Negronova offers the following observation:
I have to wonder WTF that is and it always boils down to do those who claim to want to see change by following the different path using another brand of politics, REALLY want to see change? And I'll be damned if i can't come up with another answer than "Not really." The willful ignorance from the Black intellegencia, no matter what side of the aisle, is sickening.
I am making a point to be at the seminar being held next month about the legacy of MLK between Debra Dickenson and Randall Kennedy here in Los Angeles. It has to do with the post-Obama world of blackfolks and politics. My general position has changed towards more skepticism of a black cultural or political orthodoxy and that is somewhat amplified by the popular phenomenon that is Obama, untied as he is from any real black think tank yet still reaping near unanimous support from the African American electorate.
Like most half-assed Americans, I feel like I understand MLK properly and that his life speaks in support of everything I believe in. I too enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing what to admire about the man. But he was just a man, and not a think tank - and his family has been particularly effective in blunting any effort to carry on what he might have had in mind for America's future. There is nothing but a pay-per-view system sustaining the King legacy and all think-tankery black America truly owns essentially lives in the head of David Bositis as it has for decades. And so we have emerged in the post-Civil-Rights era a diaspora of thought with a some-timy discipline.
We do have Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell. We have Armstrong Williams, John McWhorter, Shelby Steele and Michael Eric Dyson. Cornel West is out there as is Roland Fryer and Glenn Loury. I don't think any of them bother to blog and actually reach the millions, leaving it to amateurs like myself and the host of other sharp writers who deal with the issues of the day from a more thoughtful perspective than the evening news or the occassional editorial special. But is there really any insight to be gained by paying attention to these guys? Moreover do we have appropriate expectations and benchmarks for the black intelligencia, or are we only wishing them into responsibilities which nobody rightfully does or should hold?
We all know by now that there is no single black community, no single black leadership cadre, no single black voice in culture, politics or religion. It rather begs the question in my mind as to whether or not it is useful to think there should be, even at a small focus. I have the difficulty of writing at a national level and ignoring or discounting this or that story of black interest. But moreover I think we're all eventually headed into Debra Dickerson's back pocket. We are reaching, individual by individual, the black endgame. Except that from the shadows there will continue to emerge a trickle of folks wearing the black mask. But I think all of this ultimately is about attempting to reconcile ourselves to our own interpretations of the black imperative, which to my eyes always will be betwixt and between the visions of Booker T. Washington and DuBois. King for his part merely emerged as the inevitable figurehead in the march towards civil equality in law. About that endgame I wrote:
So we're watching blackness go back and forth over lines we imagine to be the end of blackness. How come we don't have but one TV show, Good Times? How come there's no McDonald's in our neighborhood? How come they don't play our music on the other radio stations? Can a black man be the Chief of Police? Those were questions at the end of blackness when I grew up. That's all done. And yet people reinvest. Well, OK forget what I said then, what I really meant was this kind of black person being Secretary of State. No what I really meant was a black Senator in a Southern state. No I meant somebody other than Jay Z as a media mogul. No, rap music winning Grammys isn't good enough, I really meant Oscars and Tonys.. no Pulitzer ..no Nobel.
Sometime after the fourth black President, somebody will ask why it's only 4 out of 60. That's not proportional. Or maybe by then the Endgame will have already occurred and people will stop asking such questions. I always recall that at the end of WW2 the big question was whether the average Negro was intelligent enough to drive a truck. People stopped asking such questions - they are Negro questions, beneath us all, long forgotten, like Negroes born at home in the Negro Community. Like sharecroppers from Louisiana wondering if they could survive in a big Northern state like Massachusetts where today the governor is black.
Black intellectuals have been, for the most part, keeping track of racial progress and watching numbers until they were magically insignificant. How long will they do that and have the attention of policymakers? Do they have that attention even now?
For my part, I'm tending to look at the long term historical parallels. I want to know, for example, how King's positions emerged in the context of his assumption of the role of the American Gandhi. So I want to look at India's independence and compare that to the black American 'nation'. We similarly have our own diversity that rather instantly moved from relative subjugation to independence. In a recent conversation about India as a democracy, an author noted that one of the things that makes Indian politics what it is has to do with the fact that it didn't evolve franchise like America or England. Instantly, poor people had the vote whereas this was not the case in the older democracies. This provides problems of identity politics in India as it does here in black America. That makes me say hmmm.
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