“The Sad But Self-Inflicted Fall Of Cornel West”: The Self Anointed ‘Prophet’ Is Yesterday’s News
Michael Eric Dyson’s blistering takedown of Cornel West in The Ghost of Cornel West for The New Republic not only closed the door on a decades-long friendship that arguably led the way in black American thought at the end of the 20th century, but also displayed how the roles of black leaders have evolved during Barack Obama’s rise to prominence.
Dyson starts off by describing West’s animus toward the president as a love that has turned into a hatred so severe that it would make the heavens shudder. He mentions the times when West called Obama a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface,” on Democracy Now! and a “brown-faced Clinton” in Salon magazine. He discusses a moment when West told him, Dyson, that he does not “respect the brother at all,” referring to Obama. All this in the first two paragraphs.
As the piece winds its way to the conclusion that solidifies the end of their personal and professional relationship, a narrative of West emerges as a man of supreme intellect who thought that he had reached the pinnacle of African-American thought. West had even gone so far as to start referring to himself as a prophet. He believed that he was the voice that the black community would run to when in need of clarity. Dyson was one of those voices early on, so West’s fall from grace in his eyes is all the more striking. He was a self-anointed prophet, who has publicly lost one of his most significant disciples and a friend.
Apparently, it was the release of Race Matters in the mid-’90s that placed West at the pinnacle, and he intended on staying there for life. He did not need to publish new, thought-provoking works. His lack of output was disappointing, and so were his verbal attacks toward others in the black community, especially at MSNBC contributor and professor Melissa Harris-Perry.
Still, he potentially could have recovered from both of these errors. Yet he decided to rest on his laurels from here to eternity, and as he did so, time, unbeknownst to him, began passing him by. When Obama showed up, and politely challenged West’s idyllic place at the summit, West responded venomously to challenge this young, brash usurper.
West was not the only person to challenge Obama’s place within the black community—Jesse Jackson had very choice words for Obama, too—but he is one of the few whose perspective has not evolved with the passage of time, and nothing could be more damning for an intellectual. Yet the key thing to remember is that Obama did not take West’s position at the summit; he instead built a taller mountain and sat atop it.
This recent evolution of black leadership in American society always makes me think about a conversation I had with my grandfather on the eve of the 2008 Iowa caucuses.
During the conversation, he explained to me that he intended on voting for Hillary Clinton for president because he did not believe that white people would allow Obama to become president of the United States. My grandfather was an educated man, a minister, and a veteran of the Korean War, but mentally it was absolutely impossible for him to believe that Obama could become the next president.
I did not agree with his perspective, but I knew where it came from, and it made me wonder more and more about how one’s environment and experiences can drastically shape what you can believe is possible in the world.
Most times when I tell this story, I need to follow it up with a simplifying analogy to explain how this perspective could have come into being. In this analogy, I condense America to a k-through-12 school.
At the beginning of America, blacks were unpaid laborers at the school. Then we became paid laborers, and then we were able to have our own classes, and through this structure, influential black teachers were able to emerge. These teachers made progress within the school and created lasting changes, but the goal was always to become one of these beloved teachers and to make change through this medium. Many of the most influential black leaders in America were teachers or educated through the church. W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington were both teachers. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X taught from the pulpit. Dyson and West used both media, the classroom and the pulpit.
Obama, on the other hand, specialized in neither, even though he taught at the University of Chicago. Instead he took the administrative route. He wanted to be the principal of the school, and that meant he could not teach full time, and this is where the conflict has largely emerged.
People like my grandfather did not believe that it would be possible to have a black principal. Many within the African-American community wanted to know if Obama would be able to teach class full time, because in their minds teaching was what black Americans had always done; and when he said that he could not, they questioned his motives and integrity.
When Obama won the presidency the opportunities for black thought and leadership expanded. My grandfather was beside himself with joy that night because he had lived to witness the previously thought impossible. What he thought was possible in the world had now expanded. Innumerable black Americans felt the same. A new level of attainment in public life was now possible.
Yet despite this progress, the need remained for great black teachers, and now a new question emerged: How would the teachers themselves handle no longer being arguably the most influential voice in the Obama era?
Dyson and other black leaders have taken a healthy position of comfortably and even vehemently disagreeing with Obama on policy issues, but respecting the man for the position he has earned and what it has done for the black community.
West clearly did not take this change well and instead opted to sternly rebuff this paradigm shift that undermined his influence.
Dyson details West’s anger when Obama did not give him tickets to the inauguration, and he mentions how West “lambasted” Obama when the then-junior senator from Illinois decided to announce his candidacy for the presidency in Illinois instead of at Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union meeting in Virginia.
West wanted Obama to visit his class, and he became incredulous when the candidate chose to speak in front of the people who elected him instead of those within the black community. West either did not see the shift or chose to ignore it.
When West did not receive inauguration tickets his fury was that of someone who did not understand that the party could go on without him.
He wanted everyone to love him for his brilliance, and forgot to use his intellect for the benefit of others. He stopped being a teacher, refused to be a student, and wanted to be a prophet.
The leadership roles that black Americans can obtain has changed in the last decade and this has required an evolution of thought amongst black intellectuals and leaders, and a re-examining of roles within the black community.
West was once both an intellectual and a leader, but as the times changed, he did not. And now progress, thought, and leadership have moved forward without him.
By: Barrett Holmes Pitner, The Daily Beast, April 22, 2015
“A Crappuccino With Good Intentions”: Before ‘Conversation On Race’, We Need Education On Race
Am I the only person in America not making fun of Howard Schultz?
The Starbucks CEO bought himself a ton of ridicule recently when he attempted to jumpstart a national dialogue on race by having baristas write the words “Race Together” on customers’ cups of Cinnamon Dolce Light Frappuccino Grande or Caffe Misto Venti with extra coconut.
On Twitter, the campaign was dubbed “patronizing,” “absurd” and “a load of crap.” On The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Rosie Perez said, “I don’t want to be forced to have a conversation. Especially early in the f—–g morning.” Some folks questioned the wisdom of calling for racial dialogue when your executive team has all the rich cultural diversity of a GOP convention in Idaho.
Starbucks says there will eventually be more to the campaign, but what we’ve seen so far has been epically bad — naive at best, dumber than a sack of coffee beans at worst. Give it this much credit, though: It came out of an earnest conviction that the future health of our country requires us to solve race. In other words, Starbucks had good intentions.
You may say that’s not much. You may note that good intentions are the macadam on the road to hell.
Me, I think we dismiss good intentions at our own peril.
Besides, Schultz’s biggest mistake was not in having baristas write a trite slogan, but in his failure to realize that much of the country is simply not equipped for the conversation he is inviting them to have. Last week, even as “Race Together” was being lampooned, I spent 41 minutes I’ll never get back on the phone with a white, Jewish reader who had insisted she wanted to have the “conversation on race” I have often said this country needs. It was not a productive encounter.
She starts on a spiel about blacks and drugs. I point out that only about 15 percent of drug use in this country is by blacks and that the vast majority of dealers are white. There is a silence. She says this is something she had not known.
We move on to the fact that Jews were footsoldiers and financiers of the civil rights movement, so she is offended that black people never attend Holocaust remembrance services. She has no statistics to prove this, but insists her observation is valid based on her lived experience. I point out that her lived experience is in Tucson, which has a black population of maybe 17.
And so it goes.
What it illustrated for me, and not for the first time, is that often, when people think they’re talking about race, they really aren’t. They are talking instead about the myths, resentments, projections and suppositions by which they justify half-baked notions about who those “other” people are.
You can’t wholly blame them. Who can speak sensibly on a subject he doesn’t understand? And we’ve been foiled in our quest to understand by an institutional conspiracy of ignorance. Race is the rawest wound of the American psyche, but somehow, you can graduate high school without knowing who Emmett Till was or that Martin Luther King ever said any words other than “I have a dream.” Race has done more than arguably any other social force to shape this country, yet somehow news media do not cover it, unless forced to do so by crisis or controversy.
So here is what I’ve come to realize: Before we can have a fruitful “conversation on race,” we need to first have education on race. We will not be a well nation or a whole one until we cease to fear and begin to understand this force that has made us who and what we are.
And how dare we reject from that cause any good person who earnestly seeks the same end, even if his solution is as dumb as a slogan on a coffee cup? Yes, I recognize the limitations of good intentions.
But they sure beat the heck out of the other kind.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 30, 2015
“The Dangling Corpses”: The Real Lynchings In SAE’s Oklahoma Backyard
The fraternity of blacks lynched in Oklahoma has 50 known members, including a man named Ben Dickerson who was spirited away from the jail in Norman just ahead of a mob, only to be seized and hanged a few miles away.
“That was fortunate,” a Norman newspaper said of the 1911 incident. “We would have had a lynching right under the shadow of the state university.”
This being the same University of Oklahoma where members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon were recently filmed on a party bus chanting a racist ditty that included the lines “There will never be a n—-r SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me.”
One of the students who have since been expelled has said in a statement that “the song was taught to us.”
The obvious questions are: Who taught it to them, and where did those people learn it?
A Reddit posting suggests that the song was also being sung at SAE’s University of Texas chapter at least two months ago.
A photo taken of an SAE house on another Oklahoma campus shows that one of the members had a confederate flag hanging in his room for passers-by to see, as if the romanticism over the fraternity’s roots in the Antebellum South could be separated from the accompanying evils of slavery and racism.
The song they all should have been taught is one written by the son of an undersheriff said to have been part of a mob that lynched a black woman and her son from an Oklahoma bridge.
The woman was 35-year-old Laura Nelson, who was with her husband, 14-year-old son, and toddler daughter in their cabin outside Paden when a four-man posse arrived in search of a stolen cow on the night of May 4, 1911.
The lawmen found the butchered remnants of one, and the husband, Austin Nelson, later admitted that he had stolen the cow because his kids were hungry.
What happened next remains in some dispute. The most likely scenario is that one of the lawmen moved to disable a shotgun that was hanging on the wall. The teenage son, L.D. Nelson, would later say he thought the lawman intended to kill his father with the shotgun.
The son grabbed another weapon, a rifle. His mother stepped in to wrest it from him and it discharged. The bullet passed through the first lawman’s pant leg and chanced to fatally wound a 35-year-old deputy sheriff named George Loney.
The father was immediately arrested and charged with the theft of “a domestic animal, to wit one cow.” He pleaded guilty and was sent to state prison on a three-year term that might very well have saved his life.
The mother and the son were arrested the day after the shooting and charged with murder. They were denied bail and consigned to the county jail pending arraignment on May 25.
The lawyers for Laura Nelson and her son would later suggest that an intervening preliminary hearing had called into doubt whether the prosecution had enough corroborating evidence to make a prima facie case.
In another Oklahoma case, in Idabel, local white guys had remedied a weak prosecution performance in a preliminary hearing against a black man named Oscar Martin by simply staging a lynching right then and there in the courtroom.
In the Laura Nelson case, local white guys decided to take more pre-emptive action.
Late on the night of May 24, a mob stormed the jail. Laura Nelson had been allowed to care for her young daughter, Carrie, and the mother is said to have been clutching the girl as she and her son were gagged and dragged away.
Other Oklahoma mobs had been known to shoot as well as hang their victims. They sometimes lowered a victim before he was dead and burned him alive.
“When he was nearly dead, his body was taken down and a fire kindled under it,” a newspaper wrote of the 1906 lynching near Norman of a man named John Fullhood. “The fire soon consumed his body and all that was left was a pile of bones. A hole was dug and all the ashes and bones were gathered up and buried.”
The mob that carried off Laura Nelson and her son is said to have raped her, but it otherwise stuck with just a pair of hemp ropes. Mother and son—she with her arms hanging loose, he with hands bound—were found dangling dead from a bridge the next morning by a black youngster who happened by with, of all things, a cow.
The mother is said to have set little Carrie down by the foot of the bridge as she was being hustled to her execution. A neighbor apparently found the child and took her home.
As word spread, white people came to get a look. A photo of the crowd on the bridge shows numerous kids among those gawking at the dangling corpses.
The more prominent members of the lynch mob are said to have included Charles Guthrie, a real estate broker and local pol who was also an undersheriff at some point. He continued on with his life and had a son he named Woody the following year.
Woody Guthrie grew up to become America’s preeminent troubadour of social justice. He would suggest that part of what formed him was the shock of seeing a postcard reproduction of that photo of the lynching in which his father seems to have played a role. A song the younger Guthrie wrote about the lynching goes in part:
“You can stretch my neck on that old river bridge,
But don’t kill my baby and my son.”
Another song that Woody Guthrie wrote is the one that the boys of SAE should have been taught, along with so much more about fundamental fairness and justice.
The SAE boys showed that they are pretty good at learning lyrics, so they should not have any trouble with these:
“This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.”
By: Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, March 12, 2015
“The Myth Of Voter Fraud”: Persists Because It Is A Racialized Weapon In A Power Struggle Over The Soul Of American Democracy
When there has been election fraud in American elections, it has usually been committed by politicians, party operatives and election officials who have something at stake in electoral outcomes. Voters rarely commit fraud because for them, it is a motiveless crime, the individual benefits to the fraudulent voter are immaterial, while the costs are prohibitive.
The most important illustration of outright corruption of elections is the century-long success of white supremacists in the American South stripping African-Americans of their right to vote. Elites and party bosses in the urban North followed the Southern example, using some of the same tricks to manipulate electoral outcomes and to disfranchise immigrants and the poor.
From this perspective, the impact of election fraud on American elections has been massive. It was only with the rise of the Black Freedom Movement and passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, that the tricks and political chicanery were halted. In fact, according to the political historian J. Morgan Kousser, the Voting Rights Act is the most important fraud-prevention legislation ever passed.
In response to these victories, a reactionary movement arose to push back against progress in civil rights and to counter the thrust toward a more equal society. Over the last 40 years, that movement has made important gains, especially in the courts, where a conservative Supreme Court, in a 2013 case called Shelby County v. Holder, gutted one of the most effective features of the Voting Rights Act – the “preclearance” formula which forced states and localities with the most egregious histories of vote denial to obtain permission from the Justice Department before putting new election rules in place.
Prior to the contested 2000 presidential election, only 14 states either requested or required that voters show some form of identification at the polls. Since then, the number of states requiring ID to vote has doubled and the forms of acceptable identification have narrowed. In what is likely no coincidence, the rate at which states have adopted tougher photo identification requirements accelerated with the election of the nation’s first black president and the demise of legally-mandated federal oversight in the Shelby case.
In rapid succession, partisan lawmakers in state after state have pushed through the new rules, claiming tougher identity checks are necessary to staunch or prevent voter fraud. And yet, in no state adopting a photo ID requirement has any lawmaker or anyone else, for that matter, presented a credible showing of a problem with voters corrupting the electoral process. In other words, if the claimed reason of preventing voter fraud is taken at face value, there is no rational basis for the policy intervention. So what is actually going on?
I think the phony claims and renewed political chicanery are a reflection of the fact that a century-and-a-half after the Civil War, and 50 years after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a deeper struggle for democracy, equality and inclusion continues. Beneath the skirmish over arcane voting rules is a fraught tension between our ideals and our fears, between what we profess to believe about the “sanctity” of the ballot, and racialized and class-based notions of worthiness embedded in the question of who is to be a citizen in the United States.
The myth of voter fraud persists because it is a racialized weapon in a power struggle over the soul of American democracy. To see this, we must set our current politics in a historical context. Long-standing fears about unworthy citizens polluting and distorting electoral outcomes are the underside of the usual celebratory story we like to tell ourselves of a progressive struggle for voting rights. In fact, the struggle has not unfolded in a linear fashion. Each successive advance has generated counter-movements rooted in alternative and reactionary histories aimed at “taking back” at least a part of what has been lost. In our own time, from the moment blacks began exercising their newly (re-)won right to vote, that right was undermined in ways that constrained its power to deliver social justice. The question of who is to be a citizen in our racially divided and injured society remains unresolved.
By: Lorraine C. Minnite, Director of the Urban Studies Program at Rutgers University–Camden: Bill Moyers Blog, Moyers and Company, March 9, 2015
“Ties To The Confederacy”: Racist Oklahoma Frat Founded By Racists
Every now and then I read a news story online that evokes such a strong visceral reaction that I actually feel like breaking my computer. Monday morning was one of those days.
I’m talking about the video that I’m sure many of you have seen by now of the racist white University of Oklahoma students—most of whom were members of the fraternity Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE)—gleefully singing in unison these despicably racist words:
“There will never be a nigger SAE. There will never be a nigger SAE . You can hang him from a tree, but he will never sign with me. There will never be a nigger SAE.”
Watching these white students—clad in tuxedos and cocktail dresses—sing these lyrics with such joy and gusto made it feel like it was a scene from a movie about cartoonish racism from an era gone by. But this video didn’t depict an incident that occurred decades ago. It happened on Sunday.
Yes, I know the students will say—as will their defenders—that they were just joking around. Bullshit. In today’s America, you know that singing about “niggers” being lynched is absolutely, unequivocally wrong. There’s no gray area.
How could this happen in 2015? I’d say the early history of SAE is very instructive on this point. This fraternity brags on its website that it was started in 1856 in the “Deep South.” (I can’t help but think racial dog whistle when I see that term, given the SAE’s founders’ ties to the Confederacy.) And SAE was at one time was a whites only fraternity as noted in its 1903 “book of rituals” that limited membership to “members of the Caucasian race”. Keep in mind that the students on the bus were heading, per media reports, to a Founders Day event to celebrate very white men who gave us these policies.
And this is not the only racist event featuring SAE. It’s merely the first incident to attract national headlines. Just three months ago, the Clemson University chapter was suspended after white students held a “Cripmas” party (“Cripmas” being a weird and really not remotely funny combination of Crips and Christmas) where they dressed in bandannas, Tupac T-shirts and sported fake “thug” tattoos.” And an SAE chapter at Washington University in St. Louis was suspended in 2013 after members sang racial slurs to African-American students pledging the fraternity.
But SAE is far from the only fraternity engaged in such racially insensitive activities. The critically acclaimed 2014 film, Dear White People, concluded by giving us a litany of similar racially insensitive events held by white college students in recent years. We are talking “thug parties” and “Crips and Bloods”-themed parties organized by white students where they dressed as the worst examples of the black community.
In this climate, we can’t be surprised to see that a few months ago at Oklahoma State University, a black sorority became the target of a slew of racist remarks on an anonymous app.
These incidents generally result in the students being punished on some level. As most are aware, the president of Oklahoma University David Boren, a former Oklahoma governor and U.S. senator, announced Monday morning that “effective immediately, all ties and affiliations between this University and the local SAE are hereby severed.” He closed the fraternity house effective Monday and condemned the students involved in the harshest terms.
That’s truly commendable. But it’s very likely that incidents like this and racial tensions will increase until we have an honest conversation about the underlying factors fostering racism. And it seems the time for this discussion can’t wait much longer. A recent poll released in connection with the 5oth anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma found that four in 10 American believe that racial relations have become worse during Barack Obama’s presidency.
So why aren’t we having this conversation? To be candid, the obstacle is coming from many in the white community. While black people are eager to have this much-needed discussion, most (not all) white people are not.
And that’s not just my opinion; It’s exactly what white and black people have been telling pollsters. For example, a 2013 Pew poll taken after the trial of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin found that 78 percent of blacks said the incident raised important issues about race that need to be addressed. However, only 28 percent of whites agreed.
And in 2014, after the grand jury refused to indict Officer Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown, we saw similar numbers, with 80 percent of blacks saying the case raised important issue about race while only 37 percent of whites agreed. In fact, 47 percent of whites responded that they thought race was getting too much attention.
Why do so many whites feel this way? Well, as I have witnessed firsthand, many white people think that any discussion about race is really an accusation. Consequently, they reflexively recoil when the issue is raised and become defensive.
Of course, there are some—mostly on far right—who truly believe that racism doesn’t exist. It’s unlikely anyone can reach those people.
But the hope is that for the others, an environment can be created on both a local and national level to have a brutally candid conversation on underlying factors and perceptions that are causing this tension. I’m not sure what will make white people comfortable enough to have this discussion. But I do know that we need to find a way.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, March 10, 2015
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