Black Leaders and Spokesmen

By Jeffrey Hart | Wednesday, April 16, 1997

We hear a great deal of talk these days about 'reducing racial tension' and about 'racial reconciliation,' but there is plenty of evidence that it may be mostly whites who talk this way. Newt Gingrich invited Jesse Jackson to sit with him at the State of the Union Address, but who invited Ward Connerly, the black businessman who had led the successful fight for Proposition 209 in California? Certainly not the Black Caucus, and certainly not Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem. Of course Jesse Jackson had called Connerly a 'race traitor' and a 'lawn jockey' and accused him of wanting to 'maim blacks.'

Connerly's sin, of course, is to have opposed 'affirmative action,' which an overwhelming number of whites also do. Jackson's language was not the language of 'reconciliation.'

No doubt the Black Caucus in Congress may be taken as a prime example of blacks 'working within the system.' Its members have been elected, after all, and often with many white votes, and they are part of the government. They earn middle-class salaries. They ostensibly play by the rules. Yet the program of its forty members is so far outside the mainstream politics as to be sort of a defiant joke. The Caucus wants wholesale economic restructuring, a much expanded and permissive welfare system, much more 'affirmative action,' less punishment for crime, and a foreign policy that puts race (black) first on its agenda.

This is not a political program, but separatism masquerading as politics.

Black representation in Congress, in other words, follows Jesse Jackson in pursuing a politics of empty gestures and racial self-expression rather than the mainstream politics of Colin Powell.

The same is true of the most visible black 'spokesmen,' figures such as Louis Farrakhan and his kooky Nation of Islam organization, with its off-the-wall theology and its open and virulent anti-semitism. Arguably, Farrakhan is the most popular spokesman today among blacks, evidently because he is the most improbable and obnoxious of all to whites. Farrakhan's recent trips to Libya and Iraq to pay court to two of the world's most vicious dictators underlines the point. (Of course all this does not prevent fuzzy minded characters like Jack Kemp from seeing merit in Farrakhan and recommending a chat with Jewish leaders. Kemp does not understand that Farrakhan's popularity with blacks derives from the fact that whites loathe him).

The same is true of lesser figures than Farrakhan, such as Al Sharpton, an oily rabble-rouser now running for mayor of new York City, and Marion Barry, who, as mayor of Washington, D.C. is a convicted felon and has made most of the city unlivable. That these grotesque figures have become 'leaders' and 'spokesmen' is not just a fluke.

Being loathed by whites is the path to black stardom, and there are statistics that go some distance toward explaining this phenomenon.

In the March 24 number of The Weekly Standard, Elena Neuman reports on a survey by Michael Dawson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Dawson concluded that 'levels of nationalism were higher among upper-income blacks than they had ever been,' that 50 percent of blacks favor an all-black political party, double the number five years ago, and that more than half of black Americans 'believe that blacks should join black-only organizations and institutions.'

The figures indicate that these attitudes increase as income-level increases. Thus middle-class support for grotesques like Farrakhan, Barry, and Sharpton is an expressive reflex of the separatist impulse.

If it seems incredible that anyone could believe the theology, anthropology and numerology of Louis Farrakhan, a 1990 survey reported by Elena Neuman in the same article found that one-third of blacks believe the AIDS virus was manufactured in a government germ factory and released into the air to cause genocide among blacks, that one-fourth believe that government 'deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people.'

The survey that issued in these and other incredible beliefs was not conducted among ignoramuses, but among public officials, physicians, professors, students — that is, mostly middle-class blacks.

Of course those who paid attention to the black response to the first Simpson trial were surprised and often outraged by the widespread belief among blacks that Simpson had been framed, and, more, by the glee of blacks shown on TV as the verdict came in.

The percentage of blacks believing in Simpson's innocence declined after the civil trial, but a surprisingly large percentage still held to that belief. And this is in the face of hard evidence that the Los Angeles police idolized Simpson and, time and again, had let him off the hook for violent behavior.

I suppose that if you can entertain the idea that Farrakhan spoke to Elijah Mohammed in a space vehicle, that the government (or Jewish physicians) are spreading AIDS, that, as Leonard Jeffries at CUNY teaches, whites are 'Snow People' while blacks are 'Sun People,' you can also believe that Simpson did not butcher Ron and Nicole.

This is to conclude that a large cognitive gap exists between many blacks and the mainstream whites, and that this gap is a reflex of their alienation and separatism. And, further, that this gap increases, not diminishes, as you go up the professional income scale.

To be on the wrong side of this cognitive gap, to believe the unbelievable, is not, let us say, the best relationship to be in with actuality.

If persisted in, it foreshadows a form of internal emigration and psychological separatism expressing itself in gestures of black nationalism. How widespread this will be is impossible to say. The whole thing may come to seem a dead-end path, harmful to the individuals who take it. But the signs are not encouraging.

Black Leaders and Spokesmen

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