The Praxis of Black Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

The oft-lamented absence of Black leaders in the United States is either off-target or mis- named. In fact, there is no absence of Black leaders in the United States. Rather, there is a plethora of them. They exist in every arena of society, politics, and culture. They are associated with every setting of institutional influence and power. They abound at the local, state, national, and international levels. Yet the observation that there are no Black leaders seems valid because it arises from this implicit question: What are they doing? If they are doing anything, those efforts and their effects are invisible. This invisibility, however, is not so much a reflection of what Black leaders are and are not doing as it is a function of the myriad ways in which our society operates, including the complete racialization that leads to the marginalization of Black people, Black leaders not being excepted. These features of United States society cannot be separated from the conundrum that is the topic of Black leadership, but they also do not get to the heart of the widespread and fallacious notion that there are no Black leaders. I would argue that what we have is an absence of vision among Black leaders. Bill Strickland calls it the absence of a theory of revolution within the United States. Harold Cruse made a similar assertion over 40 years ago: he called it a need for a theory of social action. Though Strickland’s critique is more general, Cruse’s was directed specifically to Black people. Maybe that is what people mean when they say we have no Black leaders: we have no Black leaders with vision. This is a critical distinction that should not be occluded.

What do I mean when I say that we have an absence of vision among Black leaders? I mean that they do not articulate an understanding of our conditions, goals for action, and methods of achieving our goals that is useful for leading our political action. This is a far cry from saying that they don’t have understandings of our conditions, goals, or necessary methods. But I say, explicitly, they do not project such understandings in a way that is useful for our political action.

Most Black understandings of our conditions are based on models that are neoliberal, neoconservative, and derived from radical nineteenth-century European thought or in conceptions of the world rooted in the circumstances of the mid-twentieth century. This will not do in the first decade of the twenty-first. The old maxim that all wars are fought using the lessons of the last one will not suffice, as the conditions which prevailed during the last war no longer exist. If we know this adage, why must we continue to live it out? The same considerations apply to social and political struggle. To operate effectively we must see the extant world with clarity. We must neither abandon what we have learned from the past nor project it onto our current circumstances.

We need new visions.

How We Understand the World

Let us start with our understanding of the world, including our place in it. Race marks our place in this world and in this country. Yet race is not what it once was, either here or elsewhere. Race never was what many in the U.S. imagined it to be—fixed, absolute, known, and verifiable. It has always been a shape-shifter, evanescent, insubstantial, and variable. It can be constituted in such a way as to render it a weapon of domination or one of struggle. Race is central to any struggle Black people wage, but it must be race as we know it and name it.

Looking globally, we may ask, are Arabs a race? Are Jews a race? Are Chinese a race? Are Hindus a race? Are Asians a race? Is there such a thing as the English race, the French race, or the German race? What are Russians? What are Slavs? In what way is it useful to speak of the African race? Some Mexicans speak of themselves as La Raza, the race. What does that mean? On the planetary scale race is so amorphous as to have absolutely no analytical utility. It has so many manifestations that it can well be named almost anything— nationality, ethnicity, color, phenotype, linguistic group, religion, historical aggregation, cultural identity, geographical origin, on ad infinitum.

In the U.S., while race’s central and most influential characteristics center on distinctions between European-ness and Africanity, it has always been much more complex than that, particularly given the original inhabitants of the continent. Today racial meanings are so obscure that only fools, fanatics, and ignoramuses can declare any certainty of defi- nition. In short, the term that functions as the central definer of Black people in the twenty-first century has no meaning. What does that imply for a visionary leadership? First of all, it means we must define ourselves. This is not a new responsibility, as indicated by how we have referred to ourselves over time in this place: as African, Colored, Negro, Black, Afro-American, African-American, or African-descended. I do not mean, however, simply what we call ourselves, but who we are. We must define who we are.

Who is African? Maulana Karenga, for example, says birthplace cannot privilege Africanity. Is someone born in Ghana more African than someone born in Somalia? Is someone born in Nigeria more African than someone born in Swaziland? Is someone born in Jamaica more African than someone born in the U.S.? Is someone born in Haiti more African than someone born in Ecuador? We must define who is African. Claiming Africanity is one thing and being African is another. Can someone who does not claim to be African, who—in fact—claims not to be African, be African? Can Mariah Carey be African and Tiger Woods not be African?

If we want to operate in the twenty-first century, we must account for ambiguity. We cannot be like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or Tom Delay. We must recognize that this is a complex and nuanced world. How we define ourselves, who we say we are, who is one of us, who constitutes us as a people, are all crucial questions, because they are central indicators of what we can do. Regardless of how we define ourselves, others will attempt to define us in their own ways and for their own purposes. Our mission is to see to it that our definition prevails. It will not be the only definition. Both this world and this country are too complicated for that, but it can be the dominant definition. For ours to be the prevailing vision which guides us, it must be the dominant definition.

We must say in many and varied settings, over and over again: this is who we are. We will not all be saying the same thing, but in the varied and contested articulations, a vision of who we are will emerge. Therefore, let me begin: We are African, we are Black, we are African-descended. I opt for all three as mutually inclusive or acceptable terms, all useful to avoid redundancy if nothing else. These are names. But who are we?

I claim African people all over the world. I say we are Africans, wherever we are. I do not mean Anglo-Africans, I do not mean Tutsis, I do not mean Afro-Brazilians, I do not mean either South Africans or Zulus. I do not mean Black people in the United States. I mean all of those, all of us. We are Africans. We are Black. We are African-descended.

To me, when we say we, we mean all of us, not just Black people in the U.S. We mean Black people in the world. People say, what is the basis for doing that? We’re all so dif- ferent. The basis for doing it is that it’s our decision. We determine what defines us. I know a young woman who is a Black Ethiopian Jew who lives in the U.S. All those elements constitute important parts of her identity. She is a woman, she is young, she is Ethiopian, she is Jewish, and she lives in the U.S. Calling her Black, African, or African-descended does not deny any of those characteristics. It is not an attempt to deny any of her identities, but to affirm an African identity. We do not occlude those differences. We know, for example, that Black people from L.A. are likely to have significant differences from Black people from Little Rock. We must be clear on that and take it into consideration in our analyses, but that does not prohibit calling Black people from both places ‘‘Black.’’

One of the clearest expressions of this complexity is class. To argue that class doesn’t make significant differentiations among Black people in the U.S. or anywhere else, is to play a fool’s game. Class does create significant differences between Black people. But I argue, and there is plenty of empirical evidence to support the point, that class differences between Black people are not in and of themselves sufficient to render them permanent members of separate and antagonistic populations—no more so than are differences created by religion, language, tribe, culture, geography, or gender.

Defining ourselves—all of us—as Africans makes clear the contradictions of conventional nationalism in the twenty-first century. For example, studies from the 1950s–1970s showed that in the United States the primary identity for most Black people was race. It was not being a U.S. resident or citizen. Let me bring that up to the twenty-first century and take myself as a specific example. My primary identity is African—not as a U.S. resident or citizen. I feel much more common identity with, allegiance to, comfort with, and loyalty to brothers and sisters I know in Brazil, South Africa, England, in Haiti, Ghana, Guadeloupe, Cameroon, Rwanda, and Colombia than I do to the racists who write letters to the editor in my local newspaper and who I see every day on the street. My people are those with whom I experience my primary identity, not those I find myself beside in check-out lines, freeway lanes, or movie theater seats. I simply find myself more at home in the company of my people than I do in the company of others. What does nationalism or citizenship mean under such circumstances? If I am to pledge to work for the well-being of someone, who is it going to be—someone who lives down the street with whom I have almost nothing in common except language and place of residence, or someone with whom I share the deepest interests and fellow-feelings?

A lot of people I know are moving. They are not moving to San Francisco, Seattle, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, or Jackson. They are moving to Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, South Africa, Ghana. They are not leaving their people. They are not deserting their people. They are still African. They are still Black. They are still African-descended, wherever they go. They know that. The people they live with, work with, and join in struggle with will be Black, too. A lot of people I know would move if they could, but since they can’t, they are going to stay here and live and work and struggle with African people. A lot of people I know have no intention of moving and also no intention of being anything except stone, cold, Black. They don’t hate white people, Latinos, Asians, or Native Americans. They celebrate aspects of all those peoples and respect them. They simply have no interest in being or living as anything other than what they are: stone, cold, Black.

Conventional nationalism has absolutely no relevance to the lives of any of these people. The world they live in is one where boundaries are not geographical or statutory. As a Jamaican friend put it, ‘‘A neighbor is not someone you live beside. A neighbor is someone who treats you like a friend.’’ If we let our lives be dictated by people we live beside rather than people we love and esteem, then we are the less for it. Right now in the U.S., our lives are dictated by clowns like George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Rupert Murdoch. If that condition does not speak to an absence of vision on the part of our leadership—Black leadership—little else will.

An important component of the vision necessary for Black leaders in the contemporary world is a vision of race. I have articulated one vision. That vision places us, collectively, in the world.

Our Place in the World

Both in the United States and globally Africans are on the bottom of the heap. We are both the poorest and the least educated. We have the highest death rates, the highest infant mortality rates, and the highest incarceration rates. We are the most diseased, the most fractured population, the most dysfunctional, and the most pitied.

We are scattered. We are, literally, everywhere: Africa. Europe. The Middle East. Southern Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia. Australia. The Pacific. Throughout the Americas. We are the largest single population group in Africa, the Caribbean, and South and Central America.

We are incredibly varied. We speak more languages than any other people in the world. We have more languages in Africa than on any other continent. We practice every religion known to human kind. We subscribe to the most divergent cultures imaginable. There are among us the most outstanding achievers in every field of human endeavor. There are Africans who are fabulously wealthy. There are Africans who are the poorest people on the planet.

Physically, our appearances are as different as it is humanly possible to be. Contrary to popular wisdom, you cannot tell who we are by looking at us. That is true even of Black people in Africa who are entirely of African descent. We look like everything. We look like Africans, Indians from South Asia, Chinese, Native Americans, Arabs, Western Europeans, Southern Europeans, East Europeans, and various combinations of all those appearances. We are—even genetically—the most diverse people on the planet.

Collective Goals of Africans

What kinds of goals recommend themselves to such a people? To address that question from the point-of-view of African leaders, we must make a distinction between leaders of African people and other kinds of leaders, many of whom are of African-descent. For purposes of this discussion, I restrict myself to politics.

Kofi Annan, who is African, was Secretary General of the U.N. In that role, however, he was not an African leader or a leader of African people, but a world leader, the leader of a world political organization. A Black senator in the U.S. is a leader of her or his political party, a leader of his or her state, or a leader in national government. She or he is not a Black leader, but a Democratic Party leader, an Illinois leader (because all contemporary Black Senators seem to come from Illinois), a national leader. A Black Illinois senator who is a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the Presidency continues to be a national leader. A Black Supreme Court Justice, likewise, is not a Black leader, nor is a Black Secretary of State, a Black Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or a Black Secretary of Education. Black people who occupy such positions may or may not be sympathetic to Black concerns, needs, and responsibilities, however; their primary roles and responsibilities are not to Black people, but to their broader constituencies.

Black leaders in the U.S. lead Black people. Their primary responsibilities are to Black people. Their dominant role is to lead Black people. Their constituencies consist primarily of Black people. John Conyers is a Black leader. Maxine Waters is a Black leader. Cynthia McKinney is a Black leader. They are, nevertheless, greatly constrained by their institutional settings. Those settings include not only the U.S. Congress, which is not a Black organization, but also the Democratic Party, which is not a Black organization either. Robert Smith speaks specifically to their limitations because of their institutional and party roles.

Most Black political leaders lead Black organizations. Because of the statutes under which many of those organizations are incorporated, the political roles they can play are extremely circumscribed. Nevertheless, many operate in the political arena with as much political efficacy as possible. Many Black leaders are local and state officials who have smaller and specifically Black constituencies.

Black leaders speak and act at the behest of Black people, for Black people. They serve Black people. Though they may claim to speak for all Black people, they do not. They speak only for the Black people who consent to their leadership. Unlike many African-descended leaders elsewhere, African leaders in the U.S. do not have the state apparatus both to support their decisions and as means of policy implementation. African leaders in Jamaica, Haiti, and Suriname do. But, wherever they are, authentic Black leaders serve at the behest of Black people. Again, we must be clear. They do not speak or act for all Black people, but for some Black people. As a result, they are not, cannot be, and will not be in lock-step agreement. They will be able to agree about some things, able to look the other way on certain things, and on others they will be in heated opposition. This makes them no less authentic leaders, because as the most disparate people on the face of the earth, Africans have a great deal about which they are not in agreement. But there are some matters on which many of them, and at times, even most of them, can find common cause. When that is the case, a historical moment exists which can produce significant results—nationally, internationally, or both. We may be at the threshold of such a moment now. Should that be the case, this will not be the only such historical moment we have experienced. The other occasions—the early Pan African Congresses, the Harlem Renaissance coinciding with Negritude, the African Liberation Movements occurring simultaneously with the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power preceding the Brazilian Black Movement—all have been remarkably fecund.

The recognition that there are multiple African-descended leaders coming from a wide variety of perspectives means we can expect visionary leaders to project a diverse spectrum of goals, of visions. Yet it seems that in order to improve our collective condition, such visions and goals must address our salient conditions in a way that enables us to develop creative means to improve them.

We must target getting ourselves off the bottom of the heap. There are at least two broad ways of conceptualizing that goal. One is to improve the condition of Black people, to get ourselves off the bottom with scant concern regarding who will replace us there. The other is to do away with the bottom entirely—eliminating the bottom so that no one is there. This means creating a situation where most people can share a standard of living, a way of life, and opportunities that are relatively comparable, where some are perhaps more comfortable than others, but where no one is starkly uncomfortable, and no one is punished in life outcomes or stigmatized by given factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, language, culture, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, or physical attributes.

African leaders must articulate their visions of such goals. What does a world look like in which Africans are not the poorest, the least educated, those with the highest death rates, the highest levels of infant mortality, the highest rates of incarceration, of criminalization, the highest incidences of disease, the most fractured, the most dysfunctional, the most pitied population in any specific country and throughout the earth? Do we target uplift at the individual level or the collective level? Do we target uplift to the exclusion of fighting for a more just and equitable society? Mwalimu Julius Nyerere told us long ago that even the poorest of societies can support a few outrageously wealthy people. That says nothing about the humanity, the decency of the system.

The U.S. system of predatory, ruthless capitalism obviates efforts to attack the vicious, economically hierarchical character of the society. Rather the contrary, it has been mercilessly re-enforced, creating great populations of homeless persons who have become criminalized, abandonment of the mentally ill who have also been criminalized, elimination of rehabilitation for imprisoned persons—who have become an increasingly higher percentage of the population, particularly of the Black population, and the despoliation of the basic ingredients of life: air, water, and land.

So great has been the triumph of unrestrained capitalism that the efforts of Black leaders and others who target the condition of the poor have been devoted not to dismantling the most egregious aspects of this hierarchical society, but to making the bottom of the pile more endurable. The most obvious example of this is the minimum wage. First of all, it takes the labors of Hercules to get a bill through the torturous legislative process. Secondly, neither in theory nor in practice does it say anything about the sufficiency of such a wage, much-less its decency or justice. The very idea assumes a considerable percentage of the population will be on the bottom, and to prohibit the spectacle of public starvation they should at least be paid something. Welfare, unemployment benefits, and health care operate on the same principles: not that everyone should have a life free of penury, but that there should be patches on their raggedy drawers and salt and pepper in their gruel.

For African-descended leaders to articulate a vision which addresses our actual conditions, they must speak to what that vision means with respect to society’s taking seriously the effort to realize them. They must, in Mari Evan’s words, ‘‘speak the truth to the people.’’ Decent education for Black people is going to be expensive. It cannot be paid for by those at the bottom of the heap. Competent disease prevention and medical care will be expensive. They cannot be financed by the destitute. Providing rehabilitation for the incarcerated will not be cheap. Erecting and sustaining a comprehensive, effective, mental health care system will not be cheap. Training people without skills will not be cheap. The funding for such necessities cannot come from those with negative net-worth. Where, then, must it come from?

Black leaders must tell the truth. Taxes must be raised for those who can afford to pay them. Society is not a grab-bag for the rich, an invitation to plunder and ravage for the high and mighty. Yet that is precisely what it has become in the U.S. and throughout the world, under the aegis of the piracy known as globalization. There have been other names for it: colonization, imperialism. It doesn’t matter whether it’s carried out by nations, individuals, or institutions; the impact is the same on those whose life-blood is sucked away.

The oil companies say their obscene profits are not egregious; ‘‘they’re just what the market will bear.’’ What does that mean? It means if they could charge more and people would pay, they would. In short, no profits are obscene if people will pay them. Why they are obscene is evident. What if the oil companies were afforded only reasonable profits, not price-gouging profits. Usury, we know, is illegal. What if a similar limiting principle applied to profits? What if the money which would have been excess profits went into schools, health care, mental health, rehabilitation, and housing? Nobody even thinks that way. Wal-mart has so much cash it can’t spend it all. There’s a solution to that cash surplus problem that could benefit millions of specific people and society as a whole, but rapacious capitalism doesn’t see society. It sees a fiction of separate and contending individuals who need government only to prevent them from ripping each other apart, not to tend to romantic fantasies such as social justice. A society founded on slavery has no conception of social justice.

What sense does it make for individuals to have fortunes of tens of billions of dollars? They may even give significant amounts to charity—they might as well—they can’t spend that much money. Moreover, they choose what they will give to and what they will not. They believe, and the society glorifies the fiction, that the money is theirs, that they ‘‘earned’’ it. Without even going into the very fundamental questions of whether they were self-raised, selftaught, and lived in a vacuum where they raised their own food, clothing, and provided their own shelter, we may look at the simple question of how it is physically possible for a single person to create a financial empire, without laws, rules, customs, a physical infrastructure, patterns of trade and banking—not to speak of workers. The wealth they ‘‘own’’ is social wealth, produced by the society. Put one of them on an island in the middle of the Pacific and keep that person there, with all the hard work, cunning, and ambition he or she is heir to, and see what the product will be.

In this United States the only way the broader population has access to the hoards of wealth that it was instrumental in producing is through taxes, but here we run into the shibboleth of wasted tax money. Is tax money wasted? Is there fraud in government? Are there public funds unaccounted for? Yes. But is anybody going to have the audacity to suggest that billionaires, that people who count their money by the hundreds of mil- lions, that Haliburton, Bechtel, that Exxon—that Enron—don’t waste money, are devoid of fraudulent practices, and don’t have public funds unaccounted for? And none of that wasted, fraudulent, unaccounted for money was serving any aspect of the public good. No. It was—surplus profit.

Purposeful goals, actionable goals are not amorphous. People say the Civil Rights Movement had an advantage because it had clear goals: get rid of Jim Crow. True. But it had those goals because leaders articulated them.

What, if you please, is unclear about decent education? What’s unclear about universal health care? What’s unclear about rehabilitation? What’s unclear about good mental health care? What’s unclear about a satisfactory level of housing stock? There’s nothing unclear about any of that. The powers that be just don’t want to hear it. That’s all. Period.

Do you think in the 1940s, fifteen years before the Civil Rights Movement, no one knew about Jim Crow, that getting rid of it couldn’t be articulated as a clear goal? Do you think in the 1930s, twenty-five years before the Civil Rights Movement, nobody knew about Jim Crow? Getting rid of it couldn’t be articulated as a clear goal. Do you think in the 1920s, thirty-five years before the Civil Rights Movement, nobody knew about Jim Crow? Getting rid of it couldn’t be articulated as a clear goal. Nonsense. The powers that be just didn’t want to listen to that mess. Just as they don’t want to hear anything about what clearly needs to be done today. One difference between the Civil Rights Movement and now is we have no leaders articulating these goals in a way that enables effective action. We do have leaders—and followers for that matter—articulating these goals, but more as wish-lists, as portraits of shortcomings and failures than as realistic, obtainable, and dramatically targeted goals. Because seriously targeted goals require strategies to realize them.

Methods

This leads to the question of methods. What is a vision of how we might achieve what we wish? Again, we must look to where we are at the opening of the twenty-first century. While both the Black Power movements and Civil Rights movements ended decades ago, they planted seeds. The intervening years have not been as barren as many imagine. There is a Black infrastructure, nationally and internationally, quite different from what was present thirty or forty years ago.

There are more and more varied Black organizations and institutions than there were. There are more solvent organizations and institutions than there were. The Black middle class in the U.S., while as fragile as ever, has quadrupled in size. There are more African-descended peoples in government at every level and in every capacity. There are more Black people throughout the decision-making chain of social, cultural, and economic structures. There are more Black people situated to be independently influential. Witness Oprah Winfrey, Benedita da Silva, Wangari Mathai, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Gilberto Gil, Abdias do Nascimento, Cornell West, Skip Gates, Bill and Camille Cosby, Tavis Smiley and his singular collaboration with Haki Madhabuti and the Third World Press in the publication of The Covenant. That kind of collaboration and its subsequent impact would have been impossible thirty or forty years ago.

We must be able to use, to marshal, the incomparable resources we now have at our disposal. The perfect case in point is South Africa. Thirty years ago it was under the crush- ing grip of apartheid, possibly the most racist regime in the world. No longer. Now it is an independent force, an independent, primarily African force afoot in the world. The Brazilian Black Consciousness movement has transformed the possibility for that vast country’s contribution to the struggle of African peoples throughout the world. Indeed, throughout Central and South America African-descended peoples are striving to realize their potential to transform their places in the world.

Not only that, but the concrete connections between Africans all over the globe are much more extensive and solid than they were decades ago. The connections of African-descended people in the U.S. with Africa are much less imaginary and fantastical, than they were decades ago. They are both more realistic and more real. People have traveled both ways across the Atlantic and throughout the diaspora. They have made friendships, familial conjunctions, institutional links, and collaborations. They have moved from one place to another, so that Africans born and raised in the U.S. now live and raise their families in Africa. Africans born and raised in Africa now live and raise their families in the U.S., Canada, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean. People from the Caribbean live all over the globe. We know each other in a much more personal way than we did. Several decades ago most African people in the U.S. did not know there were Black people in Central and South America—a region known as Latin-America, as if Africa had no part in it, an abysmal lie.

To marshal our resources we must self-consciously speak to each other, work with each other, collaborate with each other, with the agreed-upon purpose of changing the world. For, surely, the way it is now is anathema to us.

We must increasingly institutionalize the links between us, domestically, and internationally. We must increasingly institutionalize communication between us. This has begun—on the internet and through email, but it must be done more systematically and with greater reach into our populations. Nationally, we must create forums for coming together. We must do that internationally as well, as the African-descended legislators in the Western hemisphere have already done. Internationally, we must establish our own missions among our own people, distinct from those established by governments and controlled by others. We must collaborate economically—domestically, as well as internationally. Leaders must create such collaborations as a means, a concrete means, of articulating what we can do and what we must do.

In the U.S. we cannot be at the mercy of the Republican or Democratic parties with their absurd priorities of re-emptive war, flag waving, family values (who’s against families?), publically distancing themselves from recognized Black spokespersons, gay-bashing, starving the beast, despoiling the environment, criminalizing Black people, and other deranged flights of lunacy. As a world population we cannot put ourselves at the mercy of globalization. We must create, maintain, and use our own instruments of public policy and action, independent of the nation-state system. We must take the destiny of our own people into our own hands. Must we really roll over and tolerate dominion over us by George Bush, Orville Hatch, Trent Lott, Bill Frist, and Condoleeza Rice? Must we accept and trust the priorities of Vincente Fox, Tony Blair and his successors, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Likud, and Hamas?

Today, the state coerces us to do what we know is wrong: to wage insane and monstrous war; to force people to live on the streets; to deny health care to the physically and men- tally ill; to criminalize and incarcerate our population; to support greedy, blood-sucking buffoons as heads of state; to ravage the natural environment. If we did not collaborate in these evils, if we resisted them, the state could not implement them. If we agreed to a tax revolt—generally we are willing to pay our taxes because we understand the responsibilities of collective life—but if we agreed to a tax revolt, it would be warranted because the acts of the state are now vicious. No taxation without representation. Representation does not mean voting for measures that always lose and voting against measures that always win. In what genuine sense can that be considered representation? We are able to elect people to office whose policy postures never become policy, but instead are directly repudiated by the policies which are actually adopted. How in the world can that be considered representation? If we refused to fight in these disgraceful wars, they could not be waged. If we demanded that the homeless be housed, the sick cared for, the children educated, the indigent trained, the polluters and despoilers shut down, the state could not carry on its customary criminality, masquerading as governance. Responding to these imperatives is the responsibility of visionary Black leaders.

We know the price. All over the world, we have had visionary leaders who have paid the price—exile or death. We know the price. If our leaders are not willing to articulate the vision, the costs, and are not willing to pay them, they are not fit to be our leaders. If we are not willing to demand the vision, to recognize the costs, and be willing to pay them, we are not fit to change the world. Mack Jones says we get the leaders we deserve. He may be right.