Perceptive as ever ...
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Clear discernment of a wrong turn taken after the Civil Rights victories of the mid 1960s. See what I mean by reading these quotes:
'Black America faced two options. We could seize on the great freedom we had just won in the civil rights victories and advance through education, skill development, and entrepreneurialism combined with an unbending assault on any continuing discrimination; or we could go after these things indirectly by pressuring the society that had wronged us into taking the lion's share of responsibility in resurrecting us. The new black militancy that exploded everywhere in the late sixties - and that came to define the strategy for black advancement for the next four decades - grew out of black America's complete embrace of the latter option.' (p.58)
'Authentic black militancy, of the sort that Malcolm X at times seemed capable of, always embraced responsibility as power itself. It demanded only the freedom and equal treatment under the law that would allow responsibility to be the same fount of hope, power, and advancement in blacks that it was for others. If Malcolm X railed ferociously against white America, he never called for a redistribution of responsibility for black uplift to whites or American institutions. His was a self-help black militancy that was naturally sceptical about what others would actually do for blacks. You might call it "hard-work" militancy, since it was built around the difficult principles of self-sacrifice, delayed gratification, family unity, individual initiative, entrepreneurialism, and so on. ... . What made this militancy authentic was that it truly sought to restore an oppressed people to human dignity through real development and without an enmeshment with or dependency on the guilt of whites.' (pp.59, 60)
Everyone should read this!
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United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada