Established black leaders profit from delivering black votes while communities stay poor

Evidence

Black churches, black colleges and universities, black workers, the black middle class, black communities in general find themselves between two worlds, one world coming undone and the other out of reach. The resources that once enabled us to think about racial progress persist now in nostalgic longings for a time passed or in invocations of a politics that doesn’t quite fit the moment. People continue to march. But there are voices, young bold voices, emerging that point toward a different path. Some established black leaders attempt to silence those voices as they invoke Dr. King and profit from the business of racial advocacy. They proclaim over and over again that folks died for the right to vote while they leverage the possibility of delivering black voters to the polls for political influence and selfish gain. But poor black communities stay poor. Black unemployment remains high. We continue to lose our homes. And black institutions collapse. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 391

Categorization

• SEED: The charge that legacy civil-rights leaders weaponize the ‘folks died for the right to vote’ memory to silence younger voices — a strong angle for explaining how the blank-out ballot proposal was received.
• ADDENDUM: Directly grounds the reader’s question about the blank-out ballot’s reception — Glaude identifies the constituency (established voter-delivery leaders) that would oppose such a proposal.