From time to time, there's a can I like to kick around. It's an old can. It has no label, but I like to think, at times, that it was once filled with an exotic food, but it could have, just as well, been filled with nothing more exciting, nothing more valuable, than what it often appears to be--a simple can of beans.I've kicked it around here. I kicked it around in the comment section of the last blog entry. But alas, when no one stepped forward to kick the can with me, I was, frankly, a bit disappointed, but still determined to kick the can.
Although without a label, the can is still a shiny one, with promises of all sorts of interesting things inside.
That disappointment led to this blog entry. The can, notwithstanding its promising shiny surface, can still be ignored, but if you work your way through the several entries to follow, you'll have to, at least, pick the can up, and handle it from top to bottom, even if you decide, finally, that you don't wish to give it a kick.
But I hope you will.
This is my opening remark, a preface of a sort, to fulfill a promise I made a while back to take a closer look at what's needed to create and maintain a viable black economy.
That notion is the can I've kicked around for years. It started when I found a small book, actually a booklet, that appeared to be self-published. The title, as best I can recollect, is: "Don't Blame the White Man!"
Small though it was, the booklet was, nevertheless, ambitious in its sweep: It proposed to outline an economic strategy--nothing short of an economic recovery plan for the black community. Before integration, blacks used to own a fair number of small black businesses. Don't misunderstand me: Blacks are still small-business owners, and entrepreneurs--I'm not suggesting that we're not--but that integration took a great deal of steam out of that economic engine. One of the authors, I recall, was a registered nurse. I don't remember the occupation of the book's co-author, but he was, I believe, an accomplished professional, as well, but in an unrelated field.
Several regulars to my blog have hinted at the possibility of developing a black economy, and a couple of them have gone so far as to trace the outline of it:
"I would rather see a secret society of Black people go somewhere to meet and agree to become the talented tenth that is honestly needed....I would rather see the money that is going to be spent to go march in D.C. be pooled into an economic tool for our benefit....[I]t makes more sense to be actively engaged in pooling resources to be in the position of doing more for ourselves." msladydeborah
On several occasion, Greg L has, too, weighed in on this economic possibility. It's one of his focal points, if I might make so bold as to summarize the attention he's given to this. His following statement encapsulates this, although it may not capture Greg's complete thoughts around the subject:
"I believe that the only pragmatic choice available to our people is to actually develop our communities socially, politically and economically on our own. We have to fix what ails us and rightly or wrongly, no one is going to do it except that it be us. I also believe that after having done that, a level of confidence in our own competence would be such that we really wouldn't need to bother with seeking much from those who aren't inclined to give us anything anyway and if for some chance they did give us something, we would have developed the capacity to maximize the use of it.
"So in my mind, the central goal we need to pursue is power and the most direct path to getting it lies in political and economic control of our backyard. It's the last place that we generally look, but I'm convinced that any group of black people who were successful at executing on any initiative even making a small dent in some of our challenges would have power out of proportion to their numbers. I'm not suggesting this is easy nor will it be something that's even accomplished in your lifetime or mine, but it must be done if we are to survive and thrive."
I like the passion of both, Greg L, and msladydeborah. If I could bottle that passion and give it away, or just release it into the atmosphere as one would a weaponized contagion, this blog entry would be unnecessary, and the previous remarks redundant.
This series, then, will not treat the subject exhaustively: That would take a sizable set of tomes just to explore all the intricacies, and complexities that define the problem, and a research staff of hundreds to examine every course of action that might show a measure of promise.
So, by necessity, these blog entries will not be comprehensive. What I hope they will be is a blueprint, and a sketchy one at that, of one way, out of potentially thousands, that will help us conceptualize the challenge--that is, what resources would be required to establish and maintain a black economy, one, hopefully, only tangentially connected to the larger economy, but existing within it as a small, but powerful enclave.
