Page 139 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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some legislative measures, the Oromo movement is still lagging behind. By legally dis-
mantling American apartheid, the African American “movement succeeded in institu-
tionalizing significant gains during the early 1970s. Blacks became an important voter
bloc, participating at higher rates than whites of the same socioeconomic status and
the number of black office holders rose rapidly....Although the socioeconomic gap
between blacks and whites remained glaringly wide, significant progress against the
most overt forms of racial discrimination in education and employment gradually be-
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came evident.”
Since the 1980s there has been a political backlash against the Black movement.
Most Whites do not like the emergence of Black intellectuals and professionals be-
cause they think that these African Americans have become successful only at the ex-
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pense of White society.
Consciously or unconsciously, most Whites believe that
most Black professionals get jobs because of affirmative action since they are consid-
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This shows that the idea of White cultural and ide-
ered less qualified than Whites.
ological supremacy is still alive and strong despite the fact that African Americans have
achieved substantial progress. Manning Marable asserts that racism “is still a destruc-
tive force in the lives of upper-middle-class, college-educated African-Americans, as
well as poor blacks, and programs designed to address the discrimination they feel and
experience collectively every day must be grounded in the context of race.” 119 Since
members of the Black middle class are concentrated at the lower end of the spectrum
of higher status professional jobs, the material success of the Black elite has remained
marginal. Considering the complex problems of the Black community, Marable states
the following points:
Black America stands at a challenging moment in its history: a time of massive social dis-
ruption, class stratification, political uncertainty, and ideological debate.The objectives of
black politics in the age of Jim Crow segregation were relatively simple: full social equal-
ity, voting rights, and the removal of “white” and “colored” signs from the doors of ho-
tels and schools.Today’s problems are fundamentally more complex in scope, character
and intensity: the flight of capital investment from our central cities, with thousands of
lost jobs; the deterioration of the urban tax base, with the decline of city services; black-
on-black violence, homicide and crime; the decline in the quality of our public schools
and the crisis of the community’s values. To this familiar litany of problems one more
must be added: the failure to identify, train and develop rising leaders within the African-
American community who are informed by a critical and scientific understanding of the
needs and perspectives of their own people. 120
As we discussed in chapter III, the majority of African Americans have been left in
ghettos and exposed to all social ills.
The Oromo movement has a long way to go to achieve its main objectives. How-
ever, as a result of the Oromo movement the geographical location of Oromia is
named and recognized within the Ethiopian territory.This is progress, even though
some territories have been partitioned and annexed into neighboring regions. The
Oromo language has been recognized and made the medium of instruction in ele-
mentary school. It is taught in an Oromo alphabet known as Qubee. Hoping to halt
the development of Oromo nationalism, the Meles government has recently started to
revoke Qubee. Since the Tigrayan-dominated government does not want the flower-
ing of the Oromo language, literature, culture, and Oromo nationalism, it targets
Oromo intellectuals, politicians, and other leaders, silencing all Oromos connected