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 political attention is confined to a narrow band of subjects, and the confinement is not accidental.
There is an unwritten list of issues on which Black American opinion is solicited: policing, civil rights, education funding, and discrimination. Outside that list - monetary policy, trade, foreign affairs, infrastructure, industrial strategy, technology regulation - our views are neither sought nor expected.
A community consulted only about its own grievances has been assigned the role of petitioner. Everyone else gets to have opinions about how the country is run.
Partly because it is convenient for others. Mostly because we accept it. The Black American Zeitgeist contains a ceiling above which a Black person is not expected to concern himself, and most of us observe it without noticing.
Break the ceiling and the community's political weight applies to the decisions that actually determine its economic future - which are almost all made above the line.
A Black American position on the currency. On trade agreements and which industries they hollow out. On military deployment, given who is disproportionately deployed. On antitrust, on energy, on agricultural policy, on the tax treatment of inherited assets.
This platform takes positions across that range deliberately, because a party that speaks only about grievance is confirming the ceiling it claims to oppose.
That Black American opinion is solicited only on policing, civil rights, education funding and discrimination, while monetary policy, trade, foreign affairs and industrial strategy are treated as somebody else's subjects.
Because the decisions that determine the community's economic future are made above that line, and a party speaking only about grievance confirms the ceiling it claims to oppose.
Conserving Black America is not the same as joining the conservative movement.
Progress has to be measured in assets, not in acknowledgement.
Both parties tell a version of this history that flatters them. Neither version is a reason to hand over your vote.
The change this platform proposes does not require a march. It requires several million people doing ordinary things differently.
The critique is of a political arrangement, not of anyone's sincerity.
An independent party has to be able to cooperate without being absorbed.
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