change.
The black vote will never be taken for granted again!
Al_Calloway@Verizon.net
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