Young Black woman looking upward.
Anything short of long-term planning will spell doom, or at least the sam-o-same for Black people Our eyes must be fixed on the next century. Credit: Getty Images.

If this crushing election loss has taught us anything, we must get busy planning not for next week, next month, or the next election but rather for the next centuryโ€”the next 100 years.

As folk are scrambling to assign blame regarding why Kamala Harris wonโ€™t be enjoying a Jan. 20, 2025 inauguration for the ages, they’re looking in all the wrong places. Some say the Harris campaign was too centrist, bending backward to appease and attract Republicans. Others say the Harris campaign went too far in seeking to expand the Democratsโ€™ tent and should have gone hard in the paint to lock down the Democratic base.

Some believe a harder stance against the genocide in Gaza would have made a difference. Others point to President Biden and say he waited too long to drop out of the race, leaving Harris with only 100 days to mount a presidential campaignโ€”something unheard of in modern politics.

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They were successful because they had been working, pushing and planning for this aim for yearsโ€”actually, for decades.

Take, for example, “Project 2025: A Mandate for Leadership.” The Heritage Foundation, the white nationalist think tank that spearheaded this blueprint for American apartheid, has been publishing their “Mandate for Leadership since 1981. So, each year, for the past 43 years, they have been scheming, planning and organizing to put Black people and women “back in their place.”

But before that, in 1964, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Barry Goldwater and crew literally conspired to make the Republican Party the official/unofficial “white peopleโ€™s party.” Please look it up yourself, if you donโ€™t believe meโ€ฆ and even if you do. Thatโ€™s 60 years of cementing the GOP as a “whiteโ€™s only” political party. And Donald Trumpโ€™s right hand man Stephen Miller reiterated the point just this week.

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Oh, they accept white-identifying Blacks, Asians and Latinosโ€”anyone who will slave for their cause. But make no mistake; their cause is whiteness, and laws and policies and institutional mandates to back it up and enforce it.

And before that, in the 1850s, the Native American Party touted the slogan “America First” as a rallying cry for racist white Protestants to stop Catholic immigrants (Irish and others, who at that time were not considered white) from invading the country and stealing white jobs. That was 174 years ago.

My point: They have been on this anti-Black, anti-other tip for centuries; forever devising new ways to protect whiteness. And thereโ€™s a gazillion more examples I could share.

But they โ€˜gon do what they โ€˜gon do. The real question is “What we โ€˜gon do”?

The only acceptable answer is to plan not only for next week, next year, or next election but rather to plan and strategize and organize and fundraise and work and build with the next 100 years in mind. I guarantee you, the folk who have always seen you and me as less than human, have already drawn up their game plan for Project 2125 and beyond.

I'm originally from Cincinnati. I'm a husband and father to six children. I'm an associate pastor for the Shrine of Black Madonna (Houston). I am a lecturer (adjunct professor) in the University of Houston...