From 1992 - We The People a Post Dispatch Community Forum

This piece was part of a 1992 series titled "We the People" local residents gave their views and messages to the 1992 Candidates for President. I had already started an essay when I was approached by Jabari Asim who the worked for the Post, so I modified my piece for the PD Series - Interesting to compare my views of 1992 to the ones 18 years later:

What does true empowerment mean? Also what must a President do to show that he is truly committed to the cause? First, a President must come to understand that true empowerment should mean more than memberships in country clubs. For African Americans, empowerment should mean a fundamental change in the status quo, a change both in the distribution and access to wealth and opportunity in America.
Hopefully, this change would reflect a human rights agenda, not merely a rehash of appeasement policies of the past.

In 1992 many our brothers and sisters live in Third World conditions. A presidential commission should deal directly with the long standing question of reparations to African Americans, and the president must be prepared to carry out such a program. A president who is truly committed to change will also be prepared to make a change in the allocation of federal revenue. Too often, budgetary priority has gone to NASA and the Pentagon for some of their projects i.e. the planned Mars mission or the numerous pork barrel military programs. The military industrial complex must take a bigger budgetary hit, especially since the global challenges are not economic, not military.

Further redistribution must be focused on the billions of tax dollars that never make it to the national coffers because of the myriad of legal loopholes that wealth families and corporations have at their disposal. Empowerment must also occur in politics. Historically, African Americans have been relegated to lower level cabinet posts and shut out of most top level regulatory appointments and white house staff positions e.g. chief counsel or office of management and budget. The ideas that I write about are not new. African Americans from Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, to Louis Farrakhan have spoken or written at length on these and related topics. Unfortunately, these leaders have been labeled “radical” or “extremist”. They were typecast as spewing racism and hate. Worse, many “mainstream” leaders in the African American community chose to distance themselves from those “radical” leaders and their views. That choice however, was not without a price.

When our mainstream leaders decided that it was better to assimilate rather than agitate, to identify with their oppressors instead of their oppressed brothers, the rift in the African American community grew wider. The visceral anger displayed in the streets following the Rodney king verdict and played out in music by rap stars like Ice T is not just a response to an unjust and oppressive system, but more importantly to a civil rights community that the masses believe has grown soft.
There seems to be justification for this anger. For more than 30 years the masses have hear the civil rights community talk of patience, compromise and reconciliation, yet this TV generation sees pictures of change occurring worldwide and the perception continues to grow that the African American leadership is unwilling or unable to produce change here. The brothers and sisters in the streets perceive the African American leadership as too “removed” from the struggle and the day to day stress of being black in America, too “elitist” to care. The growing popularity of Malcolm X among the young is a reflection that they are now rejecting the old school of thought.

Our options are limited as we allow them to be. The African American community must look toward a new era with caution. While Governor Bill Clinton, for instance promises relief for the middle class, little suggests (except for his health care proposal) that a Clinton administration would reach out to those who have been historically disenfranchised. Little evidence suggests that African Americans will play a major policy making role in the next administration. I hope African American leaders remind the next president what change means.