Where Is Black America’s Long-Term Strategic Plan For Itself?

Black America does not possess a long-term strategic plan (LTSP) to guide us to our agreed goals.

Photos: SlideServe\Facebook

In February 2001, we published a commentary entitled “African Americans Achieving Their Goals in the 21st Century.”

The commentary espoused certain actions about which our positions have changed. However, one aspect of the commentary has not changed. We still do not have answers for the following three fundamental questions:

• Where are we going?

• What do we want to achieve?

• What are our goals for the 21st century?

In other words, Black America does not possess a long-term strategic plan (LTSP) to guide us to our agreed goals.

Rest assured that America’s big businesses and governments have LTSPs for Black America.

In so many places and in so many ways, we have implored Black America to formulate an LTSP because Black Churches, NAACP, Urban League, BLM, NOI, Black fraternities and sororities, Black academic associations, and Black professional organizations have not evolved such a plan.

Sadly, no HBCU has produced a graduate or group of graduates who labored for a degree by researching, analyzing, and preparing an LTSP for Black America.

An LTSP should not be prepared by one or just a few individuals. Rather, it should be the result of our best minds collaborating to produce a document that can guide most of our actions going forward—with room for periodic assessments and course corrections as circumstances change.

A clear case of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Black America keeps doing the same thing and keeps reaping the same change-at-the- margin results. We are in a loop that revolves through time with very slow change in position. We have neither a clear linear nor nonlinear path (i.e., an LTSP) to our goals.

Of course, the starting point is obtaining agreement on our goals.

Twenty years later, we entreat Black American leadership to develop an LTSP (write our history in advance) and commit to using that plan to guide our future so that we actually achieve our goals—whatever we agree they should be.

Brooks Robinson\Black Economics 09/10/21

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