Prometheus 6

John Ridley, who actually gets a Wikipedia link from me, has given the readers of Esquire instructions for sorting out niggers from Black people. Like they ever needed help.

The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger
By John Ridley

For eleven days in 2001, two blacks ran our country. It's their example and their achievement—and not the culture of failure fomented by the leftovers of the Movement—that must set a new agenda for black Americans.

The eleven days he's talking about is the incident when one of our spy planes wound up in the possession of China. Condi and Colin "negotiated" the return of the vehicle (as though anything else would every happen) stripped of its equipment (as though anything else would ever happen). He spends two pages getting to this paragraph worth of information, running every Black Conservative trope in existance as offensively as only a truly talented author can. Hopefully you'll be too angry or disgusted to read through and see how little there is there.

Let me tell you something about niggers, the oppressed minority within our minority. Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can't catch a break. Notoriously poor about doing for themselves. Constantly in need of a leader but unable to follow in any direction that's navigated by hard work, self-reliance. And though they spliff and drink and procreate their way onto welfare doles and WIC lines, niggers will tell you their state of being is no fault of their own. They are not responsible for their nearly 5 percent incarceration rate and their 9.2 percent unemployment rate. Not responsible for the 11.8 percent rate at which they drop out of high school. For the 69.3 percent of births they create out of wedlock.

Now, let me tell you something about my generation of black Americans. We are the inheritors of "the Deal" forced upon the entrenched white social, political, and legal establishment when my parents' generation won the struggle for civil rights. The Deal: We (blacks) take what is rightfully ours and you (the afore-described establishment) get citizens who will invest the same energy and dedication into raising families and working hard and being all around good people as was invested in snapping the neck of Jim Crow.

Now that he's got the standard ranting out of the way...Mr. Ridley spends an incredible amout of time lauding our Black Republican Heroes for being such excellent symbols that we all got accepted as equals by America as soon as they stepped onto the national stage.

Oh. We didn't?

He also spent an inordinate amount of time dissing people who dissed them for being Republican. Not that anyone ever did that to Colin...The General always got the benefit of the doubt a good soldier gets. And Condi straight lost a lot of us due to the words coming out of her own mouth...the Iraq invasion modeled on our civil rights struggle? Dr. Rice has traded on our legacy to support the Party of the Southern Strategy.

Yeah, tell me the Southern Strategy is dead...if so, it only died last week.

If we as a race could win the centuries-long war against institutionalized racism, why is it that so many of us cannot secure the advantage after decades of freedom?

Because the centuries-long war against institutional racism is not over. It's that simple. And this

Black America must look to that lost moment and realize that, short of a brother or sister actually being elected president, Hanna was the high-water mark of black political power.

is both true and sad...sad because Mr. Ridley has no idea

And whether Operation Iraqi Freedom is ultimately good and right and just, or if it is lousily named and uniformly disastrous, what is essential is that Dr. Condi and Colin earned for themselves positions from which to sway public debate.

That is, power.

...what power is. These two very accomplished Black folk were tools of power, not wielders of it. They implemented decisions, they didn't make them (ask the General why he resigned).

The high mark of Black political power is to be appointed to follow orders.