NEW PODCAST: All Thought Is Black Thought Podcast: Thought of the Day #1: Black Leadership and Ethics

Guess what! There's a New Podcast from Cosmic Hoboes: ALL THOUGHT IS BLACK THOUGHT!

This will be a regular feature here on CosmicHoboes.blogspot.com as well as on Anchor.fm and Spotify.

Check it out HERE or read the Black Thought of the Day.

1. Black thought for the day: Everyone is capable of leadership. I define "leadership" as the enactment of an ethics, the actualization of norms. Everyone is capable of leadership in certain ways and under certain conditions. 
2. Now, the ethics enacted by leadership aren't always "good." (Criminal syndicates have ethics that say you get killed for snitching-- similar to how trump wants to end the careers of people who cross him or how the CIA assassinates those who won’t be bought off. That’s part of their ethics.) But how our leaders perform says a lot about the ideas of right and wrong we have allowed to dominate in our communities. 
3. The established models of leadership we Black people have now come mostly from a bought-off elite leadership class, and what it shows is that our ethics are dominated by capitalistic and antiblack cowards, to a large degree, people who might sometimes have courageously put their bodies on the line in younger years but then later backed down from an uncompromising push for Black freedom as they get older and now get paid large amounts to deradicalize the demands of the youths by imposing irrelevant ideas like "nonviolent protest is the only way" (Keisha Lance-Bottoms, Barack Obama) and "pull up your pants and talk like white people" (Bill Cosby, Candace Owens).
4. That's an overgeneralization of people like John Lewis. Lewis was very courageous as a youth and has been to some degree during his career in congress. But even in his youth, he also deradicalized youths even when he was younger by opposing more radical Civil Rights voices like James Forman and Stokely Carmichael). Yet,  to a large degree, those are general models of leadership  that we are forced to aspire to because other leaders, like Fred Hampton, were murdered by police, other leaders, like Jalil Muntaqim, are imprisoned and fighting for his life against COVID 19 in a NY state prison, and other leaders, like Assata,  are being hunted in exile. Even recent speaker, sister Tamika Mallory-- from what i’ve seen-- demonstrated remarkable leadership by pushing the line when she said this:
5. Don’t talk to us about looting. Y’all are the looters. America has looted Black people. America looted the Native Americans when they first came here, so looting is what you do. We learned it from you. We learned violence from you. We learned violence from you. The violence was what we learned from you. So if you want us to do better, then, damn it, you do better..” 

6. Fortunately for Black people, more of us are beginning to push for a type of ethics that's not so shot through with obvious contradictions. So new models of leadership can be developed, but we have to seize the power to define the kinds of leadership we need. Problem is, there's a bully outside our communities and movements telling Black people that we can only have cowardly capitalistic types of leadership. So seizing the power to define our leadership requires that we punch the bully in the nose. That's sorta happening right now.

Click HERE to hear Episode #1 of ALL THOUGHT IS BLACK THOUGHT