Focus & Expectations

(From a recent online interview, I talk about my current focus and expectations).

I'm trying to see my way through to the critical mass of upper-middle class and rich blackfolks doing something. I'm not sure what it will be, but I believe it will be tremendous. I recall the adjudication of the Taxman case in New Jersey. I seem to recall that some wealthy unnamed black individuals raised a small fortune and settled this Affirmative Action case out of court. This among other things alerted me to certain possibilities. Since I've done the Silicon Valley thing and proved myself capable of doing business way above the merchant level, I'm doing what I can to make a small fortune myself. I think that as black businessmen such as myself become more numerous and visible we will see a real change in American politics. The way I see it, there are millions of African Americans sitting on the fence because nobody is really in tune with what their lives are like, yet they bear the brunt of an interesting type of backhanded regard. It's the suburban middle-class black kid who everybody likes to say should never in a million years get Affirmative Action. All of those kids are in their 20s, 30s and 40s now. There is no name for them that anyone in the popular press can toss around, but I think I know who they are and I think I know their political pulse. Black new money and black old money are going to do something. I'd like to be in the middle of that.

Specifically I want to see the ways black businessmen will interact with the political parties which is substantially different than today's status quo. It might not be different at all, but I don't believe that. I think there is this presumption that 'the dream' of African Americans stops at the suburban middle class, and people ought to know that there's a lot more ambition out there. When you look at somebody like Ice Cube and his Barbershop movies - this is the working class blacks vision that America buys into - those blackfolks with a down-to-earth attitude on the verge of dysfunction and survival by motherwit. But there is a class of African Americans whose parents already are what Ice Cube's son promises to be. I believe that America keeps treating those people as isolated exceptions, but that they will network and begin to turn heads.

Attendant to that, I want to facilitate African American bipartisanship. That means Republican husbands and Democrat wives, playing both parties to feed the family which survives good times and bad. We're still breaking up monolithic visions. This is more about politics for social power as contrasted with liberation politics and the politics of civil rights and human rights. That means creating and sustaining places on the web where folks can talk about that kind of thing. That's what Cobb is from the personal perspective and that's what VisionCircle is from a more collaborative and serious perspective.

All that is avocation. I'm not a politician or a political science professor. I'm a businessman in the software industry. I think my business ambitions are fairly conventional, except that I'm a lot more in tune with the global marketplace than most small businessmen have ever had to be.

One day after I make enough money to stop worrying about making money, I'd like to build my XRepublic system. That's the deliberative space that the internet has yet to create. It, or something like it, will gather all of the Boohabs in the world into a virtual parliament and representative democracy will never be the same.

Comments

[tootsie]

The group you represent has unigue abilitys ,some acquire thru demographic i.e.Ralph Ellison invisible man or W.E.Dubois duality of purpose,middle class value's in a black skin.How can you profit by that, the answer is easy go back home.In the aggregate black people want what all people want, sell it to them.Black people should purchase stock create a school and teach them how for a price.
tootsie

[Cobb]

I hear you. But that's always been a tough question for my generation. I always like to say that black MBAs didn't go to predominantly white universities just to become the equivalent of Korean 7/11 merchants. Many if not most of them applied no small measure of cultural capital to assume 'face' jobs in corporate corridors where, quite frankly, few if any Asians have succeeded.

So there are concrete advantages to being African American middle class kinda Blair Underwood-y that we've had for a long while before the now stereotypical asian babe is getting in dramatic representation. Those people have already said their price is too high for ghetto uplift and their success in the Fortune 500 demonstrates it. There's no way that Bob Herbert is going to give up his job at the NYTimes to go rescue the black newspaper in his hometown.

But as the black middleclass grows, all of these places are going to become more and more representative of who blackfolks are. I see that meaning that it will be cool for blackfolks to dominate larger spaces. Where in 1970 it probably didn't mean much for a black woman to try and be a PTA president in the black ghetto, nor would she try in the white suburb. In 2010 a black suburb makes this a much more attractive proposition. That might lead to School Board stuff that bears no resemblance to the uglieness of the legendary Ocean Hill - Brownsville standoff.

I'm also talking about the imbalance in black politics that owes to over-reliance on the federal government. I don't mean this in a stereotypical Republican way. I mean it in light of the fact that blacks *couldn't* get elected to local and state offices and *had* to rely on federal civil rights guarantees for their political representation. That's why the Congressional Black Caucus has been so big and black representation on City Councils has been relatively small. So we literally had to make everything a Federal Case. But now we are seeing more black Chiefs of Police and President of City Councils. We're getting down to local.

This again, is why I cannot stand the focus on presidential politics.

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