A View From a Pew: The Power We Keep Walking Past

There’s a reason race pride feels thinner than it once did, and it’s not because we lack history, brilliance, or resilience. It’s because the African American is the only group in this country whose children cannot instinctively come back to the community for what they need to survive and to thrive.

If you’re Chinese and need a job, you go to the Chinese community.
If you’re Jewish and need a scholarship, you go to the Jewish community.
If you’re East Indian and need housing, the community finds a way.

Ask yourself a hard question: when was the last time you saw a homeless Chinese family sleeping on the street? Or an East Indian elder abandoned with nowhere to go? You don’t see it—not because struggle doesn’t exist, but because the community does not allow it to become the norm.

That’s not magic. That’s organization.

Somehow, we’ve been convinced that our solution lies everywhere except where it’s always been: us. Everything we need is in the community, but we’ve been trained to believe that salvation is individual, private, and lonely. We are practicing a form of rugged individualism that was never designed for us—Caucasian individualism without Caucasian resources.

And let’s be honest: individualism works differently when you have access.
When you can walk into Wells Fargo or Chase Manhattan and reasonably expect a business loan.
When legacy admissions open doors to elite schools.
When networks, not résumés, determine opportunity.

It’s easy to preach “do it on your own” when the system is already built to catch you if you fall.

But we don’t have consistent access to those synthetic resources—so we must create our own. That requires movement, not isolation. Cooperation, not competition. Togetherness, not survival-of-the-fittest thinking.

Individualism, for us, has become a slow suffocation. It is choking the progress of Black America while convincing us that asking one another for help is weakness instead of wisdom.

United, we stand. Divided, we fall.
That isn’t poetry—it’s policy. It’s economics. It’s history.

One of our elders once said, “If you organize a little, you get a little done. If you organize some, you get some done. But if you don’t organize at all, you don’t get anything done.” Another warned that the greatest weapon used against us has always been disorganization.

And that weapon has been effective—not because we lack strength, but because we’ve lost faith in our collective power.

Most of us won’t say it out loud, but I’ll say it from this pew: I believe nearly 75% of African American people no longer believe we can overcome the machine. Not really. Not fully. And when belief dies, vision shrinks. Life becomes reduced to survival instead of destiny.

So we hustle alone.
We grind alone.
We suffer quietly and call it independence.

But faith—real faith—has never been an individual act. Faith is communal. Liberation is communal. Progress is communal.

The answer is not more exceptional individuals. The answer is a restored community that refuses to let its children fail alone, its elders suffer alone, or its dream die quietly.

We don’t need to invent power. We need to remember it.

Everything we need is still in the community—waiting on us to believe again, to organize again, and to move together again.

From this pew, the message is clear:
We don’t lose because we’re weak.
We lose when we forget who we are—together.