The Black Middle Class Should Do This Math

The American black middle class should think twice about striving for a kind of equality which
signals them equal to any individual who has financial security without the character to treat
other people with respect.
How can black citizens afford a luxury of that sort much longer?
If America has 40,000,000 black citizens, are 20,000,000 of them grown men of reproductive age?
We know a number of that sort is an exaggeration.
Of the black men in our community, how many are incarcerated? ( Thereby no longer embracing the possibility of being fully functioning members of our communities.)
Of those who aren't incarcerated, will people with guns and badges pick them off one by one as they
come of age?
Once a great number of men who aren't in prison or dead will see their numbers shrink and shrink.
When and how will the remainder of us notice this?
Will we be the ones who suddenly notice there are no more men in church?
Will we note there are suddenly no men at the perfume counters?
Will someone realize the movie theaters are all absent black men?
Will the liquor stores in the neighborhoods have to close?
Once the men are effectively reduced to a few pockets here and there- what is supposed to happen
to the rest of us?
What plan will be enacted for women and children?
Are any of us dumb enough to think it won't be easy to mark us and strip us of any real
property we have?
Why, that will be as easy as it was for the Ferguson police to beat someone, then charge him for the cost of the uniform which wound up with the victim's blood on it.
We'd better begin to think about exacting ways we are going to be able to protect our children.
We may think we have to many of them now.
How many generations is it going to take before we realize we don't have an infinite number of
children?
One of the problems may hang on the more positive news that even as we have many more men in
jail than we should, we also have hundreds of times more black male M.D.s, D.D.M.s, and Ph.D.s
and J.D.s etc. than we did when the civil rights law was passed. We have many more black men who
have Master's degrees, Bachelor's degrees, or even one or two years of college.
I know we love it, such as it is.
In order to keep it up, we'd better look lively.
America itself had better look lively, because in this century, the United States could possibly use
100,000,000 very creative professionals in order to compete with China.