Hungry for societal acceptance and status, today’s Black leaders lack boldness, courage and, yes, justified, righteous anger, to be effective. Rhetoric and posturing are not substitutes for genuine activism. Caught up in the mainstream system of rewards and status the Black Middle Class and Black leadership have been consciously and unconsciously corrupted by the allure of escaping their own Blackness by first rejecting it through self-hate and then trying to imitate the dominant paradigms set up by white society.
In the face of serious Black community degeneration and decay these Black leaders offer only temporary Band-Aid solutions that “keep the restive natives in their place.” They have set back and done great damage to the Blacks struggle for liberation by pretending that this struggle is over and by asking Black militancy to put its faith in their ability to sort things out given their proximity to the centers of power. They peddle their influence in the Black community in a most condescending way acting out a superiority that is based on the fact that most Black people are alienated from the political and economic mainstream.
Rhetoric and spin, empty promises and slick talk have now replaced genuine discussion and profound analysis. Today’s Black leaders who long ago ran from the inner city and ghetto blame Black youth and the Black community for its present state claiming that it is laziness, a failure to apply themselves, and a penchant for blaming the white man for all of society’s ills that have resulted in a lack of Black social advancement.
Yes, some of this is true but here again the Black Middle class and Black leadership has engaged in a bit of arrogant condescention. They come from the position that says “look at us we’ve made it and we came out of the projects. You failed to apply yourself and that’s why you are in this bad situation. Blame yourselves.” What’s wrong about this argument is that this layer of Black society is afraid to confront the legacy and the lingering negative effects of racism against Black people. Like all of white America, these well-to-do Blacks, embrace the position that any discussion on race relations, racism, prejudice and how all that still affects the American society today must be superfluous, shallow, limited and one-sided.
For example, United States Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama can’t articulate the issues that face Blacks in America today because he’s too busy “behaving properly.” He fails to see the difference between a Black candidate and a candidate who is Black. Instinctively, he prefers the one acceptable to white, mainstream America – a candidate who just happens to be Black. So he’s comfortable articulating issues that are near and dear to white, mainstream America while he is acutely uncomfortable when offering even a simple, non-threatening explanation on a subject that is uniquely Black.
His tortuous, painful and evasive response, for example, to the question of if he favors giving drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants was most instructive of how today’s Black leadership behaves. Obama, cognizant of the Republican charge that this was a national security issue, danced and hemmed and hawed. But he must have known that this was a road safety issue that was blown out of all proportion by the Republican spin machine and had absolutely nothing to do with United States’ national security. Yet Obama could not even say that because he wanted to be “like the mainstream boys and gals.”
So what is to be done to arrest this situation?
Well, it is admittedly no easy task and there is no one set of shoes to fit all the feet. But I believe that there must be a return to those traditional values of principled activism that the Black church was the custodian of and which produced some of the finest Black leaders of the last century. I also believe that in the 21st century there has to be a new Black leadership paradigm.
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