The Black Book II: From Hajji Malik Al-shabazz to Barack Obama

This book seeks to promote a realistic political dialogue between the American national minorities and the dominant Anglo-American majority. The problematic that arises in what American presidents Clinton and Obama have repeatedly called a "one-nation one-state" political system is: how will the state assure and protect the unique needs and interests of its minorities, particularly its historically oppressed national minorities? All black officials in the United States government are in the same position as the president; they are required to represent first of all the majority's interests. For a national minority to be able to fully address its special needs (when it can find no specific representation in the majority-dominated platform of either political party or the policy agenda of government), it must seek to enjoy the full range of human and civil rights, particularly the right to self-determination. Hajji Malik Al-Shabazz understood that the African Americans were still in the grip of American domestic colonialism. He feared that the majority ethny would prefer to commit the violation of forced assimilation leading possibly to ethnocide rather than to negotiate a collective equal-status integration of the African American national minority. As the presidency of Barack Obama is demonstrating, electing a Black president who is required to address the state's interest as a whole is not the answer for improving the well being of African Americans.

Dr. Y. N. Kly is Professor Emeritus, School of Human Justice, University of Regina, Canada, and a former consultant to government and a wide range of ethnic groups on minority rights issues. Author of five books and numerous articles, he won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award in 1990 for International Law and the Black Minority in the US, and in 1995 for A Popular. Guide to Minority Rights and is considered an expert on minorities by the UN. He is Chair and co-founder of IHRAAM, an international NGO in consultative status with the United Nations. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science, specializing in International Law, from Laval University, and diplomas from the International Bar Association and the College of Law in England and Wales in International Human Rights Law and Practice, and in International Human Rights and Criminal Procedure.