Blueprint for Black Power excerpts (chapter 2)

Please purchase this book from your local Black-owned bookstore or http://lushenabks.com/

pg 28

These power resources include property, organization, race consciousness, and ideology. We do not include state politics in our discussion at this juncture because in the context of contemporary Afrikan American social, political, and economic culture and the more basic issues it must resolve, state politics is of secondary importance to the Black community. Black politics and activism without the Black ownership of and control over primary forms and bases of power such as property, wealth, organization, etc., is the recipe for Black political and non-political powerlessness. The rather obtuse pursuit of political office and the ballot box as primary sources of power by the Black community and its politicians without its concomitant ownership of and control over important resources, has actually hindered the development of real Black power in America.

...The community’s concern with the election and appointment of Black political figures helps it to maintain false hopes that their attainment of office will significantly resolve its problems. The activities of Black politicians, given the current inadequacy of social organization and economic resources, harmfully distract the Black community’s attention from recognizing and eradicating the true causes of its problems and the remediation of its powerlessness.

We shall presently look at ethnic groups whose economic, educational, social, and political progress in America have been phenomenal and often surpasses that of Black Americans, yet, who have not acquired one elected or appointed official to high political office. We will see that it has been and is their effective acquisition and application of more fundamental power values or resources which are far more responsible for their progress and power than their political-electoral activism or lack of it.

pg 43

Most often the institutional or social chain of command is not perceived by those subject to it as coercive and as an expression of dominance by a particular scoial class for which the command structure is designed to undemocratically benefit. The chain of command or class structure is generally perceived by those who benefit from it the least, or who are oppressed by it, as functionally necessary. In this instance, compliant behavior, even when such behavior perpetuates gross inequities, is seen as morally compelling...

pg 48

The history of group economic relations in racist America demonstrates quite clearly that the "ideologies of ethnicity" - ideologies regarding group identity and interests, intergroup roles, relations and positions - have been and are key factors in streggules for group survival, advantage, defense, equity, achievement and sepremacy.

pg 51

Well-organized socially coherent and cohesive nation-states provide the best means for the accumulation and exercise of collective power resources. To the degree that a social group can approach nation-state status, even on an informal, non-declared level, it can create, accumulate, and maximally utilize its collective resources as media of its social power and will. The failure of the Afrikan American community to exercise considerable economic and political power despite its large population and broad national expanse as well as ample human and material resources, is directly linked to its failure to conceive of itself as a nation within a larger White American-dominated nation and to organize itself as such. Consequently it is dominated and exploited by White America and is economically monopolized and exploited by Whites, Asians, Arabs and any other ethnic group that possess a modicum of social solidarity and organization.