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his address to the recent meeting of the NAACP, Julian Bond crowed
that the group was the "biggest, baddest civil-rights organization
in the country." President Bush's natural assumption has been that
repairing the breach between himself and black Americans would require
reaching out to this big bad group.
But the NAACP's behavior in recent times has disqualified it from
any claim to represent progressive black thought in this country.
This year, chary of appearing before the organization responsible
for an attack ad that linked him to a lynching death, Bush resorted
to the fig leaf of a "scheduling conflict." He need not be so indirect
next year. If Bush is seriously committed to the Advancement of
Colored People, his first step will be to dissociate himself from
this irrelevant shell of an organization.
In their addresses, both Bond and NAACP chief Kweisi Mfume made
the grand old point that today's black conservatives owe their lives
to the desegregationist efforts of groups like the NAACP in the
days of yore. The problem is, the NAACP that helped eliminate lynching
and spurred Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 no longer
exists. Since the 1970s, the organization has fallen prey to the
two central fallacies of the Black Power take on civil rights: that
black people should be exempt from competition or censure until
societal inequity ceases to exist, and that a group cannot be expected
to achieve anything significant in the presence of even residual
racism. W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins are only
three who would have been baffled by these assumptions.
Nevertheless, this year's speeches were dedicated to the usual incantations
implying that blacks have made no meaningful progress since 1964.
In contrast to the dogged research typical of the NAACP in its halcyon
days, Bond and Mfume trotted out factoids that simply fall apart
under scrutiny. Bond decried the "racially motivated voter purges"
in Florida — a fiction. Both leaders parroted the idea that
American health care is shot through with racism — another
fiction.
The two even despise efforts directed at black uplift. They dismiss
the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives as encouraging "discrimination"
in the distribution of funds, when the program is aimed at the very
black poverty both claim as evidence that racism reigns eternal.
On school choice, the best Mfume could come up with was, "A voucher
is not going to do it. Some slick twist of playing around with things
is not going to do it."
If efforts to help the poor help themselves and get a decent education
aren't good enough, one can only conclude that Bond and Mfume are
waiting for a root-and-branch overhaul of American society, involving
a massive redistribution of wealth. But this is silly melodrama,
besmirching the legacy of an organization that accomplished a great
deal through the hard work of maneuvering within the existing system.
The Bond/Mfume approach is also out of step with the constituency
the NAACP claims to represent. In polls, black Americans have come
out 83 percent in favor of vouchers (Joint Center for Political
and Economic Studies), 47 percent against racial preferences (Wall
Street Journal/NBC News), and 91 percent in favor of workfare
(Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates).
True, these are the same people who voted for Al Gore almost to
a man — but the opinion polls show that this was not owing
to agreement with the Democrats' handouts-and-pity vision of civil
rights; the split between blacks' beliefs and their ballots is owing
to a sense that we must vote for the party that "likes" us. The
NAACP does much to promote this misconception. But while Bond ticked
off the racist policies of past U.S. presidents, he forgot that
his predecessors helped create the lives of today's black Americans
by working with those very administrations for better or worse.
Instead, Bond whipped up his audience by painting George W. Bush's
cabinet as a "Taliban wing" whose "devotion to the Confederacy is
nearly canine in its un critical affection."
Thus did Bond signal that the NAACP has lost touch with reality.
When we still have urgent business to do, crying wolf is a waste
of our time. Furthermore, Bond's slurs combine with the attack ad
on Bush to reveal that the NAACP, for all its indignation over "hate
crimes," has become black America's most prominent hate group. Many
contend that oppression renders a group immune from the laws of
civility. But this rings a tad hollow for a group representing a
race whose members today are more likely to be middle class than
poor.
Which
brings up a longstanding problem with the post-Civil Rights Act
NAACP: its greater interest in symbolic hate-mongering than in lifting
up the people who most need help. To be sure, Mfume promised a grand
plan addressing education, health care, voting rights, racial profiling,
etc. But why is the "biggest, baddest civil-rights organization"
in America only now getting around to such planning? There was a
time when the NAACP was virtually synonymous with black uplift,
but it has not been at the forefront on any of the issues central
to racial progress for decades now. While scattered coalitions of
activists and thinkers address the crises in crime and education,
Mfume jets around giving "grades" to the TV networks on the number
of black faces in their ephemeral entertainment shows.
Commenting
on Bush's pledge to end racial profiling, Mfume sniffed, "I welcome
the president's words, but I will welcome more his actions" —
yet Mfume's talk gave little indication that his policy plan will
amount to much more than words. Nowhere was this dearth of gravitas
clearer than in an extended passage in which he called for the audience
to think back to the time when they were — brace yourself —
sperm. "Let me tell you what it was like. You didn't have any arms
or legs. You had a big ol' head and a little tail, and that's how
you swam around." To the extent that I can make it out, this had
something to do with the role of determination in forging change,
the idea being that each sperm has but a small chance of fertilizing
the egg. Clearly, however, there are richer analogies available,
and Mfume spent more time on this little biology lesson than on
any details of his grand policy plan.
But
the eternal injustice of being black must make Kweisi Mfume exempt
from general standards. Even the NAACP's official literature smells
of a similar sentiment, evidenced in a cavalier attitude toward
spelling and composition. On just one page of the organization's
website, an official statement contains possibel, Roy Wilkens
for Roy Wilkins, and for mthe for from the. This year's
convention schedule was also riddled with errors, of the most elementary
kind. This sort of thing may seem small, but it indicates a collapse
of standards. One need only think of The Crisis, under the
editorship of DuBois. Appearances do, in fact, matter. The current
leaders of the NAACP would surely decry the stereotype that blacks
are mentally inferior, but they let pass official literature that
looks like it was written by a fifth grader.
Big-headed sperm and the art of the possibel do not represent black
America. In its antipathy to acknowledging progress, its scant interest
in community transformation, and its theatrically hostile rhetoric,
the NAACP is no longer a "progressive" organization in any serious
sense. The impulse to treat this organization as the black
voice is a grave mistake. Modern blacks are well poised to realize
that we must spread our resources more widely to attain political
influence. Even Bond and Mfume appear to sense the pendulum swinging
away, giving their speeches a defensive tone. As Bond justified
"playing the race card" and Mfume took potshots at black conservatives,
one sensed an awareness of twilight on the horizon. A group that
really believed it was still the "biggest, baddest civil-rights
organization in the country" would not have to talk this way.
President Bush could help push this tired, desperate, screeching
band to the margins by focusing on people and organizations engaged
in work that the NAACP's founders would appreciate — such as
the black ministers he met with in March and the National Center
for Neighborhood Enterprise. Bush condescends to the black race
if he suggests that it is "understandable" for black leaders to
act as hate-mongers and know-nothings.
Next year, the president ought to decline the NAACP's annual invitation
flat-out, and send no videotape as a consolation (as he did this
year). Some will seize on this as evidence that Bush is "anti-black";
but these folks would insist on that regardless, and Bush will just
have to chalk them up as losses. Truth be told, there are not nearly
as many such people as we are often led to think, and if Bush wants
to develop more of a following in black America, he must concentrate
on those blacks committed to personal excellence and moving ahead.
Sadly — but clearly — that will mean letting the NAACP
go its own way.
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