Re: Harry Potter

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Rest of the News

January 18, 2001

Black Capitalism

By Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

I keep hearing this garbage over the airwaves, in private conversations, and 
seeing it
in books and the newspaper about Black capitalism going to "free us" Black 
folks. They
present it to us by Black conservative commentator Tony Brown and his TV show, 
by that
Negro who put out that book about our "choice" to be free if we all start small
business and so on, and in the pages of Entrepreneur magazine. And we can now 
add that
Matah stuff to it. We'll be "free" alright, free of our money, into the hands 
of some
petty capitalist traders. With these programs, we are deluded into thinking 
that if we
sell enough deodorant and other consumer goods, invest in Multilevel marketing 
scams,
or other scams, then over 25 million oppressed people can just buy their 
freedom.

This is one brother who ain't sniffing what they'se defecating!

The system does not work that way: a class of exploiters will emerge who will 
exploit
the rest of us on the bottom, while they live in comfort. For the masses of us 
we will
not get wealthy, rich, or liberated, just suckered into giving up our money.

It's interesting that for the most part, none of the petty capitalist 
"solutions" that
have been offered have been about rebuilding the economically depressed 
communities
most poor Black folks live in, or building some sort of inner city collectives 
for
basic food and housing for poor folks. It's about a middle class, upper crust 
dream.

Capitalism is a system of exploitation of the poor and working people, and it 
does not
matter that a class of entrepreneurs have arisen to sell us things. I don't 
feel any
loyalty whatsoever to some trader just because he is Black, and I know that our 
trade
whether with each other or with a mass distribution system generally will not 
free us
from the clutches of this economic system. In fact, all the Black businesses 
combined
constitute less than 1/2 of 1%, a piddling economic base for sure.

The reason there is a Harlem (in NYC), Hough (in Cleveland), Watts-South Central
(L.A.), and other poor ghetto communities in this country is because capitalism
creates racist social, economic and ethnic divisions, the better to exploit us 
all.
Buying stock in a Black company, or brotha-man's toothpaste ain't going to free 
us.

Cast away illusions and prepare to struggle!