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 that treats intelligence as suspect has agreed to lose.
Somewhere in the Black American Zeitgeist, academic seriousness became socially expensive for young people. A child who reads is performing someone else's identity; a child who excels is accused of not being authentically Black. There is no more efficient way to disarm a people than to persuade them that their own minds are a betrayal.
No one imposed this. We police it ourselves, which makes it both worse and entirely within our power to stop.
The history is understandable. Literacy was criminalised, then segregated, then underfunded, and a community learns to devalue what it has been punished for pursuing. That explains the origin and settles nothing about the present.
We are not in that era. The cost of maintaining the attitude now falls entirely on our own children.
Make excellence the status good. If anything becomes genuinely popular among Black American youth, competition for it goes to extremes - that energy is the community's greatest renewable resource and it currently points at consumption. Point it at mastery.
Abacus mind math from before kindergarten, coding in grammar school, STEM throughout, as Article VII sets out. Not because Black children need remediation - they do not - but because a community that intends to own things needs people who can build them.
That treating academic seriousness as inauthentic is self-imposed, historically explicable but currently indefensible, and that the cost falls entirely on Black American children.
By making excellence the status good, and through Article VII's education programme: abacus mind math before kindergarten, coding in grammar school and STEM throughout.
Survival was the achievement of every previous generation. It cannot be the ambition of this one.
Analogies to other groups' experiences break down, and the breakage matters politically.
The hardest chapter to write, and the one most needed.
Emotional intensity is a strength in culture and a liability in politics.
Every people needs a protective class. Ours exists and is largely pointed away from us.
Respect and solidarity across the diaspora - and clear eyes about where Black American power is actually exercised.
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