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 is committed to addressing the specific needs of Black American men on a focused basis rather than inside a general agenda.
The Black American Party is committed to addressing the specific needs of Black American men on a specific and focused basis.
Specific and focused is the operative phrase. General agendas do not reach particular problems; they average them away. A program written for everyone arrives designed for no one, and the people whose needs were most distinct are the ones it misses.
Life expectancy. The Black American man has the shortest of any major demographic group in this country. It is a summary statistic containing every other item on this list and it belongs at the top.
Health. Hypertension, diabetes, prostate cancer and stroke arrive earlier and are caught later, in a population with the lowest rate of routine primary care and a deep and historically earned distrust of medical institutions.
Mental health. Depression presenting as anger, post-traumatic stress from ordinary neighborhood life that would be diagnosed instantly in a returning soldier, and a suicide rate among our young men that has been rising while nobody discussed it.
Education. Boys disciplined earlier, suspended more, referred out of the classroom faster, taught by a workforce that contains almost no Black men, and lost to reading somewhere around the fourth grade.
Employment. The last hired and first released, in industries that keep leaving, carrying records that close the licensed trades - the exact position described in the prison reform chapter.
Fatherhood. Family courts that treat him as a payment stream rather than a parent, and a custody presumption he has to litigate his way out of.
Violence. He is the most likely American to be killed by another citizen and the most likely to be killed by an officer, and this party refuses to discuss either fact without the other.
Every item above has been visible in public data for decades. Very few of them have a program attached. That is not because they are hard to see; it is because the Black American man is not a constituency anyone has had to court.
He votes at lower rates than Black American women. He is over-represented in the felony disenfranchisement rolls. He is disproportionately absent from the census, from the survey panel and from the community meeting. A political system optimizes for the people who can remove someone from office, and by that measure he barely exists.
This party intends to make him exist, in the only way that has ever worked: counted, organized, registered, and attached to a bloc that can be lost.
It is not a claim that Black American men have it worse than Black American women. The companion chapter states that agenda with the same seriousness and neither is a subtraction from the other.
Two things can be true, they usually are, and a movement that can only attend to one half of its people at a time is not a movement. It is a faction.
That the specific needs of Black American men must be addressed on a specific and focused basis, because general agendas average particular problems away.
Life expectancy, chronic and late-caught illness, untreated mental health and rising suicide, school discipline and reading loss, employment and records, family court treatment, and violence from both citizens and officers.
Because the Black American man has not been a constituency anyone had to court - lower voting rates, felony disenfranchisement, and absence from the surveys and meetings politics responds to.
No. The companion chapter states that agenda with equal seriousness. A movement that can attend to only one half of its people is a faction.
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.
Every country runs on a set of unexamined assumptions. Seeing several breaks the spell of your own.
The Black American Party is anti-abortion. No population has suffered more disproportionately from this Maafa than ours.
Material and institutional reparations for the descendants of American slavery, secured by Constitutional amendment rather than by a bill.
$10 a month for the private members network, business referral and local organizing.
Become a member →Twelve chapters and 200+ cited lessons. One-time $40, one year of access.
Enroll now →