We Need You

An article I read this week, in discussing the possibility of an egalitarian society, states that “the objective of the massed based elite is to replace the power of one minority with that of another.” Personally, I have witnessed this played out in the emergence of the new black middle-class. This group has began to assert its dominance over poor and working poor blacks, and created a new stratification within the ranks of African Americans. One in which the systems that enabled the more highly educated, more affluent blacks to succeed, have been disbanded through a lack of solidarity between African Americans as a whole. It is very much an “us and them” mentality between these groups. In terms of education, there is a general lack of concern among affluent middle classed blacks, about the plight of poor blacks, specifically those who have little to no access to a quality education. Middle class blacks would be more concerned with their own individual, personal access to material wealth, than giving back to the communities, sustaining the social systems, fighting against injustices for poor blacks, in the same spirit of the Civil Rights movement that made their personal success possible. What this does is to undermine the solidarity that made the emergence of middle-class blacks in America possible, and create division in the pursuit of the facade of the American dream. I say facade because even affluent, highly educated blacks come face to face with the fact that success does not erase, or make invisible the stigma of racial stereotypes or discrimination in a racist society like America. There must be, on the part of all groups and members of society, a collective struggle for equality that would lead to the emergence of a qualitatively new society in all areas including education. As the article that inspired this riff states, we need a “prolonged struggle based on hope and a total vision of a qualitatively new society.”