On Black Political Naivete, Optimism, and Why We Can’t Afford - TopicsExpress

On Black Political Naivete, Optimism, and Why We Can’t Afford Another Civil Rights Movement ~ Be Wise, Wisdom From the Fields “I must confess that that dream that I had that day, has at many points turned into a nightmare. Now I’m not one to lose hope. I keep on hoping. I still have faith in the future. But I’ve had to analyze many things over the last few years, and I would say over the last few months. I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching and agonizing moments, and I’ve come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead and some of the old optimism was a little superficial, and now it must be tempered with a solid realism.” ~ Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. That was a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. one year before he died, in an interview with NBC in 1967. Its purpose was to correct what he diagnosed as immaturity on his part with regards to the reality of the Black condition in America. We must be clear that he was referring to the Civil Rights Movement and when he mentions the “old optimism,” he was referring to the belief that in operating through the system to solve the problems caused by the system, we would achieve substantial gains. What he discovered however was that this was unrealistic and not a possibility in these United States of America and that the nation he foresaw his 4 little children growing up in was not this one. This is the political naivete [definition: 1) lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. 2) Innocence or unsophistication] that characterized the Civil Rights Movement and is to this day glorified in mainstream primary, secondary, and higher education. As he continues in the interview, Dr. King provides his realistic assessment of the so-called “gains” of the Movement: “I think the biggest problem now is that we got our gains over the last twelve years at bargain rates so to speak. It didn’t cost the nation anything; in fact it helped the economic side of the nation to integrate lunch counters and public accommodations. It didn’t cost the nation anything to get the right to vote established. But now we are confronting issues that cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars; now I think this is where we’re getting our greatest resistance.” Essentially, we are stressing that we as a people must take a critical look at the storied era we call the Civil Rights Movement and acknowledge its shortcomings so that we can avoid making the same mistakes as before. One such shortcoming is the fact that it excluded a vast majority of Blacks who were not in a position to reap the “gains” of the Movement (i.e. the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964). What this brought to fruition, rather than the dream of integration, was the nightmare of assimilation and conditional acceptance into the society that was lynching, oppressing, and colonizing us. Acceptance was based upon our ability to conform to a predefined cultural mold that had been set by popular American society, therefore leaving our former culture behind. To defend this claim I quote a section of Paul M. A. Linebarger’s 1948 book, Psychological Warfare. Linebarger was 2nd Lieutenant of the US Army during World War II when he helped create the Office of War Information and Operation Planning and Intelligence Board. He also organized the Army’s first psychological warfare section, performed undocumented work for the CIA and as a member of the Foreign Policy Association, was called upon to advise President John F. Kennedy. In his book, he describes how a nation should impose its will and culture on a conquered people: “The conquered people are left in the private, humble enjoyment of their old beliefs and folkways; but all participation in public life, whether political, cultural or economic, is conditioned on acceptance of the new faith. In this manner, all up-rising members of the society will move in a few generations over to the new faith in the process of becoming rich, powerful, or learned; what is left of the old faith will be a gutter superstition, possessing neither power nor majesty.” (Read more: wisdomftf/2014/11/30/black-political-naivete/)