Would King be preaching a different dream today?
By ANDREW SKERRITT
Published January 15, 2006
The annual Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is time for shopping, soul searching and, especially for serious-minded black folks, chest beating.
Each replay of King's I Have a Dream speech prompts contemplation, if not discussion, of what the dream looks like nearly 40 years after his death.
Now comes Claud Anderson, economist and author of Powernomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America, with what he calls the next step to King's work.
Anderson, founder and president of the Harvest Institute, a Maryland-based black think tank, was the featured speaker at Pasco-Hernando Community College's 21st annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. commemorative lecture series.
Anderson is the kind of guy who says stuff people aren't accustomed to hearing in mixed company. He makes black folks uncomfortable; he makes whites squirm in their seats. He makes you shake your head in disgust. But any frank discussion of this nation's sordid racial history would do that.
According to Anderson, the first step was the emancipation from slavery after the Civil War. The second step was the end of Jim Crow segregation and the enactment of civil rights laws. The next step is black empowerment, meaning blacks acquiring and operating their own businesses, giving them the power to hire and fire as well as to build wealth.
In his critique, he cites the failure of the civil rights black leadership: They fought for integration and fought to end "separate but equal." They placed too much emphasis on integration and overlooked equality, he contends.
"You can't have equality until you go back and you correct the problems," he said.
Equality is a lived experience. Decades after Brown vs. The Board of Education outlawed separate but equal, black folks still lived with the daily indignities that accompany inequality. Equality for Americans is a work in progress.
Anderson thinks that black economic empowerment is the best antidote to racism in America. He talked about his controversial economic development proposal, African Town, designed to promote black economic ownership of factories and businesses in Detroit.
He argues that if blacks, like other minority groups, can translate their cumulative wage earning into corporate ownership, building factories and owning businesses, those gains can translate into improvements in housing, education, and the overall quality of black life.
The theory: The rising tide lifts all ships.
It's an updated answer to an old question.
But the issues aren't just economic. They're social, political, cultural and of course spiritual - all viewed through the prism of history.
In Anderson's view everyone shares the blame for the stagnant economic plight of black America. Mega churches aren't doing enough, he said. He criticizes black athletes and entertainers for their conspicuous consumption and for their failure to use their millions to produce real wealth. One listener pointed to former Tampa Bay Buccaneer Warrick Dunn as an exception.
And then there are those upwardly mobile black folks who flee to the suburbs.
"Go back and rebuild your own communities," Anderson said. "Everybody understands that but black folks."
Let's not misunderstand the man. Anderson isn't calling for racial separatism. He simply says that black folks need to fix black problems first before they can move on.
It's fair to say that looking backward to rebuild is typical of all immigrant communities. It needs to become commonplace for African-Americans.Anderson pointed to Little Havana, the Little Saigons and Chinatowns across America, where ethnic groups have converged to produce wealth and build communities. Not that he has always looked kindly at the impact of immigrants. According to the Detroit Free Press, a report Anderson prepared for the city of Detroit in 2004 says integration, regionalism and immigrants from Mexico, the Middle East and Asia have hurt black people's attempts to gain wealth.
In that case he was off base. The experience of immigrants is a great example of what people of color can accomplish in this country.
Andrew Skerritt can be reached at 813 909-4602 or toll-free at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 4602. His e-mail address is askerritt@sptimes.com