(ThyBlackMan.com) Dudley Randall’s poem, “It seems to me, said Booker T; I disagree, said W.E.B.” points out an issue that has plagued Black folks for generations. During Booker T’s time, some Blacks said he was working “for the man” as he tried to build an economic foundation for his people via education, industrial training, self-help, and business principles. W.E.B. DuBois said, Washington’s program came along “at the correct psychological moment,” but he ended up being Booker T’s antagonist because Black people began to choose sides. Rather than take the best of both of those giants, we succumbed to the “divide and conquer” syndrome.
In 1915, Marcus Garvey decides to come to this country to meet with Booker T., who died before Garvey’s arrival. But, the naysayers and detractors soon started dividing the people again, pitting DuBois against Garvey instead of taking the best of what both offered and working toward our collective uplift.
Since then we have seen similar scenarios played out, such as Malcolm and Martin, Stokely and Martin, Al and Jesse, Tupac/Biggie/Knight/Dogg and all that madness, Eddie Long and Al Sharpton, Smiley/West and Dyson/Harris-Perry, and the list goes on. It’s not that we should agree on everything; that
would create a bunch of robots. We should, however, have enough sense and knowledge of the past and the present to deal with our personal disagreements in private while moving collectively and publicly toward one goal. Could our penchant for one-ups-man-ship be attributed to another syndrome called, the “HNIC,” as described in Norman Kelley’s excellent book of the same name?
All the silliness, rancor, redundancy, and, yes, jealousy among our people are both unnecessary and divisive. I recall when George Bush attended the 2003 Urban League convention but dissed the NAACP’s meeting (see Blackonomics article: “Sibling Rivalry”). Marc Morial and Kweisi Mfume were at the helms of those two organizations, and the feathers started to fly about what George Bush did; but more importantly our folks began to take sides because Bush decided he would deal with Morial rather than the fiery Mfume.
As long as we, both individually and organizationally, are fighting each other and choosing sides, as if we are on two different teams, our economic empowerment will always be an illusory, quixotic, and romanticized state of mind rather than a substantive realization.
Where I live, Cincinnati, Ohio, our NAACP branch will be 100 years old in 2015. Under its current leadership for the past seven years, we have advanced from a fledgling 400 or so membership base and a tenuous financial position, to a 2400 membership base and a long-term and stable financial position. We have also built strong, mutually beneficial, broad-based relationships – unprecedented in the history of this branch.
Around the first part of 2013, ninety-eight years after the founding of Cincinnati branch of the NAACP, a local chapter of the National Action Network (NAN) was established. Some say it was simply an effort to “compete” and make irrelevant the NAACP and its President, who overwhelmingly defeated his opposition candidate in the last election (November 2012). Idiocy has prevailed since then, mainly because of a few malcontents and sore losers who “don’t like” the NAACP President and are desperately trying to bring him down personally. At the same time, the images of our two organizations are being dragged through the mud on, of all places, a “Black” radio station. Now how stupid is that?
The new President of the NAN Chapter has not had the common courtesy to contact the leader of the ninety-eight year-old NAACP branch in an initial effort to explore ways to cooperate and move forward on common agenda items. Rather, he has operated under the guise of “neutrality,” knowing all along that the main intentions of many of his founding members are divisiveness, rancor, adversity, and ultimate destruction of the NAACP branch; that is, unless they can take it over. Their feeble attempts and bully tactics will not work; but it is sad to see a few jealous, envious, and spoiled Black folks attempt to stymy and negate the tremendous progress made in this town over the last seven years via the NAACP.
My use of Al Sharpton and Ben Jealous in the title of this article is just a generic representation of how some of our people have and continue to make Randall’s W.E.B./Booker T. poem relevant today. Al and Ben may disagree, but they are not trying to tear each other down.
Our penchant for choosing sides and trying to destroy the opposite side is detrimental to our progress. Whether we like it or not, we are all on the same team; and like on any sports team, the best players are starters and the less accomplished ones are benchwarmers. Yes, some on the bench may secretly hope for the demise of a starter so they can get into the game, but at least they are not sitting there outwardly booing their own team in order to get their chance to play. My great-grandmother used to call that “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
Written By James E. Clingman
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