Thinking about the future

I was reading something the other day that had an Eskimo proverb "yesterday is ashes. Tomorrow is wood. The flame burns brightly only today."

I found myself quoting this proverb several times over the weekend. I was attending the graduation of my niece from Dental School and this was an occasion for her parents, family and friends to reflect back on their and her life. This frequently resulted in comments like "where did all the time go?"

Another cultural tradition that has the observation made by the Eskimo proverb as a central tenet of their practice is the Zen tradition. Their admonition to live in the moment is an acknowledgment that all we have is this second but it too slips away too fast.

My mother died last week. This is the epitome of the need for being present in ones life. The separation of the physical from the spiritual in the life of the deceased and in the lives of those who loved them is irreconcilable, immediate and emotionally intense. It is in death (particularly the death of a parent or child) that men are granted the right to cry in public without being considered weak. I cried. I loved my mother and grieve her passing. But I truly believe that today and every other day should be dedicated to a celebration of life, the life of the deceased, the life of the celebrant and the only part of life that we can truly experience, the now.




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I have seen the future . . . it is the past

The direction this country is going in has a long trajectory with a long arc and it bends towards justice. The story of the impending collapse of the American capitalist historical project is one that is written with blood, sweat and tears. A look around the dustbin of the economy will reveal much that has been hidden and much that has been revealed yet not recognized. For starters there is the new found poverty of the nation. Entering into an economic downturn the likes of which has not been seen since the Great Depression. This time war will not save us because we have been and are already at war. The production of armaments offers no salvation because the primary means of production have been outsourced.

We face a world that has changed much for many of us but has remained the same for most of us. The idea of community economic development emerged as a response to the American political economy that had marginalized and disadvantaged people of African descent along with other non-European residents of the country. This process extends back to the arrival of the first indentured Africans in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 and the establishment of perpetual Black chattel slavery in 1664 in Maryland. Onward to Jim Crow laws and sharecropping the economic debasement and disenfranchisement of Blacks continued unabated until the human rights movement know popularly as the Civil Rights Movement. While attenuated even then the location of Blacks in the political economy remained firmly and securely on the bottom. This was to continue unheralded and mostly ignored by Whites into the 1970s,

By the time the American African Human Rights movement had been sidetracked and misdirected into the American Civil Rights movement the social environment was rich with expectations that couldn't be met with the half-hearted attempts to pacify and co-opt the Black leadership. The youth were not connected or rewarded by the pacification strategy and bubling up from this set of circumstances was the demand for "Black Power."

This contemporary desire for self-reliance and demand for self-determination was manifest through a number of politicial and social structures and philosophies. One that emerged was 'community economic development" This attempt at creating parallel economic structures reflected a similar strategy that harkened as far back as the presence of people of African descent in the American colonies on. Dr. W.E. B. DuBois spoke of it as "double consciousness." Many early attempts at alternate institution building were limited to social and professional organizations, e.g., Prince Hall Masons, National Bar Association, etc. Early attempts to create alternate economic institutions have include mutual aid societies, burial societies, Booker T. Washington's support of the National Negro Business League and the efforts of the Washington admirer, Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Universal Negro Improvement Association  (UNIA), as well as the Garveyite influenced, Nation of Islam.

The federal agency, Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), took notice of the emerging strategy as it took shape in the Hough neighborhood of Cleveland under the leadership of DeForrest Brown. The strategies and institutions were the efforts of economically marginalized and socially isolated Black communities without access to the financial or social capital of Main Street America to pull themselves us by their bootstraps. This initiative in the economic area was also occurring in the social and politcal areas as well. 

Long story short (I have been working on - and off- this post for a month) the strategies that were identified and developed or incorporated as a hedge against the hegemonic forces of institutaionalized White Supremacy that kept Blacks firmly secured to the bottom of the American political economy have been more widely applied as social practice and public policy as capitalism has gone global and the significance of being white is decreasing with declining returns. What does this mean? Yet to be seen. It may portend an alliance based on class interests or it may result in increasingly harsh and shrill racial acrimony. We will be the judge and jury, plantiff and defendant.




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