Presuming blacks share purposes merely because they are black denies them real politics

Evidence

I am not suggesting here that black people don’t have group interests. But certain assumptions that informed the politics of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s—for example, that black people ought to share political purposes because they are black—strike me as naïve at best and politically dangerous at worst. In some ways, they assume that black people aren’t political at all, that we’re just hardwired to hold certain positions, as if they are encoded in our genes and evident in our skin pigment. To believe such a thing is to throw democratic politics out the window. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 336