Project 2025: The Unmasking of The Exodus Preacher
Updated: Jan 7, 2025
The masking of white America’s persistent motivation to support and sustain white supremacy is the foundation of Black America’s belief and participation in the fallacy called multi-culturalism. Originally called “fusion politics” after the Civil War, multiculturalism is the contemporary umbrella term describing post-racial America’s belief in the mythical pluralistic majority of African Americans; AAPI; "liberal" whites; LBGTQI; Hispanic Americans; & organized labor. Supposedly forming an invisible, yet ostensibly insurmountable political and social body politic, this pluralistic majority is touted as the modern socio-political solution to overcome the systemic occurrence of working class white Americans voting against their interests to support the nihilistic agenda of America’s top 1%.
The bulk of my professional/managerial career was spent toiling in the ranks of the multi-cultural organizations that supposedly comprise America's new political majority. Non-profits, labor unions, community based organizations, progressive churches, social and emotional learning curricula and the public charter school system have combined to exploit my labor throughout the duration of my career thus far. For far too many organizations to date, I have donned the colors of multi-culturalism to be featured posing on the cover of university brochures amid the rainbow coalition or smiling on company websites alongside executive leaders only to be denied raises and health insurance myself, then in turn, shuttled about the country to knock doors in blistering heat or freezing cold to get other laborers to exercise their franchise supposedly for increased wages and guaranteed health insurance. Often told that my economic sacrifices are the price to be paid for progress, I suited up time and again only to be left standing alone when I take stock of what these organizations have done for me in return. Brushed aside for being "too radical" or "over-idealistic", my research remains unpublished, my voice unheard and my voter issues pushed further and further down the pragmatic liberal agenda.
But my story as an individual is also the story of my people. Black America has the unique positioning of having produced the greatest and most celebrated protest movements, credited for expanding the definitions of American democracy only to receive the least amount of representation and advocacy from America's political and economic systems in return. While other racial groups actively enjoy the benefits of double-mindedness given their split allegiance between America's co-dependent political parties, African Americans overwhelmingly have concentrated our vote to one party or the other. Originally beholden to "the Party of Lincoln", African Americans began our political destiny with near universal support for the Republican Party. The Party of Emancipation, Reconstruction and the first Ku Klux Klan Act, the Republican Party for a short time represented the interests of the Black community to the benefit of the nation as a whole.
But like all good things, interests in the plights of the Black community came to a screeching halt in America with the compromise of 1876 and the wholesale abandonment of America's only true attempt at democracy, Reconstruction. The economic and social interests of the white mob and their noble benefactors, the corporate elites, frightened the American public away from fusion politics the last 30 years of the 19th-century through successful social campaigns that demonized Blacks in the traditional and convenient tropes that surface time and again today. Laziness, criminality, corruptibility and overly-sexualized depictions of Black America raged throughout the 20th century and successfully imprisoned the image of Black Americans and instantly devalued our public collaborations with other racial groups. Immigrant populations looking to assure footholds within the American mainstream internalized the message that the fastest route to American acceptance was atop the backs of the formerly enslaved.
During this past election cycle, I attended a voter forum at a metro-Atlanta Black church where Black political spokespeople disseminated to the attending public all the best practice strategies to mobilize the Black agenda in 2024. Every recommendation hinged centrally on supporting the Democratic Party as each speaker found a less than creative way to amalgamate the Black political agenda to the agendas of America's other diverse racial and economic groups. Comparing and contrasting their recommendations to my own experiences within the Democratic Party left me distinctly wanting more.
When the opportunity for questions arose, I sauntered over to the microphone to relay my experiences in hopes of ascertaining a new and more adept political program than simply relying on the Democrats to somehow deliver the millennium to Black folks. "I am an organizing veteran of three Democratic political campaigns", I began. "In 2016, I manned the Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign down in Broward County Florida. In 2018, I served on the Coordinated Campaign to elect Stacey Abrams Governor of Georgia. And in 2019, I moved to South Carolina to spearhead the current Democratic nominee's, Kamala Harris', initial campaign attempt to become President of the United States. All three campaigns ended in a loss." When interrupted by one of the speakers who mentioned he has yet to hear the question, I retorted that the most debilitating aspects of all three campaigns in my experience was the amount of resistance experienced from our multi-cultural allies and the refusal of the campaign to centralize issues of fundamental importance to the Black community. So I concluded with the question of sincerity: "Is there any political solution for the Black community to mobilize around our issues outside of the losing platform of the Democratic Party?"
Similar to the "stand in the back of the line" refrain Black communities heard from President Obama during his two-terms in office, I was encouraged strongly to understand that Democratic candidates must represent the interests of all Americans, not just Black Americans. My response was simple. My voter issues as a Black man do benefit all Americans as a whole. I listed my top voter issues as lovable wage increases, universal healthcare, student-loan forgiveness, police demilitarization, infrastructure improvements, term limits, reparations & budget reform plus voter protections. I challenged the stage to elaborate just how these issues, if achieved, fail to revitalize this nation even as they strongly benefit Black communities.
Despite middle class America’s near-universal resistance to the multicultural American myth, Black and Brown multiculturalists continue to espouse our networking and moral suasion of the recalcitrant white population as the best and most practical route to achieving basic humanitarian gains here in the land of the free.
The most disconcerting reality is that many of the Black proponents of the multicultural myth seek to dupe the masses of their own people to justify their own perplexing life choices. For the narrow strands of Black middle class and upper-middle class citizens living in predominantly white (or multicultural neighborhoods); working in white-dominated corporate centers; and socializing largely in non-Black spaces, justifying their treason against racial solidarity by fomenting shallow white alliances that on the surface reflect a defeat of racism is a psychological necessity. But in reality, the emptiness of the multicultural America only reinforces the fundamental racial caste system of white supremacy.
This position is grounded empirically and will seek to weave together the historical accounts of labor, politics, religion economics, popular culture and race interspersed with narratives from my own life. And because this reasoning has a sound historical & personal foundation is the very reason why multiculturalists will attack this position as narrow and a exercise of projection or complaining. Multi-culturalists are history’s greatest deniers. Possibly viewing themselves as revisionists, multi-culturalists view the past through a falsified corrective lens, assuming that if past historical figures or movements adopted their foolhardy propositions, then the government and corporate vices dominating today’s socio-economic systems would be mitigated if not completely defeated.
Heather McGhee wrote one of America's brilliant multi-cultural apologies with her New York Times bestseller, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone & How We Can Prosper Together (One World Trade, 2022). Despite McGhee's detailed history of the successful campaigns white communities have launched against integration, women's suffrage, Emancipation, climate change, environmental discrimination and more, she still encourages Americans of color to attempt to align multiculturally as the best hope for creating a more perfect union. In the first half of her narrative, she quotes Ron Pollack's diagnosis on America's prospects for multi-cultural change by stating:
"If we didn't have these sharp divisions based on race, we could make enormous progress in terms of making sure that people are not hurting as badly as they are [or] deprived of what clearly are the necessities of life. And I would think it was possible if we had a sense of social solidarity" (page 63).
Such statements treat race as an incidental aside or an inconvenient nuisance toward an overall vision that is almost within our grasp. But to the contrary, race is the giant, immovable, foul-smelling elephant that continues to stink up America's top-down economic and political agenda. The current multi-cultural brigade blithely ignores that there is no "if only if it weren't for race" hypothetical to draw upon. The race as a social construction argument must at some point account for the fact that it is society itself, particularly society's overlords, who continue to invest into the racial caste system better known as the American social order. America’s socio-political and economic reality today invalidates the failed optimism of the multicultural position. American schools are just as segregated today as the 1940’s and the wealth inequality between racial groups has only widened since the advent of desegregation. But most importantly, the political agenda of the African American community continues to fall further and further down the political agenda of multi-cultural political and economic organizations all the while they continue to encourage us to abandon a close-ranks mentality.
TESTIMONIAL: The Birth of The Exodus Preacher
I experienced multiculturalism for the first time at the age of 11. Back in the early 90’s for Black students showing academic aptitude and interest, shuttling you to white schools was the best we could do to fortify your chances of success. Attending my all-Black elementary school for my formative K-5 education, I was often sent to the library for the last hour of the school day because I often completed all my assignments and homework before the final bell.
Instead of individual projects or a separate learning track to continue to develop my skills, I was allowed to watch Reading Rainbow and Zoobilee Zoo until dismissal. Upon going to middle school, I was enrolled into Atlanta Public School’s M to M program, or Minority to Majority Exploratory Program. An extension of the 1970’s era busing solution that couriered Black students from all-Black communities to all-white ones for learning purposes, I traveled over an hour each way from Southeast Atlanta to Northwest Atlanta to attend the majority white, high-class Sutton Middle School. In the matter of 8 weeks from my 5th grade graduation to my 6th grade orientation, my class demographic changed from all working-class Blacks to me being one of 3 non-white students.
Interestingly enough, my community gave me little warning or instruction as what to expect from this culture shift. The implicit direction I received from parents, ministers and everyone else was simply to go there and “be smart” and then everything else will take care of itself. My mother pulled my older brother from his middle school and transferred him to Sutton with me so I wouldn’t be totally alone, at least for that first year. I am still trying to figure out what that did for me or how that helped him. My brother absolutely hated it there every single day and damn near staged his own protest movement at home until he was transferred back for his 8th grade year.
For the first 6-weeks of 6th grade, I did not say a word to anyone socially. I didn’t know how to. I never saw that many white people in the same place in all my life. I never interacted socially or otherwise with any white person or any non-Black person to that point. Point of fact, my exposure to white people up until that 6th grade was to see them exclusively as authority figures: either as my mother’s supervisors at work when she was a corporate insurance agent or State officials discerning the amount of government supports we qualified for when I accompanied my mom to the community centers where public subsidies like food stamps or government groceries were distributed.
In 1st or 2nd grade, I was tested for the gifted program and for the remainder of my elementary school years, I was bused to another elementary school one day a week (Tuesdays I believe) to participate in what was deemed advanced level education for similarly gifted working-class Black students attending Black elementary schools in my Cluster. The Challenge program, as it was called, assembled Zone 3’s finest to the most technologically advanced elementary school in our neighborhoods and there we were assigned tasks that facilitated critical thinking, project-based learning and extended peer interactions that were simply foreign to the school curriculums at my home school.
Excelling in Challenge left me woefully unprepared to compete with students from Atlanta’s most prestigious, high-class and best equipped elementary schools on the Northside. I remember walking through the air-conditioned halls of Sutton Middle and saw my first computer lab. At Dobbs Elementary, each classroom was equipped with one computer for the 31 or so enrolled students. Every student was assigned two hours of computer time per week where we engaged in academic computer games like grammar based subject-verb agreement or remedial math review of times tables or fractions. But at Sutton Middle, in addition to each grade-level computer lab were 3-5 in class computers and each student had at least an hour of computer time daily.
During my initial semester at Sutton, a clerical error initially placed me within the general academic track. My core academic subjects: math; science; social studies; and ELA were below my aptitude scores. Moreover, although I played trumpet for 3 years already in elementary school and was featured in Springtime festival competitions, when I selected my exploratory subject of band during the summer, I was placed in the 6th grade beginning band when the school year started. Immediately, my daily assignments and homework completion distinguished my performance from my classmates. I remember my first day of band, after my band director heard me play and saw me sight read the music with ease, I can still see his head veer to the side as if he just witnessed something genuinely confusing. Befuddled, he asked me if I played trumpet before and I responded by shrugging my shoulders.
I do believe it was my band teacher who may have relayed his concerns to other teachers that I may have been displaced unto the improper track given the skill I displayed in class. Ironically enough, he was my only my Black teacher that semester. What I do know for sure is that one day near mid-semester and seemingly out of the blue, my homeroom teacher stopped me in the hall with an open folder in her hand. It was my academic file. She said to me, “Ronald, you’re supposed to be in Advanced Placement. I’m looking at your scores and grades and we have you in all the wrong classes. Why didn’t you say anything?”. I responded, “I didn’t know I was supposed to.”
In the working-class Black community where I grew up, children were seen, not heard. There was very little a child had to offer of value to the adults around them and the adults themselves worked very hard to keep it that way. When my parents were on the phone, shut up. In public, we were to speak only when spoken to. In the grocery store or department store, to ask for something was tantamount to capital punishment. At church, your Easter Speech, 3rd Sunday Youth Day participation or answering yes sir or yes ma’am in response to direct questions were the permissible avenues for self-expression. Face slappings were frequent reminders of your place and rank and beatings were a major display of love and social order.
Reinforcing the beatings were the sermon styled lectures you got in between the striking received from switches, belts, broom handles, extension cords, vacuum cleaners, combs, brushes or anything else within arms reach. We were beat so much as children, that part of our child culture at home, school and at church would be to compare the welts on our bodies after the love and instruction from adults concluded. Teachers beat us in elementary school. I remember the conversation my mother had with my grammar school Principal immediately after I was enrolled in Kindergarten. “This one, you can beat” my mother said with conviction after she signed my registration forms. And beat me they did. I was beat by my favorite teacher, my least favorite teacher, teachers I knew and teachers who were strangers. And teachers who didn’t beat found other forms of corporal punishment. Sitting in the “electric chair”, holding books with arms extended, standing in front of the class or in the corner were all accepted and common practiced in my working-class, all Black elementary school.
By the time I was introduced to multiculturalism in Middle School, self-advocacy and confidence was taboo. I accepted the world as it was given and said 'Thank you'. I ate what was put on my plate and if I were allergic to it, then it was just my time to die. Learning and developing with students of different racial and class statuses and different cultural norms than mine required skillsets and mental aptitudes quite distinct from anything I could even imagine, let alone actualize. Memorizing the rules of PEMDAS or ROYGBIV can only take you so far in the world of multicultural networking and relationship-building. Existing among others in a pluralistic society where right and wrong are a matter of context rather than power imbalance draws from what it is inside, the convictions that governed my psychology, spirituality and self-worth.
My personal acculturation to the public world is a lens into analyzing the reactions of Black Americans to the evolving world around us. Descendants of enslaved Africans and racially segregated African Americans are bred into cultures ill-equipped to master a multi-cultural world that is denied to us within the auspices of our own working class communities. And that is the exact point of multi-culturalism—to produce a commonly celebrated social order that will still result in the disproportionate number of Blacks to find less than secure financial, emotional & psychological footing, if not outright rejection.
Ellis Cose dissects the possibilities of displaced populations entering into reconciled and repaired relationships with their former abusers in his poignant discussion Bone to Pick: Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation & Revenge (Washington Square Press, 2004). In his introduction, he speaks explicitly of the ingrained and near genetic trauma systems consciously and subconsciously bred into marginalized populations of Northern Ireland. The foundations of his psychological findings have prescient impacts on the plights of African Americans here and deserve consideration when he writes:
"The Psychologist Robert Enright found that nearly half of a group of over two hundred seven-year olds he worked with in Northern Ireland were clinically depressed. The reason, he speculated, had a lot to do with the centuries of suffering the people of Northern Ireland have endured. Somehow the parents transmitted their trauma to their children. 'When husbands and wives marry', observed Enright, 'they bring what they learned from their mom and dad....They bring in the wounds of the earlier generation, which also brought in the wounds of the earlier generation.' At a 1997 conference on Northern Ireland at Georgetown University, political scientist Paul Arthur made much the same point. 'This sense of memory, I think, has been one of our deadliest problems.'" (page 2)
America institutionally denies the voice of inter-generational Black trauma passed generation to generation and initially implanted into Black communities from Euro-American employers who implanted the first displaced Africans into a prolonged humanitarian crisis in order to perpetually exploit the labor and intellectual property of the Black community. Although enslavement is overwhelmingly understood as a race-based system, it is most appropriately understood as the founding economic system of the American democracy. Black America's humanitarian crisis of homelessness, substance dependency, illiteracy, sexual abnormality & breeding plus family separation for profit inexorably made Black labor easily exploitable throughout the duration of Antebellum America and the Jim & Jane Crow racial apartheid eras of the 19th & 20th centuries.
William Edward Burghardt DuBois delivered an invaluable yet soul-cringing socio-economic treatise with the publishing of his seminal work, Black Reconstruction In America, 1860-1880 (DuBois, 1935, 1967 & The Free Press, 1998) detailing the profitable white-owned breeding system of Black labor in the United States throughout the first half of the 19th-Century. Given that the Federal Government outlawed the importation of enslaved African labor in 1808, the growth and expansion of enslavement for the next half-century was largely supplied through the natural population growth of enslaved Black parents. DuBois describes America's brutal efficiency growing the Black enslaved population in these terms:
"...but as a matter of fact, the cotton planters were supplied with laborers by the Border States. A laboring stock was deliberately bred for legal sale. A larger number of persons followed the profession of promoting this sale of slaves. There were markets and quotations, and the stream of black labor, moving continuously into the South, reached yearly into the thousands.
Notwithstanding these perfectly clear and authenticated facts, the planter persistently denied them. He denied that there was considerable interstate sale of slaves; he denied that families were broken up; he insisted that slave auctions were due to death or mischance, and particularly did he insist that the slave traders were the least of human beings and most despised.
This deliberate contradiction of plain facts constitutes itself a major charge against slavery and shows how the system so often affronted the moral sense of the planters themselves that they tried to hide from it. They could not face the fact of Negro women as brood mares and of black children as puppies." (page 43)
LABOR & RACE: The Road to The Exodus
Categorizing America's system of enslavement as the foundation of economics as opposed to the foundation of social society has a profound impact on how we view African Americans themselves and the accompanying indigenous, AAPI, European and Central and South American immigrants that comprise America's multi-cultural fabric. If abolition was America’s first labor movement, then the labor movement itself must be seen as the white civil rights movement. Every tactic of disruption planters used to disrupt & disembowel Black liberation initiatives during Antebellum were also deployed to truncate white & Asian immigrants’ attempt for fair wages and gainful employment before and after Emancipation. Industrial espionage, political intimidation, assassination & lynching are just as prevalent in the white civil rights movement for fair labor as it was in the Black civil rights movement for fair labor plus humane treatment.
America’s nasty little secret is that the progenitors & practitioners of racial hatred and corporate greed are the same people, the top 1%. These believers in American exceptionalism were never talking of the nation as a whole. They are referencing the demographic of their own status makeup. The great majority of the rank and file of American people who comprise the labor force and the voting pool have historically been described as “the rabble” or “the mob” by the class of individuals who are their employers, Founding Fathers, government representatives and social elites. Bred to be suspicious of their own labor force and fellow countrymen, America's earliest robber barons and corporate moguls instituted various and sundry mechanisms to ensure a scarcity of capital and resource so that distinct racial and ethnic groups fight themselves to the death to eek out a chance to achieve the much ballyhooed American dream.
Kelly Brown Douglass expertly crystallizes the foundational meanings of American exceptionalism in her crucial narrative, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Orbis Books, 2015). When describing the birth of the concept of American exceptionalism Douglass plainly asserts at length that:
"Even though the precise phrase 'American exceptionalism' likely did not enter into the American discourse until the twentieth century, the culture of exceptionalism emerged with the dawning of America. While most contemporary understandings associate America's exceptionalism with it's forms of democratic governing and its mission to spread democratic principles across the world, to understand it as simply about politics and and mission does not capture the racial or divine character of America's narrative of exceptionalism. To be sure, in America's earliest beginnings its sense of exceptionalism focused on the nature of its institutions, as we have seen. It must not be overlooked, however, that what made America's institutions exceptional was their Anglo-Saxon character. America's exceptional identity was grounded in the Anglo-Saxon myth. To reiterate, this myth stressed that it was Anglo-Saxon institutions that best respected individual rights and liberty. Inasmuch as America stayed true to its Anglo-Saxon character when forming its governing institutions, then it would maintain its exceptional identity. This exceptionalism was initially expressed as a chosen identity. With the formation of America's grand narrative, the two key pieces of America's sense of self came together: it's Anglo-Saxon character and its 'chosen' identity. Both are defining factors in America's exceptionalism. Thus, America's grand narrative of exceptionalism is the narrative of America's identity. To be a chosen nation is to be an Anglo-Saxon nation. To be an Anglo-Saxon nation is to be a chosen nation. It is this constructed racial-religious synchronicity that makes America exceptional." (pages 15-16)
America's economic giants publicly purport value systems, like multiculturalism that they themselves refuse to live by or even internally validate in order to police our actions and prevent the most logical coalition-building inside groups that can produce the most change. The founding fathers and the top 1% (again the same people) are the most racially homogenous demographic of any class strata in American history. They remain near exclusively Lilly-white, attempting to trace their lineage back to the Anglo-Saxon cult that pretends to be the purest and most superior breed of humanity ever produced. (Douglass, page 41)
Middle class Americans, who have the greatest access to the lifestyles and value systems of the mega-rich, even if only temporarily, form the cultural police safeguarding the racial caste systems that are the foundations of the greatest income and capital inequalities in the history of the world. Middle class lusting to emulate the values and lifestyles of the mega-rich form the largest motivation for middle class Americans to associate largely with themselves in their own time and with the mega-rich in public, professional and political settings. However, the optics of what middle class America looks like needed to change over the last 200-years to accommodate the influx European & Asian immigrants, Central and South American migrants and the Emancipation and desegregation of African-descended laborers.
To maintain the lily-white ownership class, the top 1% over-publicizes what is deemed a raceless, or post-racial managerial/professional class to offer the well worn out illusion that hard work, innovation and upward mobility are distinct from the racialized economics. Although multi-culturalism offers no standard to advance the interests of working class & impoverished Americans, multi-culturalists are adept at somehow congratulating themselves for individually overthrowing the racial psychology of the past 500-years of Euro-American racial caste.
Yet, it is interesting to note that to date, not a single multi-culturalist has standardized their personal methodology for how they have been successfully able to live and interact outside America’s racial construct. If multi-culturalism is so successful and has such a winning track record as the appropriate modern methodology for living free of racial prejudice and economic stratification, then why have they refrained from offering these strategies to working class and underclass Americans en masse?
The truth of the matter is that marginalized populations historically have looked only to themselves to organize and create the systems that produce a fighting chance for a better world. The elites within diverse communities of color historically side with the white overlords of the same class strata to maintain the only effective colorblindness in America. High-ranking class solidarity defeats the closed ranks mentality of racial solidarity throughout United States history. W.E.B. DuBois remarks on this historical truth within the Black community when describing wealthy Black reluctance to fund racial uplift programs at the start of the 20th century:
"...in general its members are curiously hampered by the fact that, being shut off from the world about them, they are the aristocracy of their own people, with all the responsibilities of an aristocracy, and yet they, on the one hand, are not prepared for this role, and their own masses are not used to looking to them for leadership. As a class, they feel strongly the centrifugal forces of class repulsion.
....Consequently this class which ought to lead, refuses to head any race movement on the plea that they draw the very color line against which they protest."
WAWG!!!
But the working classes are well aware that they can only depend on themselves. WAWG (we all we got) is the motto of those who work for a living under a system of depressed wages, heightening inflation, housing instability and food shortages.
America’s insistence to protect the rich at the expense of reasonable and common sense socio-economic coalitions should encourage ethnic-American communities to return to a close-ranks mentality to ensure their longevity and thriving. But the blaring celebrations of short-lived postmodern gains in the labor and Civil Rights movements drowns out the common sense and urgency needed to abandon multiculturalism’s sinking ship. The increased stratification of wealth, wasteful misuse of natural resources and growing political destabilization within the United States and throughout the world suggest that the time to act for the masses of citizens living and working outside of the top-10% is anything but infinite.
The likelihood of reforming the mega-rich are nil. They are nihilistically attracted to some form of catastrophic calamity to validate yet again the survival of the fittest. The current trend of the top-1% building and residing in mega-bunkers is a universal signal that the are anticipating (if not pro-actively inducing) some type world-level event that will necessitate the need for extreme protection and some form of underground habitation. Whether environmental, militarily or otherwise enacted, there is a tipping point that most people are unprepared to survive or even intellectually accept. We are nearing the point where the entire means of production of modern life are so concentrated into the hands of a few individuals, that the masses of people, including middle & upper-middle classes, will be coerced into living exclusively off the conditions provided by those in power. This is the exceptionalism that was meant by Thomas Jefferson, Charles Mill, Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the original architects of the American experiment.
Government dissatisfaction worldwide are approaching irreversible levels and faith that economic systems have the wherewithal to provide corrective action are baseless at this point. The conclusion of 2024 witnessed the collapse of the French and German governments and political instability governs nearly two-thirds of Africa and over 40% of Southeast Asia. In December 2024, I took a tour of the Federal Reserve in Atlanta, GA to gain a fairer perspective of economic theory and application in this post-modern, post-racial America. It is interesting to note the racial homogeneity of the organizations that govern the financial system and the methodologies through which they assume the positions they hold. None of the positions are publicly elected and many times, serving on one financial board gives your automatic access to several others. While touring the Fed, I asked the tour guide to account for the growing influence of crypto-currency and alternative forms of bitcoin on the world economy to date. The official replied that as of now, The Fed continues to discount crypto as currency because it is completely speculative. But I retorted my concern that the American dollar is completely speculative as well since we have abandoned the gold standard since the 1970’s. Yet the Fed regards the Dollar as currency and when I asked how, he replied "solely on the basis of worldwide faith in the government of the United States". The room instantly went up in complete laughter.
The unchecked rise in power of corporate elites and the revolving door between the United States Government, Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex gives rise to the ever-important question of just who is the government of the United States right now and what actually comprises our faith in it. January 6th is an incendiary reminder that faith in government is at best mercurial and at worst whimsical. As soon as racial & class groups in power feel slighted, their faith in government is conveniently abandoned and they resort to the very chaos and social disorder the creation of government was supposed to eradicate. Congress was last valued at over $5 Billion dollars, suggesting yet again that the policy concerns and motivations behind federal government action and inaction are exclusively the interests of top 1%. Moreover, the maintenance of a woefully binary 2-party system and obsolete Electoral College remain two of the top-1% major checks against ever having to share real power with groups outside their class and racial strata. When average Americans consider the demographics currently comprising large cross sections of the American government, we end up seeing that political representation is dominated not only by the wealthy, but also the elderly-- vis a vis, "Old Money".
Although the benefits of senior Americans means years of established working relationships, knowledge of complex systems and protocols, the advanced seniority of most of the government decreases the likelihood that American workers are represented by any cadre of officials who have worked for a living in the last 40 years. Wage stagnation & inequality are very easy to maintain politically when the government itself largely operates above the retirement age. American laborers, as a whole, continues to reject all other political and economic ideas like term limits and age limits to over-reliance on the very caste system that constrains them. Additionally, labor has become so specialized over the last 150 years that most Americans are unable to fend for themselves outside of performing the repetitive and life-draining tasks we perform for the corporations that fire us at will, separate us from our families and each other and continue to degrade the environment to a point of destruction. As the owners of those corporations continue to trickle down minimal securities to their managerial/professional classes, these middle managers self-soothe their complicity through mass delusions that they have transcended supposedly yesteryear racial and class-based entrapments.
Upper-middle class justifications of their performance in this death dance hinge heavily on their perceived ability to invest their communities out of systematic oppression. The middle class maintains the greatest contact to what Karl Marx deemed the proletariat, or the rank and file and the middle class managers desire to control that contact to the same degree that the top 1% controls contact with them. The flimsy assertion that the creation of a middle class think-tank, non-profit or mutual fund provides protection against the encroachments of economic dictators and out of date legal codes is frighteningly inadequate. They continue to perpetuate the “depend on me” attitude to working class and impoverished communities that the top 1% throw down on them.
LAW & ORDER: Or the absence thereof
The American public’s conceptual understanding of law & order, or everyday normalcy, is one of the most blatantly racist & bloodiest fallacies in human history. The daily operations of this nation’s law enforcement, healthcare, education, financial and labor systems are predicated upon tens of millions of American lives and minds being sexually violated, miseducated, undervalued, discriminated, overcharged, underpaid & mentally scarred every single day. The trauma of the American life cycle is so replete and accepted nationwide that the jarring statistics detailing the increased normalization of rape, gun violence, corporate malfeasance, government collusion, supervisory neglect, substance abuse, family eviction, mass incarceration, food scarcity, environmental degradation, childhood obesity, structural dilapidation, wage inequality, child abuse & neglect, gentrification, sex trafficking, domestic violence, racial discrimination, military suicide & state-sponsored terrorism are often defeated by the all familiar refrain of “why are you being so negative?!” The thought of living without trauma in these United States is solely the personal responsibility of each individual person.
Average Americans experience the pressures of their own socio-economic fragility so acutely that to entertain thoughts of joining together to create a better life just seems so unrealistic. And they are not far from the truth. The status competition between rank and file Americans is so extreme, that sociologists repeatedly conclude that average Americans of all races will routinely work against their own interests principally to block the perceived advancement of other “less deserving“ groups. White American communities have historically cemented public swimming pools, voted against wage increases, defeated universal healthcare initiatives, sank the Equal Rights Amendment, upended head start programs, disbanded low-income housing efforts and defeated common sense gun legislation on the strength that these policy directives ostensibly benefit Black communities more than their own. When the American government could get away w/low-interest rates for college education & home ownership loans for whites only, the government invested enough in these programs to create the vibrant middle class that Tom Brokaw labeled America’s “Greatest Generation”. But The moment America became a “pluralistic society” with the desegregation and Black Power movements of the 1950’s and 60’s is the precise moment that white conservatives began blaring loudly that the bloated federal government is too big and fat with wasteful social initiatives that deliver careless handouts to lazy population groups refusing to work the low-wage “Black-jobs” that America’s racial caste deemed them worthy.
FHA Loans and the G.I. bill were explicit in their race-based limitations that authorized their use for white families only. The strictness of America’s generational wealth-building for white families occurs at the same exact time that federal and state governments pro-actively allowed for, if not encouraged white mobs and other white citizen terrorist groups to “cleanse” Black communities of our generational wealth and property in cities from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Atlanta, GA, East St. Louis, MO, Detroit Michigan, Alexandria, VA, Mobile, AL, Wilmington, NC and hundreds more.
One of the more incendiary trends of today’s multiculturalists movement are for African Americans to retrace these cleansing sites and discover to their astonishment that Black people once owned property in America. But what is absent always in this racial atrocity pornography are the restitution efforts to remunerate Black Americans for the crimes perpetrated against them by the parents and grandparents of their contemporary white buddies, co-workers, neighbors and spouses. To this day, only 2% of lynching cases in America ever resulted in the successful prosecution of the white perpetrator. To deny the spiritual and psychological impacts of that shamefully racist statistic is to deny the humanity of the Black people non-Blacks claim are their friends, loved ones and life partners.
The multicultural movement effectively denies that America owes Black citizens anything. In the ultimate “look ahead & forget the past” fashion, America’s whitewashing of the overly effective system of Jim and Jane Crow racial apartheid produces a social amnesia that borders on schizophrenia. For Black Americans to gain validation from seeing the names of their recent ancestors (parents, grandparents or great-grandparents) on some state registry of recorded victimhood absent of any reparation continues to reinforce the second-class citizenry status that is the ultimate point of multi-culturalism in the first place.
The Black middle and upper class are often chided for their voluntary exodus out of historical Black communities to finally live their tightly held vision of white acceptance at the onset of desegregation. But their defection is still only half the story. If multiculturalism is a real concept in America, then it does stand to reason that other non-Black racial groups had every opportunity to patronize the businesses, schools and communities that the Black elites abandoned. But yet again, the Black working and entrepreneurial classes were left out on their own, to fend for themselves and prove themselves as survivors of the fittest in an economic and political system that rewards all other racial groups for ignoring Black economics at best and subverting Black business into extinction at worst.
The normalization of trauma in the United States is so thorough that the most ill-fated and oft- defeated public policies are the ones that produce the most human benefit for the most Americans. There is a frightful history of the American government and American voter base acting in unison to disinvest in the health and stability of its own nation. Universal healthcare has been defeated on multiple occasions evidenced from the only agenda item Frances Perkins failed to achieve in her revolutionary New Deal ideology of the 1930’s to the last major attempt at government-sponsored healthcare under the scandal ridden Nixon administration in the 1970’s. Today's haphazard Medicaid and Medicare expansion fight is so riddled with pitfalls and contradictions that it easier to understand how and why our government has more successfully invested in the creation of extinction-level armaments of nuclear weaponry before implementing life-generating programs of immunization and low-cost medicine for children and seniors. The uniquely American paradox regarding government sponsored healthcare remains that the overwhelmingly white elderly federal government population enjoys the right of publicly-subsidized health insurance while they simultaneously deny it to the hundreds of millions of tax paying American citizens who are footing their healthcare bills.
So, what is to be done? Can we save "The System"?
The common viewpoint that most may have is that there exists a clandestine desire for Americans to “do something” politically or economically about this pressing nihilism. Almost as if summarizing the truth of this nation was some reverse-psychologist plot to produce another misguided Civil Rights Movement. But to the contrary, America’s ingrained racism is so pervasive that there is little to be done at this point by the diverse populations of citizens impacted by its death grip. The most logical conclusion for this state of affairs is the most inevitable. The means of production are so far removed from the American masses that we would have little idea on how to unify even if we wanted to. Furthermore, does the environmental time clock even provide enough time for diverse groups to coalesce before the tipping points of famine, disease, drought & increased natural disasters destabilize our conception of normalcy beyond repair? The intra-racial rivalries of some of Black America’s greatest thought leaders prevented mass mobilization of even our single race community the last two centuries. So the chances of multi-racial coalitions proving effective in the short and long-term are even more ill-founded.
To be frank, what are the real chances for change for Americans who genuinely dislike unity and common purpose? The results show that the West overwhelmingly prefers stratification, hierarchy, inequality and repression and we increasingly target only ourselves for violent expressions of social dissatisfaction and rage. Americans quizzically prefer minimal off-days, long & intrusive work-hours, unused vacation days and depressed wages while simultaneously holding the gatekeepers of economic and political repression in the highest of esteem. The Americans who consistently vote for fluoride in our tap water, and believe that recycling a milk carton saves the environment while the American military and multi-national corporations pollute us into oblivion must be realistically questioned. The more I hear car companies advertise that they will go green by 2055, the more I ask myself, “will we even be around by then?
Multiple revolutionary Black liberation leaders envisaged a religious solution to the nihilistic threat of American democracy. The all-encompassing trauma of American socio-economics and politics now requires for everyday citizens to appeal to a higher power for the inspiration and courage to heal the common-sense and commonplace dilemmas of racialized poverty and hatred. Yet the issue with mainstream religion is that its tenets are so nonsensical and intellectually repressive that greater and greater numbers of Americans are dismissing churches and faith centers as having anything relevant to say. Religious leadership dangerously mirrors the "old-money" demographic of our fledgling political and economic systems and the prospects of the masses of rank and file Americans empowering new leadership in these precious last moments of normalcy is still in doubt.
The God of Israel instituted The Exodus as the method of salvation for his people to free themselves from a system designed off human exploitation. The leader of that movement, ironically enough, was a man who was integrated into his masters house from the day of his birth. I channel the spirit of Moses and say aloud to Pharaoh, “Let My People Go”. The beauty of the Exodus is that it represents likely the final legitimate choice available to the masses. It is understood that the American system has created prisons of such decadence that there are large cross-sections of influential people who accept that maintaining their privileges' will be tantamount to going down with the ship. But there are others who are still in touch with enough humanity and intuition that creating for themselves a life that honors the values, traditions and heritage of their ancestors is motivation enough to invest into a different way, a better way.
A message from the Author: The Exodus Road
I first investigated The Exodus as my spiritual calling in 2019, the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans to what was deemed "The New World". Instituted on December 4th, 2019 at the campus of The Interdenominational Theological Center, on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Fred Hampton, The Exodus Conference established itself as the pre-eminent discussion space for discerning the Missio Dei, or Mission of God, for the Black Church. Since then, The Exodus Conference has produced multiple organizing opportunities to concerned members of the Black community and now, through this piece, I submit the legitimacy of my claims to anyone who has an ear to hear.
The mission of The Exodus Conference extends the ancestral mission of the first Africans to arrive on these shores. Preserving the ontology and authenticity of the African-American experience is a calling of high reverence and a piece of that desire is embedded within the souls of every Black American alive today. Furthermore, The Exodus Conference missions to enliven the faith of Christianity to be something more than state religion of this world's pre-eminent political power. The impact of reducing the God of Israel to being the spiritual rubber stamp for American imperialism has wrought devastating impacts to my community and the world community at large. I wrote of these impacts in my summation of the inaugural Exodus Conference and include it here for further context and analysis:
"For displaced Christian populations today, returning to indigenous pedagogies is becoming the practical
solution to the innate hypocrisies Christians of color continue to encounter within traditional Western
theology. Yet knowledge and appreciation of indigenous African contributions to Christianity remains
isolated to ethnic and minority faith centers. Euro-American theological construction tragically confines
contemporary Christian consciousness-raising to the esoteric carousel of philosophical absurdity at the
precise moment of staggering moral anti-intellectualism, socio-economic totalitarianism & personal
identity annihilation.
Immaculate conception, Original Sin, the triune God & eschatological pre-destination relegates Euro-American theological conversation to elongated bickering and the infinite regress of pseudo-historical
minutiae at the expense of theological coalition-building and reconciliation with the indigenous, two-
thirds world. Theology must return to its foundation of philosophical truth paired with theological ritual
practice in order to reassert its relevancy on a world inundated by what Marcien Towa deemed, the
"post-colonial existential crisis".
Indigenous Africa, positioned as the hapless geo-political setting for Eurasian religious formation &
Biblical exegesis is the prop behind the contemporary Christian double-consciousness mitigating
Christianity’s ability to be a solution to contemporary problems. Western culture’s depiction of
YHWH as adopting binary worship and identity constructions frames toxic-masculine racial apartheid,
deficit-laced identity constructs and mass militarism as inherent to the divine.
The politicized Christian double-consciousness remains the faith’s greatest threat. Serving two-masters,
both as the liberation theology for Black and Brown believers on the one hand, but also the pious
colonizing tool of white male capitalist patriarchy on the other, force the tragic faith vs culture
dichotomy in all believers. Compelling every Christian practitioner of African descent to reconcile their
faith in the conventional Bible or maintain healthy cultural identity constructions spawned from
traditional African ontology is an unnatural religious trauma perpetrated to reinforce disparate socio-
economic conditions between the West and the two-thirds world.
Black Americans viewing the Bible as our sacred text for religious and ontological instruction often
internalize crippling psycho-theological constructs that replicate trauma inducing life practices and
community structures. Evaluating the efficacy of Christianity to redress the Black condition is of pressing
importance here in the quad-centennial of Black life and culture in the United States."
This piece offers the first step for millions like myself who have felt something is innately wrong with how we do life at the present moment. To form our association and accept our refusal against being dumbed down for political and economic expedience is the church I was born to form. Our first step of just simple recognition of our humanity is an important realization that connects us to each other and at the same time lovingly allows any and all detractors to continue as they are. Dispelling the overzealous recruitment myth of faith based movements means being at peace with anyone who justifies or prefers Uncle Sam's approach to life and society. Rather than argue anyone else to the death, there is a natural world that still exists full on wonder, love and interdependency for all who choose it.
I am a single individual only and although this narrative is thorough, it is meant principally to start further discussion and consciousness-raising as opposed to assuming that I have all the answers to satisfy the peculiarities of everyone's individual plight. I hope it is convincing enough to anyone who has made it this far that my intentions are for peace and security amid a post-colonial world that is anything and everything but peaceful and secure. Investigating just how God, work, creativity, love and legacy intersect is a mission that I'm on irreversibly at this point. I have paid my dues to conventional politics, economics, love, society and family and I conclusively state that I seek a better model.
If you seek a better model as well, join me, support The Exodus Conference and live as a free human being, perhaps for the very first time.
Yours honestly and sincerely,
Ronald Andrew Allen
or
RAA Exodus
Contact The Exodus Preacher or Donate to The Exodus Conference here:
FB: Ronald A. Allen
IG: exodus_now
Cashapp: $RAAexodus
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