Leaving the NAACP May Not Mean Much for Black People (829 hits)
by Dr. Boyce Watkins
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 mμrdered 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 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 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 hμrt 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 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.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the author of the lecture series, “The 8 Principles of Black Male Empowerment.” To have Dr. Boyce commentary delivered to your email, please click here.
8 Responses to Dr. Boyce: Ben Jealous Leaving the NAACP May Not Mean Much for Black People
kyle JiggettsReply September 10, 2013 at 1:15 am BLACK PEOPLE STOP SAYING THAT WE ARE ALL ONE ********. YOU ARE LOOKING FOR YOUR WHITE OPPRESSORS TO ACCEPT YOU BECAUSE YOU LACK SELF-RESPECT. AL SHARPTON AND OBAMA SOLD US OUT.GAY MARRIAGE NO VOTING RIGHTS.MALCOLM X AND MARTIN LUTHER KING FAULT AND DIED FOR BLACK PEOPLE NOT TO BE ******S AND *******S.
Rev. George BrooksReply September 9, 2013 at 7:09 pm This is news to me, if Ben Jealous has just resigned. BUT, believe me if it is true I am going to shout hallelujah!!! Because he isn’t worth two cent in the first place, and was trying to add fighting for white rights to the NAACP agenda and battles. Which is not what this organization is supposed to be about. NOW, let’s give some serious thought, folks, to trying to get Rev. William Barber, the N.C. State NAACP president to be elected as the national president. I will certainly be pushing for him, and if elected I will then renew my membership, which I dropped awhile back. — Rev. George Brooks
TruthbelieverReply September 9, 2013 at 12:47 pm Again, Watkins only has good thoughts of himself and his cohorts.
JulianaReply September 9, 2013 at 11:35 am Ben jealous has done what he was hired to do..and he did it very well indeed. A man who studied in England with a father from “New” England and ancestors from that world, Mr. Jealous is exactly what he should be. The NAACP needed a new face and new b***d, and they got it (with a mixture of the bloodline of our oppressors)…Great move NAACP!
kimmiReply September 9, 2013 at 11:30 am Personally, I would rather hear open dialog, not YOUR personal views. If this is to occur allow there to be pros And cons of the views. Come on we are adults. Give us the true facts and allow each of us to choose whether we are for or against what happens in our Black world, please……
GREG LReply September 9, 2013 at 10:45 am I’m in agreement of with much of the above. The basic problem with black leadership and organizations who purport to represent us is the lack of economic independence and that means that they’re representatives to us rather than for us. The NAACP, Al Sharpton, the Urban League and many others, on both the left and the right, are in the same position. Thus, they become an extension of someone else’s agenda and will do their level best to crush anything that that truly represents the people. This is not limited to black folks but is a prominent feature of American politics in general. Basically, it’s owned lock, stock and barrel.
YvonneReply September 9, 2013 at 1:48 pm Greg, as I see it, the truth of the matter is that there’s only one race and that is human. Man is a man, not a color, creed or race. We are brothers and sisters now. Everyday is *********** Day. All the rest is purely social conditioning — or to be more exact, human programming. Here’s a book (available at Amazon) presenting the facts: The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control by Theodore W. Allen When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no “white” people there. Nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. In this seminal two-volume work, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore W. Allen tells the story of how America’s ruling classes created the category of the “white race” as a means of social control. Since that early invention, white privileges have enforced the myth of racial superiority, and that fact has been central to maintaining ruling-class domination over ordinary working people of all colors throughout American history. Volume I draws lessons from Irish history, comparing British rule in Ireland with the “white” oppression of Native Americans and African Americans. Allen details how Irish immigrants fleeing persecution learned to spread racial oppression in their adoptive country as part of white America. We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? … Yes, gentleman, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right that you pretend to have over us … We are your equals then, by natural right, and if nature pleases itself to diversify colours within the human race, it is not a crime to be born black nor an advantage to be white.
GigiReply September 9, 2013 at 10:40 am Now that Jealous has done his REAL job, which was to put more money in the NAACP’s coffers, they need to bring back Bruce Gordon. I guess the NAACP thought that he would scare off the good white folks and corporations bc he was actually trying to make some tangible changes for blacks.
