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.
Black American culture is the most influential cultural force America has produced, and we capture almost none of its value.
Blues, jazz, gospel, rock and roll, soul, funk, house, hip-hop. American vernacular English. The dominant idiom of American sport, dance, comedy and style. Strip Black American culture out of American culture and what remains is not America; it is a regional European offshoot.
This is not a grievance. It is an inventory of assets, and it should be read as one.
The pattern repeats with each form. Black Americans originate it, the ownership of its distribution sits elsewhere, and the economic return follows the ownership rather than the origination. We have been the research and development department of American culture for a century while someone else held the patents.
The correction is not to stop creating. It is to own the catalogue, the label, the platform and the venue - to move from talent to proprietor. That is the producer-class argument applied to the one industry where Black American dominance is not in question.
Whatever a community celebrates, its children will pursue. That makes popular culture the most powerful curriculum any people has, and the only one most children complete. A culture that celebrates acquisition produces acquirers; one that celebrates establishment produces institutions.
So the argument about what our music glorifies is not a matter of taste. It is a question about what we are teaching, at scale, to everyone we have.
Defending Black American culture from misrepresentation is necessary and insufficient. The durable answer is ownership: Black-owned studios, labels, streaming catalogues, publishers and venues, so that the portrayal and the profit are both decided inside the community.
You cannot complain your way to editorial control. You can buy it.
That Black American culture is the community's largest under-monetised asset. The priority is ownership of the distribution - studios, labels, catalogues, platforms and venues - rather than only defending the culture from misrepresentation.
Because influence without ownership returns nothing. Black Americans have originated American popular culture for a century while the ownership of its distribution, and therefore its profit, sat elsewhere.
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.
Every technological wave so far has been something done to this community. The next one does not have to be.
Our children are not less capable. The infrastructure and the curriculum are less present.
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