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Smiley vs Sharpton: A
Potemkin Drama
By
Glen Ford
Last week’s live broadcast
confrontation between Tavis Smiley and Rev. Al
Sharpton was a perfect window into the incoherence
and utter ineffectuality of what passes for African
American leadership. Smiley, the media entrepreneur,
for ten years (2000-’09) staged an annual electronic
facsimile of Black political life, purporting
to represent, as spelled out in the production’s
title, the “State
of the Black Union”1—SOBU.
Smiley choreographed the event, a ritualized “coming
together” that gave the illusion of Black “unity”
and motion when, in fact, the showcase was
structurally incapable of effectively addressing—much
less resolving—any
issue of importance. Nor was it meant to be anything
but a media happening, a kind of Black
Potemkin Village where luminaries strutted,
pandered and pontificated on cue—a
manufactured drama creating an aura of relevance and
the impression of movement: a substitute for a real
Black people’s Movement.
Tavis sold lots of books along the
way, preaching a “covenant”2
that would bind his show’s performers and a hungry
Black audience to a preached—at
but not fought—for
state of being that could be achieved through
presentation, alone.
Smiley cemented his status as
Grandmaster of a holographic politics consisting of
a soundstage, on which electronic icons pushed the
envelope of contention no farther than the
theatrical constraints of an agreed—upon
“unity” would allow—never
nearly enough to reveal any contradictions demanding
resolution for the sake of future of The Race.
Then came Obama, and the undoing of
Smiley’s skillfully crafted media diversion, trumped
by the mega-show of a serious (i.e.,
corporate-funded) Black presidential campaign. Black
political theater—even
Smiley’s choreographed and meticulously casted
all-Black format—
was bum-rushed by the Obama phenomenon, which
plumbed the brass-ring aspirations of an eternally
marginalized people. All hands rushed to get on the
Showboat, where dreams rooted in at least one side
of the Black brain might be realized—and
where the money surely was.
Smiley attempted in two successive
years to lasso candidate Obama onto his stage set
for a SOBU appearance. But such an association was
anathema to the politician who made his deepest
impression on the mass white psyche with his 2004
Democratic National Convention declaration that
there was “no Black America . . . only the United
States of America.” Of course Obama would not come
to a “State of the Black” anything. Blacks were to
be neutered as a prerequisite of national unity—and
Obama’s political fortunes.
Smiley protested on the righteous
political grounds that a candidate whose entire
strategy was to lock up the Black vote by virtue of
his own ethnicity and then proceed outward, should
at least find time to appear in the Black political
Potemkin Village. He might as well have cursed
God. After eleven years as commentator on the hugely
popular Tom Joyner Morning Show syndication, Smiley
was
forced out3 in April,
2008, by "the hate he's been getting regarding the
Barack issue—hate
from the black people that he loves so much," said
Joyner, who had himself joined the mob. Smiley held
the last of his “State of the Black Union”
gatherings in 2009, although maintaining his public
radio and TV programs.
Sharpton’s
Paymasters
Rev. Al Sharpton had long been one
of the stock performers in the televised SOBU
mini-spectacles. An acolyte of entertainer James
Brown and sports hustler/gangster Don King, Sharpton
is programmed to cut a deal—for
himself. He keeps bad company and tends to wind up,
like most people who parlay with low-lifes, being
captured by them. Or more likely, he is himself
hopelessly degraded. Thus it was not strange that
his 2004 Democratic presidential campaign came under
the control of Roger Stone, a far-right Republican
political hit man whom even polite GOPers find
unsavory (see The Black Commentator,
February 5, 20044)—an
underground passage Sharpton has navigated so often
it must be considered his modus operandi.
Following the scent of bottomless
corporate pockets, Sharpton in the Obama era made
common cause with New York billionaire mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s vast political/financial network, a
capitalist empire fully enmeshed with Barack Obama’s
own Wall Street lifeline. With
$500,000 laundered5
through Bloomberg cronies’ accounts, Sharpton joined
arch-racist Newt Gingrich for a salt-and-pepper tour
touting Obama’s campaign to replace public schools
with charters and break teachers unions, nationwide.
He has graduated to full-fledged operative of the
White House/Wall Street nexus, and will advocate
nothing that might seriously upset his sugar
daddies. Sharpton is finally playing in the big
casino.
The National Action Movement leader
joined NAACP president Ben Jealous and National
Urban League chief Marc Morial for a snow-packed
Black History Month meeting at the White House,
February 13, from which the trio emerged proclaiming
that “we have a president who gets it” about the
need to address Depression-level Black unemployment—albeit
without directly targeting the particulars of the
Black condition or promising any program adequate to
the general crisis. (See
BAR, “Sharpton, Jealous and Morial
Make Small Talk at the Big House.”6)
Sharpton volunteered that the Black “leaders” might
be of use in persuading Republicans to cooperate on
the jobs issue.
The president
did not dignify the meeting or his Black admirers’
analysis with a comment.
The previous week, Sharpton was
reported to have told the
New York Times 7
the president was “smart not to ballyhoo ‘a black
agenda’”
—the meaning of which quote
would become central to the radio throw-down between
Tavis Smiley and Sharpton.
Smiley’s
Manifesto
Tavis is not Mr. Smiley unless he is
building
Potemkin Villages in the airwaves. Eager to get
back in the center of the magic circle, Smiley
returned to his old forum, the Tom Joyner Morning
Show, to market yet another gathering of “leaders,”
set for March 20 at Chicago State University. This
time, it would be a great debate over a Black
agenda. Some folks in the circle,
he tried to convey,8 were
singing the wrong song:
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The
President doesn’t need a Black agenda,
they sing. He’s not the president of
Black America, he’s the president of all
America, and he need not focus
specifically on the unique challenges
Black America is facing, they sing. I
know “What’s going on.” I know “We
shall overcome,” but I don’t know this
new tune, “the president doesn’t need a
Black agenda”. |
Smiley called
out the off-key performers, and produced a list of
others who, he vouched, had remained in tune with
the ancestors:
|
I
say this lovingly, they’re all friends
and freedom fighters…but Al Sharpton,
Ben Jealous, Charles Ogletree, Valerie
Jarrett, Marc Morial, Dr. Dorothy
Height, will also be joined by some
other crooners who I think do want
us singing a different
song…Barbara Lee, Angela Glover
Blackwell, Cornel West, Michael Eric
Dyson, Jesse Jackson, just for example.
Other invited singers
include Louis Farrakhan who hasn’t been
singing much of late, but who has a solo
I’m told he’s ready to share. Should be
some kind of choir rehearsal to get us
all singing the same song, Saturday,
March 20, in Chicago, on national
television.
Do we think that we can
give President Obama a pass on Black
issues and somehow when he’s no longer
in office, just resurrect the moral
authority to hold future presidents
accountable to our concerns? How does
that work? You give one president a pass
on Black issues, but when he’s gone, you
go right back to trying to hold the next
president accountable. I don’t get how
we’re going to do that. |
A great debate,
or an attempt to choreograph an exercise in false
“unity?” Smiley appears to think he can pull off
both, simultaneously. But later that day Al Sharpton
was in his junkyard, howling.
In the studio for his daily
radio show9 with his guest
and buddy, Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree, who
taught both Barack and Michelle Obama, Rev. Sharpton
accepted Tavis Smiley’s call:
SMILEY: How are
you?
SHARPTON: I was
fine until you started messing with me this morning.
What’s wrong with you?
SMILEY: We need a conversation about
whether or not there needs to be a Black agenda. . .
. When there are certain African American leaders .
. . who are quoted [as saying] that this president
doesn’t need to have an African American agenda,
given that Black folk are getting crushed, I said we
need to come together to have a conversation about
what that means. I think there’s a disconnect
between those kinds of quotes and Black people
[interrupted] . . .
SHARPTON: No, I think there’s a
disconnect between what you’re saying and what was
said. First of all, we never said that, and the
New York Times never said we said that. [Smiley
tries to interrupt] And if you thought we had
said that you should have picked up the phone and
asked us.
Smiley read the
relevant Times copy aloud, but Sharpton’s
awesome powers of obfuscation were in full display:
SHARPTON: I said that if you were
getting ready to have an event then you’d be smart
not to ballyhoo a certain segment of the event. That
does not mean I don’t think you should have the
event or emphasize something. What you just read is
nowhere near what you said, Tavis.
And so it went, with Sharpton
characterizing Smiley’s challenge on the Tom Joyner
show as “disingenuous” and “lies.” But the Times
didn’t take Sharpton’s statement that Obama was
“smart not to ballyhoo ‘a black agenda’” out of
context, and Smiley’s reading of the remarks was
correct. The Reverend and his fellow unrepentant
Obamites have been giving the president a “pass”
since he first appeared on the national scene,
allowing him to tack further to the Right with every
passing day. And they are demanding a pass for
themselves, as well, for wholly abdicating their
responsibility as “leaders” to formulate a Black
agenda worthy of the name, and to confront power
with demands based on that agenda. Sharpton and his
crowd have devolved to meek and ridiculous
access-seekers with no significant agenda to
“ballyhoo”—except
the president’s own, corporate agenda.
These inert human objects cannot
even be described as annexes to the administration,
since Obama finds it politically inconvenient to
recognize them as such. Their irrelevance is near
total.
Although meek as a lamb with Obama,
Sharpton played by Don King rules in lashing out at
Smiley, whom he would eject from the inner sanctum
for being “notoriously anti the president.” Tavis
has no right to call a leadership meeting in Chicago
or anywhere else, said Sharpton. “Some of the
objective people who have not been pro or con the
president should convene it.” At any rate, “I’m not
going to be there.”
In truth, there
is little point in organizing a gathering of people
who will not fight. No matter how huge the herd,
sheep are still sheep. Leadership is not to be found
on a sound stage, but in struggle. As we build a new
movement, we will grow a new leadership.
Links
1
http://sobu2009.tavistalks.com/default2.htm
2
http://www.covenantwithblackamerica.com/
3
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103056.html
4
http://www.blackcommentator.com/76/76_cover_sharpton.html
5
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/04/01/2009-04-01_rev_al_sharptons_500g_link_to_education_.html#ixzz0h3ljzDbC
6
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/sharpton-jealous-and-morial-make-small-talk-big-house
7
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/us/politics/09race.html
8
http://www.tavistalks.com/we-count-black-agenda-american-agenda
9
http://www.sharptontalk.net/
Glen Ford can
be contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Source:
Black Agenda Report
posted 3
March 2010
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Tavis Smiley
is a broadcaster, author, advocate and philanthropist.
TIME Magazine honored Smiley in 2009 as one of "The
World's 100 Most Influential People." He is currently
the host of the late night television talk show, "Tavis
Smiley" on PBS and "The Tavis Smiley Show" distributed
by Public Radio International (PRI). In 2007, Smiley
made television history as the moderator and executive
producer of the All-American Presidential Forums on PBS,
the first Democratic and Republican presidential debates
broadcast live in primetime with a panel exclusively
comprised of journalists of color.
In addition to his radio and television work, Smiley has
authored fourteen books. His memoir,
What I Know For Sure: My Story of Growing Up in America,
was a New York Times bestseller.
His latest book,
Accountable: Making America As Good As its Promise,
addresses how our political leaders, corporations and
finally, American citizens themselves can enforce
accountability and effect change.
The Tavis Smiley Foundation, a non-profit organization,
was established to provide leadership training and
development for youth. Since its inception, more than
6,000 young people have participated in the foundation's
Youth to Leaders training workshops and conferences.
* * *
* *
Tavis Smiley (born September 13, 1964) is an
American talk show host, author, political
commentator, entrepreneur, advocate and
philanthropist. Smiley was born in Gulfport,
Mississippi and grew up in Kokomo, Indiana. After
attending Indiana University, he worked during the
late 1980s as an aide to Tom Bradley, the mayor of
Los Angeles. Smiley became a radio commentator in
1991, and starting in 1996 he hosted the talk show
BET Talk (later renamed BET Tonight) on BET.
Controversially, after Smiley sold an exclusive
interview of
Sara Jane Olson to ABC News in 2001, BET
declined to renew Smiley's contract that year.
Smiley then began hosting
The Tavis Smiley Show on
NPR from 2002 to 2004 and currently hosts Tavis
Smiley on
PBS on the weekdays and a weekly self-titled
show on
PRI. . . .
Smiley was
honored with the
NAACP Image Award for best news, talk, or
information series for three consecutive years
(1997–99) for his work on BET Tonight with Tavis
Smiley. Smiley's advocacy efforts have earned him
numerous awards and recognitions including the
recipient of the Mickey Leland Humanitarian Award
from the National Association of Minorities in
Communications.In 1999, he founded the Tavis Smiley
Foundation, which funds programs that develop young
leaders in the black community. Since its inception,
more than 6,000 young people have participated in
the foundation's Youth to Leaders Training workshops
and conferences. His communications company, The
Smiley Group, Inc., serves as the holding company
for various enterprises encompassing broadcast and
print media, lecturers, symposiums, and the
Internet.
In 1994,
Time named him one of America's 50 Most
Promising Young Leaders.
Time honored him the next year as one of the
"100 Most Influential People in the World." In May
2007, Smiley gave a commencement speech at his alma
mater, Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana.
In May 2008, he gave the commencement address at
Connecticut College, where he was awarded an
honorary doctorate. In May 2009, Smiley was awarded
an honorary doctorate at
Langston University after giving the
commencement address there.
On December 12,
2008, Smiley received the Du Bois Medal from Harvard
University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African
and African American Research.—Wikipedia
* * *
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Tavis Smiley’s Annual Black
"Radical" All-Star Game
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Wake Up,
Tavis Smiley—By Stanley Crouch—Neither Smiley
nor the rest of his panel showed any interest in
“speaking truth to power” when it came to
questioning or exposing this smiling stain on their
militant dinner dress. Caught up in the tomming
before a totalitarian, both were seen and heard
co-signing Farrakhan in a way as disgusting as it
was consistent.
Jesse Jackson
was there and, as I once said to him in Washington
when Al Gore brought a number of black people down
to dinners in which the color troubles of America
were discussed, “I am sure that you are aware of the
fact that the worst mistake you ever made was to
bring Louis Farrakhan out of the dark and onto
center stage when you were running for president in
1984.” Jackson had nothing to say.
Nor did anyone
else on Smiley’s recent panel go beyond mum's the
word because they have yet to understand the
difference between complete honesty as opposed to
profiting and gaining attention from their purported
victim status. That does not allow them to see and
understand the gravity of actual engagement through
real politics, not sweating us all down with
unending typhoons of hot air. The kinds of solutions
provided by the members of HEAF and all of the
others are right down there on the ground giving the
devil all of the trouble he can stand.
TheDailyBeast
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Michael Eric Dyson to President Obama /
Michael Eric Dyson: To The Young & Disillusioned
Michael Eric Dyson: Obama isn't Moses, he is Pharaoh
/
Smiley and West: Obama & Sharpton
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 |
Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
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Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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