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.
The party seeks hate crime legislation covering those who produce and disseminate destructive stereotypes of Black Americans and our culture.
The Black American Party seeks hate crime legislation for all who have been or are involved in the production and dissemination of negative tropes and destructive stereotypes of Black Americans and Black American culture.
The companion chapter documents the harm. This one states what the party intends to do about it: seek the protection of law, which is what every other defamed people in this country has eventually obtained and which Black Americans have never been granted.
The principle that a group can be defamed, and that the defamation is a public harm rather than a private insult, is not new and is not exotic. Other communities in this country built permanent, funded, professional institutions to monitor and to answer material that defames them, and those institutions have real influence over what broadcasters, studios, advertisers and platforms will carry.
Group defamation law itself has American precedent. State group libel statutes existed and were upheld in the middle of the twentieth century, and many democracies comparable to ours maintain such provisions today.
Black Americans are, on any honest reading, the most systematically defamed population in American history, and are one of the few without a corresponding institution or protection. The party's demand is not for a special privilege. It is for parity.
This party will not pretend the demand is simple. The First Amendment is expansive, current doctrine gives group defamation very little room, and any statute reaching the production of stereotyped content would face immediate and serious challenge. A party that promised its members a law against this by next session would be lying to them.
We state the objective anyway, because objectives that require constitutional argument are how constitutional argument gets made. Every protection this community now has was impossible until a movement made it necessary.
And we state the risk plainly, because it is our own. A power to punish defamatory portrayal is a power that will be held by whoever is in office, and this community has more experience than most with instruments that were sold as protection and used as suppression. Any mechanism this party eventually supports must be one we would accept in the hands of an administration hostile to us, because eventually it will be.
Nearly everything effective here does not require a statute, and this party intends to do it now.
Build the institution - a permanent, funded Black American anti-defamation body that monitors, documents and answers, with the standing to be called before a portrayal airs rather than after.
Use commercial pressure, which is lawful, fast and effective. Advertisers are responsive to organized constituencies and this is one of the few levers a bloc can pull without anybody's permission.
Use existing law where it already reaches - individual defamation, harassment, and the civil rights statutes already on the books.
And own the distribution. The platform's chapter on entertainment argues that the decisive power is the power to greenlight. A community that owns studios, catalogues, networks and platforms does not have to petition anyone about how it is portrayed. That remedy needs no legislature, and it is the one this party is building toward.
No statutory language, no definition of a covered trope, no enforcement body and no penalty structure has been adopted. This chapter states an objective and a set of actions available today. It does not present a bill, and it does not claim the constitutional question has been solved.
Hate crime legislation covering those involved in producing and disseminating negative tropes and destructive stereotypes of Black Americans and Black American culture.
No. State group libel statutes existed and were upheld in the mid-twentieth century, other communities maintain powerful anti-defamation institutions, and many comparable democracies retain such provisions.
Yes, explicitly. Current doctrine gives group defamation very little room and any such statute would face serious challenge. The party states the objective without promising an easy law.
That a power to punish defamatory portrayal would be held by whoever is in office. Any mechanism must be acceptable in the hands of an administration hostile to Black Americans.
A permanent funded Black American anti-defamation institution, organized commercial pressure on advertisers, use of existing defamation and civil rights law, and ownership of distribution and greenlight power.
There is a difference between art that depicts a community's problems and an industry that manufactures them for sale.
We are the most valuable talent pool in global entertainment and among the least represented in its ownership.
The most commercially successful degrading portrayal of Black Americans in history is one we perform ourselves.
The same pattern as entertainment, with shorter careers and worse advice.
A community that treats intelligence as suspect has agreed to lose.
The information a community receives determines the politics it produces.
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