Friends:
The quadrennial circus is in town, to mesmerize, captivate, cajole and/or bore you to tears.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be newsworthy, were it not for the after effects of the circus and the infusion of New Millennium "players" under the tents.
In case you have not heard, white boys and girls, native born or imported, will cease to be the majority citizens of United States, not in a century but in a few staccato short years. If you are not sufficiently alarmed, allow me threaten you further: some numbers magicians lately foretold a date certain in 2001, in California, when Caucasians will not be the majority of that state's polity. Not too soon.
May I make you further uncomfortable?
Africans, of all shades and flags, are becoming increasingly relevant and prominent in the stoking, stocking and stacking of the fortunes of America's two-party political behemoths.
You are or have become the professionals and leaders in your various communities, opinion shapers, disciplined ideological stalwarts or brave tacticians. By and large, you are "the right kind of black immigrants" America needs and want. Asians are "brainy", Africans are "shrewd". Personally, I'd rather be lucky!
The African rummaged into America, expecting absolutely nothing of government. Innately bold, daring, and enterprising, and not unconscious of his family name and pedigree, the African takes challenges from which America's favored race shudder; content and docile with his rewards, until such a time as his exposure, experience and expertise gives him a voice.
Cryptically but unsettling to more than a few "locals", the educated African immigrant introduces America's hard core, to an unobstructed view of what can be of America's home-grown minority populations.
Don't start billowing self confidence until you have all the facts.
Africans are purposeful people. Most enterprising of that subset are Nigerians.
Nigerian-Americans, first, second, and t-generation, little difference. They have in fact become the visible signs of "minority progress" in many local American communities. No mere happenstance. Unlike most immigrants, yesterday's foreign student is today's Nigerian-American.
In the course of his metamorphosis, he has been baptized by fire along the way, learned the system, survived it, and is now fully adept at using the system to maximum advantage, for personal betterment and the community's at large.
Unwittingly, through a coincidence of bad government, abominable governance and ultra-harsh economics in the mother land, Nigeria exiled and exported the creme de la creme of its youth to America. Translation: the noticeable absence of a thriving middle class in New Millennium Nigeria.
Since the 1970s, Nigerians are being absorbed faster into America's middle and upper-middle classes at a dizzying rate, undeniably threatening to the favored race and the status quo. Scope the black man at your professional convention or conference, without reading his name badge. You are he or he is you: Nigerian by birth and/or ancestry.
On the left, in the motley colors of the human rainbow, with labor unions, the poor, the sick, the old and the vulnerable in its entourage, guaranteed to take your votes for granted, weighing in at its sanctimonious fighting weight is, Eileen the Donkey.
On the far right corner, attended by fat cats, commerce and corporations, the Schick, the sleek and the hick, making no craving pretense of your votes, is jaded Alice the Elephant.
Win, lose or draw folks, scary as it may be, these are your only choices if you are going to be part of the American system! A liberal mugged once too many times is today's conservative. A conservative who's had "intimate familiarization" with the quirks of the law is your blushing liberal - lenient of every human foibles, except death, and only because he is powerless against it.
The modern Democratic Party, was conceived in pity and impractical noble ideas, but born program-execution ugly. The Grand Old Party, is the party of anticipation (as in "my God, what are they up to next?"). In the Grand Old Party, nothing is a given. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was the party of the bourgeois and privilege. Harken back to just after the American civil war, reconstruction and the poll tax in the South, when Southerners would rather vote for a yellow dog than cast a Republican vote. How times change!
The modern Republican Party's tardiness breaking the mold of race and gender exclusivity, cast it as a near permanent underdog until the emergence of Barry Goldwater from the political wilderness of Arizona. It may interest you to know that even he stared out his political life as a democrat. So are Ronald Wilson Reagan, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and many others. Banishment to near perpetual opposition status builds party character. The Grand Ol' Party has learned practicality as an art of survival. All politics, after all, are local..
The Democratic party is no more pure than the Grand Ol' Party is pristine. So it spouts idealism it rarely lives by. That is the nature of man and laws. If you'd rather have it sugar-coated, do I have a place for you in Al Gore's tent!
In truth, there are shades of one party in the other. Each party has its core beliefs, rituals, practices and principles. None perfect. One, more nearly so. Let it surprise none that I identified and homesteaded in the Republican Party.
Why? The party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of emancipation of my people, has never pretended, except for public consumption and then only for the hapless, to have all stock answers to the country's ills.
Know it or acknowledge it not, Abe Lincoln's emancipation made it possible for the African to be here today, a free man, not somebody else's property.
The GOP catechism of deliverance rests in the ability of the government to be the referee not regulate life as we know it to meaninglessness. When it is wrong, which has been more than on a few occasions, the GOP makes no long drawn out apologies; it plods on gallantly, to resurrect itself down the road another day. The strength of the Republican Party lies in its domineering principle of self help. Short hand description for the person of many Africans.
So you identify with Alice the donkey? No offense taken. Black people, if for no other reasons than relevance and survival, must never encamp wholesale in one political tent. Even when "invited" to the table, neither party gives the black man enough to satiate his inner hunger for fulfillment. Such a comforting fact knowing no two blacks, regardless of their circumstance, think or act in tandem, regardless of the caricature perception projected to the external word. Politics is a game of numbers. "Tis all about winning.
Free yourselves of the altruistic thought one party craves your vote than the other. Africans, reconnoiter yourselves into ideological camps based on your life's comfort level; feed as many people as possible from the table crumbs from both parties today, so we survive to really dine at the table tomorrow. This is where Africans, Nigerians especially, should strive to commandeer political influence disproportionate to our numbers in the population at large, swinging influence to a race of people long neglected.
When was the last time your congressman or woman paid attention? Almost never, until the elections are nigh! Political parties are a social club a tad more serious than religious bingo. Immerse yourself early as a runner, an organizer, a benefactor,a monitor or a registrar. Every little step Nigerians take put us closer to our desired finishing line.
Whatever you do, if you are eligible to vote, please do your civic duty. Many died for your right of citizenship.
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