Puppets and puppet masters
By Deborah Simmons
After berating President Bush in order to whip up anti-Republican, election-year frenzy, the NAACP wrapped up its annual convention yesterday. But don't expect a serious agenda on civil rights or black America to spring forth.
The NAACP offered no cheat sheet for voters during this fall's televised debates. Nor did the NAACP's chief cook, Julian Bond, and outspoken bottle washer, Kweisi Mfume,offer America anything of substance. The words from ghetto blast master Jesse Jackson were of mere rhyme but no reasoning on Wednesday. Remarks made yesterday by John Kerry, who was the last of the liberal potentates to addressthe NAACP's hallelujah chorus, offered nothing of substance either. Mr. Kerry's speech was so generic that it could just as easily have been spoken to a Log Cabin Republicans meeting as to the Black Panther Party, with but a few substitutions.
Disappointingly, the NAACP convention 2004 was just more of the same caustic and counterproductive rhetoric.
What has happened to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People?
I think the organization has lost its way because its leadership has forgotten that "advancement" is the operative word in its formal title.
The NAACP's leaders have so colored the organization in partisan, racially damaging rhetoric that they have disgraced the organization's nonpartisan and diverse ancestry. That Mr. Bond, whose pre-NAACP vitae I hold in high esteem, and Mr. Mfume consider blacks who do not sing in their liberal chorus to be "puppets" of the white man is not surprising, however.
But if black conservatives are puppets of the white men who share some of the same views and values, then what do Messrs. Bond and Mfume consider themselves as they think and move in lock-step with John Kerry as they did with Al Gore in 2000, as they did with Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996? (Oops, I forgot. Bill Clinton was the first black president, and John Kerry wants to be the second.)
And therein lies another rub. The NAACP is not a black organization. That its leadership has lost its way is, perhaps, best illustrated in the fact that, while the Clinton administration might have been on speaking terms with the NAACP, the question is to what end?
During the Clinton-Gore years, black youngsters and teens, who already were on the low rung of the educational ladder, practically dropped into academic oblivion.
During the Clinton-Gore years, more and more black boys joined more and more black men behind bars.
During the Clinton-Gore years, statistics began emerging that showed black women eventually would surpass men in HIV/AIDS infection rates.
During the Clinton-Gore years, the war against drugs became a joke; now look at the high rates of black drug addictions, homelessness, mental illness, and child neglect and abuse.
Instead of the NAACP chastising the Bush administration and asking, "What has the white man done for black folks lately?" I think black folks need to ask the NAACP, "What have you done for us lately?"
As Rod Paige, the Bush administration's black education chief, wrote in his "message" to Messrs. Bond and Mfume in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, "You do not own, and you are not the arbiters of, African-American authenticity."
As a matter of fact, no one is.
Even in its infancy, the NAACP didn't color its commentary. To be sure, it spoke in terms of black and white. But its mission, its dialogue, its fight was not against the white man, but against discrimination and social injustice. The NAACP of old fought discrimination in the courts.
Indeed, by the time Rosa Parks, an NAACP member, sparked a boycott because she proudly sat her ground on that bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, blacks spun off the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to lead the way. With Martin Luther King Jr. at the helm, the SCLC successfully ended that battle against Jim Crow.
Now, today, though, it seems the NAACP does not fight against discrimination or social injustice, so much as it fights and ridicules individual politicians (Mr. Bush is one example) and inconsequential issues (such as the Confederate flag).
We expect the NAACP to encourage Americans to register to vote, and the NAACP's founding fathers expect no less. But when the NAACP crosses the railroad tracks to stir up racial discord and berate blacks who choose to remain true to American republicanism, well, that's just plain wrong.
The most appreciated speaker at the convention this week would have been Bill Cosby, who for the past several weeks has been talking about social problems that plague black America. "I know that it has been an issue, and he has assured us that he will be giving a comedy performance," an NAACP representative told a reporter for this newspaper. "Of course we have talked to him about it."
How revealing. The NAACP tells Bill Cosby, who has been discussing issues of interest to black conservatives, to shut up. Seems that all puppet masters aren't white conservative men after all. |
