That Black America’s premier leadership agency — the NAACP — is capable of redefining itself for what I view as a new facet of its historic leadership function, I have not the slightest doubt. From my perspective, the main problems confronting this new metamorphosis in the NAACP stem less from “The State of Black America” (to quote the title of National Urban League’s annual volume on African-Americans) than from present-day conditions that define our 21st century oligarchic-capitalist American society.

As the Atlantic Monthly Magazine editor Jack Beatty informs us in Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007), today’s oligarchic-capitalist American democracy is a sad country today, a “most distressful nation” (to crib a term used by the University of Chicago sociologist, Andrew Greeley, to characterize societal crises that once plagued Irish-Americans). Which is to say, our country today is a nation wherein top-level business elites claim Gilded Age-type wealth advantage over the typical American citizen, exhibit crude greed-type orientations, and have greed-type economic privileges.

Worse still, perhaps, in today’s oligarchic-capitalist America, a corporatist-hegemony is exercised over state and federal legislators, a hegemony that crudely and massively manipulates and influences public policy decisions and outcomes that affect multi-layered spheres in daily American life. Under this kind of oligarchic-capitalist American democracy, it is a Sisyphean undertaking to remedy social crises such as those facing the poor sector in African-American life. Or for that matter any other gigantic American crises, like America’s health care crisis, weakening middle-class crisis, wealth gap crisis, decaying physical infrastructure crisis (e.g., collapsed inter-state highway bridge in Minnesota in August 2007), etc.