(ThyBlackMan.com) The recent resignation of NAACP president Ben Jealous was a surprise to everyone, including myself. I don’t spend much time thinking about Ben’s career plans, but my crystal ball said nothing about a resignation.
Ben’s decision to leave the NAACP is one of those defining moments that lead us to reflect on the last five years, and what they’ve meant for black people. The truth is that they haven’t meant much.
There is no question in my mind about whether the NAACP is better off since Jealous took over five years ago. The organization has been prominent in the public eye. The group is not as old, dusty and irrelevant as it was back in 2007. Through some savvy business moves, the organization is now in the financial black, able to operate at a level that it could not before.
If I needed someone to teach a class on how to run a successful organization, I’d hire Ben Jealous as the primary instructor.
But we’d be naïve to somehow think that the success of the NAACP is highly correlated with the success of black America in general. Even as the NAACP has filled its coffers and regained national prominence, the black community
has endured one of the darkest eras of the last 100 years. While white unemployment has gotten markedly better, black unemployment is as bad as it was when Dougie Fresh was a teenager. In fact, black unemployment right now is 30% worse than it was during the original march on Washington, back in 1963.
Let’s be clear: Ben Jealous and the NAACP rode to prosperity on the back of the Obama presidency like Ed McMahon sitting on the couch next to Johnny Carson. If you’ll recall, Ed always laughed at Johnny’s jokes, and his job was to make Johnny look good on stage. The alignment between Ben Jealous, Al Sharpton and the Obama Administration has been so disgustingly tight that if they were a boy band, they would be called ’N Sync.
The result of this marriage of men is that the NAACP has worked harder on gay rights and immigration than they have on nearly any other issue affecting the African American community. The group that includes tens of thousands of elderly black people who go to church every Sunday is not the same one that would stand up and salute the president’s sudden commitment to gay marriage.
Personally, gay marriage was never a big issue for me, since I’ve never been proposed to by a gay man. But for some with roots in the church, there was no rush to embrace the liberal agenda at the pace that the Democratic party demanded it. In fact, I dare say that Jealous’ knee jerk decision to stand with nearly every word uttered by the White House over the last four years was blatantly disrespectful to the rank-and-file membership of the organization. It also murdered his ability to stand as a conditional objector to the president’s policies if they were harmful to African Americans.
There is also the little matter of Jealous’ decision to take money from Wells Fargo, the company that did more to steal the homes of black people than the KKK ever did. As a result of the foreclosure crisis and predatory lending, black home ownership is now at an 18-year low. I doubt that this situation was helped by an organization that chose to remain on the payroll of a company that should have executives going to prison for the billions they stole from the black community – paying off our leaders should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card for every bank that decides to rip us off. As a person who watched his grandparents lose the home they’d lived in for over 50 years, I found this alliance to be deeply offensive.
I can’t really go much into the 50th anniversary March on Washington, the event that even Dr. King himself would probably not be invited to. Dr. King spoke heavily on poverty and against the American war machine at the time he died, which caused him to be demonized by millions of Americans, both black and white. Another scholar and man of God who has done the same, Dr. Cornel West, was not asked to participate in the march as well. As men like Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond had their microphones snatched after two minutes, people like Nancy Pelosi and Cory Booker were allowed to bang away on their watered down political agendas. Jealous was part of the circus of politicians who put together this event, which was like a group of fat people running a health food convention.
Ben Jealous didn’t lead the NAACP as a black man. He led the organization as a passionate and unapologetic liberal. His unhealthy and unholy alliance with the Obama Administration was to the detriment of the African American community, and reminds us that filling your pockets can also lead to the emptying of your soul.
I give Ben Jealous tremendous credit for being, in some ways, a brilliant and motivated visionary. I also give him credit for overcoming our personal differences and signing the open letter to end the mass incarceration crisis that Russell Simmons and I sent to President Barack Obama. I truly believe that, deep in his heart, there were a lot of decisions Ben made that kept him from sleeping at night.
But while we praise Ben Jealous for being the amazing young man that he is, we must be honest about the fact that the representation of black people is often an unprofitable inconvenience for those who take black loyalty for granted. The NAACP is not an organization for people like me. It is also a group that doesn’t yet seem to understand that you can’t take money from anyone who offers it. It is a lack of economic independence within black families and organizations that keeps us from being able to stand up when situations call for it. Instead, the people controlling our purse strings tell us to sit right back down, and we typically do as we are told.
When one does an inventory of the key initiatives pursued by the NAACP over the last five years, it’s hard to think of anything that was done for the black community that wasn’t pre-approved by the liberal Democratic establishment. Unfortunately, what this says it that if you’re black and conservative, the NAACP is not for you. So, when I think about all of the conservative black people in my own family, I can understand why they’d be as excited about joining the NAACP as they would about joining the Tea Party. When it comes to advocating for black people without feeling the need to water down the agenda to appease paternalistic outsiders, there are just aren’t any options. As a result, many of our most prominent black public figures are effectively hijacked.
Believe it or not, I have tremendous respect for Ben Jealous as a person. But it makes no sense to sprinkle praise on a man without being honest about his legacy. If I were Obama Administration Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, I would give Jealous an A+ for helping to secure and suppress the black community to ensure that our petty little needs didn’t get in the way of a president with more important things to do.
I am also h?rt by the divide-and-conquer tactics of the Obama administration, which weakened the black community by freezing out some public figures and embracing others. A more unified stance by “black leadership” would have sent a far stronger message than the one we ended up sending. The idea of having meetings with the president over black unemployment and not including prominent black economists and business people effectively meant that the meetings were about grandstanding and almost nothing else. The lack of progress on the issue, as well as the Obama Administration’s silence on black joblessness serve as key cases-in-point.
As I head to New York this week for the next stop in our New Paradigm Tour, I am excited to have involved Dr. Cornel West, a man who has (for right or wrong), remained committed to speaking his truth on behalf of black people for the past several years. The last stop in Chicago included Min. Louis Farrakhan, a person I reached out to because he has created one of the most impressive models of black economic self-sufficiency in history.
I am not concerned about the stigmas attached to either Farrakhan or West, two men who would never be invited to sit at the table with the president. I am more impressed with the idea of black men and women who choose to speak freely, even if their words are not popular, politically correct, or pre-approved by the liberal establishment. The goal of black people should be strength, unity and respect for our community, and sometimes earning your respect means that others aren’t always going to like you.
The need to “bunker down” and focus on rebuilding our own families and to protect our own economic and educational well-being in a world designed to hate us is partially driven by the fact that many of the groups that allegedly exist on our behalf are not actually doing anything for us. This, to some extent, ends the need for centralized black leadership and instead ties into necessity for each of us to do what we must to protect our children, ensure they are educated and make our communities strong. In other words, every mother, father, man and woman must realize that they can become their own greatest black leader.
Many African Americans who work hard, obtain education and play by the rules often find themselves crushed by workplace racism, black unemployment, mass incarceration, and economic frailty. So, even those of us who’ve allegedly “made it” wake up some mornings realizing that we never actually escaped the plantation. During my years of dealing with the racism of academia, I’ve felt like one of those people.
With regard to Ben Jealous, I sincerely wish him well. I also fully expect that there will be prolonged negative consequences to my decision to share my thoughts about him in an open and honest way. But the fact is that we have to call it like we see it and we can’t spend our time worrying about what other people are going to think. We must commit ourselves to black freedom of thought.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.