Folks over at P6 are in something of an uproar over Al Sharpton's recent dissing of Barack Obama. This is in reaction to Ariana Huffington's amazement at the vituperate nature of Sharpton's attack.
I don't think that Sharpton sees himself as a competitor to Obama for black attention and he is right to play the press as if his endorsement of Obama matters. It does matter. But what Huffington is picking up on is something like HNIC. I don't think she is completely wrong in this, but there are two different battles here.
Sharpton is a black pundit, very little more and very little less. He exist is a limbo world within the media because there is no black pundit who can outfox him. Since all black opinion making is not mainstream opinionmaking, Sharpton can carve out a little space for an audience who is not only marginalized but somewhat proud of that fact.
If Tavis Smiley would have stayed Tavis Smiley as long as Rush has been Rush, then Tavis could deliver the kind of smackdown that Sharpton deserves. But Tavis wanted to play his own game, which just underscores the fact that black punditry isn't yet mainstream.
Even Juan Williams who has gone off the plantation a bit in the past year is facing this kind of conundrum.
The bigger question here is why don't blackfolks support a black pundit? The answer is that the black market doesn't support one economically speaking. Not enough black people care enough to make a black political media star out of anybody. Not McWhorter, not Steele, not Armstrong Wiliams. Nobody, left, right or center has a larger media profile.
Could Steve Harvey do what Bill Maher does? Nope.
Again, I'm going to emphasize the extent to which black political opinion desires an underground cache. And you can measure it in the size of the outrage against a white pundit calling Obama a Magic Negro, which is something we've all been talking about since day one. There's no mystery in black culture. There's no reason to keep this underground conversation underground, and so long as black people collectively fail to support an open black punditry, the longer people like Cosby and Sharpton will be able to hijack it.
Yeah I said Cosby and Sharpton. But that includes Michael Eric Dyson as well, and anybody else who is a part-time pundit. Sharpton comes like De La's first album, he's living in a full time era. That's why none of the crab pundits can take him down. But I still say it's a demand side issue.
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