Who died and made you King?
I could just spit: New York Magazine ran an article in its year-end issue profiling what could be called “The Al Sharpton Factor” in the presidential primaries. Although we are supposedly “colorblind” and terrified of the race conversation, we acknowledge there is such a thing as black vote, and that it has ramifications. Sharpton’s fixture as an outspoken defender of high-profile black legal cases has promised him the role Token Negro in American politics, which Sharpton makes clear, is a position from which he will not budge. Throughout the article he gloats on his role as the Arbiter of Black Opinion, showboating, playing voicemails to his cell phone from Obama, Hillary, and John Edwards, each of whom vy for his counsel on an upcoming debate at Howard University. More likely than not, I have heard blacks of all ages and generations express explicity (and sometimes with disgust), “Al Sharpton doesn’t speak for me.” [And if Barack Obama doesn't know this. . . .where has he been? Who has he been talking to?] Speaking for a vague collective “blackness”, Sharpton fits an old mold of black leadership, that as the New York piece considers, maybe be obsolete. What scares me the most, then, is that if Sharpton is deemed the touchstone of black issues, how much more out of touch are our presidential candidates? How obsolete, then, do I become as a black person in this country?
The concept of black leadership, or leadership for black Americans has become extremely diffuse, especially as the “black experience” is no longer as monolithic, and the “black cause” has become so entangled with class. But Sharpton carries on, as if post-modernism never happened, often laboring the point of subversive racism within the individual mind. I will say, he has said some good things here. But I wonder that Sharpton doesn’t speak for us as much he speaks for his own agenda to place himself at the behest of the establishment he so proudly finds himself today.
Leadership is a tricky thing and the road to hell is paved with even good intentions. If one more racist apologizes to Al Sharpton for using the word, “Nigger” in public forum, America is in big trouble in terms of its concept of what a leader of any demographic is supposed to do and how they are supposed to function. We are in even worse trouble in terms of understanding what black people really need and how it should be addressed.
To me, one of the most indicative moments concerning politicians and their complete lack of concept on blacks in America happened occured during the 2004 Vice Presidential debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney. Moderator Gwen Ifill posed the question: “But in particular, I want to talk to you about AIDS, and not about AIDS in China or Africa, but AIDS right here in this country, where black women between the ages of 25 and 44 are 13 times more likely to die of the disease than their counterparts.” Neither of the men were aware of what has become a pretty common fact, that AIDS is growing among black people at an epidemic rate, and continued to discuss funding AIDS issues in Russia and Africa.
