By Lucius Gantt
Tell me. Where do we go from here?
It’s 2020, another election year, and once again African Americans seeking political progress will be running……for their lives!
Every Black person worldwide that contributed digitally to any of President Barack Obama Presidential campaigns will forever get hundreds of emailed requests from candidates that they don’t know and candidates that have done little or nothing to deserve Black voter support.
Obama has handed over your contact information to basically any candidate that would ask him, or the Democratic Party, for your digits.
Thank you, my brother, for the political spam but you won’t provide Black voters or Black political vendors with ways to contact the Democratic National Committee, state and local parties or individual Democratic candidates.
It’s no secret. This year, as in most election years, Black voters will decide who wins almost every election. Hood votes, trap votes and even crack votes will decide if President Trump remains in The White House or resumes his customary visits to the whore house.
Anyway, where do we go from here?
So called Negro leaders and media charlatans will stress that voting in 2020 is paramount. You will hear candidates and pundits say we should vote in 2020 like our lives depended on it.
I agree but I’m not running for office. I agree because my ancestors and your ancestors fought and died for rights to vote and the people you love that suggest you should not go to the polls or vote absentee are political haters and, in a sense, traitors to their race!
I’m voting because any President would be better than the current guy in Washington, D.C.!
I’m smart enough to know that even though I’ve only missed one voting opportunity in the last 50 years and that was earlier in 2020 when I requested an absentee ballot and the state where I am ignored the request and didn’t send me a ballot. I could have gone to a voting location and tried to vote provisionally but I have a disability that makes it difficult to stand in a line for over three hours. One missed vote in 50 years is not very bad.
If you have a candidate that you love and support I encourage you to cast a ballot for him or her.
However, I must warn you that politics in capitalist societies are primarily about the money. Major campaign contributors will get political access, political considerations, political appointments, government jobs and government contracts.
You will get what you’ve always gotten. The Negro leaders will get cold coffee and stale donuts at a White House reception and no matter what is said or done at the reception, the Negro leaders will say, and convince you, that the election winner is “all right”!
The Gantt Report believes we have to make our own way out of no way. We have to turn political nothings into political somethings. We have to rise up when false political prophets tell us to get ahead, we merely have to bow down.
What Black people in America need is not a political savior, a political benefactor or a political hero. All we need to progress in America is land and money!
Our grand parents and great grand parents built thriving and prosperous areas like “Black Wall Street” in Oklahoma, “Rosewood” in Central Florida, Harlem in New York and Auburn Avenue in Atlanta.
All of those places are gone or are gentrified with Black business that hire Black people being replaced by coffee shops, gay bars and high rise housing developments.
We can finance and develop the community projects that we need but we need to listen to the voices that exploiters, oppressors and modern-day neocolonialists don’t want us to hear.
There are successful, so to speak, Blacks in America that donate millions and millions to causes that are acceptable to the powers that be. Good for them but their contributions are perhaps a drop in the economic buckets.
Claude Anderson, Umar Johnson, Boyce Watkins are some of the people with so-called economic plans that you admire.
I’m giving you notice, put me on a Black History, or any other panel, with any or all of them and I’ll prove their plans are only white plans dipped in chocolate and you can tell them I said it.
We all have roles to play in Black progress. We all have contributions to make but many of the people on talk shows, on stages and commencement speakers that you pay money to hear are good speakers but don’t have a clue about how to bring about Black progress.
Where do we go from here? I’d like to meet with so-called Black billionaires about how they can fund and finance Black progress projects without a penny leaving their bank accounts.
I won’t discuss details here but tell your people to holler at me. I’m easy to find.
I know where we go from here.
Lucius is a contributing columnist to NNPA newspapers around the nation, and the author of “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing,” available on Amazon.com and from bookstores everywhere.