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Black Success, How To Get It

By Robert B. Kennon, 1987

President, Kennon Company African and Middle Eastern Trade

   Enterprising Blacks can have the greatest financial success now, since acquiring political power and laws to prevent being driven from the marketplace.  They have the same American dollar as other races and a great disposable income.  Billions of dollars of capital and huge natural resources are available to them from Africa if they identify with high culture African historical origins instead of an African Slave Coast heritage. 

   This new cultural identification will motivate them to achieve higher and obtain higher social status.  It will also give new direction to restructure Black business organizations to be more profitable and keep money within their race.

   All studies show that what races achieve presently is connected to their past cultural patterns.  These reveal the image of the ways they will cope with the present and future.

   Most Black Americans relate to descent from the low culture African Slave Coast and to the legacy of the depressed conditions of the American cities’ Black ghettos.  Little or no Black businesses existed there.  Much economic activity was associated with criminal pursuits. 

   Blacks were restricted to a servant status or a few professions like teachers, preachers, and an occasional undertaker, lawyer or health professional.  The legitimate big volume profitable businesses have usually been in the hands of other races.

   Blacks played a significant role in agriculture.  Despite having been slaves and later sharecroppers or tenant farmers, many Blacks have been farm owners.  However, with the exception of the U.S. Southern Reconstruction period, they have been excluded from being farm product processors and brokers.

   These pursuits would have given them the greatest profit.  Notwithstanding these adverse conditions, Blacks have progressed economically and now possess billions of purchasing power to use in making a significant change in their living conditions.

   There are the greatest chances for properly motivated and organized Blacks to improve their economic conditions.  They are currently in political control of the American big cities such as Oakland, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, New Jersey, New Orleans, Atlanta, etc.

   The list continues to grow.  If Blacks stop thinking in welfare/poverty terms and begin to execute large development programs based on upward mobility and Black-owned big business, will they finally realize the tremendous economic leverage potential involved in having control of America's big central cities.

   These are the best units the world has ever produced to allow people to wipe out poverty in their race and move upward to a solid middle class/rich condition.  This is particularly true when central city political and business leaders work in connection with increased international trade.  All others races in control of big cities have done this.  What is holding up the Blacks?

   Blacks’ ability to use big city clout for maximum racial benefit requires a changed behavior and a different business organization.  This new effort must be preceded by a changed perception of themselves historically.

   If not, Blacks will continue to operate in their habitually inefficient non-productive ways.  Most blacks identify with descent from low culture African Slave Coast historical origins and consciously or unconsciously act in a noncohesive unbusinesslike manner as present day counterparts of the low culture Africans they claim descent from.

 

   Identification with those origins gives nothing to help Blacks succeed in American industrial society.

   Blacks who want the self-esteem and pride that is a prerequisite to getting big economic success should stop tracing their heritage to the African slave coast and focus on the ancestry stemming from the Black Egyptian Pharaohs and the Ethiopian Emperors and Queens of Sheba who dominated Africa and Arabia for thousands of years as originators of high culture.

   Blacks should borrow the mental attitudes, philosophies and cultural/technical ideas these rulers created as a pattern for advancement just as other races, including the Whites, do.

   It is most important to do this now when rulers of independent Africa favor sharing their resources with Black Americans who trace their descent from the high African culture of Egyptian Black Pharoahs and the Emperors and Queens of Sheba (Ethiopia) rather than from the Slave Coast.

   Historically, high culture Africans looked down on primitive Slave Coast Blacks.  So, if American Blacks continue to trace their cultural origins to the Slave Coast and not civilized Africa, present day Africans as well as Whites are going to continue to look down on American Blacks as inferior people.

   This will handicap American Black businesspeople in attempts to be considered as responsible agents for African Blacks to bring their unlimited economic resources to the American economy.

   For instance, African Blacks may use American Blacks’ political clout after having gained their independence, but if American Blacks don’t act to get a new high culture origin image the Africans will turn to other races for business representation.

   This writer discovered the African thinking on this issue during many years of representation and business with African rulers and businessmen in Ethiopia, Egypt, Sudan and other parts of Africa, such as the late Emperor Haile Selassie.  His identification with high culture African ancestry caused them to give him many big business favors and big concessions.

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Dr. Kennon was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley with post doctoral research at London University, the Sorbonne Paris and Cairo University Egypt.  He has held both Rosenwald and Fulbright Fellowships to conduct surveys on industrializing Africa through American capital.

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