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.
There is a difference between art that depicts a community's problems and an industry that manufactures them for sale.
Cultural violence is the deliberate, funded projection of degrading imagery into a community, at scale, over generations, by parties who profit from it and do not live with the consequences. It is not the same as a hard film about hard lives, and the distinction matters: one is art, the other is an extraction industry with a soundtrack.
The test is who decides and who profits. A community telling its own difficult story is culture. An outside industry commissioning that story at volume, because a specific version of it sells, is something else.
The minstrel show was the most popular entertainment form in America after Reconstruction, and its function was to make Black Americans comprehensible as buffoons. Blaxploitation updated the wardrobe. Gangsta rap updated it again and added the crucial innovation of getting us to perform it ourselves and call it authenticity.
The through-line is not a conspiracy. It is a market. Each era discovered that a particular degrading image of Black Americans was extremely profitable, and each era supplied it.
Article IX of the platform commits the party to confronting the media's mischaracterisation of the Black American community. In practice that means an organised, permanent, professional defamation response - the thing nearly every other community in America has and we do not.
It also means ownership, because the fastest way to change what gets commissioned is to be the one commissioning. And it means telling the truth about our own participation: the industry supplies the demand, but some of us have been very well paid to perform the supply.
The deliberate, funded projection of degrading imagery into the community at scale by parties who profit from it - distinguished from art about difficult subjects by who decides and who profits.
A permanent, professional defamation response, ownership of the studios and labels that commission the work, and honesty about Black American participation in supplying it.
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.
Every country runs on a set of unexamined assumptions. Seeing several breaks the spell of your own.
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