Black Dreams, White Liberals

January 18, 2008

Black Dreams, White Liberals
By Charles Krauthammer

Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. -- Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7
WASHINGTON -- So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive -- the implied analogy to today.

The principal objection was that Clinton appeared to be disrespecting Martin Luther King Jr., relegating him to mere enabler for Lyndon Johnson. But it is certainly true that Johnson was the great emancipator, second only to Abraham Lincoln in that respect. This was a function of the times. King was fighting for black enfranchisement. Until that could be achieved, civil rights legislation could only be enacted by a white president (and a white Congress).

That does not denigrate King. It makes his achievement all the more miraculous -- winning a permanent stake in the system for a previously disenfranchised people, having begun with no political cards to play.

In my view, the real problem with Clinton's statement was the implied historical analogy -- that the subordinate position King held in relation to Johnson, a function of the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the time, somehow needs recapitulation today when none of those conditions apply.

The analogy Clinton was implying was obvious: I'm Lyndon Johnson, unlovely doer; he's Martin Luther King, charismatic dreamer. Vote for me if you want results.
Forty years ago, that arrangement -- white president enacting African-American dreams -- was necessary because discrimination denied blacks their own autonomous political options. Today, that arrangement -- white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty -- is a demeaning anachronism. That's what the fury at Hillary was all about, although no one was willing to say so explicitly.

The King-Johnson analogy is dead because the times are radically different. Today an African-American can be in a position to wield the emancipation pen -- and everything else that goes along with the presidency: from making foreign policy to renting out the Lincoln Bedroom (if one is so inclined). Why should African-
American dreams still have to go through white liberals?

Clinton is no doubt shocked that a simple argument about experience versus inspiration becomes the basis for a charge of racial insensitivity. She is surprised that the very use of "fairy tale" in reference to Obama's position on Iraq is taken as a sign of insensitivity, or that any reference to his self-confessed teenage drug use is immediately given racial overtones.

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Anyone who has ever made a principled argument against affirmative action only to be accused of racism knows exactly how these tactics work. Or anyone who has merely opposed a more recent agenda item -- hate crimes legislation -- on the grounds that murder is murder and that the laws against it are both venerable and severe. Remember that scurrilous pre-election ad run by the NAACP in 2000 implying that George Bush was indifferent to a dragging death of a black man at the hands of white racists in Texas because he did not support hate crime legislation?

The nation has become inured to the playing of the race card, but "our first black president" (Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton) and his consort are not used to having it played against them.

Bill is annoyed with Obama. As Bill inadvertently let on to Charlie Rose, it has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with entitlement. He had contemplated running in 1988, he confided to Charlie, but decided to wait. Too young, not ready. (A tall tale, highly Clintonian; but that's another matter.) Now it is Hillary's turn. The presidency is her due -- the ultimate in alimony -- and this young upstart refuses to give way.

But telling Obama to wait his turn is a tricky proposition. It sounds patronizing and condescending, awakening the kinds of racial grievances white liberals have spent half a century fanning -- only to find themselves now singed in the blowback, much to their public chagrin. Who says there's no justice in this world?
letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

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NAACP must adapt to live up to name March 27, 2007

NAACP must adapt to live up to name
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Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist based in Washington: Tribune Media Services
March 27, 2007

Sixty-nine African-Americans were reported lynched in 1909.

If those murders followed the pattern of thousands of similar crimes committed between the Civil War and the civil rights movement, each would have attracted hundreds of Christian white women, children and men to watch the death kicks of a black man hanging by his neck from a tree or burning alive. The atmosphere would have been festive, like a county fair. They would have taken pictures or body parts as souvenirs. Nobody would have ever stood trial.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- the NAACP -- was founded that year and chances are nobody would have felt it difficult to explain what was meant by the second of those double-As. It would have been considered quite an "advancement," for instance, simply to get white people to stop lynching black ones with impunity.

Beyond that, there was a need to secure voting rights, desegregate schools, stop job discrimination, fight police brutality. In 1909, then, it was clear what you meant when you spoke of "the advancement of colored people."

Ninety-eight years later, it is considerably less so.

Witness this month's surprise decision by NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon to step down after only 19 months on the job. Gordon, a 61-year-old former telecommunications executive, quit because of a disagreement over the meaning and methods of advancement.

He says he wanted the group to invest more of its resources into what might be called advancement from within. Meaning pregnancy counseling, mentoring, and programs designed to teach business and wealth-building skills. This brought him into conflict with the NAACP board of directors, which wanted to restrict the organization to its traditional role of advocating against injustice.

Gordon told The New York Times it was never his intention that the NAACP stop going after job discrimination, police brutality and other manifestations of injustice. He only wanted it to shift some of its emphasis toward strategies designed to empower. "It would be insane to give up on advocacy," he said. "I just think we can do more than that, and should."

He's right.

We are all quick -- we are all far "too" quick -- to embrace a false choice where African-Americans are concerned. It asks us to believe that if we agitate against injustice, we cannot acknowledge the need to improve from within, and if we acknowledge the need to improve from within, we forfeit the right to agitate against injustice. Gordon apparently realizes what many of us do and the NAACP board does not: This is not a case of either/or. We can do both/and. And, we must.

Lynching is no longer a pressing problem, the murder of James Byrd notwithstanding. But many of the other issues the NAACP was formed to fight still exist, albeit in altered form. So its leadership is still needed on issues like voting rights, desegregation, job discrimination and police brutality, just as it was in 1909.

But by the same token, this is no longer 1909. Or 1940. Or 1955. Or even 1972. This is 2007: The world is different now. The problems are more complex and the strategies employed against them need to be multilayered and sophisticated. The NAACP's inability to understand this has, I think, helped make it stagnant, static and marginal to today's struggle.

"The NAACP is today," says a slogan on the organization's Web site. But that will only be wishful thinking until the group finds a way to reinvent itself for this millennium. It can start by recognizing that we -- meaning African-Americans -- can and should take ownership of our own uplift, be the instrument of our own empowerment. Ideally, the NAACP should be a leader in that movement.

After all, that's advancement too.
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Leonard Pitts is a syndicated columnist based in Washington. E-mail: lpitts@miami herald.com Copyright (c) 2007, Chicago Tribune

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