Civil RightsRoller Coaster

Recognition:
Black people in America have been riding a roller coaster since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 41 years ago: soaring up steep inclines with the outlawing of employment discrimination, doing loop-de-loops over open housing mandates and racing around the tight curves of political empowerment. But that coaster seems poised to take one of its precipitous drops as blacks compare where we were as a people in 1965 with what faces us at the dawn of 2005, as President George W. Bush prepares for his second term as commander-in-chief of these united, divided states.

BlackAmericaWeb.com

The rollercoaster of social and political development in Black America has stalled, in part, because of a tendency to misrecognize tactics as strategy and strategy as end. A tactic is that which is used to further the overall strategic development of a plan. “Sit ins” were a strategy used to further the strategic goal of integration. Integration was a tactical goal on the way to equality before the law and not, as has often been demonstrated in practice, an end in and of itself. The civil rights movement was never designed to cause America to homogenize, to create a singular American identity in which cultural differences and factional interest were elided in favor of a common, one sizes fits all, American identity. The singular distinction inherent in the term American, as it refers to the USA, is a proposition for a society. That proposition exists in the constitution of the United States of America. To be an American means to agree to live by the principles and mechanisms of civil governance laid out in the Constitution. Any violation of the principles of government should be addressed through the mechanisms of government (voting, census, election of officials, delimitation of rights and power (Federal and State)). The argument inherent in the Civil Rights movement was an argument for access to the mechanisms of government in order to create fidelity between those values enumerated in the Constitution and the practice of citizenry and government. The Civil Rights movement was a call for accountability. It called into question to whom the laws of the society applied. To lose sight of these dimensions of the movement is to hop a on a rollercoaster that vacillates between ups and downs; submission and domination; inclusion and exclusion; wealth and poverty; war and peace.