by Henry D. RoseBlack American politics has been deformed by the intrigues and insults of a misleadership class that collaborates with the enemy while launching “wholesale attacks on the moral character of the Black working class and poor.” These new elites are disconnected from the historical currents of their people. “Their mantra is that there is no Black America, no Black agenda and no need for either.”
The Misleaders
by Henry D. Rose
“Their primary role is to justify the ongoing oppression of Black people and to thwart any independent movement towards Black freedom.”
They have steadily narrowed the scope of Black possibilities in the U.S and globally. Their weapons of choice are the rueful smile, sarcasm and ridicule, the distortion of fundamental ideals, the forgetting of pertinent facts, and the ever present denunciation. They are professors and preachers, pundits and politicians. They are the “new” Black leaders and they have tried to empty Black politics of its content.Their mantra is that there is no Black America, no Black agenda and no need for either. Their message to the masses of Black people globally is “get it together.” Theirs is the political theory of the dominated, the weak, the clueless - a visionless gaze that pretends to see beyond racial paradigms of oppression and resistance.
The racial justice struggle among Black folk in America is near an all time low, as evidenced in a loss of memory, a lack of vision, a lack of program, and a lack of nerve. The descent is rooted in the politics of collaboration with our adversaries about the tone, tenor, and scope of the struggle for racial justice. White power is playing the tune and far too many of the Black elite class is doing the dancing.
“The 'new' Black leaders have tried to empty Black politics of its content.”
The new elite’s inspiration in terms of ideas comes not from Black freedom fighters but from the father of neo-conservatives Norman Podhoretz who said, “On the one side we have those liberals whose ultimate perspective on race relations…envisages the gradual absorption of deserving Negroes one by one into white society.” This was the direction that America decided to go. The “new” Black elite has been educated, trained, and is handsomely rewarded to guard that ideal of “one by one absorption into white society,” as though white society has a right to determine the life chances of the entire African-American people. What happens to the “undeserving Negroes?”
Black political and media commentators have launched wholesale attacks on the moral character of the Black working class and poor. The common thread that runs through their jeremiads is that the Black poor have lost their way and have broken a bond with the noble Black past. Out of the windows of glass houses these bricks are thrown.
That’s how you get a famous Black comedian telling Black folk to cut their braids, stop naming their children those strange sounding neo-African names (can’t be absorbed with braids or African sounding names), and justifying the shooting of Black children over lard, sugar, and flour cooked into pound cake (in a grotesque channeling of Marie Antoinette). This is how you get a Black elected official talking about Black health in terms of “not feeding your kids Popeye’s for breakfast,” while failing to bring the full power of his office to bear against the entrenched powers that circumscribe and cheapen Black lives by the millions. Instead of rational policy prescriptions what the “new” Black leaders give is warmed over “darky” jokes (a sick form of humor) designed to create separation in white eyes between themselves and the mass of Black people.
“Instead of rational policy prescriptions what the 'new' Black leaders give is warmed over 'darky' jokes.”
The new elite are not trying to change racially oppressive America to fit Black humanity; they are trying to change Black humanity to fit into racially oppressive America. They wish to be midwives to a breech birthed Black freedom movement - ass backwards and loving it. Their primary role is to justify the ongoing oppression of Black people and to thwart any independent movement towards Black freedom. The best way to spot this group of “new” Black leaders is by their allergic reaction to any collective solutions to the situations Black people find themselves in. Though they owe their positions and power to the collective struggle of Black people their public stance toward other Blacks is “you’re on your own.”
The elite may mobilize to get people to vote for them, but any form of collective action that is not endorsed and sanctioned by the American political system is poison (equivalent to tongue kissing a rattlesnake for them). This collusion has a clear class basis, but is also ideological. There are plenty of Black scholars, preachers, and some politicians that fight the good fight. But the new Black elite are marked by their silence on important issues. When Black folk were drowning in Hurricane Katrina they stood silent about the implications of it. Black people have been plagued with double digit unemployment for decades, yet the elite speaks of Black unemployment as a moral issue, but finds ways to wax poetically about the structural nature of national unemployment. Black people have been systematically forced into subprime loans for generations, yet the new elite had not one word to say about it even when Black people were being attacked by the right wing for causing the mortgage meltdown. The contradiction of Black people fighting wars for corporate and elite interest against people of color globally is not a problem for them. But, like a pack of rabid hyenas, they will attack any Black person who puts the Black condition in historic perspective and implicates the larger society in these crimes. Not content with remaining mute themselves, their portfolio extends to forcing other Blacks into a deafening silence.
“Black people have been plagued with double digit unemployment for decades, yet the elite speaks of Black unemployment as a moral issue.”
The political positions taken by the new Black elite are at odds with the tide of Black history, domestically and globally. Domestically, Blacks have been the most radical ethnic/national group in the USA. Black radicalism is the logical result of being kept at the bottom of the American social structure by the inhuman structures of enslavement/hyper-segregation. Globally, Blacks have long been in the vanguard of support for and identification with movements of the global South (aka the Third World) towards independence - support rooted in the recognition that the colonial system of racial oppression and exploitation was the bastard offspring of Black enslavement.
The new circles of Black elites are not of that historic Black current and offer nothing of value for the future. They are, however, valued by the established order for the services they render - and they know it. That is why Colin Powell says never challenge the police even if the police are trampling on your rights. That is why Bill Cosby said that if he were President he would say nothing about racial issues (meaning racial oppression). Cosby knows that talking about racial oppression doesn’t serve the established order and upsets the white majority in the USA - and so he advocates silence. Like Cosby and Powell, the new elite in their silence rob the struggle of heat and light. They have purposefully become the obscene caricatures of the oppressor that Frantz Fanon warned against in The Wretched of the Earth, seeing the world through the oppressor’s eyes, and speaking to the world (their own people included) with the oppressor’s voice - eager centurions of white power.
Henry D. Rose is currently the statewide coordinator for the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance. Mr. Rose was lead organizer for SEIU 1199 New Jersey. He is chair and founder of Blacks for Social Justice, the publisher of Chin Check newsletter, and a member of People’s Organization for Progress. Mr. Rose cofounded Genesis Shule ( a community school in Newark).
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