Four months have gone by since the inauguration of our forty-sixth president and in the events since, race has been in almost every headline and by-line. Text and contexts surrounding the African American agenda is going through n interesting round of revision. Policies, laws, and schools of thought as old as time are be rewritten before the American people.
In 2005, novelist and writer Walter Mosley wrote Life Out Of Context, his thoughts on the history and potential of the African American in an American context.
Mosley writes, “they don’t invite you to the table and we don’t demand our place there. If the situation continues, we will never beat out a place for our social context; our voices will never be heard- by them or by us”. Mosley encourages the reader to consider one’s own status and worth as African Americans in the American system. Political in writing and sociological in theory, Mosley adopts an interesting position in his critique of the Democratic party and their then- Black agenda.
Twelve years after this work was published, in an era where America has witnessed the first African American president being elected and more recently, the first woman of color elected to be Vice President, there is much to be said about what the new Black agenda is. African Americans played a very important role in the 2020 elections and at the dawn of perpetual and revitalized voter suppression tactics, the Black agenda is reaching unchartered territory.
Writer Jonathan Capehart, in his 2013 article for The Washington Post, “A ‘Black Agenda’ is an American Agenda”, writes, “Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) agreed, spelling out some specifics. ‘An inherently African American, black agenda, is inherently an agenda that lifts low-income people into the middle class…the president ought to have an agenda that focuses on educational disparities, that focuses on housing disparities, etc…”
This was about eight years ago, during the first term served by then 44th President Barack Obama. Was the agenda a tall task back then? Yes. Is the agenda a tall task now? Yes. Have recent events such as a global pandemic, racial protests, and an ever-changing cultural and social landscape, lent one to consider the possibilities of revisiting such an agenda? Yes.
Mosley and Capehart invite readers to consider the context of the agenda in which the African American exists. With race and color becoming more prevalent topics, it is clear that the context will be redefined to new schools of thought unseen before.
