MLK Day 2020: Defining the Next Narrative for Black America

It’s time for black leaders to end our Stepin Fetchit approach to racial equity. Overemphasizing our failings has unified friend and foe in defining black people by poverty, pathology, and problems. While we’ll never ignore those conditions, they have never defined us.

The next narrative for black America must more accurately define us by our aspirations and contributions before noting our challenges so that our fundamental importance to the world is properly understood.

Fact is, Black America has championed “liberty and justice for all” even more than the Founding Fathers. I recognize the audacity of my statement, but America must reconcile this truth in order to commission black people’s centrality to the very concept of “free society” here.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”