Black People Have No Pride 2: Assimilation

What were our goals after we gained our Civil Rights? It would have been great if we focused on being more independent and improving our communities, but instead I believe that many Blacks saw it as an open door not to be equal to whites, not just in rights. Whites are perceived to be at the top of the racial ladder. Therefore, by assimilating into white culture, we had the chance to have all of the power we had attributed to them thus far. Assimilation has been our goal since the Civil Rights Movement, and it still is.

High Opportunity Cost

The more you work to gain something, the less you can work to gain something else. You can not hope to assimilate into white culture, which doesn't even value those who are not white, and advance black culture simultaneously. However, Black people seem to be under the impression that we can have it both ways. I do not believe that Black people as a community can thrive under a white system because it was designed to oppress minorities and establish white power. That's why I don't understand why people are surprised when they hear about studies that concern racial profiling or unequal hiring practices. People act as if it should be a surprise when Black schools are underfunded. Black people believe a white culture will act in their best interest--that the more we assimilate the more this will become true. Considering the state of things today, this is definitely faulty reasoning. We should have worked on establishing independence after the Civil Rights Movement. To borrow the words of Malcolm X.

It only means that we should control the economy of our community. Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should white people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the white man? Why? If a black man can't move his store into a white community, you tell me why a white man should move his store into a black community. The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.

Then you wonder why where you live is always a ghetto or a slum area. And where you and I are concerned, not only do we lose it when we spend it out of the community, but the white man has got all our stores in the community tied up; so that though we spend it in the community, at sundown the man who runs the store takes it over across town somewhere. He's got us in a vise.


So the economic philosophy of black nationalism means in every church, in every civic organization, in every fraternal order, it's time now for our people to be come conscious of the importance of controlling the economy of our community. If we own the stores, if we operate the businesses, if we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we're developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind. Once you gain control of the economy of your own community, then you don't have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business.(Ballot or Bullet)

Black people still depend on white people for whether we have food on our tables or not. Whether or not Affirmative Action comes in for us or not shouldn't determine whether or not we have a job. We seem to have been under the impression, since the Civil Rights Movement, that we "came over hear on the Mayflower"--that now that we had equal protection under the law we are seen as equal to whites in this country's eyes. We tried to be a part of a white system, but didn't recognize that it would always put us at the bottom. Furthermore, not only did assimilation make us dependent on whites and put us at an economic disadvantaged, but adopting its values caused to have a low opinion of ourselves.


It is impossible to be assimilated into a society and not adopt is values. This is why we suffer so much from internalized racism, not just from the values of slavery but from trying so hard to be a part of white culture. We believe that dark skin is inferior to light skin and in "good hair" not only because of slavery, but because those are principles of white culture, and by assimilating into it we have adopted their method of thinking.


I believe that if we had established our own society after the Civil Rights Movement instead of working so hard into integrating into white society, we would have had stronger community both economically and mentally. Self-hatred would have been a distant memory.