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BIG NEWS: The NYT just published this adapted excerpt from my forthcoming book! They titled the excerpt "We Need a Second Great Migration." The title of the book is #TheDevilYouKnow. The excerpt will be the cover of the Sunday Review. So excited... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/opinion/georgia-black-political-power.html?smid=tw-share
1. Because this is an excerpt, and the entire book is an argument that builds, the excerpt can only capture so much and will likely leave people with question (a good thing). But, let me address a few things in this thread...
2. This for me is not a theory or thought experiment. I believe completely in this plan. I have moved to Atlanta myself.
3. The idea of moving with political intentionality, to take over a state or colonize it, is not new. People have been talking about it in one from or another since slavery.
4. Perhaps the most successful example of it was not carried out by black people but white ones. In 1971 two Yale law students publish an article in the Yale Law Review called "Jamestown Seventy" in which they propose this idea of "radical federalism," taking over a state.
5. The next year, Richard Pollak jumps off the idea, publishing an article in Playboy entitled "Taking Over Vermont" with the subtitle "Get 225,000 counterculturists to settle int the green mountain state and exercise their franchise — and you've begun a unique social experiment"
6. Tens of thousands of young white hippies move to the state. They transform Vermont from a rural, conservative state to now one of the most liberal state in the union. And it didn't even take a majority.
7. The so-called "Reverse Migration" of Black people to the South is already long underway. People have been chronicling it for at least a decade. By my estimate, more Black people have already moved back south that moved out during the first wave of the Great Migration.
8. I wrote this book as an actual plan for black people, not for the book critics, most of whom in America happen to be white.
9. If they are like me, they got tired of people endlessly diagramming a problem without proposing a plan.
10. I also got tired of pleading with white America to recognize my humanity. 400 years is helluva long time to wait, and true equality is still not a reality.
11. This plan completely bypassing any need for white people's approval or playing on their guilt or countering their opposition. White people are simply not centered in this plan for black liberation. Black people can do this on their own, constitutionally.
12. As I write: "I am not advocating for a Black nationalism, but a Black regionalism—not
to be apart from America but stronger
within it, through consolidation and concentration. The goal is not sedition but liberty."
to be apart from America but stronger
within it, through consolidation and concentration. The goal is not sedition but liberty."
13. "...that they now do, they could have ensured that almost every president in the last fifty years was a Democrat."
14. I could of course go on and on — after all, I wrote a whole book about it — but I'll stop here and encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. You can pre-order now. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-devil-you-know-charles-m-blow?variant=32208588505122
