Tomorrow we hear the inauguration speech from the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama. That creates a lot of questions for what it means to be black in America now. Since slavery we have represented the moral compass of the country. Now many blacks have assimilated with the white power structure in hopes in getting that piece of the American lie. Do we still hold the moral high ground from centuries of oppression or have we as a race capitulated to the powers that be so we could “GET OURS!!!”. This is the most important question facing the black community at-large. Is the civil rights movement truly dead, fractured along socioeconomic lines and undermined by the black middle class and intelligentsia?
Let us remember what our prophetic brother Malcolm told us about those who pretend to be something they are not:
respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong,
than one who comes up like an angel and he’s nothing but a devil.”