This past week I was on vacation. I was cruising the foam-streaked sapphire waters of the southern Caribbean and trying to give my mind a much-needed rest from the hard-charging business of daily journalism.
But people like Gerald and Jan`ice Sargent of Indianapolis wouldn’t let that happen.
Jan’ice is a hairstylist. Gerald is a diesel machine operator for International Navistar. As we waited in a sitting area of the ship, we talked about cruising (they had been on numerous ones), and I had them chuckling about my challenges in learning how to scuba dive in just three days. Invariably though, the talk turned to politics. They expressed disgust at the racial indifference shown toward the black victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and at much of the way in which the country is being run nowadays.
But being on the cruise and being among people like the Sargents got my mind to working even though it was supposed to be resting. That’s because they reacquainted me with something that is rarely glimpsed at in mainstream media these days -- that something being the growth of the black middle class. That’s because when I saw them, as well as the waves of black folks who must have made up about a third of the revelers on Royal Caribbean’s Adventure of the Seas cruise ship, I saw vast untapped political potential.
And I saw a situation that needs to change.
True, the status of the black middle class is, in many ways, fragile. According to researchers Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro in the groundbreaking book titled “Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality,” the black middle class owns 15 cents for every dollar owned by the white middle class. And for black couples like the Sargents to maintain a middle class standard of living, both of them usually have to be working. That’s not so for white couples.
There are other inequalities and some setbacks as well. But there’s no mistaking that in spite of it all, and especially since the post-civil rights movement years and the prosperous times of the late 1990s, the black middle class has grown exponentially. It’s seen in home ownership. It’s seen in cruising.
Where it’s not seen -- or not seen enough -- is in our politics.
I say this because these days, many of us seem to be at a crossroads when it comes to who ought to represent us. Many black people -- and not just the young -- are disillusioned with the Democrats, but feel there is no where else to go. Others, sadly enough, are becoming Republicans by trying to convince themselves that it’s all right to allow the white people who run that party to relegate them to invisibility and that, somehow, we have a stake in the outcome if gays are banned from marrying.
There’s a better way. But it’s a way that we’ll have to create. And we can do that.
The first way we can do that is to realize that if so many of us have money on hand to cruise, we have money on hand which can collectively be used to change our state of political subjugation. Collectively, we have money to form powerful black political action committees and foundations in much the way that the Cuban American National Foundation has done. They are a huge reason why, in spite of four decades of an economic embargo that has yet to topple Cuban president Fidel Castro, that failed policy still exists. They are a powerful lobby that sees to it their interests are met, regardless of which party is in power.
What all this shows is while it is important for us to make our voices heard with our votes, it is also important to make our voices heard with our dollars. That way, we can create more choices for ourselves and put ourselves in a position to not be taken for granted, or be messed with.
That’s why seeing all my black people enjoying a cruise made me think about the political independence we can enjoy if we start paying for our own politics.
Just like we pay for our vacations.
