By Roger Green
After reviewing the results of the June, 23 Democratic primary, an historic event that exposed the fragility of the traditional Black political establishment, I am roused to recall a meeting that I and the late Assemblyman Albert Vann had with the iconic Pan Africanist and human rights leader Kwame Toure (AKA Stokely Carmichael).

This engagement occurred in 1982, seventeen years after Kwame released his groundbreaking book with Charles V. Hamilton, titled Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.”
In keeping with the ideas promoted in this text Al and I secured an election to the New York State Assembly after benefiting from the support of the Metropolitan Black United Front, and defeating the political machine of the democratic party Boss, Meade Esposito. However, while our electoral victories were celebrated by progressives and signaled that an insurgent Black political movement was beginning in Central and East Brooklyn, Kwame Toure, always the provocateur, presented Al and I with this cautionary admonition.

“There will come a time when the Black Community will need to assess the difference between quantitative leadership and qualitative leadership”.
I posit that that time has come. Indeed, the electoral route of the Black political establishment by the Democratic Socialist of America demonstrates that a growing number of voters in our African Diasporic community have assessed that despite the historic aggregation of Black elected officials in the federal, state, and local government we are still suffering as a result of the intergenerational transmission of racial and economic inequality. Indeed, let us assess the following:

The Chief Judge of the Court of
Appeals is Black
The Lt Governor is Black
The State Attorney General is Black
The Speaker of The Assembly is Black
The Majority Leader of the
State Senate is Black
The Public Advocate is Black
The minority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives is Black
The status of these Black elected officials stands in stark contrast to the masses living in our African Diasporic communities that continue to be harmed by an unaffordable city primarily driven by chronic unemployment, wage stagnation, and wealth inequality.

I regret that a failure to enact a progressive public policy agenda by organizing working and operational unity has contributed to a self-defeating erosion of Black political power. Certainly, the implosion of the Adams regime, the failure to promote an alternative mayoral candidate, and the inability to elect a progressive Black speaker to the City Council should have served as a cautionary alarm for the incumbent Black political establishment.

History instructs that power travels the path of least resistance. If our elected officials fail to co-create progressive public policies and a progressive civic infrastructure that can resist the dangers directed at our community, another power will fill the void. To wit: the Democratic Socialists have stepped into an unattended crisis.

The voters in our African Diasporic communities must acknowledge that the failed leadership of far too many Black elected officials has placed our precarious communities between a rock and a hard place.
The rock : represented by the DSA, an organization largely empowered by enthusiastic white youth who have no organic relationships with the history and current lived experience of our African Diasporic community.

Moreover, this political enterprise seems to be energized by a sectarian quest for power that fails to acknowledge the need to create a united front with progressive elected officials who operate outside of the DSA’s immediate orbit. The defeat of Borough President Antonio Reynoso and Assemblywoman Stephanie Zinerman did abort this equitable mission: “Those closest to the pain should be closest to the power”

The hard place: a coterie of Black elected officials who have become far too compromised by and reliant on an anti-democratic donor class that prioritizes the needs of the oligarchs over the aspirations of a beleaguered African Diasporic community.

This codependence has created a cycle of political alienation and political atrophy, causing feeble voter participation in a devolved civic infrastructure. This failure of leadership erodes our ability to advance a governance founded on the moral imperatives of economic and social justice.

Given this crisis, I respectfully urge our youthful African Diasporic constituents to build a transformative civic infrastructure that will create an accountable progressive criteria for our elected officials and a public policy agenda that will address the intergenerational transmission of racial and economic inequality.

To this end, we should begin this journey by convening an assembly on August 6, the Anniversary of the endangered 1965 Voting Rights Act. We must make a commitment to engage in a thoughtful and deliberative conversation informed by this charge articulated by Amilcar Gibral, “Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories”.