ot When the Going Gets Messy, There's Jesse
By Shelby Steele. Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author, most recently, of "A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America" (HarperCollins, 1998).
When we see the Rev. Jesse Jackson once again descend on Florida, once again turn Democratic talking points into a bad poetry of protest ("it's the count not the clock"), and once again arrange black faces around himself in a crescent of indignation, it is clear that a very familiar lever in our political culture is being pressed.
Mr. Jackson is doing something that he is conditioned to do. When he and other civil-rights leaders press this lever, they are invariably rewarded with two things: an exceptionalism that excuses blacks (and in this case Democrats as well) from rules that others must live by, and the license to meet a less demanding standard than others must meet.
Moral Capital
This is the lever that often licenses blacks to meet a lower standard in college admissions, or that wins them a $176 million discrimination settlement from Texaco when no discrimination has been proven, or that chalks up weak academic performance in black students to "subtle forms of racism." It is the same lever that Mr. Jackson now presses to turn black misvoting in Florida into "disenfranchisement."
Of course, everyone now thinks he has Jesse's number. We all see the race card coming and there is a widespread feeling that Mr. Jackson is an exhausted figure on the political landscape who long ago used up his moral capital. And yet on Nov. 21, the Florida Supreme Court rendered what was essentially a "Jesse Jackson" decision. The court clearly saw itself as protecting the "disenfranchised" against a law that it must have felt was unjust. One of the justices worried openly in court that the Republican position of insisting on the law might "disenfranchise" certain voters.
This lever in our political culture works like the sideshow game in which a lever is hit and a clown is dropped into a tank of water. Here the lever is hit and an event is submerged in a paradigm of victimization and oppression.
Suddenly, people appear telling stories. There was something funny at a polling place, a hostility just beneath the surface, a registration that could not be located, a group of police lurking on a corner for no apparent reason, confusing ballots. Suddenly, it is as though Orville Faubus rather than Jeb Bush is governor, and there is the feeling that an old American evil has reared its ugly head. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once appealed to President Kennedy for federal intervention against a racist South, now Kweisi Mfume asks Janet Reno to intervene.
When reality is bent in this way, back to the great American shame of racism, we enter a surreal terrain in which history colors the present so that we see it as an opportunity to redeem the past. Now we will not stand by as we once did and let injustice hide behind the law. Now we will take the license to do the right thing and make the rule of law stand aside for the work of justice. (Where was the Florida Supreme Court back in 1960 when injustice was palpable all across that state?)
When Mr. Jackson rides into a situation like Florida, his purpose is always the same: to use racism to undermine the moral authority of laws or standards or rules so that excepting blacks from them can be seen as an act of justice. Yes, the law says the election must be certified seven days after the vote. But there is a whiff of racial oppression in the air. The word "disenfranchisement" has come into easy usage with its imagery of Jim Crow injustice. Now Florida's election law loses much of its moral authority. And now justice requires exceptionalism -- that the terms of the law be set aside, that deadlines be extended, that recounts be allowed to the point of redundancy.
But this is Al Gore's election bid, not Mr. Jackson's. And one would think that Mr. Gore could fight his own battles. But in fact he cannot. Without Jesse and the great specter of black oppression, there is no depth or resonance to Mr. Gore's claim of unfairness. Jesse vets Mr. Gore -- a privileged white guy -- to ask for the same exceptionalism that normally only blacks have the moral authority to demand. Democrats are still in the Clinton era and one thing this means is that they may go to church as New Democrats but when they get into a street fight they go black.
Blacks are their muscle. When the law or the rules or the simplest standards of decency stand in their way, when it is time to scorch the earth, they whistle for blacks. At Bill Clinton's lowest moments during impeachment it was the Congressional Black Caucus that muscled for him. Maxine Waters, John Conyers, Charlie Rangel et al., crowding the talk shows, flacking for the moral relativism that gave Mr. Clinton cover, but a relativism that many white Democrats lacked the authority and nerve to flack for.
Now Mr. Gore is in a street fight and his deal with blacks, like Mr. Clinton's, is to offer exceptionalism (affirmative action) in return for moral muscle. The James Byrd commercial put out by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is but one example. Indeed, no rhyme intended, a Gore presidency would no doubt mean a Jackson lieutenancy.
There is great pathos, if not tragedy, in images of Mr. Jackson screaming "Keep hope alive" from the pulpits of black churches in Florida. After all, this is not the civil-rights movement. This is the political campaign of a privileged white baby-boomer who has no more than pandered to black fears for his own gain.
To rally blacks into a monolith, as if Mr. Gore's candidacy were a liberation struggle, not only wastes moral capital but also makes blacks the easiest group in American politics to take for granted. They simply become a given, a constituency of "ultra" Democrats whose price is so cheap because their loyalty is so obvious.
Full Parity
What black America deserves is a leadership that ignites our energies with the idea that personal responsibility -- despite past or even present suffering -- is the only power that can truly deliver us to full parity with others. But today's black leadership only rallies blacks with a sense of their victimization into a voting campaign that promises nothing more than a little exceptionalism. And this as the sun begins to set on affirmative action.
Having lost faith in the capacities of its own people -- having bought into the defamation that blacks are intractably weak without white intervention -- this leadership uses hard-earned black moral capital to chase the likes of Mr. Gore, and flatters itself that it can provide him with muscle. This, after going to bat for O.J. Simpson and bodyguarding for a philandering president who thanked them by suggesting that his very philandering made him "the first black president."
At no time in American history have blacks suffered from a leadership so lost, and so absurd |
