Well, maybe that depends on where you spend the day. From Walter Mosley's An African-American Appeal for Peace:
All this is our responsibility. Every child wasting away under his mother's powerless gaze. Every Muslim burned by a Hindu. Every innocent citizen blown up by a suicide bomber or crushed by an onrushing, revenge-drunk tank. I know we are responsible because US dollars have found their way into, and out of, every battlefield, every hospital bed and every pocket of every terrorist in the world.We--black men and women in every stratum of American society--live in and are part of an ecosystem of terror. We, descendants of human suffering, are living in a fine mansion at the edge of a precipice. And the ground is caving in under the weight of our wealth and privilege.
The piece appears in the January 27, 2003 issue of The Nation, but has been up on their site for a while; think I saw it linked at BlackElectorate.com, but they're not so much about the archives from what I can tell. . .
What's not seen often are references to the "wealth and privilege" of black people living in the U.S. Well, if you discount the odd conservative/libertarian insistence that we're the richest, most bestest well-off black people on the planet, which is always in the context of telling us to shut the hell up. So, yes, discount.
Something else rarely seen (again, depending on how you spend your time) are references to "we" by black authors. Or maybe I just got used to the McWhorter-style third person technique of black folks writing about black folks for a clearly-presumed white audience.
Or maybe I need more coffee, as this seems particularly half-developed a notion. . .
"We" is about community (African-American, but also to the wider American, English-speaking and human communities) and communal accountability (because where "we" invites and includes, it also obligates). When I read it on the printed page, I smile and sit up a little straighter.
There's a lovely snippet from the Q-'n'-A near the end of a bell hooks bookstore reading I attended in Berkeley two years ago:
[...] Hi, my name's Marcus. I'm a student at UC-Berkeley. ... I mean, I kind of relate that to, like, being at UC-Berkeley, where as an individual in class, I'm the only one. I feel like sometimes that I represent the whole race. I was wondering: Can I call that love?
I think, if I understand you right, you can call that love insomuch as you assume that representation as political accountability. I stand here, willing to be accountable to blackness and for blackness in a revolutionary and loving sense. I think that's very different, 'cause any black person can sit in a classroom and let white people impose on them, um, the idea that they represent or speak for the race. But that's very different: to be someone who says 'I feel that I can really represent. I ain't ashamed; I can represent blackness, in whatever context I want to represent blackness in.' You know? I think that's a very different kind of thing, because that's a political choice, as opposed to the many young students across the nation in predominantly white schools, many of whom don't even feel black until they get in that classroom and the white folks are saying 'Be black for me, 'cause I need a black person right now!' (laughter) That, too, can just be a form of minstrel entertainment. And many of us feel compelled to rise to the occasion, of feeling we have to take that role as opposed to organically understanding what our political relationship to blackness is [...]
Also: Mosley's "Time for a new black-power movement"