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Strategy for a Black Agenda
Public leaders and academics must collaborate in saving black communities
Outposts of Africa and the Caribbean are everywhere in Europe after massive mid-twentieth century worker migrations. In Britain, where race barriers have crystallised, a giant failure syndrome frustrates black advancement. Black leaders have no real program for change, and black academics show no rage or passion in affirming black humanity. The truth is they have lost the ability to imagine a better future.
How, then, are beleaguered black communities in Britain to survive and succeed in the 21st century? Surely, the answer must lie in forging new leadership goals.
Enhancing black progress
No black leader in the public realm - whether in parliament and government, town council chambers or quangos - can remain insulated from the search for solutions to racial problems.
To be strong, proud and effective, black leaders will need to promote a range of policies that enhance black progress. Building up a supportive critical mass of intellectuals and information is essential.
The momentum behind this idea is unstoppable. It began with a veritable revolution in policy thought and practice. The trigger was the 1989 inaugural seminar in London of the Parliamentary Black Caucus organised by the new black MPs Diane Abbott, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz, and Lord David Pitt. Allied with them were the US Congressional Black Caucus led by Congressman Ronald Dellums and the presidents of major US organisations of black elected officials.
One thousand delegates from around the UK, and from different political and educational backgrounds, voiced their views and grievances. "Agendas for black advancement" in education, politics and economic development, and international affairs were debated.
"Our formation is a vital development in ensuring the political representation of black people at national and international levels," said Bernie Grant MP for Tottenham, "For far too long the black community has had no voice in Britain and we are seeking to redress that".
A year later, intellectuals and researchers rallied to this view. Forty Black British, African Caribbean and Asian, academics, local activists and politicians came together at an unprecedented series of meetings in London and the University of Warwick. They aimed at common agreement on research action for policy solutions to pressing social and political problems.
Strategy for a black agenda
From these unique beginnings one can perceive the outline of a strategy for a black agenda. It is based on the collaborative efforts of policy makers and intellectuals, with the participation of the black communities they seek to serve.
Mapping the agenda is the first step. This task outlines what must be done to aid a deeply distressed populace in all the areas of their concern.
Work and social class
- Employment: to find creative remedies to reverse the bleak trends in black unemployment, to integrate the workplace and to reduce the growing racial disparities in employment.
- Education: to shift the focus from the supposed deficiencies of minority children to addressing the institutional barriers to academic progress, at all levels of the educational system.
Material conditions of life
- Housing: to support beneficial regeneration of down-trodden areas with large black concentrations through links with community aspirations, requirements and priorities, and to address the policy implications of the shortage of affordable, decent homes for lower income groups.
- Health: to expand and integrate provision for the needs of black people in the training, planning and delivery of health services.
Politics and governance
- Participation: to increase black representation in councils of goverment, industry, trades unions and political parties, and in the running and planning of public services agencies.
- Urban Renewal and Development: to link urban resource investments by government and corporate Britain with statutory equal opportunity and affirmative action practices.
- Budget Allocations: to gain advantage from census-related urban financing, and to take steps to reduce the impact of under-counting of blacks and ethnic minorities.
- Movement of Peoples: to continually review discriminatory aspects of immigration policy and provisions for work and travel in "Europe without frontiers".
Crime, law and justice
- Welfare and Justice: to review and redress black over representation as welfare dependants and in prisons and mental institutions, and to pinpoint required changes in the legal profession, probation service, judiciary and magistracy.
- Racial violence: to examine and recommend solutions to the prevention of racially motivated crimes against black people.
Arts and enterprise
- Arts: to advocate the management and control of black cultural reproduction in literature, the arts, media, journalism, entertainment, leisure and sports
- Business: to expand the training and involvement of black enterprise in the local and national economy, e-commerce and in exports and trade.
- Mutual aid: to examine and promote the success of voluntary activities, charitable appeals and fund-raising techniques within black communities.
Social Organisation
- Institutions: to promote organisational safeguards against Institutional Racism and for effective race relations policies; to strengthen black-led institutions in education, welfare, religion and political affairs, and to harness cultural pride and moral conviction with the attainment of collective secular goals.
Establishing a black policy centre
Secondly, promoting strategic thinking about agenda solutions is task and can be spearheaded by a black-led policy centre. The centre, appropriately located, staffed and funded, would compile a State of Black Britain report on the lives, livelihood and living conditions of black people. Further activities would include creating a register of black academics and leaders in the public realm; encouraging policy seminars, training programs and information sharing; and publishing monographs and popular reports, fact sheets and guidelines.
Together, the agenda and the centre's activities herald important changes that must be made in the ways black political leadership and black academics relate to and work with each other. On the one hand, leaders in the public realm would benefit from research information and insights that help them in charting the direction, intensity and rapidity of positive change. On the other hand, black scholars would explore policy-driven issues and offer guidelines for policy action.
Bridging two cultures
In future, there will be large questions to resolve. How to consolidate and advance the progress already made by blacks in Britain? How to develop life-enhancing and danger-limiting strategies to survive? How to increase the capacity of black people to define, express, and pursue their interests in a competitive and often hostile policy making environment?
Establishing a strategy for a black agenda is of crucial importance in answering these questions. With it black people everywhere will be enabled to debate leadership accountability and open dialogues on the way forward.
Undoubtedly, this idea, this plea, will face great obstacles. Bridging two cultures of black politics and academia will be bitterly opposed by those who wield power in both spheres. The ire of the bigoted and prejudiced will be raised. Fair-minded liberals may be disquieted.
Nevertheless, forging a
strategy for a black agenda is timely. With it we can gain early warning
of the issues of the coming era, and test our genius in resolving them.
Without it we lack a compass in a sea of black despond.
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