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 deliberate defamation of Black American culture and character by legacy media since minstrelsy is a social crisis, not a grievance.
The Black American Party recognizes the immediate social crisis caused by the deliberate defamation of Black American culture, and by the misrepresentation of the morality and character of Black Americans carried out by legacy media since the times of minstrelsy.
Deliberate is the word to hold onto. This chapter is not describing a cultural drift or an unfortunate pattern of coverage. It is describing a product, manufactured on purpose, sold for money, continuously, for more than a century and a half.
It begins with the minstrel show, which was for decades the most popular form of entertainment in the United States. Its entire commercial proposition was the Black American rendered as lazy, dishonest, comic, hypersexual and stupid - performed by white men in cork, then, once the form was established, by Black performers who had no other stage.
It continues through the reconstruction-era press, through the film that revived a terror organization and was screened at the White House, through half a century in which no Black American appeared on a screen except as a servant or a threat, through the news conventions that supply a mugshot for one accused man and a graduation photograph for another, and into a streaming and social economy that has automated the whole apparatus and made it faster.
The technology changed at every stage. The product never did.
It is not hurt feelings and this party will not let it be filed as such. The character a country believes a people to have is the character its institutions act on.
It sets what a jury believes before the evidence is heard. It sets what a landlord assumes, what a loan officer assumes, what a hiring manager assumes, what an emergency room believes about a woman's pain, and what a teacher decides about a seven-year-old on the first day of school. It sets the political ceiling on what can be done to us without cost - because a population widely believed to be criminal, idle and immoral can be policed, incarcerated and disinvested from while the public regards it as prudence.
Every economic mechanism this platform proposes has to operate through people whose expectations were installed by this material. That is why the chapter sits here rather than in a section about culture.
Honesty requires this, and it is treated at length in the platform's chapters on entertainment and the minstrel show that never ended. A substantial share of the most degrading material currently in circulation is performed by Black Americans.
But the argument is about who signs, who distributes, who owns the catalogue and who selects which of the many things our people make gets a marketing budget. Our community produces gospel and jazz and scholarship and engineering and enormous quantities of ordinary decency. Somebody decides which of it is amplified to a global audience, and it has almost never been us.
The remedy is therefore ownership before it is complaint, which is the argument this entire platform makes about everything.
That the deliberate defamation of Black American culture and the misrepresentation of Black American character by legacy media since minstrelsy constitutes an immediate social crisis.
Because it has been a manufactured, sold product - beginning with the minstrel show, America's most popular entertainment form for decades - rather than a drift in coverage.
It sets what juries, landlords, loan officers, hiring managers, emergency rooms and teachers assume, and it sets the political ceiling on what can be done to Black Americans without public cost.
Yes. It states plainly that much degrading material is performed by Black Americans, and argues the decisive question is who signs, distributes, owns the catalogue and chooses what gets amplified.
The party supports legislation mandating DNA paternity testing at every birth, before any father is named on a birth certificate.
There is a deliberate campaign to divide the sexes. The party rejects it, and states what it asks of Black American men.
The same campaign, the other half. What this party asks of Black American women, stated with the same directness and no more.
The party is committed to addressing the specific needs of Black American men on a focused basis rather than inside a general agenda.
The party is committed to addressing the specific needs of Black American women on a focused basis rather than inside a general agenda.
The statement is a fact. The organization has political and financial interests disconnected from the political interests of Black Americans.
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