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.
Every community teaches through its symbols. Ours are largely being chosen for us.
A flag, a handshake, a style of dress, a way of greeting a stranger - these are not decoration. They are the compressed instructions a community gives its members about who they are and how to behave. Every durable people has a dense symbolic vocabulary and defends it carefully.
Black Americans have one of the richest symbolic vocabularies in the world. The nod. The dap. The Sunday best. The afro of the sixties and seventies as a deliberate statement. We invented these and then largely stopped curating them.
When a community stops choosing its own symbols, other people choose for it, and they choose for their own reasons. The imagery most widely associated with Black American men in mass media was not selected by Black American men. It was selected by people selling something, and it sells.
The result is a symbolic vocabulary our children absorb before they can evaluate it - one that flatters criminality, disposability and display, and that would be recognised as defamatory if it were applied to any community with an organised defence.
The party's position is that symbols should be chosen deliberately, the way every other self-respecting people chooses them. That means cultivating the symbols of the producer class - the trade, the ledger, the deed, the family, the graduation, the shop with a name over the door - with the same energy the culture currently spends on consumption.
It also means the party carrying its own mark and using it consistently. A movement that will not bother to look like something will not be taken for something.
Because symbols are the compressed instructions a community gives its members about who they are. When a community stops choosing its own, others choose for it, for their own commercial reasons.
The critique is of a political arrangement, not of anyone's sincerity.
An independent party has to be able to cooperate without being absorbed.
Three different things get called betrayal, and confusing them wrecks movements.
Every people that intends to lead maintains institutions that produce leaders.
Societies are steered deliberately. The only question is by whom and toward what.
Survival was the achievement of every previous generation. It cannot be the ambition of this one.
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