The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
A community serious about its children cannot leave them in other people's systems.
Black American children are over-represented in foster care and wait longer for permanent placement than children of other backgrounds. Every one of those years is a child growing up without the household this platform argues is foundational.
This is a place where the community can act directly and immediately, without waiting for legislation or anyone's permission.
Informal kinship care - a grandmother, an aunt, a cousin taking a child in - is a long-standing strength of Black American family life and deserves recognition and support rather than suspicion from agencies. Formal adoption by Black American families should be actively encouraged and the barriers to it examined, because several of them are financial and financial barriers can be addressed.
A child raised inside the community keeps the community's culture, language and expectations. That is not a small thing to preserve.
Recruitment and support of Black American adoptive and foster families. Legal and financial assistance for kinship carers who are already doing the work informally. Scrutiny of agency practices that screen out households on grounds of income or housing that have little to do with whether a child would be loved and raised well.
Several of the obstacles to Black American families adopting are simply money: home study fees, legal costs, the income thresholds agencies apply, and the requirement for a spare bedroom a family may not have. None of those measures whether a child would be well raised, and all of them are addressable with capital rather than with legislation.
This is exactly what a community fund is for, and exactly the sort of thing a members network could underwrite long before any political programme is enacted. A community that can raise money for a funeral can raise it for an adoption.
A party that argues the household is the first institution, and then says nothing about the children currently growing up without one, is not serious. Article VI's commitment to family strength has to include the families that are assembled rather than born.
Every child placed inside the community is a child who keeps its language, its expectations and its people. That is a generational asset, and it is won one household at a time.
That Black American children are over-represented in foster care and wait longer for placement, and the community should act directly - recruiting and supporting Black American adoptive families and formalising the kinship care already happening informally.
Black American political attention is confined to a narrow band of subjects, and the confinement is not accidental.
Not conservative. Not progressive. American - and specific about what that means.
Conserving Black America is not the same as joining the conservative movement.
Progress has to be measured in assets, not in acknowledgement.
Both parties tell a version of this history that flatters them. Neither version is a reason to hand over your vote.
The change this platform proposes does not require a march. It requires several million people doing ordinary things differently.
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